Politics of African Anticolonial Archive 9781783487899, 9781783487905, 9781783487912

Table of contents :
Cover
......Page 1
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 8
Foreword......Page 10
Chapter 1 Introduction
Politics of African Anticolonial Archive......Page 16
Chapter 2
An Abbreviated Postcolonial Account of the Archives
Reconsidering the Unified Fields in the Human and Social Sciences
......Page 32
Chapter 3
Curating and Politics
Searching for Coherency in African Anticolonial Archive
......Page 52
Chapter 4
Comradeship, Committed, and Conscious
The Anticolonial Archive Speaks to Our Times
......Page 72
Chapter 5
Realism without Abstraction
Amílcar Cabral and a Politics of the World
......Page 98
Chapter 6
Inviting Marianne to Dance
Congolese Rumba Lingala as an Archive against Monument
......Page 116
Chapter 7
Recollections of Past Events of British Colonial Rule in Northern Ghana, 1900–1956
......Page 136
Chapter 8
The Skin and the Stool
Re-Crafting Histories of Belonging in Northern Ghana
......Page 166
Chapter 9‘But for God’s Sake, Let’s Decolonize!’Self-Determination and Sovereignty and/as the Limits of Anticolonial Archives......Page 192
Chapter 10
The Hip-Hop DJ as Black Archaeologist
Madlib’s Beat Konducta in Africa and the Politics of Memory
......Page 222
Chapter 11
Archiving Thomas Sankara’s Presence
Metamorphoses of Memory and Revolution in Burkina Faso
......Page 246
Afterword......Page 272
Index......Page 282
About the Contributors......Page 288

Citation preview

Politics of African Anticolonial Archive

Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions Series Editors: Mustapha K. Pasha, Aberystwyth University; Meera Sabaratnam, SOAS University of London; Robbie Shilliam, Queen Mary University of London This is the first series to mark out a dedicated space for advanced critical inquiry into colonial questions across International Relations. The ethos of this book series is reflected by the bricolage constituency of Kilombos – settlements of African slaves, rebels and indigenous peoples in South America who became self-determining political communities that retrieved and renovated the social practices of its diverse constituencies while being confronted by colonial forces. The series embraces a multitude of methods and approaches, theoretical and empirical scholarship, alongside historical and contemporary concerns. Publishing innovative and top-quality peer-reviewed scholarship, Kilombo enquires into the shifting principles of colonial rule that inform global governance and investigates the contestation of these principles by diverse peoples across the globe. It critically re-interprets popular concepts, narratives and approaches in the field of IR by reference to the “colonial question” and, in doing so, the book series opens up new vistas from which to address the key political questions of our time.

Titles in the Series Meanings of Bandung: Postcolonial Orders and Decolonial Visions, edited by Quỳnh N. Phạm and Robbie Shilliam Politics of African Anticolonial Archive, edited by Shiera S. el-Malik and Isaac A. Kamola Decolonizing Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique, by Meera Sabaratnam (forthcoming)

Politics of African Anticolonial Archive

Edited by Shiera S. el-Malik and Isaac A. Kamola

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © Shiera S. el-Malik and Isaac A. Kamola 2017 Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. 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 Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-789-9 PB 978-1-78348-790-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78348-789-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78348-790-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78348-791-2 (electronic) ∞ ™ 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. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Forewordix Pal Ahluwalia 1 Introduction: Politics of African Anticolonial Archive Isaac A. Kamola and Shiera S. el-Malik 2 An Abbreviated Postcolonial Account of the Archives: Reconsidering the Unified Fields in the Human and Social Sciences Siba N. Grovogui

1

17

3 Curating and Politics: Searching for Coherency in African Anticolonial Archive Shiera S. el-Malik

37

4 Comradeship, Committed, and Conscious: The Anticolonial Archive Speaks to Our Times Branwen Gruffydd Jones

57

5 Realism without Abstraction: Amílcar Cabral and a Politics of the World Isaac A. Kamola

83

6 Inviting Marianne to Dance: Congolese Rumba Lingala as an Archive against Monument Míde Ní Shúilleabháin

v

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vi Contents

7 Recollections of Past Events of British Colonial Rule in Northern Ghana, 1900–1956 Christopher Azaare Anabila

121

8 The Skin and the Stool: Re-Crafting Histories of Belonging in Northern Ghana Anatoli Ignatov

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9 ‘But for God’s Sake, Let’s Decolonize!’: Self-Determination and Sovereignty and/as the Limits of Anticolonial Archives Timothy Vasko

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10 The Hip-Hop DJ as Black Archaeologist: Madlib’s Beat Konducta in Africa and the Politics of Memory Seth M. Markle

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11 Archiving Thomas Sankara’s Presence: Metamorphoses of Memory and Revolution in Burkina Faso Allen Stack

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Afterword: Archives, Life, and Counter-Archives Sam Okoth Opondo

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Index267 About the Contributors

273

Acknowledgements

This book emerged from a series of discussions, conference panels, and considerable feedback over the course of many years. We tested the initial idea of this book before an ‘empty-room’ session at the International Studies Association (ISA) – Northeast (2014) and a ‘standing-room only’ session a year later at ISA in Toronto. The audience’s attention, as well as the feedback we received from Jeffrey Ahlman and Jacob Stump, not only invigorated us but proved pivotal in developing the language needed to figure out and, eventually, convey an argument that – especially in those early days – still seemed elusive. In November 2015, all the contributors met at Trinity College, Hartford, to workshop the chapters. As a group, we discussed each piece, with the help of faculty and student discussants. We are deeply thankful for the generous contribution from everyone who dedicated their time and brilliance during this pivotal moment in the project. This book still bears the strong intellectual imprints of James Barrett, Elliot Barron, Christina Heatherton, Shanelle Morris, Garth Myers, Sam Opondo, Vijay Prashad, Callie Prince, Schirin Schenkermayr, Lars Skattum, Maurice Wade, and all the others who attended the workshop and contributed to the vibrant conversation. We are profoundly grateful for everyone’s contribution. This workshop was made possible with generous funding by Trinity College’s Political Science department and the Center for Urban and Global Studies and, especially, Anthony Messina and Xiangming Chen. Mary Beth White did a heroic job organizing the conference logistics and finances, Dave Tatem helped with the web page, Rita Law designed the beautiful poster, Elliot Levesque organized the space and logistics, and the wonderful folks at Chartwells and the Trinity Restaurant kept us well nourished.

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viii Acknowledgements

Our editors at Rowman & Littlefield International, Anna Reeve and Dhara Patel, did an amazing job moving the project from conception to print. Sinéad Murphy and Michael Watson kept us on track – no easy feat, and for that we apologize. Three anonymous reviewers gave incredibly valuable feedback on the initial proposal. We’d like to also thank our research assistant Elizabeth Hampson, who helped finalize the manuscript, and the DePaul University Research Council, for providing the funding. We cannot express enough how awesome it was to work with the contributors to this book. Their commitment and investment in this time-consuming project helped make this book one in which the chapters, while standing alone, each read as part of a co-authored book. We are grateful to have had such a dedicated, passionate, and inspired group to work with. The image on the cover is from the New Orleans graffiti installation ‘ExhibitBE’, created by Brandan Odums along with dozens of others. Installed on a five-story block-long housing complex destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, ‘ExhibitBE’ consists of vibrant portraits – Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Nina Simone, Harriet Tubman, Tupac Shakur, Muhammad Ali, and others – along with quotes, testimonials, and representations of black life in New Orleans and elsewhere. Allen Stack took pictures of the exhibit while in town for the ISA, and Shiera heard him recount his visit on a panel later that day. Isaac saw the images on Allen’s phone that evening, while listening to jazz at Vaughn’s Lounge. ‘ExhibitBE’ was ensnared in long legal dispute and eventually demolished in 2015. Itself a fleeting moment of anticolonial archive, the images, memories, and the utopic futures contained in this masterpiece remain with us, forever expressed in the promise of her upturned eyes. Shiera thanks Jacob Stump for his generosity and supportiveness in this adventure as in others. Isaac would like to thank Serena Laws for being such a rock-solid companion for so many years. And Harvey and Callia, who have given us such joy … no matter what rascality they might be getting themselves into at any given moment.

Foreword Pal Ahluwalia

Shiera el-Malik and Isaac Kamola’s Politics of African Anticolonial Archive is a timely book because the very project of anticolonial resistance and its relationship to decolonization and imperialism needs urgent reconceptualizing. Such a reconceptualization has been necessitated by the various political agreements that were put in place across the continent to achieve independence. The removal of the colonial powers was seen by many as a panacea for all of Africa’s ills. There was little acknowledgement that the impact of colonization could not be erased with the mere political transformations that were bequeathed to African leaders. Indeed, it was not long before African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah proclaimed that neocolonialism was the latest stage of imperialism (Nkrumah, 1965). In the settlements leading towards independence, African voices and acts of resistance were accorded little attention. The colonial powers largely sought accommodationist types of regimes that would leave intact the systems and economies that they had built during the colonial era. A radical form of politics was something that could not be envisioned, especially in the context of the cold war. In country after country, forms of parliamentary democracies with no real basis within the political culture of the nation were established. It was thought that a ‘moderate’ leadership would be more in tune with the colonial powers and easier to manipulate. Although freedom was achieved, the colonization of the mind remained more pervasive and dangerous. The physical presence of the colonizer could be removed; yet, the mental presence was much harder to dislodge. It was incorporated into the consciousness and culture of the dominated to the extent that they identified it as part of their own Weltanschauung. This ideology of domination, by which the history and culture of the colonized is denied, corresponds to the very real domination of the colonial power in the material sense. The dependency and structural distortion of the ix

x Foreword

colony’s economy is paralleled therefore by a psychological dependency and distorted consciousness that makes the colonized the dominated subjects of another country. To draw upon the African anticolonial archive is part of this larger project. It is aimed at examining the reservoir of anticolonial resistance to present alternatives to the contemporary malaise that pervades the continent. It is aimed at harnessing fragments across time, space, and place and at providing meaning and inspiration to a new generation of Africans who are seeking an alternative. Many years ago, in the first edition of the journal African Identities, which I edited, we wrote about the importance of theoretically ‘mainstreaming Africa’ (Ahluwalia and Zegeye, 2003). What we meant by that was twofold. First, the study of Africa needed to be disaffiliated from the very frames and encapsulations of area studies and, in particular, African studies. Second, the theoretical work undertaken by African scholars needed to be read with the same degree of respect as their Western counterparts. We pointed out the success of the subaltern studies group in bridging that theoretical gap. The subaltern studies project began as a result of several scholars’ dissatisfaction with the ways in which traditional Indian historiography erased histories of subordinated groups. Since then, subaltern studies has gained a much wider audience across the world and has developed a broad interdisciplinary following. A great deal of the global interest in subaltern studies comes from the ways the project is affiliated with, and constitutes, a larger ‘postcolonial’ critique. The Gramscian category of ‘subaltern’, as it has been deployed by Ranajit Guha and other members of the subaltern studies collective, has become an important explanatory tool and offers a valuable anticolonial archive. For me, this is precisely the kind of project that this book embarks upon. Perhaps, one of the first to recognize the debilitating effects of colonization was Frantz Fanon. It is the ‘imaginative geography’ of colonialism that concerned Fanon. For the colonized to reassume their own history, the defeat of the colonial power, he pointed out, was not enough. There must, in addition, be a process whereby a new consciousness, embodied in a new national culture, is formed, and the old ideology of domination dispersed. Fanon recognized the importance of this process and devoted a large section in The Wretched of the Earth to a consideration of how it might be best achieved. In so doing, he distances himself from those intellectuals whose search for culture took them back to the values of precolonial African or Arab traditional society. A commentator on Che Guevara once noted that ‘the Marxist humanism of Che is thus, above all, a revolutionary humanism which finds expression in his conception of the role of men [sic] in the revolution, in the communist ethics, and in his vision of the new man’ (Lowy 1973: 17). The issue of identity is thus transmitted into a new humanity, and a society that will support the existence of this new species. Fanon’s project can be expressed in similar

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terms. For Fanon, as for Guevara, revolution is only authentic, only worthwhile, to the extent that it creates the basis for this new humanity, for a new human identity and provides conditions that will succour it. Time and again, this humanist emphasis breaks to the surface of Fanon’s analysis (Ahluwalia, 2010). There must be, he insists, as well as an economic programme, ‘an idea of man and of the future of humanity…’ (Fanon 1967, 162). The national liberation struggle must make its first priority that of returning dignity to ‘all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein’ (Fanon 1967, 163). Indeed, it would seem that, for Fanon, the end product of revolutionary struggle is nothing less than the creation of a new set of human possibilities, not just for the colonized, but, through their struggle, for all mankind: The new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others. (Fanon 1967, 198) It is essential that the oppressed peoples join up with the peoples who are already sovereign if a humanism that can be considered valid is to be built to the dimensions of the universe. (Fanon 1970, 125)

What Fanon is asserting is the rise of a new spirit of humanity, of a new species of humanity in the course of the national liberation struggle. There is ‘a new humanism, a new theory of mean coming into being, which has its roots in man’ (Fanon 1970: 134–135). On the basis of his revolutionary humanism, Fanon emphasizes the need to break completely with the patterns of colonialism, the need for the colonized people to re-educate themselves in order to achieve revolutionary objectives and to build a new revolutionary culture. In short, it is not enough to carry out decolonization with its attendant social and economic changes. The ideology of the colonial world has to be expunged totally by the revolutionary raising of consciousness. ‘After the conflict’, Fanon insists, ‘there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonised man’ (Fanon 1967, 197). Essentially, Fanon is making the same point as Guevara when the latter notes that the ideology of bourgeois society can outlive a process of socio-economic transformation. Social transformation is a necessary condition, but it may not be a sufficient one to create the basis for the new humanity. Therefore, direct intervention at the ideological level may be necessary. In Guevara’s terms, ‘to build communism, a new man must be created simultaneously with the material base’ (Gerassi 1969: 541). Fanon is explicit as to the way in which the revolutionary transformation of consciousness is to be achieved. In The Wretched of the Earth, he emphasizes

xii Foreword

the absolute necessity of political education. The army, the militia, the party cadres, indeed, the whole population must be the focus of an education programme specifically geared to raising the level of political consciousness: To hold a responsible position in an underdeveloped country is to know that in the end everything depends on the education of the masses, on the raising of the level of thought, and on what we are too quick to call ‘political teaching….’ To educate the masses politically … is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge … but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people. (Fanon 1967, 157)

Moreover, if this process of education is to be successful in eradicating the cultural domination of the colonial power and in establishing a national culture based on revolutionary humanism, then it must go hand in hand with an integration of the mass of the people into the organization of the new society. For this reason, Fanon strongly emphasizes the need for the decentralization of decision-making at all levels of society; the ‘party should be decentralised in the extreme’. Only by accepting responsibility within such a decentralized structure can the mass of the people experience their liberty, only on this basis can ‘the new man’ emerge. Any movement towards the establishment of elites, any exclusion of the masses from the experience of building the new society, will frustrate its achievement. For Fanon, then, a restructuring of consciousness is as vital as any other aspect of decolonization. Nowhere is the importance he ascribes to this process more obvious than in his treatment of neocolonization. If we view a change in consciousness as an automatic response to the catharsis of violent struggle, then the neocolonial phase appears anomalous and in need of explanation. But if, as has been argued, we accept that he sees a change of consciousness not as an automatic response but rather as the result of an important struggle in its own right, then neocolonialism becomes readily explicable on Fanon’s terms. It occurs where, despite the military and political defect of the colonizer, the colonizers have not yet liberated themselves from a colonialist mentality. Thus, neocolonialism appears as one of the ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’, where national consciousness ‘instead of being the all-embracing crystallisation of the innermost hope of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilisation of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been’ (Fanon 1967: 119). Fanon was clearly overly optimistic as to the possibilities of the liberation struggle in the Third World ushering in a ‘new humanity’. Such a view, while characteristic of the Promethean ethic that informed so much of New Left Marxism, particularly in the Third World revolutionary context,

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overestimated the possibilities inherent in a liberation struggle and underestimated the extent to which a political victory could pose as a final consummation. But his emphasis on the emergence of a restructured consciousness, as a necessary precondition for a genuinely ‘new’ society, shows a keen understanding of colonialism, culture, and consciousness. As he emphasized, it ‘is not possible to take one’s distance with respect to colonialism without at the same time taking it with respect to the idea that the colonised holds of himself through the filter of colonialist culture’ (Fanon 1970: 114). If the problem of decolonization of the mind perceived by Fanon and Edward Said and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was regarded as a real problem in the era of national liberation, what is to be said today? The situation is bleak. No longer do we have the possibility of national independence to shore up our belief in regeneration, renewal, and cultural assertiveness. The failure of Africa to throw off the economic controls of foreign powers and companies, the record of military dictators, of financial organizations, of genocide, and simply the failure to develop, stand as testaments to fifty or sixty years of failed promises and continuing disempowerment. What was true about colonial hegemony in the 1960s remains true today, although constructed as forms of cultural hegemony. Empowerment sought through a change in consciousness is still necessary. The ‘idea that the colonised holds of himself through the filter of colonial culture’ remains a key problem. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa. The failure of development processes and the rapid degeneration as a result of warfare, factionalism, drought, and disasters have all conspired to continue to undermine the confidence of Africans in their own potential, that is in their own identity, in their potential for liberation. Politics of African Anticolonial Archive is an attempt to open up a different narrative, to allow people to engage within a different framework, and to draw on a rich heritage of anticolonial resistance.

REFERENCES Ahluwalia, Pal. 2010. Out of Africa: Poststructuralism’s Colonial Roots, London: Routledge. Ahluwalia, Pal and Abebe Zegeye. 2003. ‘Mainstreaming Africa’, African Identities, 1 (1): 3–12. Gerassi, John (ed.). 1969. Venceremos, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fanon, Frantz. 1970. Toward the African Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lowy, Michael. 1973. The Marxism of Che Guevara, New York, Monthly Review Press. Nkrumah, Kwame. 1965. Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto and Windus.

Chapter 1

Introduction Politics of African Anticolonial Archive Isaac A. Kamola and Shiera S. el-Malik

On 3 October 1984, Thomas Sankara – former guerrilla fighter and president of Burkina Faso – addressed a rally at the Harriet Tubman School in Harlem. Organized by the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, the rally took place on the eve of Sankara’s address to the United Nations General Assembly. However, prior to leaving for the UN, Sankara purportedly received a request from the Reagan administration for a copy of his speech, perhaps as part of a vetting process concerning whether to extend the new African president a White House invitation. When the Reagan administration suggested Sankara edit out criticisms of Western powers, Sankara ignored their request (Harsch 2014, 17). Effectively turning down a White House visit, Sankara instead planned to spend the days before the UN General Assembly in Atlanta at the invitation of Mayor Andrew Young – the renowned civil rights activist and first African American ambassador to the UN (Harsch 2014, 17). However, barred from making the trip to Atlanta, Sankara instead spent the days at various cultural and political events in Harlem. The previous day he inaugurated an exhibit on Burkina Faso art exhibition at the Third World Trade Centre, telling the crowd that ‘the fight we’re waging in Africa, principally in Burkina Faso, is the same fight you’re waging in Harlem. We feel that we in Africa must give our brother in Harlem all the support they need so that their fight too becomes known’ (Sankara 2007, 143–44). The following night, after a performance by ‘singers, dancers, and musicians’ demonstrating ‘what the revolutions should be’, and before a crowd of approximately five hundred people, Sankara drew further connections between Harlem and the struggles on the African continent, once again pronouncing that ‘our White House is in Black Harlem’ (Sankara 2007, 149). In this speech, he spoke of Harlem as the place that ‘will give the African soul its true dimension’, and declared that ‘our struggle is a call to build. … As Blacks, we want to teach others 1

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how to love each other’ and, in doing so, teach ‘the meaning of solidarity’ (Sankara 2007, 149–150). He demonstrated what this looks like with the story of his exchange with recently assassinated prime minister of Grenada, Maurice Bishop: Last year I met Maurice Bishop. We had a lengthy discussion. We gave each other mutual advice. When I returned to my country, imperialism had me arrested. I thought about Maurice Bishop. Some time later I was freed from prison thanks to the mobilization of the population. Again, I thought about Maurice Bishop. I wrote him a letter. I never had the opportunity to send it to him. Once again, because of imperialism. So we have learned that from now on imperialism must be fought relentlessly. If we don’t want other Maurice Bishops to be assassinated tomorrow, we have to start mobilizing as of today. [Applause] That’s why I want to show you I’m ready for imperialism. [Unbuckles belt and brandishes pistol in its holster. Cheers and prolonged applause.] (Sankara 2007, 150)

Today, this speech might seem remarkable – even unimaginable: a president of a small African country, clad in military fatigues, waving a firearm in New York City, and calling for African Americans to stand with him in a united fight against imperialism. However, during the early 1980s this speech was anything but exceptional. In fact, it was part of a vibrant and powerful contemporaneous practice of thinking, speaking, acting, and world-making. This speech contained many themes of African anticolonial thought, including a critique of colonialism and imperialism, a vision of an alternative world not limited to Western capitalism or Soviet-style communism, an articulation of a politics premised on emancipation and liberation, as well as the existence of dense networks of collaboration and solidarity among different groups, parties, independent states, and organizations. In this tradition, Sankara’s speech was like many others in that it offered an alternative future cultivated by an international network of charismatic and national leaders, supported by mobilized populations, and held together by bonds of friendship, solidarity, and militancy. The language is poetic, yet strident. The publicness of the event was possible because of a dense network of institutions and coalitions: the United Nations brought people to New York, the Patrice Lumumba Coalition organized the event, a large crowd turned out for it, and the words, images, and memories created that night in Harlem were recorded, published, circulated, and archived. In the decades that followed, however, many of the imaginaries and lived worlds articulated that night in Harlem fell under direct, and violent, counterassault. The economic policies of the World Bank, International Monetary

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Fund (IMF), and other major financial institutions demanded that African countries slash their government funding and social services, sell off government enterprises, and ‘open’ their markets to foreign penetration. The Reagan administration funded covert wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, as well as Joseph Savimbi’s brutal Union for the Total Independence of Angola, provided material support for apartheid South Africa, and launched airstrikes against Libya. Starting in 1984, Harlem and other centres of African American politics and culture were transformed by a CIA-sponsored crack epidemic, yet another devastating effect of the America’s covert and extralegal war against the Nicaraguan government. Social services and welfare programmes in the United States and around the world were slashed. The economies of many African countries stagnated.1 In October 1987, Sankara was killed in a coup that brought an autocrat willing to accommodate foreign interests – Blaise Compaoré – to power. Today, thirty years later, it seems hard to remember, or even imagine, a world in which new economic and political realities still seemed possible. As the adage goes, we are now more able to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Jameson 2003). It seems hard to imagine a time when the world seemed more than a gaudy parade of conflict and military intervention, terrorism, civil war, neoliberal economic policies, ecological crises, graft and corruption, and free-market globalization as far as the eye can see. Like today’s world, the mid-twentieth century also had its share of profound political and economic crises. However, embedded within these crises – and existing parallel to them – were visions of the world otherwise: strong articulations of a world that had not yet come, a world defined by human liberation and freedom from want. Today, such talk often seems like the lofty, luxurious, and possibly deluded revelry of a long-lost era, of charismatic leaders and revolutionary possibilities – an anachronistic naiveté on the wrong side of history. This suspicion seems confirmed in the observation that contemporary inheritors of these anticolonial struggles – such as the revolutions of Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park – seem so fragile in comparison, prone to collapse under their own weight. It is in the spirit of Sankara in Harlem that this book turns towards african anticolonial archive.2 We read the intellectual work produced during this time – African anticolonial thought – not as a moment or collection of lost 1.  In 1975, sub-Saharan Africa provided 17.6% of the world’s GDP; by the end of the 1990s, this number was down to 10.5%. In addition, African countries suffered from high child mortality, low life expectancy, and infant mortality rates of 10.7% (Arrighi 2002, 5). 2.  With lower-case designations, we highlight our discomfort with considering as a proper noun ‘the African anticolonial archive’. Each of the three main words is open for interrogation; in some contexts, they may also be verbs.

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ideas, but rather as an archive that continues to circulate: another horizon for thinking the present. This horizon still very much exists and continues to shape the world around us. After all, African decolonization was one of the crowning achievements of the twentieth century, achieved despite the fiercest opposition by the United States, Britain, France, NATO, and ‘the West’. We suggest that reading the archive of this period remains necessary for understanding our present. The hopes, fears, memories, possibilities, texts, sounds, and images of this time constitute an African archive. They also constitute an inheritance for the entire world.

AFRICAN ANTICOLONIAL ARCHIVE African political thinking of the mid-twentieth century is a vibrant body of work – often scholarly, polemical, and poetic. While the following chapters more clearly draw out the contours of the assemblage that we are naming ‘african anticolonial archive’, for now a preliminary sketch will do. At its most basic, the african anticolonial archive can be read as a body of work that diagnoses the logics of colonialism in Africa, and does so for the political purpose of fighting colonial rule within a particular historical conjuncture. On the one hand, this collection of texts includes books, articles, essays, speeches, letters, poems, and PhD dissertations that contemplate colonial rule in order to better develop forms of knowledge, politics, and strategies aimed at constructing an alternative. On the other hand, these texts exist in relationship to other practices of thinking, arguing, and working that embody and inform an anticolonial politics, including architectural spaces, song, conversations in courtyards, memories, and images. Unlike ‘postcolonial theory’, which self-consciously originated within a circle of subaltern scholars seeking an academic intervention within an academic field, we argue that african anticolonial archive must be located (to the degree it has a location) within the political fights against colonial rule during, and after, the period of decolonization. It was produced by a heterodox group of scholars, political leaders, peasants, teachers, journalists, and citizens engaged in the political struggles against colonial powers. As such, it critically engages questions of identity, history, and the state for the purpose of national and human liberation. Because the project of decolonizing African states had to constantly negotiate complex patterns rooted in the haphazard way their borders developed, African anticolonial thought is often concerned with thinking through ways of incorporating different peoples into a common project, united against a common colonial master. This work is fundamentally critical and philosophical. It is also intricately grounded in its condition of place. Or, more accurately, places – as its producers lived, worked, and participated in conversations with nodal points across Africa and other continents.

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African anticolonial archive, then, does not exist as a single, coherent thing. It cannot be found neatly compiled within a set of document boxes housed within a specific institution. It is an archive that was created in circulation and continues to circulate today. While archives are always problematic objects – defined as much by their exclusions as their contents, and often compiled through horrible expressions of power and violence – we nonetheless find it useful to consider the possibility that there does exist, at least in practice (and even if fragmentary and contested), a phenomenon we can call ‘african anticolonial archive’. It is useful to hail the presence of archive because ‘the archive’ invokes a claim to foundational authority, demanding academic or scholarly attention. Scholars and students have long deferred to, engaged with, read, critiqued, and reread ‘the colonial archive’. We would say that the anticolonial archive is also deserving of such care. However, such engagement often takes place without an instituitonalized location, a finding key, or a reading room. This book, therefore, is an act of engaging the political and universal significance of african anticolonial archive, while simultaneously curating an archive that does not necessarily exist as a single, self-evident thing. Our organizing question – What does it mean to ‘look back’ into archives, and african anticolonial archive in particular? – is inspired by Nigerian historian Yusufu Bala Usman’s argument that ‘looking back’ means being attentive to the power involved in constructing primary sources in the first place (Usman 2006, 2). ‘Looking back’, then, is neither a nostalgic nor a contemporary act of looking for a moment of authenticity but rather a relationship between a historical moment, its actors and locations, and the present historical moment. Looking back can also be understood as archiving – as archives in processes of production with no end.3 Drawing on such problematics, this book investigates the contours of what might be considered african anticolonial archive, namely the large and often forgotten body of work that formed the intellectual backbone of Africa’s many anticolonial struggles during the twentieth century. This archive is seldom conceptualized as coherent for reasons of historical amnesia, ambiguous record-keeping, racial and geopolitical marginalization, the political violence of the Cold War, and the fragmentation of material in different metropolitan, linguistic, and institutional contexts. A number of chapters in this book more carefully examine the various conceptual difficulties arising in efforts to locate a thing called african anticolonial archive. Recognizing the historicity that gives rise to seemingly incoherent African anticolonial thinking, this book presents two lines of inquiry. First, it asks how – given these realities – might african anticolonial archive be curated within the present. Secondly, it does not read this archive as an engagement in 3.  See also Derrida (1998), Stoler (2009), and Hall (2001).

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a history of political theory or philosophy (‘African’, ‘global’, ‘comparative’, or otherwise) but rather as a means of speaking to contemporary political issues, including those of identity, sovereignty, inter-nationality, and globality. We read the past through the present and in doing so read the present as an archive. Looking back at (and, therefore, forward from) this body of work focuses our attention on the conditions under which this archive is written and asks to what important contemporary political struggles does this archive continue to speak. We ask: what are the embodied, spatial, temporal, and thematic boundaries of African anticolonialism? NOTES ON CURATING AFRICAN ANTICOLONIAL ARCHIVE The purpose of returning to african anticolonial archive is to examine what future possibilities still exist within its present. In the same way that one studies the colonial archive to map the power and violence of colonial rule, as well as its silences and possible resistances, anticolonial archive might be read as mapping the unfulfilled, utopic aspirations that existed within the recent past – and, therefore, possibly the present as well. This might be something akin to what Wilder calls ‘identifying and fashioning “historical constellations” as one way of writing a “history of the present”’ (Wilder 2015, 15). In this way, curating the anticolonial archive is not an attempt to fix a thing or to even provide its genealogy. Rather, like an artist commissioning, producing, collecting, and then installing an exhibit, we see this book as a sort of gallery space – maybe a distant relative, and pale academic equivalent, of the exhibit on Burkinabe art Sankara visited in Harlem. For the reasons expressed above, ‘african anticolonial archive’ is not a collection that can be drawn upon – a standing reserve of information ready to be tapped – but rather something that requires curation. Curating an african anticolonial archive, in other words, is not a matter of retrieving from some pre-existing, already collected body of work, but rather the project of locating (and dislocating) texts, ideas, structures, music, images, and the like, and arranging them together in new ways. Martinon describes the process of curating as creating the conditions for a jailbreak from pre-existing frames, a gift enabling one to see the world differently, a strategy for inventing new points of departures, a practice of creating allegiances against social ills, a way of caring for humanity, a process of renewing one’s own subjectivity, a tactical move for reinventing life, a sensual practice of creating signification, a political tool outside of politics, a procedure to maintain a community together, a conspiracy against polices, the act of keeping a question alive, the energy of retaining a sense of fun, the device that helps to revisit history, the measures to create affects, the world of revealing ghosts, a plan to remain out-of-joint with time, an evolving method of keeping bodies

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and objects together, a sharing of understanding, an invitation for reflexivity, a choreographic mode of operation, a way of fighting against corporate culture, etc. (Martinon 2015, 4)

Thus, we understand the process of curating as a way to access horizons for thinking the present in ways that are not yet obviously available. To our minds, curating can allow for surprise, counter-intuitive understandings, and creative critical engagements. In the context of this book, many of the authors are writing from departments of political science, international studies, law and politics, law and government, government, history, sustainable development, or from outside of the neoliberal university. We are writing as graduate students, contingent faculty, untenured faculty, tenured faculty, community historians, farmers, and with a multitude of other experiences of situatedness. We met at a workshop held at Trinity College in early November 2015 at which we stumbled upon a collection of guiding premises that informed how we ended up curating this book. We note them here, with the caveat that another collective might draw from a different set of guideposts and that others may choose to curate an african anticolonial archive differently. Curating Beyond Area Studies Today, the history and intellectual contributions of African anticolonial struggles are not widely studied, and its authors not widely read (especially in the Western academy where most of the authors included in this book live and work). When African anticolonial movements and thinkers are studied, they are often inscribed within time and place – historical figures, situated within particular events taking place on the continent of Africa. If read at all, one might turn to Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Biko, Sankara, Cabral, or Senghor to better understand a particular time in African history. This book, however, writes against the tendency to read African anticolonial thought within an ‘Africa-as-area studies’ approach. As such, this book does not claim to represent the entire African anticolonial experience, or even sample representative experiences from across the continent. Rather, we ask: What might these thinkers tell us – an ‘us’ that might include scholars, students, and activists, anywhere – about the politics of ‘our’ present conjuncture? How might the African anticolonial travel? We understand this continent of thought as having a wide diaspora. No one blinks an eye when political theorists or scholars of, say, international politics draw upon a German philosopher (e.g. Kant, Marx, or Weber) or a French theorist (e.g. Foucault or Derrida) to describe the broad contours of the human experience – be it capitalism, the state, power, discourse, etc. In a way, it even sounds silly to conceptualize Marx as primarily a ‘German thinker’ or Foucault a ‘French philosopher’. Despite the fact that these

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theorists, as is the case with all thinking people, work within a particular context and conjuncture, we have nonetheless grown comfortable in assuming that some thinkers (and not others) can be easily read universally. In contrast, African anticolonial theorists are often read as products of very specific and exceptional circumstances, exclusively conditioned by those experiences, and therefore the producers of ideas limited to the specificity of time and place. They might be read as sources of data, but not producers of knowledge or intellectuals in their own right. Rather than trying to provincialize the canon of European thought, the authors in this collection wonder what might happen if we universalize, in a grounded way, the experience of African anticolonial thought. What if we suggested that the fight against colonialism in Africa was not only a particular and exceptional experience, but also a universal articulation of the human condition – an experience with insights that might be shared by all people? This task goes hand in hand with a deliberate effort to expand what counts as african anticolonial archive. After all, anticolonial thought took place not only in the speeches and writings of national and military figures, but also in the homes, conversations, architectures, music, and imaginations of whole populations of peoples, different in many ways but united in a common demand for political, economic, and cultural self-determination. In the same way that Patrice Lumumba imagined a Congolese nation united by the shared experience of Belgian colonialism, we might imagine african anticolonial archive as a body of work held together not by the specific characteristics of its multifaceted elements, but rather by a common rejection of the colonial project. The lessons from this rejection are important because the colonial project continues to thrive to this day, most obviously in its ostensible offshoot: the neoliberal economic and political order. Curating Beyond the Academy This book reflects approaches to documents, arguments, and materials that might be considered ‘international relations’, ‘world politics’, and ‘African studies’, but does so in ways that intentionally leave them unhinged from these disciplinary meanings. The form and the content of this book intervene in the dominant academic mode of reproducing historical and political truth. One impetus for engaging with African anticolonial thought is to question our role as academics, pedagogues, and knowledge producers within the present political moment of the neoliberal university. This engagement is an effort to demonstrate the radical plurality of political thought and to develop a response to the prevalent notion that intellectuals can only access Africa through the exportation of data. One thing we find especially compelling about african anticolonial archive is the way in which it was formed within the context of deep engagements

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with the Western scholarly debates of the time (over Hegelianism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, etc.) without assuming that the conclusions drawn from these investigations must necessarily be ‘for’ the academy. Rather, ideas were fashioned for the purpose of engaging the immediate, timely, and political questions of colonial rule, economic and political independence, and national identity. In this way, life-and-death debates about political strategy across Africa are often deeply informed by intellectual debates taking place within France, the United States, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. Even when written as dissertations or as scholarly journal articles, african anticolonial archive bridges the particular conjuncture of struggle and the universalizing language of scholarship, demonstrating the limits of (and also the powerful possibilities implicit within) academic knowledge production. It is this kind of politics, theoretics, and voice that we attempt to mimic in this book. In this way, the book is not an investigation into the immediate tactics or strategies of anticolonialism, but rather it is an experimental demonstration of how working within African anticolonial thought functions to shift epistemologies. Just as Négritude rethought epistemic claims about race, and ujamaa socialism challenged core epistemic claims made by Marxism and Leninism, this book seeks to demonstrate the powerful epistemic politics of this anticolonial thought without ‘retrieving’ these insights for domestication within ‘scholarship’. In short, we seek to model the tension between scholarly and political interventions in ways that borrow explicitly from what we see as core methods and insights of African anticolonial thought itself. The importance of maintaining this tension – between scholarship and politics, between the production of knowledge and the use of that knowledge within a particular conjuncture – stems from the profound reverence we have for the fact that the authors of this archive attempted to answer problems that actually do not have answers; they asked questions that are fundamentally questions of politics. Those who write with a fiduciary obligation to ‘scholarship’ often miss the fact that some questions – often the most important ones – exist at the interplay of force, and therefore have few, if any, answers outside the effects these ideas have on the arrangement of the political and economic order. Cabral calls a theory ‘revolutionary’ based on what it allows one to do within a specific context. Curating a Failure One reason African anticolonial thought often goes unread has to do with an anxiety that anticolonialism and the arguments that fall under its oeuvre are generally perceived as failed projects. After the victories of political independence, by the 1980s, the dynamics of anticolonialism seemed to fall apart. Economic development stalled. States ‘failed’. A number of leading

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figures became implicated in all sorts of unseemly activities. Populations became disenchanted as the aspirations of newly independent peoples found themselves in conflict with the virulent and uncompromising demands of bond markets, financial institutions, foreign nations, and internal resistances. The political defeats of this time are commonly read as an indication that the ideas embedded within these political projects were ‘wrong’ or ‘dead’. However, it is important to acknowledge that newly independent states actually found themselves pushed and pulled between commitments to anticolonial thought and an externally imposed ‘reality’ of international finance and the Cold War strategic environment. As a consequence, anticolonial thinking often confronted, blended with, and accommodated ideas produced within Western social sciences, including the disciplines of political science and economics, and disseminated through the Bretton Woods institutions. These ideas produced their own failures, as seen in high levels of indebtedness, poverty, and political instability. However, while the catastrophic and deadly failures of the IMF and World Bank can be forgotten, forgiven, or reformed, the failures of African anticoloinalism are commonly deemed an unsalvageable, ‘African’ problem. The political successes of African anticolonial thought are commonly forgotten, even as those countries and institutions that once reinforced colonial rule across Africa now present decolonization as an inevitability, the outcome of which was spoiled by African governments themselves. Another anxiety stems from the notion that anticolonial thought is primarily concerned with ‘old’ arguments. As such, it is less common to find arguments that re-evaluate the ‘old’ arguments against colonialism, that analyse its forms of governance, social order, and knowledge practices. Grovogui (2009, 330) suggests that we consider these old arguments against colonialism as counterpoints that ‘give expression to unique modern experiences through analyses of culture and national politics but also the effects and implications of the “Westernization” of global politics’. Imaginaries that expose other ways of making sense of the world that we inherited are evident in these counterpoints. Something important happens when we ask about how much we do not know (and how these ignorances have been produced). One can, then, think of neoliberalism as itself the living archive of this defeat. A scattered process that emerged as a response to the market instability of the 1970s, neoliberalism describes elite control of financial markets that protects the processes of capital accumulation and concentration (Harvey 2005, 12). It represents a disconnecting of markets from states by a process of legal and political restructuring of the decision-making capabilities of central government, and by a discursive process that divorces the idea of markets from the ideas of history and culture, and from any embeddedness in geographical, social, and historical context (Harvey 2005, 47). Today,

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universities are themselves very much sites of neoliberal transformation – a project possible, in part, because of the defeat of the anticolonial project. Many of the disciplines we inhabit are themselves the direct product of colonialism, and the maintenance of an imperial order during the Cold War (Wallerstein 2006). Reading african anticolonial archive as an archive of a failure also means reading the world of higher education as itself a failure to live up to its highest aspirations and possibilities – choosing instead to focus on ‘consumers’, revenue streams, and professionalization. Reading african anticolonial archive is, in other words, a chance to read a possible, alternative self. As such, this book cannot be about reaching into the archive of African anticolonial thought and retrieving long-lost gems from a glorious past. Rather, reading African anticolonial thought as an archive of both successes and failures opens up the possibility of considering the humble possibility that, maybe, the most important political questions do not actually have theoretical answers. There might not have been a good theoretical response to the economic, political, and geostrategic crises of the 1970s and 1980s. More perfect theories alone might not have resulted in better political outcomes. Despite this fact, or maybe because of it, we are still well served to push at the horizons and examine again exactly what the important political questions are. Curating Open Horizons The project of cultivating and curating alternative imaginaries requires studying what those imaginaries were, where they came from, and how they appeared as possibilities in a particular moment. Our reading of a politics of african anticolonial archive forces us to work with an Africa, an anticolonialism, and an archive all the while recognizing that these three words represent ideas that are produced over time and space. We are engaging them in particular times and spaces, and with particular modes of inquiry. That is, we are engaging them politically. Thus, we avoided definite and indefinite articles in our title. Engagement, contestation, and sense-making are consequential, but they are no single thing in all places or to all people. ‘Africa’ and ‘anticolonialism’ can similarly be approached as open for us to make sense of. And the idea of archive, archives, and archiving point to the contingencies of how we make sense of the world we engage. This edited book collects and curates a broad array of material that reflects on anticolonialism in Africa, broadly defined. Each contribution connects the historical period with the anticolonial present through a critical examination of what constitutes the anticolonial archive. In this sense, seemingly historical themes are reanimated in the present moment, and historical struggles become constitutive of conversations about struggle and emancipation in present. The

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book, then, considers african anticolonial archive as always in the process of being constructed such that the assessment of this archive is the one that involves a contemporary process of curating. OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS The chapters in this book, as well as the book itself, enact different ways of curating material from the period of decolonization. They examine the constitution of archives: how they are formed, by whom, and under what conditions. Following this chapter, Siba Grovogui’s chapter (chapter 2) examines the long history of practices of ordering variable connections to similarly varied dynamics of power. He shows how, as contemporarily understood, ‘archive’ has a totalizing function (connected to modern epistemological practices) that must be negotiated in generative attempts to ‘order’. Grovogui argues that decolonizing archives requires refusing the claim that archives are already existing things out in the world, paying attention instead to how material is ordered and retrieved. Shiera el-Malik picks up this theme in chapter 3. This chapter reflects on her struggle to teach, thematize, and, constitute an african anticolonial archive. She turns to the notion of curating to demonstrate how she might compile a still elusive ‘Reader of African Anticolonial Thought’. This chapter represents her attempt to develop a way to think about archiving and curating that works with, rather than in opposition to, practices of ordering that Grovogui interrogates. Branwen Gruffydd Jones takes up the argumentative thread of this book in chapter 4. She suggests that the archive might not be so totalizing if one starts with the acknowledgement that whole collections of anticolonial thought emerged within personal interactions and communications. Focusing on Lusophone anticolonial thought, she centres the intimacy of interaction among anticolonial thinkers as informing the contingencies within the archives left behind. For her, the anticolonial archive is not just an archive that speaks to the time in which it was created. It also tells us how that struggle can be reinvigorated in our current ‘problem-space’. Isaac Kamola continues with Lusophone material in chapter 5. Kamola seeks ways to use Amílcar Cabral’s grounded realism to understand the neoliberal university. Although Cabral is not generally ‘applied’ outside of his historical context, Kamola undertakes a reading of Cabral’s work to show how his insights into the logic of revolution are helpful in thinking about how ‘we’ in a neoliberal, institutional context might also better understand the reality that concerns us most. He shows how the counter-political cosmology that Cabral constructs offers a new theoretical framework from which to find revolutionary potential with one’s immediate reality.

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Míde Ní Shúilleabháin’s contribution (chapter 6) focuses on imperial archives as juxtaposed against the lived and circulating archives of Congolese Rumba Lingala music. Moving from the Stanley Pavilion to the vibrant dance halls and music venues across Congo and France, Ní Shúilleabháin argues that archives are more than ‘document and monument’. Instead, she thinks of archives and archiving as productive spaces that incorporate spaces for new kinds of thinking, and that create possibilities for new kinds of political argumentation. Chapter 7 is written by Christopher Azaare Anabila, a historian and elder living in Northern Ghana who, concerned that the youth are losing their connection to their history, has embarked on the formidable project of compiling a detailed history of the Upper East Region of Ghana. Grounded in interviews with chiefs, earth priests, and elders, as well as his own memories, embodied knowledges, and the writings of colonial administrators, Azaare’s work provides a rich understanding of the Gurensi and Boosi people, and the ways in which the legacy of colonial rule, and its resistances, continue to shape the life in Northern Ghana. Anatoli Ignatov, who works closely with Azaare, examines the history of Gurensi and Boosi people in chapter 8. Ignatov argues that the histories of belonging in Northern Ghana were constituted through physical objects, places, and ways of being that were, and continue to be, greatly affected by the history of the slave trade. He examines how the struggle against colonial rule remains embodied within the material life of Northern Ghana – in its sacred sites, religious practices, clothing, and even architecture. Chapter 9 by Timothy Vasko is an effort to curate an absence, namely the expected yet missing engagement between African anticolonial thinkers and Native American intellectuals. Despite a common history of dispossession, thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. make only passing mention to this shared history. To better understand this absence, Vasko looks at the archive of international law, and specifically how it conceptualizes and constructs sovereignty differently in Africa and North America. Vasko warns that taking conceptions of sovereignty already encoded into international law as the starting point for anticolonial demands risks reproducing colonial power, while missing possibilities for shared political solidarity. Seth Markle’s piece, chapter 10, emphasizes the strategies for constructing shared imaginaries across time and space with an examination of how african anticolonial archive continues to circulate through the work of DJ/ producer Madlib. In addition to a politics and aesthetics grounded in collecting, sampling, and repurposing the speeches and music of African anticolonial struggles, Madlib combines these pieces together to tell the story of a Pan-Africanism that does not yet exist. While offering a reading of one album, Markle’s chapter nonetheless offers a refreshing argument about the

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politics of the archive, and its current uses – which includes fluidly making and remaking the stories of Black resistance. This collection concludes with chapter 11, a contribution by Allen Stack about the politics of maintaining personal archives – circulating within private caches of documents, memories, music, and private conversations – within the capital city of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, during the brutal presidency of Blaise Compaoré. Stack examines how these formerly hushed conversations about Sankara and executed journalist Norbert Zongo re-emerged in the streets during protests against the regime. Stack’s argument moves away from the troubled conception of archives with which we started the book and, instead, insists upon acknowledging how people collect, navigate, imagine, and wield these archival stories in ways that are overtly political. His story is one about ideas and political figures once thought stamped out, who return to the street within the voices of those continuing to demand a better future. We understand our engagement with african anticolonial archive, whatever it looks to be in the following pages or in the minds of our readers, to be an explicitly political engagement in our respective fields about what counts – and is collected – as knowledge, and how ordinary people, ourselves included, acquire, navigate, imagine, and wield conversations across time and into our future. We cannot assume that we will ever return to a time in which a Sankara-like person will speak of Maurice Bishop and the end of imperialism, before a crowd in Harlem. That was the past. But this past still circulates within the present. Just as the colonial archive structures the present, so too does anticolonial archive. The anticolonial past continues to speak. Now, it is time to consider what kind of tools, and possibly weapons, already exist in our collective hands. This book can be read as an invitation to think with and through Africa, anticolonialism, and archive in ways that perhaps upset problematic reifying processes. Each of these chapters represents the author’s individual, and our collective, struggle with articulating a ‘story’ about Africa, about anticolonialism, and about archives. This is what we mean when we write of opening horizons, thinking possibilities, and imagining futures. We invite the reader to experiment with us! REFERENCES Arrighi, Giovanni. 2002. ‘The African Crisis: World Systemic and Regional Aspects’. New Left Review 15: 5–36. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Eric Prenowitz, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grovogui, Siba. 2009. ‘Counterpoints and the Imaginaries Behind Them’. International Political Sociology 3 (3): 327–331.

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Hall, Stuart. 2001. ‘Constituting an Archive’. Third Text 15 (54): 89–92. Harsch, Ernest. 2014. Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Martinon, Jean-Paul. 2015. The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. New York: Bloomsbury. Sankara, Thomas. 2007a. ‘Asserting Our Identity, Asserting Our Culture’. In Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983–1987. New York: Pathfinder Press. ———. 2007b. ‘Our White House Is in Black Harlem’. In Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983–1987. New York: Pathfinder Press. Stoler, Laura Ann. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Usman, Yusufu Bala. 2006. Beyond Fairy Tales: Selected Historical Writings of Yusufu Bala Usman. Zaria, Nigeria: Abdullahi Smith Centre for Historical Research, 2006. Wallerstein, Immanuel Wallerstein. 2006. European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power. New York: The New Press. Wilder, Gary. 2015. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chapter 2

An Abbreviated Postcolonial Account of the Archives Reconsidering the Unified Fields in the Human and Social Sciences Siba N. Grovogui The aim of the postcolonial project of decolonizing the archives was to support new utopias. This task has not been entirely successful, in part because of a profound misunderstanding within the postcolonial world of the nature, constitution, and ideological dimensions of the European or Western archetypes that they sought to emulate. The problem is not that the decolonizing project of archives has insufficiently negated truisms and irrefutable discoveries and their intimations, including the unevenness of historical trajectories and sociopolitical developments. Rather, the decolonizing project has yet to effectively structure its own archives away from the central logics, rationales, functions, and meta-reasoning of the existing imperial and colonizing archives – all of which remain to date the archetype of the decolonizing project. To succeed, postcolonial archiving must indeed orient the formation of archives around new arrangements of observations, questions, and lines of inquiry towards alternative common sense and common places. This task would require new methods and theories of the archives and archiving. The term ‘archives’ has ancestry in a Greek conception of knowledge and its accessibility. In that conception, knowledge is best derived from understandings of the whole and its relation to its parts. In this sense, archives give an overall view of knowledge that subtends augmentation and furthers discovery. For instance, Aristotle’s sciences of nature and politics suggest that the laws, causes, and teleologies of nature and politics reveal themselves to the senses as cosmology – a science of origin, causes, and constituents that provide reasons for or explications of the survivability of the universe (Aristotle 1885; Leunissen 2010). It is easy to understand in this context that the role of the archives was to record as well as provide credence, stability, 17

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and predictability to the extant authoritative cosmologies in the different domains of knowledge. In the underlying codependency between cosmology and archives, the former directed the mental process’s observation, discovery, intuition, and the like towards analytical determinations through reason, method, and universal principles. In the above scenario, cosmologies provide models (or archetypes) that give intelligibility to things of the same kind. The archetype, in the Aristotelian view, need not reside in consciousness, but it must reflect a collectively inherited idea resulting from an identifiable pattern of thought and a set of images. In this context, an archive may proceed from any original pattern or model, an archetype that may be shown to encapsulate a set of convergent or coherent representation. It is the task of the scientist, philosopher, or theorist to establish the essence, and therefore validity, of the prototype or paradigm that clarifies the nature, scope, and relevance of the archetype. This is accomplished through a number of processes including logical reasoning, dialectics, and other scientific methods that give coherence to cosmology or the universe reflected in the archetype. The underlying models of science and philosophy still prevail today, with significant departures. Post-Renaissance scientific practices introduced structures of thought, methods, logic, and rationalities as well as modes of evidence and classification that transformed both science and the archives. They added a view of archives in which ‘Western’ science functions as prototype, or a model of models for all scientific practices as necessary and essential path to truth. The condition of this event was the adoption between the years 1545 and 1555 of the idea of genus as the central organizing principle or metaphor for all taxonomies applicable to nature, society, and cultures. It enabled the appearance of as well as explanation for the central divisions and subdivisions in biology, science, and social analysis. The proclamation of the supposed Western genus was one of the chief achievements of the Renaissance. The Renaissance had inherited from the Greeks and Romans a number of sciences. Philosophy (which pertained to ideas, morals, and wisdoms) and mathematics (which applied to numbers, their functions, and distributions) were the primary or fundamental sciences because they were associated with thought itself. They were seconded by sciences of language (philology) and of nature: physics (related to motion, matter, and things), physiology (medicine, human body), geography (for landscapes and the properties of lands), and ethics (which stood for the sciences of what now passes for politics). These fields privileged the functions of integration over differentiation. They appeared as unitary fields that admitted parts from everywhere so long as they could be integrated into the whole. In other words, up to this point, particular ideas or thought forms could be assigned points of origination, but their universality flowed from the fact that



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the implied human activities appeared elsewhere in recognizable and identifiable forms. Post-Renaissance human and social sciences – themselves already integral distinctions – introduced radical overhauls of the existing disciplines in manners that fundamentally set the tone for the new disciplines, their methods, epistemologies, and the like: viz., history, anthropology, cultural studies, moral and political thought, political economy – to name but a few. These fields were intended to give new life or instrumentality to knowledge which functioned as the central ideological pulse of the political project leading to the hegemony of Europe – and later the West. The new disciplinary fields gave new significations to the idea of the human by generating new concepts of humanity and the purpose of human life. Again, these converged towards justifications of the emergent commons: state and international orders, kingdoms, and empires. This process was predicated upon a logic founded on predictive distributional patterns, or algorithms. The logic, to which I have already alluded, was the appearance of the human and science as self-contained classes of things marked by common but exclusive characteristics. From then onwards, Western conceptions of humanism and universalism – and therefore the humanities and social sciences – gave primacy to a certain unity of the human species and a unique place within the chain of beings. Long before the nineteenth-century introduction of the biological concept of ontogeny to support developmental and differentiated histories of societies, sixteenth century European thought had established ‘Western science’ not merely as the principal genus of all modes of thought but as genus onto itself and an exclusive one at that. Since the seventeenth century, this belief in the originality, specificity, and unique status of European populations, science, methods, and values has dominated European/Western thought. As a mode of classification, a genus necessarily comprises and is related structurally or phylogenetically to other species based on identifiable modes of differentiation. This notion of the Western genus provided logic as well as organizing structure to modern archives, which are at once distinguishable and indistinguishable from imperial and colonial archives. The ‘West’ now appears to have a unique and unparalleled access to all essential moral and physical or natural cosmologies. The emergent cosmoses are thus reducible to parochial principles (discernible through reason alone) and the instrumentalities of knowledge: the construction as discovery of self-serving social, moral, affective, and institutional cosmologies. The condition of science in this context is to render concrete and therefore particular images of social life the universal teleology of reason. The purpose of science would be to provide ‘scientific’ justifications to specific fields of knowledge (including academic disciplines) and professionalization (through mentoring or the sanction of guilds). The

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underlying processes reflect principles of power, hegemony, and exploitation that have defined the organizations of national and international societies upon Western ascension to hegemony.

PLACES AND CONTENTS, ORDER AND NATURE Modern ‘archives’ emerged early in the seventeenth century as a claim to the dependability of science, reason, and rationalism to provide a verifiable or dependable path to knowledge. In this sense, archives provide the structure for parochial but singular understandings of natural or cosmological wholes and their relations to singular or individual parts. The modern archives provide researchers their initial knowledge of natural, physical, and moral systems and their parts, delineating through their structure the contours of attainable truths and possible social projects with inherent dynamics. Thus understood, the inception of modern archives is implicated in imperial conceptions of subjects, values, and interests articulated around historically specific evolutionary notions of sovereignty, reason, and human capacity based on near-theological visions or images of the distribution of human faculties – themselves secular iterations of Christian theology on grace, justification, and redemption. Consistently, the verb ‘to archive’ appears in the English language in the late nineteenth century to reflect the breakdown of the singular papal-initiated imperial project of the Christian world over the rest into different colonial designs of European entities no longer bound by papal bulls or the dictates of Catholic ecclesia. This is to say that the history, forms, and substances of modern archives are inherently connected to Europe’s imperial ambition, arising from European expansion, conquest, and colonization of the rest of the world. Both the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries are high points in this singular historical event. Mirroring these generative contexts, colonial archives emerged to provide validations and justifications to the colonial acts. For clarification, the French imperial court first used ‘the archives’ to designate two things: a place and a content. In the first instance, the archives referred to buildings or spaces where official records were kept. The second meaning of ‘archives’ designated the objects or public records deposited in buildings or spaces of the same name. The French state, and state project, was the link between the place of record and public record. Initially, the state ordered and administered historical records on behalf of itself and the nation. The public record – in the singular – was therefore that which the state sanctioned as in the public interest or, alternatively, declared to be of public utility. Understood in this sense, archives are distinct from a catalogue, a late Middle English designation for a complete list of items that is organized systematically, typically in alphabetic or thematic other, as resource for interested



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entities. Consistently, the catalogue has evolved synonymously with any publication that lists resources or contains details of things, places, artistic works, etc. Finally, both archives and catalogues are distinct from a repertoire (or repertory) which, beginning in mid-nineteenth century, came to designate a collection or range of things, reserves, supplies, or skills and talents and types of behaviours as well as stocks of plays, dances, or pieces that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform. The modern idea and drive to assemble knowledge and disseminate it through a general-purpose, printed, and widely distributed encyclopeadia became effective between 1525 and 1535.1 It evolved in the eighteenth century into what Denis Diderot called ‘reasoned dictionary of sciences, arts, and crafts’:2 in his case, a multi-authored volume intended to represent the various strands of Enlightenment thought and eventually change the way people thought about themselves, nature, and the world. This kind of encyclopeadia had instructional, or pedagogic and didactic, value. The invention of printing was itself not inconsequential to the popularity of and accessibility to the encyclopeadia. The Encyclopædia Britannica and the Enciclopedia Italiana represented the underlying ambition to collect useful knowledge from around the world for the purpose of its dissemination around the globe.3 The idea spread from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries and then to the earlier part of the twentieth century when encyclopeadias appeared in less geographically widespread languages. The second half of the twentieth century only cemented a trend that emerged in the nineteenth century that was the proliferation of specialized encyclopeadias that compiled topics in specific fields. It is in this last movement that the encyclopeadia began to appear as a crucial dimension of disciplinary archives. Unlike in mathematics, the principles of differentiation expressed in the archival assembly of modern encyclopedia collections was not an independent function from the instrumental value they carried with them. This value consisted in a relation to power, expropriation, and its justification. For the post-Renaissance human and social sciences, this posed serious problems. First and foremost, the challenges to past orthodoxies also destabilized the structures of authority upon which the sciences were built and practised. The new sciences derived their authority on the distinction that pioneers like Francis Bacon and Robert Williams Boyle established scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge, while claiming empiricism and sceptical and 1.  The English physician and philosopher Thomas Browne was one of the earlier users of the word ‘encyclopaedia’ in the English language (1646) in the preface to his Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries into very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths (London: printed for Edward Dod, and sold by Andrew Crook, 1658). 2.  Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 1751 and 1772. 3.  The appearance of Wikipedia is the latest instantiation of the encyclopeadia.

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experimental methodologies for themselves. From this point of origination onwards, the reputation of science depended upon the discovery and the establishment of facts based on the principles of verification, experimentation, and other incorporated modes of evidence. René Descartes, Isaac Beeckman, and Isaac Newton reinforced this view by introducing the belief that mathematics and the universal laws of nature, encrypted as the new physics and natural philosophy, would deliver Man from moral degeneracy and mental mystifications. The discovery of the New World and the advent of the transatlantic slave trade introduced new dimensions to the taxonomies that would inherently flow from the new science. The realities of the emergent political economies of morality, justice, legality, and ethics demanded explanations of European advantages as well as the requirements, and responsibilities of advantages over population groups who, by necessity, had to be imagined to be inferior or limited in their faculties or capacities. The related questions availed themselves to metaphysical resolutions through concepts, clusters of concepts, and cognitive models that even today condition a meta-reasoning about the West and its others and the relationships between them. This meta-reasoning has not only generated its own logics but also provided metaphors and categories and principles of thought that recur in all the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. All human disciplines today associate progress, redemption, and regeneration to the West. The ground for this disposition is, first and foremost, because it is by now indisputable that Europe (and by extension the West) possesses reason, science, and rationality. The key predicate of the central logic and sensibility of this meta-reasoning is that Europe has exclusively generated the greatest men of history. To corroborate this, European scholars refer to a history dotted by epic events, and that the application of reason and rationality to these events has led to great civilization in Europe. It is therefore assumed that Europe has an extraordinary destiny; that its progressive trajectory is predictable; and that Europe is pragmatic, auto-generative, and auto-correcting. The opposite of all of the above is assumed in varying degrees in relation to populations and sociopolitical entities without Europe and the West. There, however purposeful the events, they all are ultimately led by impassioned men who nonetheless act in the absence of universal reason or value and certainly reactively. Because, these men are incapable of redemptive, progressive, and generative sensibilities, they could be dispossessed, sold, tortured, and subjected to famine without remorse or account. Their reactions to the conditions of their oppression and enslavement could only be judged by their (re)actions, often judged to be ill-timed, excessive, unreasonable, misguided, and in any case dissociated from any universal



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reason or larger moral purpose deserving apprehension and arguments under the general categories applicable to Europe. The post-Renaissance implosion of the old integers, or unifying rationales and justifications of knowledge and its purpose, gave rise to multiple new integers as disciplines that nonetheless referred to identifiable root in the imagination and symbolic organization of human activity. Each of the new integers required justifications that may be found in the necessity of empire and its regimes of hierarchy, oppression, and exploitation. As the nineteenth century announced itself, the movement known as natural history added new fields including criminology and criminal sciences like craniology, eugenics, public hygiene (later public health), political economy, and policy studies (later political science). These were all bound up in the desire of imperial states for social control and social engineering on behalf of nation-building within the context of the industrial revolution, urbanization, rural dislocation, and the administration of formal empires. The introduction of the subjects of history, anthropology, cultural studies, and the likes of policy studies had successfully subverted the unity of the old integers of, say, philosophy and ethics. But they also triggered the possibility of the introduction of unsustainable derivatives: the French would say ‘dérive’ or deviation, undesirable variation, or perversion. Specifically, during the Enlightenment, there appeared the fear of fractionalization and infinitesimal derivations – a very destabilizing thought!4 This singular threat to the practices of science generated its own impetus for the restoration of credibility and authority to the fields ostensibly for the sake of the integrity of the subjects or fields. In practice, however, the new drive seemed at best contradictory. The emergence of disciplines during this time was predicated upon the dual principles of progress (or continuity) and plural (unconstrained) experimentations, on the one hand, and, on the other, homogeneity (for certification) and authority of certified censors: a sort of council of guardians. One element of credibility of the fields was the appearance of likenesses of theological canons as a guide and measure of knowledge. The canons invariably contained lists of articles, artefacts, documents, books, and others that were (and still are) considered authoritative on account of their singular revelations and capacity to inspire practitioners of the new faiths into establishing traditions of thought that are consistent in form and purpose to their points of reference. The desire for canons in the disciplines was itself paradoxically due to one of the central goals of the Enlightenment to dispense the context, structures, and processes of the sorts of intellectual, moral, and 4.  The term ‘infinitesimal’ was introduced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the seventeenth century around the year 1670. While in mathematics and the natural sciences, the term simply applied to rules and processes and their outcomes, for authority-hungry social scientists and humanists it was associated with instability – or the reappearance of hordes.

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institutional stasis that had befallen society, partly as consequence of the strict and uniform rules and procedure established under theological canons as means to truth. Like the orthodoxies that preceded them, the disciplines too ended up with incontrovertible codes of procedures, processes, and corresponding regimes of truth that would serve as proper frameworks for accessing professional resources, defining professional competency, and assessing consistency with the emergent traditions.5 The central elements of these resources were the archives: the collections of documents, records, and like materials that provided information about place, institution, and human activities and, ultimately, the proper purpose of public and private lives. They remain today the repositories of the fingerprints of the colonial project that produced post-Renaissance disciplines and canons. They are the reasons why disciplines today, even in postcolonial environments, still cannot provide full accounts of the generative events of the modern world. Nor are canons fitted to reflect the concerns of those colonized subjects whose bodies, psyches, material, and symbolic resources were expropriated and made available to imperial entities for their power, needs, and enjoyment. This is why the decolonial project, even before it speaks to the inadequacies of today’s disciplines to reveal the lived world to our collective senses, may want to requisition disciplinary archives for investigation. DISCIPLINARY PRACTICES OF ARCHIVES Today, the term ‘archives’ harkens to a number of practices: organizationally, archives aspire to provide the roots or ways to all possible knowledges; functionally, they are intended as filters or screens that ensure the ascent of proper science and scientific methods over lesser forms of knowledge; and teleologically, archives generate scientific common sense, disciplinary common places, and therefore the subjective connections of scientists to their disciplines and professions. Indeed, the use of archives has developed over time to reflect function and functionality. On the one hand, archives are generative of an interface that allows their users to navigate and process data and information as unitary, singular, and coherent resource. Further, archives provide users with the ability to relate one set of data to other related sets in a logical and coherent fashion. 5.  Using the case of the Scottish Episcopal Church, for instance, the Code of Canons provides the legal framework for practice. It is considered a living document that may be amended but is the ultimate reference to past resolutions on the operation of the church and its internal regulation.



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If archives are implicated in the decolonizing project, it is not merely because of the genetic connection between modern archives and the colonial event. Archives are implicated in postcolonial melancholies, desires, and hopes. The relationship between modern archives and the colonial event is not simply a matter of conjecture but one of conjuncture and coincidences that provided rationality to a variety of colonizing activities and colonial undertakings. Specifically, European ‘discovery’ of the New World not only secured the wealth and resources that solidified the social status of the New (post-Renaissance) Man but also opened up the space and possibilities for a great deal of the comparative analyses that gave credence to the new sciences prior to the actual scientific successes that would seal the hegemony of the accompanying ways of knowing: methods, metaphysics, epistemologies, and the like.6 What was true of post-Renaissance Enlightenment science in the above regard was also true of nineteenth-century natural history. Propelled by the New Imperialism and the establishment of formal colonial rule, this era opened up the possibility of the differentiation of humans into races and corresponding degrees of intelligence and civilizational attributes based on geography, skin pigmentation, and other supposed genetic characteristics.7 The related contribution to Western archives generated by taxonomies, semantic and symbolic webs of common sense and allowable queries as well as structures of information retrieval, and mechanisms for answering queries are characteristics of disciplinary common places. Metaphorically speaking, therefore, archives are prose to the poetry of life and the complexities of life forms and human activities. Archives have also emerged as tools that postcolonials give themselves to diagnose the past, make prognoses for the present, and prepare themselves for the necessary disembodiments for departing from the multiple realities of ‘our’ collective presents. From a postcolonial perspective, Western archives appear today as justifications in support of an ‘argumentum ad absurdum’. This argument is that the entire metaphysical and epistemological foundation of the intellectual enterprise of empire had been predicated not on ‘empirics’ but on two assumptions. The first is that it would be unwise, false, untenable, and absurd to not accept or concede the superiority of Europe, its cultures and institutions, over the rest, especially given Europe’s ascent to hegemony and the current political and material pre-eminence of the West. The second assumption, complementing the first, is that one could only attain false, untenable, absurd results – or ontologies, pragmatisms, moralities, etc. – if one were to negate the first order or standpoint: that Europe is superior. This necessarily 6.  See, below, comments on Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt. 7.  See, below, comments on Francis Galton.

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lends credibility to the professional reluctance to entertain any metaphysics, epistemology, ontology as well as precepts, predicates, postulates, axioms, narratives, and modes of verification and evidence that fall outside of the canons and the archives from which they flow. The fact of archiving, Trouillot notes, is always predictably based on intelligible fundamental theorems.8 The practice of archiving is therefore the social and political mirror-image of the operations performed in calculus. Archiving is based on the social calculus that, when represented properly, any social project may be sustained over time. In this sense, archiving is always the product of cultural, intellectual, and artistic activities by spatially situated individuals and collectives with particular connections to power, morality, institutions, and their economies of production, distribution, and consumption as well as those of freedom, justice, and peace. These connections are reflected in the imaginaries of authority, social order enclosed by archives, along with structures of subjectivities, values, and affectations. In the humanities and social sciences, archives are the tools that societies give themselves to diagnose the past and make sense of the symptoms of the present in order to establish credible prognoses for the future: for instance, whether to aim for new departures and in the event how to prepare and escape the present. Further, archives hearken to the idea of roots and indeed they were the lenses through which past encounters were filtered and our evidences fortified. Archives inspire their authors to make connections with the material, immaterial, and symbolic worlds, or the ecologies of life, when needed. Above all, the primary function of archives is to preserve for the purpose of reproduction. Indeed, this function of preservation applies first and foremost to the commons: the common spaces occupied by collectives because of commonalities of fate, interests, and faith (or reason) and the rational purpose of imagining joint destinies as well as enacting shared interests, values, and institutions. The languages, prevalent in the human sciences, of commonality, solidarity, and responsibility suggest a certain universalism of life and its purposes without which today’s political order could not be conceive. Historically in the West, this presumed universalism was never without its incongruities. In theology, God created humans but planted among them a chosen entity or people. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are still disputing who among them occupies that privileged place. So too was the monotheist God capable of bestowing children upon Noah but giving the three children – Shem, Japheth, and Ham – with separate and unequal trajectories and destinies. 8.  As Michel-Rolph Trouillot noted in Silencing the Past (1995), archives are also constructed – as they include monuments, museums, mausoleums, sculptures, and the like. At time, they are simply designated as battlefields, burial grounds, etc. The ones that are chosen among them as anchors to our collective memory also matter to any sciences related to memory.



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The possibility of chosenness (in line with the dubious actuality of it) and the actuality of separate trajectories for different classes of the human always opened up the conviction, validation, and justification of hierarchies within the commons. This occurred long before the appearance of the West where the ‘commonwealth’ (as the joint collective order) was likened to the celestial orders, the kingdom of heavens in monotheism. (Similar processes unfolded in Asia, particularly in China.) Although the Chinese and others had conjured political orders and social systems that depended on notions approximating the Western commonwealths, many of the practices, ideologies, and traditions associated today with the commonwealth were distorted in archives constituted after the Renaissance. Western archives provide long memories of institutions and imaginaries of the commons, whether one moved thematically from philosophy to theology and back to philosophy, or chronologically from the ancient to the modern to the postcolonial. Throughout, the idea of the commons itself proceeded from images of the family and familial relations – for instance, the nation as family or the family of nations; trusteeship and protectorates; etc. A dysfunctional family indeed! It would be erroneous to attribute the colonial fate met by archives and the techniques that produced them, although the methods and the intent have been conjoined historically. Although the verb ‘to archive’ does not appear in the English language until the nineteenth century, archiving on a global scale would not have been possible without European adventures in the New World and Europe’s subsequent ascent to hegemony. The convergence between the two can be illustrated through singular historical figures. Take Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt was an explorer of the (American) tropics and one of Europe’s leading scientists of his time whose multivolume book Kosmos (Cosmos) was published between 1845 and 1862. Writing on the website ‘Center for Humans & Nature’, Laura Dassow Walls has aptly noted that to think of Cosmos merely as ‘a popular science book about stars [would be] like saying Darwin’s Origin of Species is a book about breeding pigeons’.9 Humboldt was in fact among public intellectuals of his time who set out to change everything from art to literature and the sciences of society by introducing scientists and others to a new view of nature that related to ‘man and the movements of society, with language, economy and exchange, institutions and architecture’.10 It would not be an exaggeration to say that his success as a scientist was as great as his impact as an authoritative voice in his time. In this conjunction, Walls points to the now obscured ‘social and aesthetic dimensions of [his] thinking’11. 9.  Laura Dassow Walls, ‘Introducing Humboldt’s Cosmos’, http://www.humansandnature.org/ introducing-humboldt-s-cosmos. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid.

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Humboldt was not only an explorer but also a linguist, an influential proponent of romantic philosophy, and a founding figure of the field of biogeography: study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through (geological) time. The social and cultural significance of biogeography was that its principles could be extended to human populations at a time when the need for such was more than compelling to settlers and empire-builders as justification for stripping Native populations of land, wealth, and life forms. Indeed, imperialists found much in the rest of the world they conquered that set those regions and space apart from Europe in every way imaginable: geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, isolation, and habitat area. The use of the word ‘Cosmos’ by Humboldt was therefore not happenstance; he deliberately sought to unify the diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture into totalities that served to develop a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity. To Humboldt, and generations that followed him, the well-ordered whole that was the universe inspired systems of thought that appropriated, manipulated, exploited data on human cultures, lives, events, and activities to usher in justifications of empire. Specifically, Humboldt’s successes inspired nineteenth-century geographical societies that supported the work of explorers in – according to them – ‘the far reaches of the earth’. One such organization was the Belgian ‘Committee for the Study of the Upper Congo’, whose activities led King Leopold to sponsor the International Association of the Congo and on that body’s recommendation to plead for a conference on Africa that was finally held in 1884–85 in Berlin. That Humboldt himself has nothing to do with Berlin is beside the point. The point is that he ushered in systems of thought and cultures that contained the seeds of cultural oppression, economic exploitation, and political authoritarianism. The latter was predicated on a historical ‘white man’s burden’ to provide salvation to heathens and other infidels in the interest of progress and universal human redemption. It is also no coincidence that the verb ‘to archive’ emerges around the time when men like Francis Galton sought to combine strength in multiplicities of disciplines in order to generate useful totalities to justify the ‘order of things’. Galton, it must recalled was an English Victorian progressive and aspiring polymath whose own intellectual ‘cosmology’ combined statistics, sociology, psychology, and meteorology, all of which could get acquired at home without leaving England. But Galton was also an explorer, geographer, and inventor whose skills in and advocacy for anthropology, eugenics, and psychometrics were influenced largely by his travels around the world and in Africa, about which he published Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical Africa (1891). The first and second editions of this text’s publication (1853 and 1889) bookended the 1884 Berlin Conference. Humboldt, Galton, other nineteenth-century explorers, and their peers in the human and social sciences (most notably Charles Darwin and Karl Marx)



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published vast numbers of essays, articles, and books on such varied number of topics and subjects. Humboldt’s books and publications numbered a thirtyvolume edition of Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland and the multivolume Kosmos. Galton produced over 340 papers and books and on the side invented the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression towards the mean. He not only introduced statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence; he was also among the first to use questionnaires and surveys to collect data on human communities. Galton is also known for his work in anthropometric studies, which complemented his interest in eugenics. These two examples suffice to illustrate the reason behind the appearance of archive as verb: it was now possible to devote one’s life to the activity of archiving both the publications and their revealed collections of peoples, places, artefacts, cultures, civilizations, behaviours, animals, and other creatures, including plants from around the world. ALGORITHMS, HEURISTICS, AND DISCIPLINARY PRACTICES The coincidences between the advent of modern empires, the emergence of disciplines, and the constitution of archives have not been without consequence. These coincidences resulted in inescapable relationships between rulers, archivists, and the users of archives, in particular academic disciplines. One result, in regard to the imagining of the world as a globe, was that European imperialists proceeded from a unitary model borrowed from the image of a unified celestial order. The next move was equally important, which is that God had bequeathed responsibility for the globe, including the determination of the means of order and its preservation, to designated members of the Creation. The latter idea itself was inspired by theologies of celestial preferences among the creation and derivative ontological and moral hierarchies. The secularization of the kingdom of heavens, which began with the coronation of Charlemagne, gave way to peculiar notions of the commons – modern monarchical entities, also called kingdoms, colonial empires, states, and the international orders or systems that they generated. It was the province of the so-called moral and policy sciences (yesteryear’s fields of political theory and political economy) to give actuality and legitimacy to the activities and aspirations related to the construction of empires, states, and the derived European territorial dependencies around the world. It also expected that these sciences would provide justifications for such undertaking in order to sustain the motivation to sustain the actualized orders and their universes of politics, legality, morality, identity, subjectivity, interest, values, and the like. Looking back, this civic dimension of the social sciences generally is inescapable. This discipline-civic responsibility is not a thing of the past. For instance, the field of international relations appears with the stipulation of the

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so-called American Century to replace (colonial British) anthropology as the imperial prism of legitimacy and legibility of the American Empire. The skeptical or curious might want to know how disciplines could remain bound by civic responsibility and simultaneously make sense of the complexities of material worlds that did not abide the human will. Modern archives are not only too complex but also constituted by data, documents, monuments, artefacts, etc., of multiple sources reflecting the great diversities of the symbolic systems represented in archives. On examination, however, archives are based on internal logic, rules of organization, and cultural purposes that cut through the complexity at the moment of consumption – or use. In other words, archives are predicated upon finite modes of differentiation – of race, geography, culture, and the like – that, again, seek to preserve their intended orders. Archives, in short, provide the template to a moral calculus that, when used properly, would connect the user to the desired historic aspirations and related modes of existence. Much like an algorithmic procedure or formula for solving a problem, archives operate along predictable axes of organization, distribution, and orientation (of lines of inquiry, for instance). This calculus begins with a set of integrals. The integral is one of the two main operations in calculus that relates parts to a whole. Its inverse, with which it is associated, is differentiation. Put differently, the integral is not only the basic cause, source, or origin in any principle of organization but also the part that attaches or grounds others into wholes. As with integrals in calculus, archives begin roots or causes of organization that assemble other themes, subjects, artefacts, devices, and repertoires, catalogues, and like instruments into coherent fields of knowledge. However, while archives integrate disparate sets of data and information into coherent wholes or fields of knowledge, they (by which I mean their authors) also create the fields to which they give intelligibility. Further, like integrals, archives are a function of knowledge of which other functions might be derived. These derivative functions are not only the fields and disciplines but also the different subject of the fields: realism, pragmatism, liberalism, etc. The secondary functions – pragmatism, realism, liberalism, etc. – emerge upon processes of differentiation within the initial function or field. Owing to disciplinary codes and structures of authority, the categories of thought resulting from the secondary function of archives themselves generate new wholes that are complete in themselves, and therefore do not admit any fractions. In calculus, this would be an integer to an integral: the first depends on the part but functions separately according to its own rules and dynamisms. Concretely, the category of the human (more appropriately, Man), which appears during the Renaissance as the central concern of the humanities and the social sciences, is an integer. It functions as placeholder



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for the collective of all mammals with the faculties and capacities of humans. Post-Renaissance humanities were to later devise functions of differentiation for humanity that assigned seemingly stable characteristics to distinct ‘wholes’ of humans as ethnicity, nations, and races based on criteria flowing from the newly founded archive-driven knowledge, itself an integral. The integrative functions for these elements of the human were cultural outlook, geographical location, climatic variations, and under eugenics and genetic make-up. From the above, humanity came to imply many things depending on the selected integer. In one sense, it meant the notion and symbolic constitution of all human entities, or the collective of humans as a whole. In another sense, humanity meant (and still means) the quality of being human or embodying the best of the human faculties of compassion, empathy, etc. The third meaning of humanity is the quality of being humane, which is the integer for humanitarian discourses. Each of these meanings reverted back a different function of differentiation. In the first instance, once integrated, humanity does not admit fractional parts because the very definition of the species depends on this admission of a whole. As intimated above, this does not mean that humanity is not numbered or that its parts cannot be counted. As a function of the modes of differentiation emerging from the Renaissance, therefore, human beings as a whole were supposed to be collectively endowed with unique faculties that are proper to the human and therefore set it apart from other mammals, yet possess these faculties in unequal and/or uneven measures. In other words, the degrees of scientific and cultural advances attained by each human groupings were attributed to uneven cognitive processes (which allows them to cogitate), sensorial states (reflected in arts, dance, poetry, etc.), and emotive and affective dispositions (of feeling and passion among others). Some of the principles of differentiation as a function of which it was possible to imagine differentiation within or alongside unity (or unicity) had preceded the Renaissance. In Europe and around it, the three monotheistic or Abrahamic religions had all in their particular fashions proclaimed the unity of creation while claiming a special place within that creation for themselves. Judaism appropriately identified enslavement in Egypt as a condition or function of the fall while claiming a chosen status for itself over contemporaneously enslaved – who were not descendants, associates, or followers of Moses. This status of the Chosen has given rise even today to some exclusivist and discriminatory claims. To be sure, this is the result of an instrumentalization of the faith and theology by smaller fractions of those who would claim today to be Jewish. Christians too have faced the conundrum of reconciling the idea of one God with that of its supposed three forms: the Trinity of God the father, God the son, and God the Holy Spirit. Islamic texts too

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exhibit parallel constructs that bestow privileged status to Muslims in both celestial and earthly matters. This is to say that theological and philosophic grounds existed, even before the Renaissance and Enlightenment, to justify violent proselytism towards others as long as the end be salvation and deliverance. Then, millions had been slaughtered or ‘made’ die in the name of the love of God, faith, the responsibility of the faithful to ensure that the entire creation was made aware of the obligation of humanity as a whole to submit to God’s will and to be grateful and graceful by accepting salvation from the bearers of the gospel. Those to whom evidence of the Living God was presented had the obligation to obey, but those who failed to obey God’s will were destined to hell: real, imagined, and/or metaphorical. Much violence came about as a result of the subsequent imperial folly: or, the insistence that enslaved and colonized populations had to submit to the authority and the magic of the faithful. Post-Renaissance proselytizers likewise saw submission and the violence of conversion as insurance against the greater evil of hell that awaited the insubordinate. The above orders of identity, subjective rationalizations, justifications, and worldly designs set the context for pernicious algorithms or logics and near-mathematical equations that have come to impair or disfigure the facts and modalities of evidence and proof available in the archives. For instance, to date, modern archives affirm as natural successive phases of the ascent of Europe and its derivative entities in the New World, from conquest, colonization, enslavement, settlement, and empire. One need look no further than in the notions of nature and human nature favoured in political and international theories. In international relations, realism and liberalism, along with minor traditions, seem to provide justification for imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism through benign treatment of the implied notions of sovereignty, subjects, interests, and just wars. The embedded understandings allow international theorists to maintain, as a matter of both necessity and function, the fiction that the European adventurers, settlers, and colonialists who set in motion events leading to the current international order somewhat engaged in, say, treaty-making that obligated them through actionable commitments. To uphold the underlying fictions, many moral and near-ontological questions must be set aside. One fiction that must be indulged here is the idea that European entities engaged in fair exchange with indigenous populations, particularly in Africa and the New World at the time of settlement and colonization, which amounted to treaties. The logic of the fiction is easily impeached if one considers the morality of the legal position according to which a treaty cannot be attained in any context, is when one of the parties explicitly or implicitly assumes its own will is inherently superior to that of the other or that the other’s will is inferior to its own. The archives on colonial treaties and treaty-making – whether presented to us as documentary proofs or supportive



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evidence in literary, political, or philosophical texts – nonetheless demand of us to ignore the absence of this central presumption of the equality of wills as condition for any notion of free will. CONCLUSION: WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD? It is not the idea of archives that is indicted here. In the first instance, it means ridding the modern imperial archives of their organizing principles, or integers. This means that archive must be stripped of its function (Western hegemony) and organizing principles: the preservation of Western interests under the cloak of universality, reason, and rationality. In fact, there is little to suggest that modernity was self-enclosed and wholly inimitable; that the ideas, institutions, and imaginaries that crystallized into Western science and technology leading to hegemony were unavailable elsewhere. Nor can one make the case that the terms, values, and ethos of the modern Western experiments do not have idiomatic equivalents elsewhere. The particular form of state that emerged from Europe, the happenstance of discovery, and the singular will to conquer and dominate other regions benefited in hindsight from Catholic theology and belief in salvation, the institutions of sovereignty flowing the justifications of the coronation of Charlemagne, the humiliations of the Crusades, and, later, the investiture struggles and their denouements. All of these paved the way later for the conceptions and functions of state, the pacts between capital and state, and the constitutional function of militias and armies. In regard to the above, the purpose of decolonization of the archives is thus to strip modern archives of their central function of preservations of the notions sovereignty, citizenship, and subjectivity, along with those of community (including the commonwealth), race, and state. Decolonizing would consist therefore of imagining non-hegemonic and non-racialized archives worldwide on the bases of epistemologies and ontologies that are not beholden to the current functions of archives. This does not mean, however, the splintering of archives and the impossibility of universal knowledge. It is the case that future archives must reflect the multiplicity of discourses, imaginaries, and practices of the commonwealth. Universalism emerges in this context as fact – not a programme or a regulatory mechanism – of shared aspirations. I am particularly interested – and I hope that you are – in the manners and contexts in which the questions, tropes, metaphors, and imaginaries of the commons have been expressed historically throughout the world, particularly with respect to their relations to order, truth, sovereignty, pluralism, justice, and coexistence. Nor is the decolonizing project one of substituting one authoritative set of archives for the existing ones. The problem with today’s archives and

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the sciences erected around them is that they are both limited and colonizing. The academy has responded to the first dimension of the problem in the English-speaking world by proposing multicultural curricula which, in addition to existing fields of regional studies, were expected to expand on prior human and social knowledges. As a result, most scholars today have dispensed with the central predicate of post-Enlightenment ideologies that the West alone generated the sciences, technologies, networks, and ideational and spiritual norms that produced modernity. It is now widely understood that historically specific dimensions (and functions) of the instruments of modernity – including the institutions of state, capital, armies, and intelligentsias – appear around the world more or less simultaneously in response to similar circumstances and the attendant historical consciousnesses of the material world. This truism is now widely held without denying regional variations and the cultural projects in which these instruments and institutions were implicated. These variations account for the European edge over other regions around and after the so-called discovery of the New World, leading Western hegemony. The proper aim of the decolonizing the archives is to systematically revisit the foundations and structures of the human and social sciences, along with their justifications. This task becomes imperative in light of the generally accepted fact that the disciplines and their truisms and methods and epistemes have either exhausted their rationales or outlived their imperial utility and colonizing function. In fact, there is no more reason to adhere to disciplineapproved archives so long as they remain moored to the original (self) validating role and self-categorizing function assigned to them by imperial and colonial designs. Indeed, the refutation of the imperial and colonial dimensions of the archives may also mean revisiting the cartographies, utilities, functions, and relations of regions prior to empire and beyond. The decolonizing project may also lead to the revamping of encyclopeadia and their catalogues and repertoires of the nature, purpose, conditions, and requirements of life in order to better capture the characteristic dynamics of human existence. What is at stake is nothing less than profoundly altering the landscape of learning and the meaning of archives themselves in order to offer new genealogies as context for learning; new rationalities as sign posts to our collective quest for knowledge; new instrumentality to orient our collective efforts towards justice and reconciliation; and new justificatory narratives for needed utopia to extricate ourselves from looming catastrophes. This task is not easy, obvious, or within the province of one person or one essay. Sure, it does raise questions about the management of information or data. There are obvious questions in this regard about the value and place of scientific insights; truths and methods; categorizations and self-categorizations; and finally, facts, evidence, and common sense. Nothing is new here.



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However, there have been good and bad responses to the related questions. One obvious scientific reflex has been to hold everything as relative. The relativity argument has been used against both archival and scientific orthodoxy as it has been to deflect criticisms of orthodoxy, particularly in regard to the possibility of a decolonized order of archives. It is indeed a good argument to point out the possibility of knowledge itself and the status of that which is known in relation to that which is not: the unknown or currently unknowable. But it is bad faith to dispense with the fact of the known (however contingent) and the fact that human deliberations and policy depend on determinations of constants and variables. They may be held relatively speaking, but they are not necessarily relative in status all the time. They are the conditions of language, thought, and judgement. It goes without saying that the purpose of the decolonizing archival project is to bring to the symbolic and material resources from all cells of human populations (or social entities). These resources may be at once, although not necessarily concurrently, complex or simple. They may also be incorporated or not into or as part of complex or simple systems of thought and social organization. The important point here is to avoid assuming any archives and their base systems of thought or social organization to be inherently teleologically overdetermined. The philosophical and organizing principle of decolonized (or postcolonial) archives must be that there is a relationship between knowledge, on the one hand, and known or assumed social and symbolic cosmologies of values, aspirations, and possibilities. You may ask as I do, how can this project of multiply centered archives lead to learning? While quantum computing may be beyond my grasp, it is not extraordinary today to assume that iteration, correlation, and non-linearity among complex systems may lead to self-organization. In lieu of the gravity of physics, one may imagine, for instance, that desire, will, and coordination among multiple social entities would align knowledge and scientific insight with the requirements of the moment. This may only be a matter of probability, but probability is one key function of the investment of knowledge into policy or action. It would therefore be unwise and scientifically dubious to assume that the non-existence of decolonized archives today is sufficient evidence that such a thing may not exist in the future. This is not to elide the question of difficulty or the paucity of existing methods and disciplinary practices in regard to which is proposed here. It is evident for instance that there is no available method by which a project of decolonization would integrate today’s multiple (national) archives. One reason is that existing archives obey divergent constitutive principles and norms. Indeed, it may be wise not to discount the fact that we may be facing a plethora of seemingly inexhaustible amount of data. The beginning of an answer to this question rests again whether there are available mechanisms

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and principles for managing such a problem. We know for instance that no region of the world, not even the so-called New World, was without civilization and related institutions. We also know today that most regions of the world had been connected long before European hegemony and that these connections allowed for the diffusion of goods, science, technology, the arts, and the like. Properly decolonized archives would point to patterns and distribution, as well as variations and convergences in human activities and related social forms. One can think of these patterns, convergences, and divergences, through the prism of distributional algorithms. The relations between them, their possible connections, and the manners in which they may be related to the present and serve today’s human societies are for lack of a better term a matter of heuristics: or, what kind of orientation do we collectively wish to give to data mined from the available archives. The central truism or constant here is the non-sufficiency of any singular archives. The solution to the dilemmas of multiplicity may therefore lie (partly) at the intersection of action (archiving) and purpose or philosophy of archival retrieval. In sum, the aim of decolonizing the archives is to restore needed complexity to knowledge, to reflect the complexities of human existence and experiences. Archives thus understood have to respond to the collective desire for plausible futures that hold greater (probable) promises for justice and postcolonial reconciliation. This possibility assumes of course the existence of ways and modes of life beyond its fixed and determinate boundaries. In this regard, the postcolonial insistence on decolonizing the archives is a repudiation of the available sciences, methods, and their epistemes and ontologies. Rather, the need to decolonize originates from a sense that the expansion of knowledge and its base data are not only desirable – as a subjective matter – but also (objectively) necessary to securing a collective future based on all available human resources of analysis, reflection, and prediction: intellectual, scientific, mental, psychic, spiritual, and the like. REFERENCES Aristotle. 1885. The Politics of Aristotle, Jowett (trans). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Galton, Francis. 1891. Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical Africa. London: Ward, Lock, and Co. Leunissen, Mariska. 2010. Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Bacon Press.

Chapter 3

Curating and Politics Searching for Coherency in African Anticolonial Archive Shiera S. el-Malik

Recently, I asked students in a course on feminism and international studies to construct their own Twitter-based research projects. I asked them to follow people on Twitter, see what moved them, and decide what they wanted to look at. The assignment was deliberately vague. I wanted them to find their own interests and to see what questions emerged as important for them. In another stage of the assignment, they found secondary literature that could help them make sense of the interactions they chose to examine. Then they wrote their drafts, peer reviewed each other, and revised. We spent extra time on the first stage of the assignment. They wanted to know what looking at tweets could tell them that would be of value. Some were interested in conversations about intersectionality, women, labour, and sex work. Others were curious about how Twitter works as a platform on which people make claims about ethnicities or ‘police’ black women’s femininities. One examined how ignorance is produced, and yet another sought out connections between women’s social relations in Japan today and post-Second World War. Their concern with using this material to make truth claims raised another question that we had to discuss. How could we make sense of a set of observations without presenting them as a thing out in the world? We talked about how we might investigate relations without reifying them as a thing disconnected from the power that worked to make them appear before us? We talked about different kinds of relationships at play in the task before them. One was the relationship(s) that we are seeking to investigate. Another was the relationship between that which we want to investigate, the platform upon which the material is created, and the historical processes constituting us as researchers undertaking the investigation at hand. By this, we understood that different people come to their research with different historically contingent experiences and 37

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with different grounded insights. The relationship between the constituted researcher and the research at hand is an intricate one. We talked about a third kind of relationship, the methods by which we go about investigating are itself the product of other social relations, past and present. How blurry our vision can get once we try to parcel out these elements! Take, for example, the process by which the student is constituted as the student who is interested in studying the process that gives form to what we have come to call practices of sex workers which are complex and layered processes, as well as varied practices that reinforce and interrupt specific patterns of sense-making. I have struck through the contingencies encompassed in this sentence in order to show what gets elided. With the contingencies obscured, the sentence might read: the student is interested in studying sex workers. The presumption that students exist and that sex workers exist is built in to the statement. But, in fact, both students and sex workers are categories and conditions whose social meanings are far from self-evident. Given these contingencies, students in this course were asked to consider how they ‘curate’ their observations from Twitter and present them to readers supported by secondary research.1 The problem they found is that the more one unpacks relations, and their contingencies, the harder it becomes to say anything. Yet, they also learnt to recognize that interventions and communiqués require platforms from which to speak. The students were all making sense of the observations that they later turned over in their hands, touched, tasted, smelled, thoughtfully considered. They became aware that the sense-making practices were some that they had developed and honed over years and others were practices that they started developing more recently. I noticed this as they became increasingly vocal about relating their research process to their experiences and to stories (e.g. of their parents or learning as a practice). The context, then, was one in which I had asked them to curate a Twitter conversation, to archive it, and to analyse it. All the while, I tried to remind them that ‘archives generate their own logics and … the lines of inquiry that emanate from the dialectic of archives, memory, and recollection necessarily reflect particular perspectives’ (Grovogui 2009b, 6). Their curating of a Twitter conversation was doomed to failure, of course, if our idea of success is to produce a consolidated empirical referent, a singular thing that needs study. If instead we gauge success as engaging this reflexive and analytical process of thinking, we might find them quite 1.  For reasons of brevity, I cannot go into details about this course here, although a syllabus is available for interested readers. For the purpose of this chapter, I am using this anecdote to highlight the relationship between researchers, research, and historical contingencies that I intend to explore here.



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successful indeed. They were uncomfortable and unsure, but they had to proceed; they had to seek comfort in the process of investigation to distract themselves from the persistent ambiguity and in-fluxness of the ‘thing’ they were studying. This is the politics inherent in staking a claim, although this process is rarely visible. And, this, I think, is the lesson. Designating a thing to look at is a process imbued with ambiguity and contingency; its navigation requires us to develop clarity, draw lines, delineate categories, make sense, enact closures, etc. The lesson (and actually the question) is to think about how to do research while remaining cognizant of the contingencies of that research. This lesson developed organically out of my own set of inquiries related to an ongoing project collating African thought of the anticolonial period. I collect unpublished and out-of-print materials and read them alongside some of the in-print work of Steve Biko, Amílcar Cabral, and Frantz Fanon, for example. I intend to organize the primary documents into a ‘Reader of African Anticolonial Thought’ not unlike Bruce Fetter’s (1979) Colonial Rule in Africa: Readings from Primary Sources – a collection of primary materials collated according to a certain logic. I also want to offer a list of connected (further) readings to make more visible the contemporary resonances of the older primary materials, as in Fredrick Cooper’s (2002) Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. But this project feels hamstrung to me. I want to claim that I see value in what might be called African writing of the anticolonial period. In particular, I am most interested in collecting writing that spoke directly against colonialism, its presumptions, its politics, its patterns of sense-making, and its world-making, as well as writing that was perhaps produced by those intelligible as political actors.2 The value I want to note is twofold. On the one hand, the content speaks to how we might analyse modes of governance, enframing, multiculturalism, practices of political leadership, etc., which are concerns of political theory. On the other hand, I want the interventions to point out how we might refigure critical analysis and political intervention (or metaphorical chess moves) in a time in which these kinds of exercises seem divorced from the historical contingencies that contour them, which reflects a different kind of concern about the politics of knowledge. I have long been interested in the relationship between the researchers and research, but I now find myself ensconced in this project that has me drowning in the contingencies of the ‘thing’ ‘I’ am trying to look at. Thus, the chapter here is a reflection on a separate and ongoing project. The first project, the compilation of a reader yet to come, it seems to me, raises some 2.  I wrote about this in an essay about Bessie Head’s work (see el-Malik 2014).

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serious questions about knowledge and archive. For example, how can I delineate and categorize an archive which, as Siba Grovogui (2009b, 6) notes will necessarily reflect particular perspectives, while remaining open to other modes of making sense of this smaterial? I have begun to understand the relationship between the material and its interpretation as one that can be productively engaged through curating. In the field of museumology and museum studies, much thought goes into who curates, how curating happens, what politics underlie curatorial practice, and for what purpose curating takes place (Martinon 2015; O’Neill 2012; Smith 2012). For me, ‘curating’ queries the act of collecting material (information/data) and organizing it according to some meaningful set of criteria. How a thing gets curated is directly connected to when it gets curated, where it gets curated, by whom it gets curated, and their histories. In this chapter, then, I examine three sets of relationships. In ‘A Troubling Project’, I focus on how I came to this project and study the relationship between the texts of African anticolonial thought and myself, as well as my effort to show how this work speaks with, to, and against international political thought (IPT). In ‘Troubling Patterns of Intelligibility’, I discuss the relationship between me and an audience who continues to read this project in certain ways that I argue delimit such an engagement.3 Here, I examine how to navigate these patterns in ways that might trouble them. In ‘Curating Coherency’, I focus on the relationship between the texts of African anticolonial thought and disciplinary knowledge production. Here, I show how I am attempting to curate the material I currently have. In order to think about these relationships, I am going to work with ideas of agnotology and curating. Agnotology – the study of socially produced ignorances – centres power on the practice of denying certain sources of knowledge; it suggests that what we are challenging here is not knowledge, but what counts as knowledge and particularly productions of ignorances. Curating likewise links other moments, various pasts and simultaneous presents to a ‘here and now’ without necessarily obscuring the context and contemporaneousness of those links. It is my contention that thinking African anticolonial archive4 in terms of agnotology and curation makes it possible to do two things. First, it attempts to develop a line of inquiry without obscuring its contingencies. And second, it makes compelling claims that push against the bounds of ‘common sense’, of what is easily intelligible. 3.  Other disciplines are represented here. I am thinking particularly of history, sociology, anthropology, and economics. 4.  I write ‘african anticolonial archive’ in lower case to highlight the contingencies that this chapter seeks to explore.



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A TROUBLING PROJECT As an adjunct teaching several streams of political theory and IPT courses in a political science department in 2007–2008, I was assigned to teach a class on ideas and ideologies. Most of the syllabi I consulted offered a survey list of the dominant ideologies of the twentieth century, liberalism, socialism, communism, etc. I wanted to find another way in to the topic that would leave me less bored and constrained. I figured that centring the course on political thought in Africa in the twentieth century allowed me to tap in to most of the major ideas of the time period and to connect them to political tools and concepts students learnt in other political theory classes. I did not find it radical to consider the writing of anticolonial thinkers to be political theory. The material seemed to exist in an easy conversation with more ‘classical’ political thought, about state, politics, power, capital, violence, freedom, democracy, humanness, art, governance, authority, legitimacy, and so on. It did not occur to me that this would be considered unusual until I searched political theory and IPT syllabi. African anticolonial writings were largely absent. When I did find a source I wanted to include, it was often out of print. When they were in print – and here I am thinking about Frantz Fanon (2008, 2004, 1994, 1967), Amílcar Cabral (2016, 1979), and Steve Biko (1978) – they were ghettoized in cultural or area studies rather than placed in conversation with other political theorists of their time.5 I had basically stumbled upon a striking absence of material that seemed to me to be so obviously fitting for a political theory course. Others acknowledge that postcolonial political theories are not represented on syllabi of standard courses in political theory even though they tackle vibrant issues in contemporary political thought. Kohn and McBride (2011), for example, note that subjugated knowledge is embedded in forgotten intellectual history of the struggles for decolonization. They show how anticolonial writings offer a critique of liberalism from which contemporary political theory could benefit. My response to this gap in the literature has been to think about some of the central issues in contemporary political thought and to curate the readings that I have collected along themes to which I think they speak: theory and practice, socialist economics and humanist philosophy, racism and anti-racism, social and political identities, violence, and self-determination and statehood (el-Malik 2013b).6 It is evident to me that African anticolonial thought has 5.  This changed with the publication of books like Kohn and McBride (2011), Martin (2012), and Wilder (2015), among others. 6.  I outline these themes here not to make the case that this is a definitive reading. Rather, my aim is to use the type of thinking in which I am engaged in order to ask other questions about the politics, logic, and ethics of undertaking a task like this.

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qualities that make it contemporarily relevant to researchers of politics and international relations (IR).7 Thus, my project started with the claim that African anticolonial thought can be understood as political thought – that it constitutes a literature that similarly accommodates interrogations of social life and the human condition. However, in the process of curating African anticolonial thinking around six themes, I faced a dilemma. A reader would likely hear me say that an archive exists and that it encompasses six themes, as was my experience on multiple occasions.8 Yet, this was not what I meant to convey. Instead, I wish to state that a claim to such an archive can be made, but its roots live in the context of this utterance and not in any already coherent archive that exists ‘out there’ in the world. Curating this archive, as with constructing any ‘thing’ to study, is an act of contemporary politics. To my mind, what is at stake here is more than what counts as knowledge. Also at stake are conceptualizations of the present, their sometimes barely perceptible links to the past, and how we might imagine futures. Take the academic study of global politics as a case in point. Scholars address issues as varied as drones, neoliberalism, corporatization of universities, rape, war, poverty, security, human rights, the transformation of the world economy, violence and insecurity, governance, and many, many other topics. I see countless connections between how anticolonial thinkers analysed their world and what we might learn from them. But, to the extent that it appears in written work or on blogs, these analyses are tethered to the continent of Africa rather than used in general ways in the construction of analytical or theoretical frameworks – a provincialism not reserved for political theorists from other places. Concomitantly, the way African anticolonial thought is used to rehearse historical narratives confirm an assumption that such work has little to teach us about how to study, understand, and navigate contemporary politics. Recent interventions have begun to develop claims that African anticolonial thought can be said to carry contemporary relevance (Martin 2012; 7. As noted elsewhere in this book, Amílcar Cabral, for example, wrote an excellent essay, ‘Weapon of Theory’, that is currently in print; yet, he is rarely cited as a important theorist of the relationship between theory and practice, which has been a core question to the study of politics not only in Africa but throughout political philosophy. While Marx’s thinking about praxis, taking place at a particular moment in time and in a very specific place, is frequently considered an age-old theoretical question, Cabral’s intervention into this discussion can be ignored completely. I am not saying that I would prefer this to be the case with Cabral or that Marx be provincialized. Rather, I highlight the stark difference between the two approaches as something that I find troubling. 8.  For example, when presenting this conceptual framework at the Royal Irish Academy (2013b) and at the International Studies Association (2014), I received questions like the following: ‘Eh, not another project of hero-worship!’ ‘If the colonial archive lives in metropolitan offices and buildings, where is the anticolonial archive?’ ‘These were political interventions in a past historical moment; they don’t help address questions of development and corruption.’ These are not unfair questions, but they presume a project with a different remit than the one I am trying to undertake.



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el-Malik 2015; Wilder 2015). These interventions argue that this thought can be helpful in examining global power dynamics more broadly and also into the current historical moment. They show that political and moral imaginaries contained substance and form that remain intelligible to contemporary readers of politics and society. These imaginaries develop specific arguments about leadership, government, responsibilities, etc. The context of some of these prescriptions, although not in every case, is vastly different from prescriptions we might contemplate in a contemporary context. There are arguments about the proper organization of a revolutionary political party or tactics related to rural guerrilla warfare, for example. Some prescriptions are focused on seemingly arcane political economic problems that predate the transnationalization of capital in the 1970s. Substantively, then, these can appear outdated and irrelevant to those in a contemporary political economic context. However, I am not making the claim that this material is directly useful content-wise, although the content can be important for understanding context and historical legacy. Rather, I think that the form of these arguments represent more or less imaginative patterns of sense-making in a specific moment that can potentially be mirrored in contemporary practices of sense-making.9 TROUBLING PATTERNS OF INTELLIGIBILITY My project of curating themes that run across ‘the’ African anticolonial archive has been troubled, I think, because practices of intelligibility themselves obscure the particular reading of this literature that I am trying to undertake. For example, the writings of the anticolonial context are broadly concerned with questions of the state, authority, identity, community, politics, governance, history, and so on. Yet, as I noted above, the study of politics and IR tends to limit this literature to area studies, identity, and cultural studies of Africa and African history, for example, rather than centred in the general corpus of study. Arguably, few Western theorists assume that Africans, their modes of thought, ideas, and actions have been integral to the dramas of modernity. They appear in Western narratives only as appendages of Western makers of history (Great powers); on 9. An excellent and insightful approach to this is Wilder’s (2015) thinking with and thinking through Césaire and Senghor’s arguments regarding decolonization and freedom. ‘Thinking with Césaire and Senghor means engaging a future that might have been’ (256). To this end, Wilder is suggesting that we study these thinkers, not for their proposals, but instead for the problems that they identified – ‘concerning the relation of state sovereignty to human freedom or the prospects for selfmanagement, plural democracy, and human solidarity in an interdependent world’ (256). Alessandrini (2014) also represents an exciting way to think about reading Fanon for contemporary politics.

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terms defined by the latter (viz., the cold war or other great divides); armed with ideas springing from Western intellectuals (now great thinkers). The unstated implication is that these ‘others’ have not offered any valid discourses or practices outside of the strictures of the Western political languages and imaginary. (Grovogui 2009b, 8)

Consequently, perhaps, this material seems to be temporally bounded by a narrow reading of its conditions of possibility in academic work. Despite my understanding of this material as having broader resonances with political thought, I increasingly find myself also trapped in area studies.10 I am heartened, however, by Siba Grovogui’s response when his own thinking gets caught in these practices of intelligibility and by how he dances with, and through, their limitations. In a 2013 Theory Talks interview, he recounts being accused of ‘being a bad reader of Hegel’ (Creutzfeldt 2013, 9) at an International Studies Association conference. He said, [The senior colleague] insisted that if I spoke Hegelian then I was Hegelian, and I retorted that I was not, but that deploying Hegel was merely an instance of vehicular language, allowing me to explore certain predicates, certain precepts and assumption, and that is all. In this way, I can use Kant, or Hegel, or Hobbes, or Locke, and my problem when I do this is not with those thinkers – I can ignore the limitations in their thinking which was conditioned by the realities of their time – my problem is with those people who think they own [or do not own] traditions originating from long dead European thinkers. (Creutzfeldt 2013, 9; insertion and emphasis my own)11

Grovogui could have used any number of thinkers in order to articulate the point he was trying to convey, but his conveyance may not have been intelligible to the audience (including the senior colleague who made the accusation). Presuming that they had read Hegel, it made sense that he should use Hegel to develop his own intervention. From this angle, Grovogui used Hegel as a sort of translator between various provincial forms of theorizing, thereby rendering Hegel and Kant no longer simply European. Rather, thinking through them in this way re-situated them as thinkers available to other thinkers, and for the purpose of thinking about the world. And, for Grovogui, they are thinkers who can help him translate between the dominant categories through which the world has come to be intelligible, other available categories, and new imaginaries. 10.  Indeed, a senior colleague sought my input in an area of policy so distant from my political theory footing with the explanation that I was the only Africanist around. From my conversations with other scholars of Africa, this is not at all uncommon. 11.  I added ‘do not own’ to highlight my query as to why we do not all own African anticolonial thought.



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Further, Grovogui refused to be mistaken for a Hegelian, which I take to mean that he refused to reify Hegel. He used Hegel for what Hegel allowed him to convey. For him, theorists offer analyses and tools. While Grovogui was accused of being a bad reader of Hegel, he is buoyed because his readings do not help constitute a club of Hegelians even if he was misunderstood as so doing. In his own words (and in this case citing Voltaire), Grovogui notes, I have quarrels with Voltaire’s characterization of non-Europeans at times; but I have a greater quarrel with how he has been colonized today as distinctly European. Voltaire rejected European orthodoxies of his day and opted explicitly to enter into dialogue with Chinese and Africans as he understood them. … A lot of Western philosophy and political theory was actually generated – at least in the modern period – after contact with the non-West. So how that is Western I don’t know. I encounter the same problem when I am in Africa where I am accused of being Western just because I make the same literary references. It is a paradox today that even literature is assigned an identity for the purpose of hegemony and/or exclusion. (Creutzfeldt 2013, 10)

Thus, Grovogui queries the very frame that presents West and non-West as entities. I take from this that Grovogui’s starting point is one that both understands the historically contingent locations of thinkers and tools, and the moves that must be made in order to upset dominant modes of intelligibility to make room for other kinds of thinking. I found that I needed to adopt this kind of move in order to make my reading of African political thought intelligible outside of the frames that have been otherwise reserved for this dusty literature and, in doing so, avoid hailing more prophets in political theory. If we are to keep alive legacies of imaginative thought then ‘we must be wary of giving way to hagiography’ (Alessandrini 2015, 3). And, this means a hagiography of the Western canon, in particular. A related example of this flexible movement appears in an International Political Sociology forum that dealt with the question of how to move beyond the European and North American traditions in social and political thought. Again, Grovogui’s challenge is to show that the question itself comes out of European and North American traditions of social and political thought. He writes that ‘the greatest failure (and tragedy) of IR is the lack of will to center its reflection on life beyond one’s own polis or community’, namely that ‘the stuff of international thought, occurred (and occurs) only in singular Western or European traditions’ (Grovogui, 2009a, 328). Using the discipline of anthropology as an example, he explains that some strands extricated themselves from moorings in the colonial project by turning their focus towards the social relations and communities of the empire itself. Thus, the focus of attention turned to the observer himself or herself. By comparison, political

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thought (in general, and in IR specifically) ‘has failed to properly relate the study of the state, international community, or civil society objectively to the questions of global order, security, justice, and peace’ (ibid.). Thus, instead of investigating forms of world-making and imaginaries broader than that which constitutes ‘European’ or ‘Western IR’, the discipline rests instead on a sort of ‘theoretical fundamentalism’ that yields the very question of how to ‘move beyond’ as rooted in a ‘liberal model of pluralism and toleration’ (Grovogui 2009a, 329). To avoid this, Grovogui suggests that we might move along three modes of inquiry: (1) move away from imperial foundations as did anthropology and political geography; (2) attend to postcolonial critiques that present challenges to political thought; and (3) document and incorporate other forms of worlding that political thought in IR has not yet archived. Underpinning this analysis to the question of how to make a discipline less Western, Grovogui has effectively presented a project that both provincializes Western frameworks and puts the very question of inclusion under suspicion. It is an approach that situates the ‘West’ as precisely constituted in its relationality with an imperial dynamic rather than as a ‘thing’ in and of itself. It is a move to reorient ourselves by interrogating the conditions of possibility that present particular questions as questions and, in doing so, helps me to recognize similar intellectual moves in the material I have collected for my project. These two examples, the accusation of being a bad reader of Hegel and querying the conditions of having a conversation ‘beyond the West’, highlight the power of reification and ways that I might be able to move with it. The problem of reification, of abstracting this ‘theorized action’, and therefore of neutralizing its policies, visibly emerges once we put forth the question of African anticolonial thought. Grovogui’s response to the accusation of being a bad reader of Hegel is not to say that he has read Hegel correctly. In fact, his response is precisely to recognize that if one thinks that Hegel is a singular thing, then he has been reified. So, Grovogui’s response points to how he has managed to avoid reifying Hegel and still engage him as a thinker. He makes a similar move in response to the question of how we can move beyond Western traditions in sociopolitical thought. As we saw above, he suggests that if one thinks that Western traditions are purely Western, then it makes sense to try to think about Eastern traditions. However, if we see that ‘the West’ is a thing that has been constituted through practice and continues to be both constituted and reified by questions about moving ‘beyond’ the West, then we cannot ‘get at’ the complicated forms of sense-making and world-making that might otherwise appear visible. Grovogui’s triple-stage strategy above, then, represents a strategy for navigating tendencies towards reification. Let me explain this using a comment made by Patrick T. Jackson. Jackson (2004) attempts to invert Alexander Wendt’s claim that states are people too, by showing that ‘people’ is also contingent. Jackson’s argument



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has broader reach than I can do credit to here, but for my purposes, I want to use Jackson’s (2004, 281) comments regarding the problematic question: What makes a thing a person? For him, this question centres ‘a thing’ and ‘a person’ as clearly delineated entities. It encourages one to delineate abstract criteria to attribute to the thing one is trying to make sense of. For example, a person is one who thinks, or African anticolonial thought is political thought. One might ask instead: What is the process by which a thing becomes a person? Or what is the process by which African anticolonial thought comes to (dis)appear as thought? This approach highlights the relational process that constitutes African anticolonial thought as such. This thinking is consistent with approaches that challenge fixedness. Of course, asking how African anticolonial thought comes to (dis)appear as thought requires also asking, how does ‘Africa’ come to appear as Africa? James Ferguson (2006) takes up this question as a starting point. He begins his analysis of Africa in global politics with the notion that Africans were never simply bystanders. One way to access their activity is to begin with the notion of ‘Africa as a category through which the world is structured’, that is, historically contingent, yet powerful in its categorical imposition (Ferguson 2006, 5). This is a claim that one cannot simply deconstruct the notion that there is a thing called ‘Africa’, because the idea of ‘Africa’ represents something. It is an idea that has a history that does not simply fade away when one argues that there is no single thing called ‘Africa’. Further, Ferguson (2006, 5) asks ‘how that place-in-the-world functions in a wider categorical system and what this means for the way we understand an increasing transnational political, economic, and social “global order”’. This is a query that highlights relationality and enacts translations of ‘traditional’ ways of understanding Africa. Cooper (2014) repeats Grovogui’s query of whether or not the question is even the one that we should be asking. Building on DuBois’s book Africa and the World (originally published in 1946), Cooper traces the continent’s place in the world as connected to its intelligibility and shows how other paths were available for thinking Africa differently. The point for me, as for DuBois, Ferguson, and Cooper, is more than how is Africa intelligible in the ways that it is intelligible. Rather it comes to be as follows: Alternative pathways were opened up at different moments of African history, not least in the critical and uncertain decades in which a future beyond colonial empire was in question. The patterns we often see as built into global structures do not necessarily have the solidity we think they possess. They were born of contingent and contested political processes, which we might not notice if we do our history backward, assuming that the path to our present was the only option in the past. (Cooper 2014, 101)

The point, then, comes to be about how Africa became intelligible in the specific ways that it has come to be intelligible. Moreover, what is left

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outside of the frames of intelligibility as they develop their contours? In the quote above, Cooper is unpacking precisely the practices that lead to the production of ignorance, or agnotology. ‘Ignorance, [here] is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle’ (Schiebinger 2005; see also Proctor 2008). In other words, ignorance does not just happen – it gets produced, and it does so in complex ways. The disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe from Ghanaian history is a great example of both agnotology in general and of how it occurs along already existing nexus of power dynamics. Feminist historian Jean Allman (2009) investigates this disappearance of a high-ranking official woman in Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party and ‘propose[s] … an agnotological approach to women’s history – an approach that does not assume disappearance and marginalization (launching us, therefore, directly into reconstruction and recuperation), but rather insists that we first interrogate that foundational assumption of disappearance with a battery of how’s, why’s, and when’s, and then consider what those agnotological fissures might tell us about the nation, the postcolonial state, and the disciplinary urges of history and of feminist inquiry’ (ibid., 15–16; see also el-Malik 2013a and Trouillot 1995). Allman shows that Kudjoe is referred to in a number of documents and writings, but after independence she was written out of the record (Allman 2009, 13). For Allman, the question of why we know so little about Kudjoe precisely demonstrates the energy that gets expended in the process of obscuring knowledge. For me, this energy highlights that what we are talking about with this archive is a living politics (Hall 2001). It is a ‘record’ of moves, patterns of communications, and argumentative strategies. If we begin, then, with the notion that ‘ignorance has a history and is always unevenly distributed’, such that ‘the geography of ignorance has mountains and valleys’ (Proctor 2008, 26), we would need to return to the question of what happens when we move around processes of reification. ‘What is at work here is not merely a theoretical choice that provides a privileged place from which to perform a critique, but rather a brave and clear-sighted attempt to find a space for agency in the face of overwhelming historical forces’ (Alessandrini 2014, 73). In order to find this space, Alessandrini (2014) argues, we need to appropriate arguments and reading strategies, in particular one he calls an anti-pious or non-pious approach to reading. A non-pious reading incorporates the idea that if theory travels then it can be thought of not as ‘theory from elsewhere’, but as ideas that flow along specific, historically contingent routes (Said 1975). This makes Grovogui’s use of Hegel a product of a non-pious reading. If a non-pious reading accounts for historical contexts and engages important thinkers as co-conversationalists for the purpose of discussion and intelligible conveyances, then Grovogui’s approach is quietly radical. For me, this helps to challenge the dismissive arguments that African anticolonial



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thinkers used ‘European’ ideas and their thinking is relevant only to things African. I can imagine, then, that ideas move, exist, evolve, transform, and are made meaningful in a number of ways. They develop intelligibility and are instrumentalized in ways that are not always predictable, but are in some way historically contingent. If African anticolonial thought can be considered an example of a radical joining of ideas that travelled, arrived, left, and came back transformed, then it seems prudent to think about how to make sense of it rather than to make claims about it. With the latter, I would use existing patterns of intelligibility to stake a claim. With the former, I am left to attend to the patterns of intelligibility themselves, and how they came to be, as well as to think hard about other kinds of intelligibilities that I can access, and for what purpose. Returning to the metaphor of chess, what are my own chess moves? CURATING COHERENCE If patterns of intelligibility are a problem because they reify dominant practices and obscure other modes of intelligibility, then perhaps an explicit and visible position-taking, such as curating, that refuses abstraction and seeks possibilities can present a way forward. But, the desire to understand Africa, theory, and travel as fluid practices that do not conform to a fixed topology, but instead shape what comes to be intelligible, runs up against an already existing thing: the archive. Archives label and order content. Taking seriously, then, Derrida’s comments on the archive being a forever incomplete project, one might say that African anticolonial thought represents a collection/collective of thinkers who examined and analysed the world at a specific moment, from a variety of vantage points and staked claims to certain interpretations/explanations/analyses. They placed in a single frame a set of analytical tools that did not traditionally occupy the same space within logics of coloniality: politics, governance, identity, art, poetry, social science, socialism, religion, theory, etc. A non-pious reading of Derrida, then, might consider this an archive, however momentary, fragmented, and inevitably incomplete for the knowledge it presents today.12 Thus, we might say that ‘the’ african anticolonial archive reorients colonial historiography from a narrative of imperialism towards a model more specific to local dynamics and readings of empire. ‘An’ african anticolonial archive marks out the contours of specific manifestations of epistemologies of colonial governance. ‘It’ encompasses a marking out of anticolonial subjectivities in the voices and political activities of those the archive records. 12.  See Wilder (2015) and Alessandrini (2014), who argue that anticolonial thought (in particular that of Césaire and Senghor and Fanon, respectively) presents a practice of critical engagement, strategic thinking with a historical moment.

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Turning to the notion of curating, though, may seem odd given that it is something artists do, not sociopolitical analysts. However, I am deliberately choosing to use a metaphor and process from art – I draw on a practice of art because there is something about how artists have to confront materials, and contemplate how to curate it, that disrupts notions of expertise. The literature on curating encourages one to approach the practice of curating with an eye towards the process rather than the ‘output’. The process of curating then is one that is alive with possibility. ‘Curating’ a classification system, then, need not necessarily reproduce epistemic closure if it enables critical engagement. In fact, this is the point that Wilder makes about the work of Senghor and Césaire, that their work allows for a critical engagement with possible conceptions of freedom that were available during the post-war moment. However, it is precisely their deep commitments to the very types of questions that should be asked that rendered them easy to misunderstand. Despite this, it is worth noting Martinon’s (2015, 3) insight that ‘the protean guises of “the curatorial” are precisely what give it its power and potential. It is also what makes it quintessentially of our time and inevitably a difficult thing to define.’ What follows is in part excerpted from a book proposal. It lays out the six themes that I think help organize the African anticolonial archive in ways that work against reification and the reproduction of ignorances. SIX THEMES13 1. Theory and Practice14 Anticolonial thought as it emerged in Africa can be understood to reflect complex understandings of the relationship between theory and practice. I noted Cabral above, who claimed that daily practice involves theorization and that strategically engaged theory is required for political effectiveness in the revolution. There are others. For Sékou Touré (1959), theories and ideas have no productive capacities unless they are embedded in the practices of 13.  For each theme, I have added a brief reference list in a footnote from a book proposal I am now titling African Political Thought 1940–1985: A Reader. These should not be taken to be complete. For example, I am still working through women’s writings and contemplating a seventh theme regarding aesthetics and poetics. 14.  Touré, Sekou. 1959. ‘Introduction’, The Colonial Fact. Parti démocratique de Guinée. Congrès national. pp. i–ix; d’Arboussier, Gabriel Marie. 1965. ‘International Co-operation: Man’s New Dimension’, UN International Cooperation Year Lecture Series. 29th January. pp. 74–84; Mondlane, Eduardo C. 1966. ‘The Trusteeship System of the United Nations’, Paper prepared for a Conference on South West Africa, Oxford, England. pp. 1–16; Soyinka, Wole. 1972. ‘A Letter to Compatriots’, in The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka. Rex Collings: London. pp. 11–16; Cabral, Amílcar. 1979. ‘Weapon of Theory’. Unity and Struggle: Speeches and writings of Amilcar. New York: Monthly Review Press. pp. 121–154.



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ordinary people. General foci include the relationship between experience (including the experience of decolonial imaginings) and ideas of colonialism, power and humanness, and the idea that abstract political ideas must be grounded in the experience of colonialism. One consistent theme rests on the entwinement of what we might call imaginative or utopian politics alongside calls for practical politics. 2. Socialist Economics and Humanist Philosophy15 Anticolonial thought in Africa can be understood to have formed part of a broader conversation regarding the merits of socialism and humanist approaches to social organization and social healing. For example, Senghor writes, Under the capitalist system, the political, cultural, and spiritual liberties, which are so often quoted, are enjoyed only in theory: on the surface. They are not lived. Under this system the word is not bound up with the idea, the act with the word, there is in short, a gap between practice and theory, between life and ethics. The result is the theoretical contradictions of Free Enterprise, with its doctrines of laissez-faire and laissez-aller, and the anarchy of its practical application. (Senghor 1961, 10)

Contemporary discussions of everyday security connect well with this conversation. 3. Racism and Anti-Racism16 Anticolonial thought in Africa can be seen to read racism as part of the apparatus of government and predominantly relies on an anti-racist platform (and 15.  Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 1961. ‘Socialism as Humanism’, in On African Socialism. Frederick A. Praeger: London. pp. 26–45; Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Lecture Given by H.E. the President of the Republic of Senegal at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University, 26th October, 1961. pp. 1–11; Nyerere, Julius K. 1964. ‘The Courage of Reconciliation’, Lecture. Dag Hammarskjoeld Memorial Lecture, Dar es Salaam; Nkrumah, Kwame. 1966/1968. ‘“African Socialism” Revisited’, in Two Myths. London: Panaf Books. pp. 7–12; Nyerere, Julius K. 1969. On Socialism. Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–58; Kaunda, K. D. 1970. ‘This Completes Economic Reforms: Now Zambia is Ours’, Speech, United National Independence Party National Council: Lusaka. pp. 1–14; Nyerere, Julius K. 1973. ‘The Rational Choice’, Speech. Sudanese Socialist Union, Khartoum. pp. 1–13. 16. Mandela, Nelson. 1962. We Accuse: The Trial of Nelson Mandela. London: The African National Congress, 1962. pp. 1–36; Fanon, Frantz. 1956/1967. ‘Racism and Culture’, in Toward the African Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press. pp. 29–44; Biko, Steve. 1970/1978. ‘Letter to SRC Presidents’, in I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 8–16; Biko, Steve. 1970/1978. ‘Black Souls in White Skins’, in I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 19–26; Biko, Steve. 1972/1978. ‘White Racism and Black Consciousness’, in I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 61–72.

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it is arguably anti-patriarchal). Colonial power and bureaucratic processes relied on and reinforced essentialist, hierarchized, and reified categories of race, gender, and identity in order to designate classes of people. In response, many thinkers argued for explicitly anti-racialist understandings of political and politicized racial categories and against race as a disciplining logic of the ‘modern’ era (see Fanon, Gilroy 2000). 4. Social and Political Identities17 Anticolonial thought in Africa can be seen to have read ‘identity’ as part of an apparatus of governance that requires clearly designated races, ethnicities, tribes, etc. and articulates a nuanced understanding of what might be understood as the construction of working identities. The starting point for thinking about identities is as bounded in practice rather than typologies of stable facts across time and place. One does not have to arrive at this conclusion through a deconstruction, discourse analysis, or genealogy; it is self-evidently so. 5. Violence18 Anticolonial thought in Africa identifies the prevalence of violence throughout the colonial apparatus and therefore has to articulate – and clearly stake – a position regarding violence. The colonial system is violent and any response to the system will be violent. Of the types of violence, the first is physical violence (labour, torture including sexualized forms of torture and violence, 17.  Lumumba, Patrice. 1960. ‘Speech at the opening of the All-African Conference at Leopoldville’, in Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958–1961, Jean Van Lierde, ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. pp. 343–350; Mondlane, Eduardo C. 1969. ‘The Ideology and Practice of Portuguese Colonialism’, in The Struggle for Mozambique. Baltimore: Penguin; Nyerere, Julius K. 1970. ‘The University’s Role in the Development of the New Countries’, Studies in Tanzanian Education. Dar es Salaam: Institute of Education and Department of Education; Cabral, Amílcar. 1970. ‘National Culture’, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and writings of Amilcar. New York: Monthly Review Press. pp. 138–154; Touré, Sékou. 1979. ‘From the State to the Nation’, in Africa on the Move. Conakry: Panaf Books. pp. 299–305. 18.  Fanon, Frantz. 1952. ‘The “North African Syndrome”’, in Toward the African Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press. pp. 3–16; Mandela, Nelson. 1955. ‘Spectre of Belsen and Buchenwald: Life under Apartheid’, in Freedom, Justice, and Dignity for all in South Africa: Statements and Articles by Nelson Mandela. New York: Department of Political and Security Council Affairs. pp. 4–6; Mandela, Nelson. 1961. ‘Outlaw in My Own Land’, in Freedom, Justice, and Dignity for all in South Africa: Statements and Articles by Nelson Mandela. New York: Department of Political and Security Council Affairs. pp. 6–8; Mandela, Nelson. 1961. ‘I Am Prepared to Die’, in Freedom, Justice, and Dignity for all in South Africa: Statements and Articles by Nelson Mandela. New York: Department of Political and Security Council Affairs. pp. 16–35; Biko, Steve. 1971/1978. ‘Fear – An Important Determinant in South African Politics’, in I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 73–79; Thiam, Awa. 1978/1986. ‘Feminism and Revolution.’ Black Sisters, Speak Out: Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa. London: Pluto Press. pp. 111–128; Soyinka, Wole. 1978. ‘Kaduna 68’, in The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka. Rex Collings: London. pp. 124–210.



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segregation, discipline, access to food). The second is psychological violence (segregation, inferiority, fear). A third is gendered and sexual violence (rape, female genital mutilation , domestic labour). Violence is deeply grounded in context and is therefore not amenable to abstraction. This focus on everyday or banal forms of violence appears frequently in women’s writing. Questions of (in)security, migration, war, and displacement receive attention in African anticolonial thought. 6. Self-Determination and Statehood19 Anticolonial thought in Africa stakes a claim to an understanding of selfdetermination and statehood that is abstract, political, materialist, and humanist. A central authority is seen as necessary to guarantee order. People consent to a polity and a ‘nationalism’ defined in political terms, not necessarily in ethnic or racial terms. The new state’s political identity gets transmitted via schools (increased literacy), arts, and public debate. Nationalist also includes a direct connection with the people. The state must regulate capitalism in order to provide for its population. Many thinkers suggest that anti-racist and anti-racialist, humanistic, political practice can function at the state level. This also includes a discussion about the colonial ‘nature’ of a state-centric system. CONCLUSION I began this chapter with an anecdote from the classroom. It was the syllabus that I wrote for that class that helped me navigate some of the challenges that continued to stymie me as I worked on a project – African Anticolonial Thought 1940–1985: A Reader. I talked to people about the project, applied for and won funding, and presented at conferences. Yet, I found myself troubled by the appearance of having plucked an empirical referent out of history. I could see that I was understood as presenting an already existing entity to my audience. I also felt troubled by the ‘seemingly depoliticized’ 19.  Patrice Lumumba. 1959. ‘African Unity and National Independence’, in Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958–1961, Jean Van Lierde, ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. pp. 69–77; Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 1961. ‘A Prerequisite: Cultural Independence’, in On African Socialism. Frederick A. Praeger: London. pp.67–75; Mondlane, Eduardo C. 196?. ‘The War of Liberation in Mozambique’, Speech. pp. 1–11; Kenyatta, Jomo 1968. Suffering Without Bitterness: The Founding of the Kenya Nation. Evanston: East African Publishing House (Northwestern University Press). pp. 272–331; Mondlane, Eduardo C. 1968. ‘Achievements of the African Nationalist Movement in Mozambique’, Speech delivered in London. 7th March. pp. 1–15; Nyerere, Julius K. 1969. ‘To Plan Is to Choose’. Presidential Address, The National Conference of Tanganyika African National Union, Dar es Salaam. pp. 19–35; Kenyatta, Jomo. 1971. Kenya: The Land of Conflict. London: Panaf Service Ltd. pp. 3–23; Nyerere, Julius K. 1978. Crusade for Liberation. Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press.

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character of this ‘seemingly historical’ project. This project appeared interesting, but of another era. Indeed, at the first International Studies Association (2010) panel that I put together, and one which for various reasons disintegrated to the point that I was the only original panellist left, the discussant actually clapped his hand to his forehead and said, ‘not again’ suggesting that Africa can be considered contemporary, and not simply stuck in the mid-twentieth century. This chapter is my attempt to clarify the contours of what I am trying to do with the material that I am working with. I think that to claim that African anticolonial thought is contemporarily relevant is to use hindsight to ask questions about the consolidation of power and its relationship to knowledge. I suggest that to the extent that ‘it’ can be consolidated, African anticolonial archive offers evidence of contestations regarding knowledge and production of knowledge that were consequential. The productions it encompasses utilized ideas as tools to carve out a space for contestation. Thus, African anticolonial archive, however one might understand such a thing, is an outcome of politics; it is an outcome of intellectual engagement with the world. Lastly, I would also claim that while these relations are visible in the case of political thought within a historical moment and of a particular place (like politics and contestation in Africa), the space for reflexive examination of what is at stake in the making of a claim must also be central to the work of research and teaching. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Maura Conway, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Isaac Kamola, and Jacob Stump for their ears and for their extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Special thanks go to IK and JS for their extensive support for this project. REFERENCES Alessandrini, Alexander. 2014. Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different. New York: Lexington Books. Allman, Jean. 2009. ‘The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe: Nationalism, Feminism, and the Tyrannies of History,’ Journal of Women’s History 21 (3): 13–35. Biko, Steve. 1978. I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cabral, Amílcar. 2016. Resistance and Decolonisation. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Trans. Dan Wood.



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Cabral, Amílcar. 1979. ‘Weapon of Theory’. Unity and Struggle: Speeches and writings of Amilcar. New York: Monthly Review Press. pp. 121–154. Cooper, Fredrick. 2014. Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-state. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cooper, Fredrick. 2002. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Creutzfeldt, Benjamin. 2013. ‘Theory Talk #57: Siba Grovogui on IR as Theology, Reading Kant Badly, and the Incapacity of Western Political Theory to Travel very far in Non-Western Contexts’, Theory Talks, http://www.theory-talks.org/2013/08/ theory-talk-57.html (29-08-2013). DuBois, W. 1965/1946. The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History. New York: International Publishers. el-Malik, Shiera. 2014. ‘Against Epistemic Totalitarianism: The Insurrectional Politics of Bessie Head’. Journal of Contemporary African Thought 32 (4): 493–505. el-Malik, Shiera. 2013a. ‘Intellectual Work ‘In-the-World’: Women’s writing and anti-colonial thought in Africa’. Irish Studies in International Affairs 24: 101–120. el-Malik, Shiera. 2013b. ‘What Can We Learn from 20th Century African Anticolonial Thought’, talk delivered at the Royal Irish Academy, ‘Changing Face of Africa, Dublin, 31st May. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skins White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2004. Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1994. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press. Fetter, Bruce. 1979. Colonial Rule in Africa: Readings from Primary Sources. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Colour Line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Grovogui, Siba. 2009a. ‘Counterpoints and the Imaginaries Behind Them’. International Political Sociology 3 (3): 327–331. Grovogui, Siba. 2009b. Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions. New York: Palgrave. Hall, Stuart. 2001. ‘Constituting an Archive’. Third Text 15 (54): 89–92. Jackson, Patrick. 2004. ‘Hegel’s House, or “People are States Too”’. Review of International Studies 30 (2): 281–287. Kaunda, Kenneth D. 1970. ‘This Completes Economic Reforms: Now Zambia Is Ours’, speech, United National Independence Party National Council: Lusaka. pp. 1–14. Kohn, Margaret and Keally McBride. 2011. Political Theories of Decolonisation: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, Guy. 2012. African Political Thought. New York: Palgrave. Martinon, Jean-Paul. 2015. The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. New York: Bloomsbury.

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O’Neill, Paul. 2012. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge: The MIT Press. Proctor, Robert. 2008. ‘Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and its study)’. In Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. pp 1–33. Said, Edward. 1975. ‘The World the Text and the Critic’. The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 8 (2): 1–23. Schiebinger, Londa. 2005. ‘Agnotology and Exotic Abortifacients: The Cultural Production of Ignorance in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World’, American Philosophical Society 149 (3): 316–343. Senghor, Léopold. 1961. ‘Lecture Given at St. Anthony’s College’, Oxford University, 26th October. Smith, Tony. 2012. Thinking Contemporary Curating. New York: Independent Curators International. Touré, Sékou. 1959. ‘Introduction’, The Colonial Fact. Parti démocratique de Guinée. Congrés national. pp. i–ix. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Wilder, Gary. 2015. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonisation and the Future of the World. Durham: Duke University Press.

Chapter 4

Comradeship, Committed, and Conscious The Anticolonial Archive Speaks to Our Times Branwen Gruffydd Jones BROTHER FROM THE WEST Brother from the West – (How can we explain that you are our brother?) the world does not end at the threshold of your house nor at the stream which marks the border of your country nor in the sea in whose vastness you sometimes think that you have discovered the meaning of the infinite. Beyond your threshold, beyond the sea the great struggle continues. Men with warm eyes and hands as hard as the earth at night embrace their children and depart before the dawn. Many will not return. What does it matter? We are men tired of shackles. For us Freedom is worth more than life. From you, brother, we expect and to you we offer not the hand of charity which misleads and humiliates but the hand of comradeship committed, conscious. How can you refuse, brother from the West? FRELIMO (1973) 1 1.  FRELIMO 1973, as reproduced in Bragança and Wallerstein 1982 besides the title page.

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I have recently started to make some initial steps in researching the political thought and practice of the anticolonial liberation movements of Portugal’s African colonies – Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe.2 For pragmatic reasons, I have started the research in London and Lisbon, with a view to visiting Maputo, Bissau, Luanda, and Dar es Salaam at a later stage of the project. During a three-week stay in Lisbon in November 2014, I began to dip tentatively into the extensive labyrinth of the PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado) archives held in Portugal’s National Archives in the Torre de Tombo and to consult the volumes of the journal Mensagem produced by students of the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, which are held in the National Library. The chilly evenings of those rain-soaked days would find me reading in a café in Lumiar, working through the extended reflections and memories of Mário Pinto de Andrade, recounted in a series of interviews with Michel Laban in Paris between 1984 and 1987. One of my initial strands of enquiry was the relationship between lusophone African anticolonial thought and Francophone African thought, in particular, Négritude (Gruffydd Jones, 2015). Andrade, a prodigious researcher, writer, editor, and translator, who had started to correspond with Alioune Diop while he was in Lisbon and later worked with the journal Présence Africaine during his period in Paris in the 1950s, was a central figure in this confluence of thought and practice (Andrade, 1997). In these interviews, Andrade recounted the formation of the Centro de Estudos Africanos in Lisbon in 1951 and the clandestine activities of Amílcar Cabral, Francisco Tenreiro, Marcelino dos Santos, Noémia de Sousa, Alda de Espírito Santos, and others. One of their contributions during those years in Lisbon was the publication of an article in Présence Africaine, written collectively for the special issue entitled Les Étudiants Noirs Parlent, published in Paris in 1953. When I was back in Lisbon the following August, I discovered that, though the National Library did not have any copies of Présence Africaine, the library of the Faculdade de Letras at the University of Lisbon did hold a number of issues of the journal, including the special issue Les Étudiants Noirs Parlent. I soon found myself sitting in the upstairs floor of the Letras library holding that very issue in my hands: with the thick yellowed paper and uneven page edges of an original copy of the journal issue published in Paris in 1953. I reflected briefly and with some awe on this conjuncture of time, 2.  My research focuses on the thought and practice of the main liberation movements, namely MPLA, PAIGC, and FRELIMO. There were various other political organizations with sometimes quite divergent ideas, especially in the case of Angola Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. Rather than focusing on this complexity and diversity, my research focuses on these main movements which were in each case the leading movements and which, importantly, collaborated with each other. Thus while each movement and its leading figures had their own distinct strands of debate and discourse, there was also a very important shared base of ideas and modes of practice.



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space, and materiality – that I was in Lisbon in 2015 holding a journal published in Paris in the 1950s, which contained the writing of a group of African students who ‘spoke to the world’ anonymously from their clandestine activities in this same city of Lisbon in the 1950s, then the heart of Portugal’s fascist colonial empire. Surely no library in Lisbon at that time would have subscribed to Présence Africaine, hence its absence from the holdings of the National Library. The existence of this and a few other issues of the journal in the Letras library is due to the subsequent donation of the personal collection of Alfredo Margarido, Portuguese writer and translator, anticolonial and antifascist militant, who was an active member of the Casa dos Estudantes do Império in Lisbon in the 1960s. This short anecdote serves as an entry to some reflections on the anticolonial archive, what it is and how we should engage with it today. After acknowledging recent theoretical and epistemological critiques of the idea of archive, the chapter starts to explore a more immediate or mundane notion of the archive as the records of earlier practices that remain available to us today. In doing so, I try to suggest how a concrete sense of the transnational commitment and values of anticolonial struggle emerges from the details of these extended activities, and of their archiving. The final section explores some of the politics of reading and learning from the anticolonial archive, from the position of our own times.

WHAT AND WHERE IS THE ARCHIVE? Many scholars and critics in recent years have emphasized that the notion of ‘the archive’ must be understood not simply in terms of physical sites and collections of materials, but in metaphorical and epistemological terms – as hegemonic and counter-hegemonic systems of knowledge, power and memory, processes of naming and categorizing, of defining what is remembered and how, what is forgotten and silenced (Richards, 1993; Shetty and Bellamy, 2000; Arondekar, 2005; Lalu, 2000; Taoua, 2003; Burton, 2005). It is impossible now for scholars to consider the notion of the archive without heeding the contributions of Foucault, Derrida, Spivak, among others (Foucault, 2002; Foucault, 1986; Derrida, 1996; Spivak, 1999). For Foucault the notion of the archive signifies a broad complex of thought and practice, constituted by a plurality of authors, texts, sites, statements, and arguments, which exist and cohere in an expanded sense in and across time and space. Foucault foregrounds the relationships between power and knowledge, understanding the archive in a manner related to the notion of discursive formation, to signify a configuration of statements, modes of enunciation and subject positions; the rules which govern what can be said and thought, what statements can

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be articulated; and the endurance of these configurations, rules, and logics over time. By archive, Foucault does not mean ‘the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past’, nor indeed ‘the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation’. Rather, archive is ‘the system of discursivity, in the enunciative possibilities and impossibilities that it lays down. The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’ (Foucault, 2002, 145). This system of discursivity is integral to the construction of particular social and international orders: The ever more complete preservation of what was written, the establishment of archives, then of filing systems for them, the reorganization of libraries, the drawing up of catalogues, indexes, and inventories, all these things represent, at the end of the Classical age, not so much a new sensitivity to time, to its past, to the density of history, as a way of introducing into the language already imprinted on things, and into the traces it has left, an order of the same type as that which was being established between living creatures. And it is in this classified time, in this squared and spatialised development, that the historians of the nineteenth century were to undertake the creation of a history that could at last be ‘true’ – in other words, liberated from Classical rationality, from its ordering and theodicy: a history restored to the irruptive violence of time. (Foucault, 1970, 132)

These and other theoretical interrogations of the notion of the archive profoundly challenge the traditional methodological relationship between ‘the archive’ and scholarship. Understanding the archive as a repository of facts and evidence related to the historical past, the analysis of which forms the basis for new, better, or more comprehensive knowledge of the past, is no longer plausible in any straightforward sense (Seth, 2008). This indeed was the historically specific mode of knowledge that emerged in the same epistemological and political context as the archive itself (Iggers and Powell, 1990). As the new institutions and practices of European government in the nineteenth century increasingly made use of and required the generation and organization of information and records, statistics and surveys, the development of history as a branch of scholarship organized on scientific grounds was institutionalized. And with the development of history as a scientific endeavour emerged ‘a new archive fantasy’: the ideal of a comprehensive and methodically organized depository of records and documents in one place, secure and preserved, to enable the production of complete and comprehensive, authoritative, and objective historical knowledge (Tollebeek, 2004; Tollebeek, 2002). Whether considering the archive in straightforward terms as a site containing records (the archive therefore indicating both the place and its contents)



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or in epistemological terms, critics have foregrounded the relationships of power which configure the archive as a structure of dominant knowledge and practice, especially state power. This of course includes the colonial state. The construction of state-organized archives was an inherent element of the practice of colonial government, hence the methodological concerns of examining colonial archives along or against the grain in order to establish critical insights into the character, contradictions, and limits of colonial power (Stoler, 2010; Spivak, 1988; Lalu, 2000). When we consider the archiving practices of the colonial state, we must acknowledge that the ‘archive fantasy’ was part of and a tool of the broader ‘colonial fantasy’. This included the construction of comprehensive knowledge of the world as part of the production of colonial order (Richards, 1993). European colonizers assumed the role of custodians of knowledge, history, and civilization in and of Africa, premised on the foundational assertion that Africa had no knowledge, history, or civilization of its own. Thus the archiving practices of the colonizers had necessarily to be destructive as well as constructive – denying, destroying, or removing existing knowledge practices, libraries, and archives. The conceptual, methodological, and political questions arising from the notion of ‘the archive’ are in some sense radically different when we consider the anticolonial archive. We can begin by considering the anticolonial archive in straightforward terms, as a collection of documents and artefacts which constitute the records and traces of the activities of anticolonial struggle. WHERE AND WHAT IS THE ANTICOLONIAL ARCHIVE? In this sense of a collection of material items, where is the lusophone African anticolonial archive? Here already we encounter a defining feature of these and other anticolonial struggles: their necessarily extended and transnational dimensions. From the very beginning, the early emergence of the thought and practice of these movements spanned the cities of the Portuguese empire, in and across Luanda, Bissau, Lourenço Marques, Lisbon, and Coimbra. With no opportunities for higher education in the colonies (Présence Africaine 1953, 223-226 and passim),3 the few African students who were able to pursue their studies beyond secondary school necessarily travelled to Portugal to attend university in Lisbon or Coimbra, generally to train in medicine, law, or agronomy. Early relations of friendship and intimacy among the African students arose on the basis of the need to get together, to escape the suffocating isolation and negation of being an African student in Portugal. So it was 3.  The students of the Portuguese colonies, writing from Lisbon, begin their article, p. 223: ‘The problem of the Portuguese territories is that African universities in the Portuguese possessions in Africa do not exist.’ This and all other quotations here from sources in Portuguese and French are my own translation.

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through playing football, going to the cinema, sharing lodgings, and exchanging their poems and writings with each other that the early affective bonds of anticolonial solidarity were forged (Andrade, 1997, 58–61). Central to the activities of the African students in Lisbon and Coimbra in the late 1940s and 1950s was the circulation and exchange of ideas – conversations and debates among themselves engaging with their own and others’ ideas. The importance, the politics, and the extended nature of this practice of ‘textual culture’4 are indicated by its material and social conditions of possibility. As students in the metropole, seeking to reflect critically on their individual and shared collective situation as Africans and as colonized, correspondence with colleagues and friends in Africa formed a vital element, enabling them to remain in touch with and informed about conditions, events, and struggles in Angola, Mozambique, Guiné, Cabo Verde, and São Tomé and sending back news of their debates and activities in Lisbon and Coimbra. The circulation of texts as well as letters was a fundamental dimension of this extended correspondence. Andrade maintained correspondence with Viriato da Cruz in Angola, for example, following their pact of friendship prior to Andrade’s departure for Portugal: We exchanged books: he had sent me Gandhi, I had sent him Senghor’s Anthology of black and Malagasy poetry; and other books, poems by David Diop, for example which were in the Anthology; he sent me articles related to my linguistic research: information that he found in journals, the Administrative Monthly, old journals, etc. (Andrade, 1997, 67)

Mário de Andrade describes how the African students would urgently share the books they received and the vital role of the African seamen working for the two shipping companies Companhia Colonial de Navegação and Companhia Nacional de Navegação that controlled the sea traffic between Portugal, the colonies, and Brazil, in bringing books and letters from Africa and Brazil to Lisbon (ibid., 77, 81, 101). Thus the textual culture of anticolonial thought was one of travel and circulation, as ideas were ‘translated, disseminated, reformulated, and debated’ – in contexts marked not only by difference, as Brent Hayes Edwards notes of the practices of black internationalism in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s (Edwards, 2003, 7), but also by surveillance, police harassment, and imprisonment. One of the significant projects in the early formation of anticolonial consciousness of the African students in Lisbon in the 1950s was the organization 4.  This term is used by Shamil Jeppie in his discussion of recent works on the long history of books and writing, specifically Arabic texts, in Africa, to indicate the intersection between thought, the book or text, and reading (Jeppie, 2014, 103).



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of the Centro de Estudos Africanos (Andrade, 1997, 71 and passim; Andrade, 1999; Mateus, 1999, 75–79). This consisted of a series of seminars, held over a number of months between October 1951 and 1954. These meetings and discussions took place against the constant risk of discovery, harassment, or arrest by the Portuguese state police, the PIDE. Andrade explains that for this reason the seminars were held on Sundays, at the house of the Espírito Santo family, a family of São Toméenses: Why on Sundays? In the first place because people didn’t work, it is a family day, and we had to avoid the suspicions of PIDE seeing Africans gathering in one house, seeing an avalanche of people, a meeting of people at the house of one family, which could be suspicious. … It was necessary to do it on Sundays, as if we were simply eating, drinking and enjoying ourselves. (Andrade, 1997, 74)

In addition to these seminars, the students of the Centro de Estudos Africanos and the Casa dos Estudantes do Império organized the publication of their own and other works, publishing the journal Mensagem and collections of poetry and translating the writings of figures such as Senghor, Césaire, and Langston Hughes (ibid., 76–77). As the activities of anticolonial struggle moved from the realms of culture, publishing and debate to political organizing and eventually armed struggle, the leading figures necessarily dispersed and travelled far beyond the metropolitan centre of the Portuguese empire, while always maintaining contact through letters, visits, meetings, conferences, sending each other documents, books, and reports (Andrade, 1997; Lara, 1997). The determined surveillance of Portugal’s fascist colonial regime propelled this dispersion. Lúcio Lara recollects that at that time their shared palavra de ordem or principle was ‘avoid being imprisoned by the PIDE and if possible escape abroad’ (Lara, 1999, 19).5 Both in Lisbon and in Luanda, Maputo and Bissau, their activities had always to be clandestine and they constantly faced harassment and the threat of imprisonment by the PIDE or DGS (Direção-Geral de Segurança). The activities of political organizing, generating political and material support, and military training therefore necessarily took place in neighbouring independent African countries, as well as across Europe and beyond, especially in the socialist world. For several months, some of the leading figures of these movements – Mário Pinto de Andrade, Marcelino dos Santos, and Aquino de Bragança – were based in Paris; others – Hugo Menezes and João Cabral – in London; while Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, and Alda do Espírito Santo returned to Guiné, Angola, and São Tomé. From Europe and Africa they travelled widely to attend and participate in meetings, conferences and festivals: 5.  evitar ser preso pela PIDE e fugir para o estrangeiro de preferência.

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youth festivals in Prague, Poland, and Moscow; the Congresses of Black Artists and Writers in Paris, 1956, and Rome, 1959; the Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent, 1958, after which Andrade and Viriato da Cruz travelled via Moscow to visit China, along with delegations from Uganda and Senegal; the second All African Peoples’ Conference in Tunis, 1960; the Conference of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in Havana, 1966; and the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, 1969. The mutual collaboration among the nascent national liberation movements was from the very beginning made concrete in the formation of collective organizations: Movimento Anti-Colonialista (MAC, 1957–1960); Frente Revolucionária Africana para a Independência Nacional das Colónias Portuguesas (FRAIN, 1960–61); and Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (CONCP, 1961–1975). The MAC was founded in Paris in 1957 by members of the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné (PAI, which later became PAIGC), the MPLA and nationalists from Mozambique and São Tomé (MAC, 1957). During 1957–1960, members of MAC were dispersed across Europe: Mário de Andrade, Noémia de Sousa, Guilherme Espírito Santos, Marcelino dos Santos were in Paris; Lúcio Lara and Viriato da Cruz were in Frankfurt. This distance at times caused difficulties and confusion in terms of communications among the members over specific actions taken in the name of MAC.6 Communication between the members in Paris and Frankfurt was mainly by letter, and books and reports were sent by post. One of the intense activities during this time was compiling reports based on accurate concrete information about the conditions in the Portuguese African colonies and Portugal’s policies, laws, and actions. The militants were frequently requesting books and reports from their colleagues to this effect. At times they used pseudonyms and codes to avoid alerting the suspicion of political sensors. On one occasion, a copy of the MAC report was carried from one group to another by Lotte Pfluger, motherin-law of Lara, well hidden inside a box of chocolates, without her knowledge (Lara, 1999, 134). The transition from MAC to FRAIN took place in January 1960 in Tunis, on the occasion of the second Conference of African Peoples (Laranjeira 1996, xiii; Andrade, 1997, 156). Throughout their struggles, the liberation movements relied especially on the practical as well as political solidarity of neighbouring and other independent African states. FRAIN established a base in Conakry, where PAIGC and MPLA also had bases, and later opened an office in Leopoldville after Congo’s independence and in Dar es Salaam 6.  See the correspondence between Espírito Santo, Mário de Andrade, Lúcio Lara, and Viriato da Cruz regarding the ‘sections’ of MAC in France and Germany, 1959, in Lara, 1999: 116–134.



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after Tanzania’s independence. As more former colonies gained their independence, the space open for anticolonial movements to organize and to establish bases or headquarters enlarged. On the other hand, as the struggle against Portuguese colonial rule necessarily turned to armed struggle in the various colonies, first in Angola in 1961, the need for coordination among the movements and the construction of support and solidarity within and beyond Africa became more urgent. Thus CONCP, the Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas, was born in April 1961 in Casablanca and established offices in Rabat and later Dar es Salaam. From the beginning of the formation of the lusophone African anticolonial movements from the late 1950s, concerted efforts were made to establish international recognition of the legitimacy of their cause, alongside the work of mobilizing and raising consciousness among their own peoples. The discourse of these collective organizations was articulated through formal appeals, petitions, and reports to governments and international organizations, as well as through pamphlets, communiqués, and press conferences, through representatives attending international conferences and meetings, interviews to the press around the world, and so on. From its establishment in 1960, members of FRAIN sought to publicize their struggles widely through interviews and press meetings in various countries. In March 1960 Amílcar Cabral, operating under the pseudonym Abel Djassi and representing FRAIN, travelled to London and held a press conference on 3 March. FRAIN, via Cabral, established connections with the Committee of African Organisations, a solidarity campaign group based in London with offices at 200 Gower Street, where the press conference was held, and provided leaflets in English and French about the anticolonial struggles of the Portuguese colonies, for distribution in London by the committee.7 In September 1960 FRAIN sent an appeal contesting Portugal’s position within the framework of international law to the member states of the UN (FRAIN, 1960a), and in December 1960 members of FRAIN presented a formal communication about the illegality of Portuguese colonialism to the House of Commons in London at a press conference (FRAIN, 1960b). Luís Cabral underlines the significance of their conscious public judging, in his account of FRAIN’s press conference in London: 7.  According to a PIDE report, FRAIN represented the Portuguese African colonies in establishing connections with the Committee of African Organizations based in London. The PIDE report of 1961 states ‘The leaders of this Committee are the already known leftists: Fenner Brockway, Frank Allum, Konny Ziliacus, Rev. Michael Scott, Franc Warbey and Stephen Swingler. The office of this Committee in London is the same as that of other subversive and communist-friendly movements and organizations, such as the Anti-Apartheid Committee and the local branch of Présence Africaine.’ Processo PIDE/DGS Del A PInf 11.19.C 1540, Arquivo Nacional, Torre de Tombo, Lisbon; p. 53; PIDE Informação No. 84/60-GU, 16 March 1960. p. 111, Processo PIDE/DGS Del A PInf 11.19.C 1540, Arquivo Nacional, Torre de Tombo, Lisbon.

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At an important press conference … in this city, [Cabral] violently denounced the crimes of colonialism in our lands. The privilege thus fell to the British capital of offering the platform on which, for the first time, an African coming from a Portuguese colony of Africa accused the colonialists in the face of the world. (Cabral, L., 1984, 79)

Within the framework of the UN, the nationalist movements and their collective organizations consistently emphasized the legitimacy of their struggles and the illegality of Portugal’s continued colonial rule and provided detailed evidence of conditions within the Portuguese colonies and the character of colonial violence and repression. Amílcar Cabral, both as representative of FRAIN and then CONCP, and also as secretary general of PAIGC, was particularly active and persistent in this regard, making repeated formal submissions and declarations to the UN. These included a report presented to the UN Special Committee on Territories under Portuguese Administration in June 1961; a Memorandum to the UN General Assembly in September 1961; a petition to the UN Special Committee on Territories under Portuguese Administration hearing in Conakry in June 1962; a report to the UN Special Committee on Territories under Portuguese Administration in July 1962; a Declaration to the UN General Assembly in December 1962; a Memorandum to the UN General Assembly in September 1963; a report to the President of the UN Special Committee on Territories under Portuguese Administration in 1965; a declaration to session of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Dakar, August 1968; a report to the Sub-Commission of the UN Committee on Decolonization at their meeting in Algiers, May 1970; a statement to the UN Security Council in Addis Ababa, February 1972; a statement to the Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly in October 1972; and a report to the UN Committee on Decolonization meeting in New York in March 1974. Leaders of the other national movements similarly presented reports about the situations in their colonies: Eduardo Mondlane, president of FRELIMO, presented a lengthy statement about Mozambique to the UN Special Committee on Territories under Portuguese Administration in April 1962, and in May the same year Mário Pinto de Andrade, then president of MPLA, submitted a report on conditions in Angola. This partial sketch of some of the activities of anticolonial struggle indicates that the presence of the archive would extend from Luanda, Maputo, and Bissau to Lisbon and Coimbra; to Paris, London, Frankfurt, Rome, New York; to Prague, Moscow, and Tashkent; to Tunis, Rabat, Algiers, Dakar, Conakry, Casablanca, Kinshasa, Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa; and on to Beijing, Havana, and beyond. Records might be found in the archives and libraries of states and international organizations and also those of solidarity organizations, youth groups, political parties, universities, newspapers,



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journals and publishing houses, as well as the private collections of journalists, politicians, film-makers, and activists. The archive would include documents, reports, texts, pamphlets, notebooks, drafts, handwritten and typed, in Portuguese, French, and English; manifestos, journals, letters, telegraphs, poems; audio recordings, film reels; photographs, posters, drawings and cartoons – a multitude of material items which remain in our present as the concrete traces of past encounters, conversations, debates, conferences, decisions, resolutions, the relationships and practices of anticolonial struggle. This extended physical existence of the anticolonial archive across multiple sites, beyond the capacity of any individual researcher to deal with, reflects not only the political imperatives but also the practices and values of anticolonial struggle, of collaboration and debate, forged through and forging solidarities far beyond the scope of the national in the quest for transformation and better futures. ARCHIVING THE ARCHIVE The work of assembling components of the broader archive to be available for the public and for the future is in itself a political project, infused with values and principles that informed and reflect the anticolonial struggle. This work of archiving is both collective and individual, institutionalized and contingent, a heterogeneous practice, ‘partly public, partly private’ (Hall, 2001, 91), which includes collecting, ordering, and processing material records as well as recording and writing individual and shared memories. The work began, of course, with the activities of the movements themselves, individual members, and their supporters. Several collections of documents and writings were published during and shortly after the liberation wars (e.g. Machel, 1974; Cabral, A., 1974; Reis and Muiuanem, 1975; Fortunato, 1977; Bragança and Wallerstein, 1978a; Bragança and Wallerstein, 1978b; Bragança and Wallerstein, 1978c), and several protagonists subsequently recorded their memories: Mário de Andrade conducted a series of interviews with Michel Laban between 1984 and 1987; Sérgio Vieira has recently published his testimony of anticolonial struggle (Andrade, 1997; Vieira, 2010). Decades later the availability of hundreds and thousands of documents, letters, images, recordings, and other items of the lusophone African anticolonial struggles, in various public locations or publications, is the fruit of precisely such archiving work. In Mozambique, the Samora Machel Documentation Centre was established in 2005 by Machel’s family, friends, colleagues and comrades. In 2006 the Centre organized a series of roundtables on themes including ‘The Diplomacy of Liberation’, ‘The Role of Thought in the Revolutionary Process’, and ‘The Nationalist and

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Internationalist Dimension of Samora Machel’. Oscar Monteiro, deputy chairperson of the Centre, explained the need to secure ‘the legacy not only of the man, but also of an epoch, and of a generation’ (Panapress 2006). In Angola, Lúcio Lara’s archive has been compiled and published in Luanda in three massive volumes, while the Associação Tchiweka de Documentação houses the materials of Lara’s and others’ collections (Lara, 1997; Lara, 2006; Lara, 2008). Ruth Lara describes their efforts to assemble and preserve Lúcio’s archive: For as long as I’ve known him Lúcio had the habit – or the mania, I would say – of keeping all papers: letters, invitations, and, of course, documents. So, during our voyaging from Frankfurt to Conakry, passing through Tunis and Casablanca and later through Brazzaville, the ‘papers’ were accumulating, in an arrangement that only he understood and where only he could find, every time, the document that he needed. With our arrival in Luanda … the documents had to be classified and I could have access to them. It was thus that I began to arrange them, by subjects, by dates, in files, reaching around eighty files full of letters, manuscripts, communications, presentations … some of them unedited. (Ruth Lara, ‘Porquê este livro?’, in Lara, 1999, p. 21)

Similarly, the Agostinho Neto Foundation has coordinated the publication in five large volumes of the records about Neto held in the PIDE–DGS archives in the Torre do Tombo, Lisbon – more than 6,000 documents over 4,000 pages (Neto, M. E. and Neto, I. 2012). In Lisbon, the library of the Faculdade de Letras at the University of Lisbon contains many volumes that originally formed the personal collections of Michel Laban, Alfredo Margarido, and others, while the Mário Soares Foundation has assembled a vast range of personal archives, including those of Mário Pinto de Andrade and Amílcar Cabral. This very work of assembling, documenting, and processing the archive – organizing, transcribing, photocopying, scanning – can be seen in some senses as the mirror of earlier practices of translating, transcribing, exchanging, and publishing, which were so central to the formation of anticolonial thought (Andrade, 1997; see also Edwards, 2003). Some of these and other archival collections are also becoming available and accessible in digital form via the Internet, with many digital archive projects based outside Africa, in North America and Europe. The Mário Soares Foundation has conducted an immense work of digitization, making some of its vast collections freely available over the Internet.8 Another major project to produce a digital archive of these and other African struggles is the Aluka 8. See http://www.fmsoares.pt/.



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project, an online digital library of resources from and about Africa. One of its first collections is Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa, which contains over 190,000 documents and images drawn from regional collections and archives, related to the anticolonial struggles of Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The Aluka project was launched by the US-based non-profit organization ITHAKA, which seeks to support the ‘worldwide scholarly community’ by developing and promoting the use of information technology. ITHAKA incorporates JSTOR which now hosts the Aluka project archives.9 In an article recounting the development of the project, Allen Isaacman, Premesh Lalu, and Thomas Nygren describe some of the fears and criticisms articulated by African scholars and archivists (Isaacman et al., 2005; see also Lalu 2007). During a series of planning meetings in Durban, Harare, Johannesburg, and Maputo, participants expressed numerous concerns, including ‘suspicion that this digitizing initiative would be yet another North American project designed to appropriate Africa’s patrimony and subvert intellectual property rights and national heritage’ (Isaacman et al., 2005, 65). Such concerns resound in multiple localities as local archivists who are already trying under difficult conditions to maintain the records of their own pasts, including their own political struggles, encounter digitization initiatives from elsewhere, often with access to substantial resources and technologies not available locally. These international politics of the archive centring on questions of differential and often very unequal resources, access, ownership, and interests emerged, for example, in discussions about the archives of pan-African film and photography at a recent workshop on Pan-African Cinema, Négritude, and the Archive at Birkbeck, University of London.10 Many of the participants had long been involved both in film and other forms of cultural production and in producing archives of black cultural production. Discussions of initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, BLK Art Group, the African Asian Visual Artists’ Archive, and Scribe Video Centre in Philadelphia, foregrounded the collective, community and intensely political character of these projects. This contrasted with a sense of the totalizing, objective, comprehensive but apolitical approach of digitization projects of the global neoliberal present which, in their very ambition of total inclusivity, can yet enable an erasure of political memory. Meanwhile in Mali, the British Library’s Endangered Archives Project has supported an initiative of the Djenné Manuscript Library to help collect,  9. See http://www.ithaka.org/; https://www.aluka.org/; https://www.aluka.org/struggles; http:// about.jstor.org/content/struggles-freedom-southern-africa. 10.  The one-day event was held on 18 October 2014, organized by Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image. The central focus was discussion of June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive.

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preserve, and digitize some of the thousands of ancient manuscripts held in Djenné, many in private family or school collections. In an account of this digitization project, Sophie Sarin, one of the coordinators, described some of the fears and criticisms voiced by the Imam of Djenné and ‘a small but powerful section of the Djenné community’ (Sarin, 2015, 182, 183). The criticisms, she notes, ‘draw their venom from the eventual free Internet access of the digitised images’, an objection that she struggled to overcome: When I was called to the Prefect’s office to explain in detail the free Internet access, he expressed his critical view of the matter, likening it to the French colonial appropriation of the large collections of Malian manuscripts, now found in the French National Library. It was impossible to convince him that the project is not at all similar in that it does not remove the original manuscripts from the Djenné library. (Ibid., 183–4)

HOW AND WHY SHOULD WE READ THE ANTICOLONIAL ARCHIVE? I found it helpful in opening these reflections to briefly consider the methodological implications of Foucault’s analysis of archive as the system of discursivity which determines or shapes, over time, what can be said and thought, what statements can be encunciated, and to draw attention to the shared historical location of the emergence of ‘the archive’ as a site for the systematic holding, storage, organization, and preservation of records and of a scientific or objectivist tradition of historical inquiry. The above sketch of the constitution and existence of the anticolonial archive, in the relatively basic sense of material records and traces of the past, gives rise to initial insights regarding anticolonial practice. We should also extend our reflections to think of the anticolonial archive in similarly broader epistemological senses, however. And doing so carries important implications for our method and politics of inquiry. If, following Foucault, the dominant archive signifies a discursive regime, an enduring set of relations and rules which structure the realm and limits of possible thought, speech, and knowledge, then anticolonial practice can be understood as necessarily refusing and contesting the prevailing archives. Anticolonial struggle entailed a coordinated, conscious, enduring, and very difficult struggle against the existing order and rules and their underlying presuppositions. Anticolonialism was a struggle against dominant discursive and material regimes of colonial international power, a struggle to defy and refuse both the content and the limits of existing international relations and their archives. What method of inquiry, engagement, and presentation might enable us to grasp and remain consistent with the anticolonial politics of the anticolonial



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archive? How can we access and engage with the anticolonial archive, from our own time, in a manner which avoids unwittingly lapsing back into and reproducing the underlying rules of discursive and disciplinary formations which constitute the dominant archive against which these struggles were waged? How can we resist the ‘containing’ of these histories and archives of struggle in and through the methods and practices of academic expertise? In considering the contemporary politics of intellectual work in the anticolonial archive, it is worth recalling Stuart Hall’s discussion of the archive of cultural studies. Noting the dangers of professional institutionalization of critical academic practice, he concludes: ‘I come back to the deadly seriousness of intellectual work. It is a deadly serious matter. I come back to the critical distinctions between intellectual work and academic work: they overlap, they abut one another, they feed off one another, the one provides you with the means to do the other. But they are not the same thing.’ In making this distinction, he cautions against work that inscribes ‘itself in the overarching meta-narrative of achieved knowledges, within the institutions’ (Hall, 1992, 285–6). How can we avoid producing academic work that remains inscribed in the metanarrative of achieved knowledges within the institutions, and instead aspire to committed intellectual work in the anticolonial archive? The Jamaican critic and theorist David Scott has long posed the vital question of how, from the position of our own present, we should best re-engage with anticolonial thought and practice, visions, and values, of earlier times and generations (Scott, 2005; Scott, 2014a; Scott, 2014b). He argues that because we operate today in a different problem space to that of the earlier time of anticolonialism, we cannot simply narrate past anticolonialism in the romantic or heroic mode through which these discourses were originally structured. We cannot assume that the values informing earlier struggles continue straightforwardly to resonate in our very different political and ideological present. We live today in a different problem space: If our sense is … that our present constitutes something of a new conjuncture, and that consequently the old story about the past’s relation to the present and to possible futures is no longer adequate, no longer provides or sustains critical leverage, how do we go about altering that story? (Scott 2005, 42)

Scott resolves this dilemma by proposing the narrative mode of tragedy, rather than romance, as more fitting for telling the story of anticolonialism in and for our own present, a time when past anticolonial visions of the future appear only as the ‘bleak ruins of our postcolonial present’ (ibid., 45). This view that African and other anticolonialism is now only an ‘exhausted’ mode of thought is quite widespread (e.g. Mbembe, 2000). A striking counter to this position, however, is that ‘the major obstacle blocking a new opening

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[of relations between Europe and Africa] are the ruins of old ideas: progress, modernisation, nation state – ideas that continue to lie at the foundation of the European order, but at the same time retain an inextricable historical link with colonialism and exclusion’ (Mytkowska 2015, 15). This argument indicates a very different relation between the anticolonial past and our neoliberal present: one of continuities across, rather than the contrasts between, different temporal ‘problem spaces’ or conjunctures. If it is the old ideas at the foundation of the European, Western, and contemporary international order that are the ruins and major obstacles, then surely, as Bhekizizwe Peterson argued in a discussion of the archive in South Africa, we must strongly resist the lure to underplay the imperative to discover and construct the canons of previously marginalised groups, whatever the limitations that come with canon-formation. Otherwise, we will be unable to inscribe a local and Pan-African provenance in the production of knowledge … and will continue to proceed as if the contradictions and challenges that face South Africa now, especially with regard to the politics of race, ethnicity, class, gender, identity, culture, nation, and so on, are novel developments, untheorised by past generations in South Africa and on the African continent. (Peterson, 2002, 30)

Until the continuities of colonial practices are acknowledged, it is likely not to be possible for many from the West to understand the reasons for Africans’ suspicion and reluctance when faced with external digitizing archive projects. It might indeed be easy for researchers beyond Africa to access archival materials through the Internet while the actual items can remain in Africa. But this is a highly unequal exchange. How easy is it for an African researcher to visit Europe today in order to conduct research in the museums and archives of Paris or London? Even as digitization projects render readily available the contents of the archives of anticolonial struggles, the barriers to the circulation of people between former colonial and former colonized places become higher and higher. In an era of global digital accessibility, it is all the more imperative that researchers outside Africa, above all those ‘from the West’ as addressed by FRELIMO in 1973, think very carefully about the politics of intellectual work in the anticolonial archive. Perhaps, it is not the role of Western scholars to write the histories of other peoples’ struggles – whatever the chosen mode of narrative emplotment. This is the work of those involved and those who have come after. As the Guinea-Bissauan film-maker Flora Gomes recently commented, ‘The rich history of our liberation struggle cannot be told by others, however interested they might be in us. As someone said once, could it be that the lion has to ask for authorization from the hunter to tell his history?’ (Gomes, in Cuaiaté, 2013, 8). Those from the West do,



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however, have a responsibility to acknowledge, study, and learn from these archives of theorizing by past generations on the African continent, including not only their theorization and practice regarding the politics of race, ethnicity, class, gender, culture, and nation, but also their theorization and critique of colonialism, imperialism, and international relations. It was precisely this sense of a broader shared world, a broader contribution, and a broader sense of responsibility transcending race, ethnicity, class, and nation that imbued the thought of these anticolonial movements (Cabral, A., 1970; MAC, 1957). VISITING THE AFRICAN ANTICOLONIAL ARCHIVE At the workshop for this book project, Vijay Prashad explained his initial excitement upon being invited to join the session as discussant. He told us that he had initially assumed the African anticolonial archive was an existing institutional entity and he immediately wanted to know where it was so that he could visit. Digitization projects such as that of the Mário Soares Foundation or Akula collate and assemble archives of anticolonial struggles, but they are not in themselves anticolonial archives. Anticolonial archives emerge out of and through anticolonialism, as part of the ongoing struggle waged against colonial structures and knowledges. The necessity and importance of such archives were already understood by anticolonial movements – as noted above, the first efforts to collate and make available collections of anticolonial documents and thought were made by the movements themselves. They also envisaged the creation of a specific archive or museum of African anticolonialism. In August 1963, Amílcar Cabral, on behalf of the PAIGC, wrote to the president of the Organisation of African Unity’s (OAU) African Liberation Committee. After noting the interest of the Guinean combatants in the meeting of the OAU Council of Ministers in Dakar, in his letter Cabral proposed that the committee should guarantee the creation of a Museum of African Liberation, and that this museum should be established in Bissau, after the country’s independence (Cabral, A., 1963a; Cabral, A., 1963b). Let us begin to imagine this Museum of African Liberation, and what we might find there. Let us visit the Museum as guests, as brothers and sisters from the West,11 to learn from this archive. Many of the exhibits and displays in the Museum provide insights primarily into the process and experiences of the struggle itself; many, equally, provide insights into the character of colonialism, imperialism, and international relations. One of the rooms addresses the question of civilization. This room is not dedicated to African civiliza11.  Cf. FRELIMO 1973 in the epigraph.

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tion and culture, however – for, as Cabral observed, ‘The time is past when it was necessary to seek arguments to prove the cultural maturity of African peoples’ (Cabral, A., 1970, 10). On one wall of this room, two photographs are displayed side by side. The first is an image of Amílcar Cabral, in the sculpture room of a museum somewhere in Europe. Cabral stands contemplating a statue – a white marble statue of a European female nude, kneeling, her eyes closed, hands gently clasped, her long hair tied at the back of her neck, her face angled slightly upwards. What thoughts go through Cabral’s mind as he regards this statue, this classical symbol of ‘civilization’? We cannot know, but we can reflect on some of Cabral’s judgements of ‘civilization’ expressed elsewhere. A clue to Cabral’s views on ‘civilization’ might come from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, in which he exposed the horrors of the Second World War as the fruits of a stricken civilization (Césaire, 2000/1955, 31–33). Similarly, Cabral frequently described conditions in Portugal’s colonies in the 1960s and 1970s by making explicit comparison with Nazi rule. The Appeal that Cabral delivered to the Committee of African Organizations in Gower Street, London, in 1960 began: ‘In the Portuguese colonies – “the African zone of silence” – 11 million human beings are living like serfs in their own countries, condemned to a way of life which is even worse than that which Nazism wished to impose on Europeans’ (Cabral, A., 1960, 1), and the PIDE was routinely referred to as the Portuguese Gestapo. A decade later Cabral opened his lecture on National Liberation and Culture, delivered as the Eduardo Mondlane Memorial Lecture at Syracuse University in 1970, with a reference to Nazi Germany: When Goebbels, the brain behind Nazi propaganda, heard culture being discussed, he brought out his revolver. That shows that the Nazis – who were and are the most tragic expression of imperialism and of its thirst for domination … had a clear idea of the value of culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination. (Cabral, A., 1970, 3)

Should civilization be equated with imperialism and its thirst for domination – and thereby, ultimately, with Nazi Germany (as Césaire indeed argued)? Such an equation might appear forced from a Western vantage point. But for the colonized, the horrors of occupation and domination were legitimized precisely in the name of civilization. The African students of Portugal’s colonies addressed the question of civilization in their contribution to Présence Africaine in 1953, in a section entitled L’Étudiant Africain et la civilisation occidentale. They started by noting that ‘those who praise “Western civilization” claim for themselves the monopoly of the message of



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Christ: the moral armour of this civilization, they say, is Christianity. What exists for Western Europe is the ensemble of Greco-Roman traditions.’ And then they went on, The European states are constituted on the basis of their political traditions. And since the fifteenth century, a certain Western Europe came into contact with Africa, by means of systematic impositions and domination. The European, whether English, French or Portuguese, who set out to ‘colonise’ Africa, was without culture. It was only later that the African appreciated the famous ‘values’ of Western culture, but no longer as ‘values’, now as importations of the white ‘coloniser’. … The first white traders who entered into contact with black Africa were never concerned with learning about local values. From the beginning there was nothing to do but accept their purpose of exploitation. Barely did an attitude of curiosity and surprise arise before being replaced by a bellicose attitude: domination and destruction, total dispossession of the native and his belongings, of the land and its products. (1953, 226–227)

After five centuries of experiencing this Western civilization, this unbroken history of dispossession, domination, and destruction, the African peoples of Portugal’s colonies demonstrated their own culture and civilization by fighting to take back their independence (Cabral, A., 1965; Neto, A., 1974). As Cabral explained at the second meeting of CONCP in 1965, Portugal came to our country proclaiming that they came in the service of God and in the service of civilization. Today we respond to them with arms in our hands: whatever the God which is with the Portuguese colonialists, whatever the civilization which the Portuguese colonialists represent, we will destroy it because we will destroy any form of foreign domination in our country. (Cabral, A., 1965, 165–6)

For the colonized, the fruits of this civilization might be measured not so much in the achievements of classical art, but in the experience of its technology. The second photograph, displayed alongside that of Cabral and the white marble statue, is of Samora Machel. He is standing with several other Mozambicans – some are FRELIMO combatants in uniform, others are ordinary people, men and women. Most are frowning, their gazes pointed in different directions – some at the ground, some to the side, others look towards Machel, whose own gaze is directed downwards. At his feet lie three large cylindrical objects. Writing on the nearest of these objects – ‘NAPALM PRX-4-15 4/68’ – makes it apparent that these objects the Mozambicans regard are bombs. Napalm, one of the technological expressions or achievements of Western civilization, is a ‘thickening agent’, originally developed and employed by

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the US Army during the Second World War, ‘for the preparation of gelled gasoline fuels used as filling for incendiary bombs and in flame throwers’. In its original formulation, it consisted of ‘an aluminium soap derived from a combination of acids of the type exemplified by lauric acid and by napthenic or oleic acid’ (Fieser et al., 1946, 768). Its first significant use was by American forces against Japan during the Second World War. During the Second World War, the British and US armed forces abandoned their previous policy of ‘precision bombing’ (restricted to military and strategic targets), moving to a strategy of more indiscriminate ‘area bombing’ (which could include residential areas, social infrastructures, and civilian populations) against Germany and Japan, respectively (Lindqvist, 2002, 181–196; 219–222; Longmate, 1983; Werrell, 1996). The US Air Force ‘urban area’ bombing campaigns against Japan towards the end of the Second World War, and subsequently against Korea in the 1950s, made extensive use of napalm to realize widespread destruction and annihilation of urban residential and industrial areas and their populations on a vast scale (Neer, 2013, 75–86; 91–104; Coffey, 2014, 90–104; Werrell, 1996; Lindqvist, 2002, 228). Napalm was also used to bomb rural areas in order to destroy crops, burn villages, and terrorize populations by the French forces in the Algerian war and, most extensively and devastatingly, by US forces in Vietnam (Neer, 2013, 106–125). At this time the United States and perhaps other NATO allies also supplied napalm bombs to Portugal for use in the colonial wars against Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Mozambique (Bosgra and van Krimpen, 1972; Coker, 1985; Crollen, 1973). Cabral informed the UN in 1962 that ‘Portugal continued to use the most modern weapons, including napalm bombs’ (Cabral, A., 1962, 18). He repeated this charge in considerably more detail to the UN Commission of Human Rights meeting in Dakar in 1968 (PAIGC, 1968, 18–22, 29–36). Samora Machel repeated the same point several years later, in 1973: Barbaric bombardments of napalm with fragmentation bombs follow successively from dawn, against old people, women, children, hospitals, schools, agricultural areas. They intensify the use of chemical products designed to destroy our crops. The air-force flies air more and more frequently over our villages to burn, pillage, destroy and kill all that is living. (Machel 1973, 62)

Napalm, the culmination of months of scientific experiment and research at Harvard and other laboratories in the United States, is a very effective incendiary weapon. It ignites easily, producing fire over a wide area which burns at a very high temperature. As a gel substance that burns, napalm



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spreads and spatters widely. It sticks to surfaces such as roofs, walls, and skin, producing fire which is not easily extinguished. The visitor from the West might stand for some time regarding these two photographs, this apparently strange juxtaposition of images in a room entitled, simply, ‘Civilization’. Perhaps, they might reflect that Western civilization should not be gauged by its own criteria of advance and achievement, but by the judgements of those who have actually experienced its implementation (imposition). And the visitor from the West might realize further, with some curiosity or surprise, that, having decided to visit a museum about other people’s struggles and histories, they are in fact learning new, forgotten lessons about their own history. CONCLUSION These reflections on the anticolonial archive have sought to underline the politics of researching this archive in its various dimensions in our present times. We get some initial sense of the values, practices, and difficulties informing anticolonial struggle simply by considering the form, content, and extent of the archive itself. The material traces of those earlier political struggles, in the form of texts, documents, pamphlets, recordings, and images, exist today in numerous locations on many continents. This extended location of the archive reflects and embodies the transnational dimensions of anticolonial struggle and its values of solidarity and cooperation, of comradeship, committed, and conscious. These values and politics should continue to inform contemporary engagements with the anticolonial archive, especially by those from the West. The anticolonial movements spoke to the world about their struggles, and in doing so they sought not only to establish their own legitimacy and gain support but also to offer to the world a challenge of shared responsibility. It is with this sense of responsibility that we should engage today with these archives of past struggles, so as to avoid the ‘condescension of posterity’: ‘Returning to the archives of this moment obliges contemporary thinkers to confront the accreted condescension that the present, in all its accumulated superiority, bears towards the recent yet distant pasts’ of anticolonial struggle (Eshun and Gray, 2011, 2). If the idea of the archive entails not simply a collection of records from the past, but a structure of knowledge, a dominant configuration of statements, modes of enunciation, and subject positions, then we must be alert to the endurance of these configurations and logics over time, into our present. In this broader sense, the colonial archive, as an international structure of knowledge and mode of practice, surely still exists, not least within

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the institutions of academic work as well as within contemporary modes of international relations. Intellectual work in the anticolonial archive today, wherever that work might take place – in actual libraries and archives or in the space of political imagination, conjuring the affective sensibility of anticolonialism – remains a work of struggle and commitment. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Very many thanks to Isaac Kamola and Shiera el-Malik and all participants for such a stimulating workshop at Hartford, October 2015; and to Isaac and Shiera for their editorial comments and support, and for their considerable patience. Thanks also to Vijay Prashad for comments on an earlier draft and to Ambreena Manji, Claire Mercer, Rui Lopes, Tim Press, and Shane Burke for helpful discussions. REFERENCES ———. 1953, “Situation des étudiants noirs dans le monde, pars les Étudiants d’Afrique Portugaise.” Présence Africaine 14, Special Issue ‘Les Étudiants Noirs Parlent’: 223–40. ———. 2006, “Roundtables held at Mozambique’s Samora Machel Centre.” Panapress 27 May 2006. Online: http://www.panapress.com/Roundtables-heldat-Mozambique-s-Samora-Machel-Centre--13-582034-17-lang1-index.html (accessed 25 January 2016). Arondekar, Anjali, 2005, “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, 1–2: 10–27. Bosgra, S. J. and C. van Krimpen, 1972, Portugal and NATO. Amsterdam: Angola Comité. Bragança, Aquino and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds, 1978a, Quem é o Inimigo (I): Anatomia do Colonialismo. Lisboa: Iniciativas Editoriais. Bragança, Aquino and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds, 1978b, Quem é o Inimigo (II): Os Movimentos de Libertação Nacional. Lisboa: Iniciativas Editoriais. Bragança, Aquino de and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds, 1978c, Quem é o Inimigo (III): A Estratégia da Libertação. Lisboa: Iniciativas Editoriais. Bragança, Aquino and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds, 1982, The African Liberation Reader: Documents of the National Liberation Movements, Vol. 1: The Anatomy of Colonialism. London: Zed Press. Burton, Antoinette, ed., 2005, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cabral, Amílcar, 1960, Circular da FRAIN sobre o Processo dos 50. CasaComum.org. Online: http://hdl.handle.net/11002/fms_dc_42660 (accessed 20 January 2016).



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Mbembe, Achille, 2000, “African Modes of Self-Writing.” Public Culture 14, 1: 239–74. Mytkowska, Joanna, 2015, “Preface,” pp. 15–16 in After Year Zero: Geographies of Collaboration, edited by Annett Busch and Anselm Franke. Warsaw and Berlin: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Haus der Kultueren der Welt. Neer, Robert M., 2013, Napalm, An American Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Neto, Agostinho, 1974, Quem é o inimigo? Qual é o nosso objectivo? Lisbon: Edições Maria da Fonte. Neto, Maria Eugénia and Irene Neto, eds, 2012, Agostinho Neto e a Libertação de Angola, 1949–1974, Arquivos da PIDE-DGS, 5 vols. Luanda: Fundação Dr. António Agostinho Neto. PAIGC, 1986, Les Crimes des Colonialistes Portugais face à la Déclaration Universelle des Droits de l’Homme. Transcrita pelo Comissão de Informação e Propaganda do Comité Central do PAIGC, a Declaração de Amílcar Cabral, perante a Comissão dos Direitos do Homem da ONU, na sessão realizada em Dakar, de 5 a 12 Agosto 1968. CasaComum.org. http://hdl.handle.net/11002/fms_dc_84241 (accessed 6 February 2015). Peterson, Bhekizizwe, 2002, “The Archives and the Political Imaginary,” pp. 29–37 in Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers. Reis, João and Armando Pedro Muiuanem, eds, 1975, Datas e Documentos da História da FRELIMO. Maputo: Imprensa Nacional de Moçambique. Richards, Thomas, 1993, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso. Sarin, Sophie, 2015, “In the Shadow of Timbuktu: The Manuscripts of Djenné,” pp. 173–87 in From Dust to Digital: Ten Years of the Endangered Archives Programme, edited by Maja Kominko. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Scott, David, 2005, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scott, David, 2014a, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scott, David, 2014b, “The Tragic Vision in Postcolonial Time.” PMLA 129, 4: 799–808. Seth, Sanjay, 2008, “Which Past? Whose Transcendental Presupposition?” Postcolonial Studies 11, 2: 215–26. Shetty, Sandhya and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, 2000, “Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever.” Diacritics 30, 1: 25–48. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 1988, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 271–313 in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 1999, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura, 2010, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Taoua, Phyllis, 2003, “The Anti-Colonial Archive: France and Africa’s Unfinished Business.” SubStance 32, 3: 146–64. Tollebeek, Jo, 2002, “The archive: The Panoptic Utopia of the historian,” pp. 339–55 in Eco in fabula: Umberto Eco in the humanities, edited by Franco Musarra. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Tollebeek, Jo, 2004, “‘Turn’d to Dust and Tears’: Revisiting the Archive.” History and Theory 43, 2: 237–48. Vieira, Sérgio, 2010, Participei, Por Isso Testemunho. Maputo: Ndjira. Werrell, Kenneth P., 1996, Blankets of Fire: U.S. Bombers over Japan during World War II. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Chapter 5

Realism without Abstraction Amílcar Cabral and a Politics of the World Isaac A. Kamola

Amílcar Cabral is probably best known for his 1966 speech at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in which he declared that ‘if it is true that a revolution can fail, even though it be nurtured on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet successfully practiced Revolution without a revolutionary theory’ (Cabral 1979c, 123). Delivered before an audience of revolutionary leaders from across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, his speech offers an examination of the specific contours of imperialism in Africa and the unique characteristics of social class formation emerging from this context. This speech exemplifies core elements of Cabral’s own revolutionary theory, drawn from his experience as both a colonial subject and leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Produced within the context of an armed struggle dedicated to creating an independent economic and political reality in Guinea-Bissau, Cabral’s writings and public statements constitute a complex, if not immediately intuitive, revolutionary theory. His primary problematic concerns how one might begin to conceptualize, and actualize through struggle, an independent nation within a colony otherwise marked by stark colonial, racial, ethnic, class, and geographical differences. While definitely a thinker of his time and context, Cabral is commonly read – when read at all – as confined to this context: a historical figure from a particular historical time and place. As a consequence, Cabral’s theoretical work has ‘not travelled well’ in the decades since his assassination in 1973 (Gibson 2013, 18). This chapter argues that Amílcar Cabral is not only an important theorist of African anticolonial and anti-imperial politics but also a theorist of the world. At a time in which the language of ‘globalization’ reigns supreme,

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Cabral fashions a richly alternative language and politics – one that eludes the prevalent conceptual and political snare of ‘global-speak’, namely the reoccurring spatial dichotomy of ‘global’ and ‘local’. While the language of globalization has successfully drawn attention to the great complexity and interconnection that shapes the contemporary world, it does so by imagining some places, peoples, and things as essentially ‘local’ in order to identify and define an emergent ‘global’ reality (Kamola 2012a, 2012b, 2013). This value-laden dichotomy is particularly problematic given that dominant theories of globalization are largely shaped by Western intellectual traditions and ‘northern epistemologies’ (Santos 2007), the exclusion of ‘southern theory’ (Connell 2007a, 2007b), undergirded by the material conditions that reproduce the relative ‘marginality of African analysts in most fields of academic production’ (Grovogui 2012, 117, see also Federici, Caffentzis, and Alidou 2000, Zeleza and Olukoshi 2004, Mamdani 2007, Kamola 2014). My reading of Cabral, therefore, is not an effort to incorporate Cabral within conversations about globalization or to demonstrate that the struggle for independence in Guinea-Bissau was a ‘global’ event in need of greater consideration. Rather, I demonstrate that Cabral’s revolutionary theory has the potential to travel into academic discussions about globalization in ways that potentially revolutionize how those of us living and working within higher education go about producing knowledge about the world as an integrated whole. A reading of Cabral that self-consciously starts with the desks, offices, and classrooms that make such a reading possible might encourage us to foreground the university as itself a complex political reality embedded within a constellation of complexities, suggesting that a revolutionary theory of globalization begins with an analysis of the institutions in which we1 live, work, and think. This chapter first offers an overview of the conjuncture in which Cabral was writing, namely the armed struggle for the national liberation of the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. The second section examines Cabral’s writings as shaped by this conjuncture. In particular, Cabral uses this experience – what some might consider a small military organization, within a peripheral African country – as the groundwork for developing a theory of 1.  For the purpose of this chapter, I assume that ‘we’ and ‘us’ refers to students, faculty, staff, and, possibly, administrators studying and working within institutions of higher education. The academy, of course, is not the only vector through which Cabral’s work might move. Edward Said urges us to remember that as theories travel ‘from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another’, they change dramatically (Said 1983, 226). They might lose their ‘fiery rebelliousness’ (Said 1983, 240) and at other times they become ‘tougher, harder, [and] more recalcitrant’ (Said 1994, 55, quoted in: Duvall and Varadarajan 2007, 92). My friend Mike Kramer, for example, reads Cabral to inform his work organizing service and hotel workers in Boston. Mike has a different reading of Cabral – probably more ‘fiery’ and ‘rebellious’ – than my own. That being said, as higher education increasingly comes to resemble other sectors of highly stratified and underpaid service work, Cabral’s ideas might travel within the academy in more rebellious ways.



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the world. The subsequent section reads one specific essay, ‘To Start Out from the Reality of Our Land – To Be Realists’, as grounding a vision of the world as an interconnected whole by starting with the ‘specific reality of our land’ (Cabral 1979a, 44), a reality over-layered with the particularities of the history, geography, and demography of his native Guinea-Bissau. I conclude by offering some preliminary thoughts about how this argument might travel into current academic debates about globalization, encouraging us to start with the university as grounding a politics of the world. CABRAL WITHIN A REALITY Born in 1924 in the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, Cabral’s biography is split between the mainland and the islands of Cape Verde. Colonized in the 1440s and centrally located within the Atlantic slave trade, the islands of Cape Verde developed a large Creole merchant population who, by colonial standards, benefited economically, educationally, and socially from Portuguese colonialism. In contrast, the mainland colony of Guinea-Bissau served as a plantation-based source of colonial agricultural extraction administered from Cape Verde (Forrest 1992, 16). Following the Berlin Conference, Portugal took greater interest in GuineaBissau, increasing its direct military support and engaging in greater efforts to ‘pacify’ the Native population (Forrest 1992, 16–17). Portugal appointed colonial authorities, many from Cape Verde, to oversee nine administrative regions in Portuguese Guinea and ensure agricultural production through forced labour, extracted under conditions defined by ‘great cruelty’ (Forrest 1992, 19). Cabral was the son of Cape Verdean parents working in Portuguese Guinea. At age ten, he returned to Cape Verde to receive his education and, in 1945, left for Lisbon to study agronomy (Forrest 1992, 31). While in Portugal, he met intellectuals from Angola and Mozambique, including Agontinho Neto (future president of Angola) and Marcelino dos Santos (founding member of FRELIMO), and others within the anticolonial movement. As a young man, Cabral found inspiration in the armed uprising of the Cuban Revolution (1953–9) and Algeria’s Front de Libération Nationale. After his studies, Cabral returned to Guinea-Bissau to work on an agricultural census of groundnut production for the colonial administration, a position that gave him a detailed understanding of the plight of the peasant population in Guinea-Bissau. He also served as director of an experimental farm in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bissau. During his tenure at Pessubé Farm, Cabral transformed the farm from ‘a mere unit of vegetable production’ created to feed the ‘colonial political and administrative authorities’ into

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an agricultural research station dedicated to ‘the construction of the new conceptual agricultural building’ capable of developing the techniques needed to eventually replace the colonial agricultural model after independence – an independence Cabral saw on the near horizon (Schwarz 2013, 81). In 1956, disappointed with the slow pace of change, Cabral co-founded the PAIGC with five friends from his time in Lisbon. The original PAIGC strategy included waging a non-violent struggle in both Guinea and Cape Verde, aimed at creating a unified and independent nation – an ambitious goal given the long historical, economic, social, and cultural differences dividing the islands and the mainland. As a consequence of this revolutionary approach, the PAIGC originally focused its political organizing efforts on the urban areas. However, after the massacre of fifty striking dockworkers in the port city of Bissau, Cabral and the leadership of PAIGC shifted their strategy to include armed struggle. Inspired by the Cuban revolution, the PAIGC rooted their efforts in the countryside. However, unlike the Cuban model of focoism, which assumed that small groups of guerilla fighters served as the revolutionary vanguard thereby ‘reduc[ing] theory to guerilla war’ (Gibson 2013, 20), Cabral and the PAIGC leadership fashioned an armed struggle that was also a mass struggle. The PAIGC’s first armed attacks on the Portuguese colonial army began in 1962, and by 1968 two-thirds of Guinea-Bissau was under PAIGC control (Forrest 1992, 33–35, Cabral 1966, 5–15). Within this context, Cabral served as the political and military leader of the PAIGC, as well as the party’s main intellectual. He also represented the organization as its primary ambassador, forging lines of internationalist solidarity among independence movements within Africa’s Portuguese colonies, and the Third World more broadly. In January 1973, Cabral was assassinated by members of the PAIGC’s Executive Committee. After being shot, Cabral purportedly turned to his assassin, saying ‘this is no way to resolve differences’ (Manji and Fletcher 2013, 6).2 In the following months, under the banner of Operation Cabral, 2.  António Tomás powerfully argues that for nearly forty years it was widely assumed that Cabral was assassinated by members of the Portuguese secret police. However, recent reporting demonstrates that he was more likely assassinated with full support of the PAIGC leadership. For Tomás, this fact reveals ‘the disjuncture between revolutionary hopes and postcolonial realities. More importantly, it conveys the kinds of readings of the past that our particular postcolonial present authorizes. The story that claims that Cabral was killed by the fascist police made sense in the context in which GuineaBissau was hailed the quintessential revolutionary war in Africa’ (Tomás 2011, 1). Tomás argues that Cabral’s message of unity and joint struggle did not actually reflect the underlying realities of the internally divided PAIGC leadership. As a result, Cabral largely failed to recognize the ways in which the counter-insurgency strategies being deployed by the Portuguese were successfully mobilizing ethnic, political, and institutional differences within the country. Tomás suggests that one ask ‘what could Cabral have seen that he did not see? ... Asking these basic questions when build[ing] our theories to explain our contemporary challenges may help us, I believe, to develop better ones’ (Tomás 2011, 15).



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the PAIGC intensified their attacks. In September, they declared unilateral independence. This victory proved a major blow to the fascist government in Portugal, which fell the following year. CABRAL’S ARCHIVE: ‘A POSTCOLONIAL THEORIST ACTING WITHIN A COLONIAL SITUATION’ Cabral produced an extensive body of written work that, from an academic standard, might appear ‘staccato and uneven’ (Wallerstein 1971, 67). Cabral’s writing from the 1950s consists of a number of youthful poems, his agricultural survey of groundnut production, and nearly sixty studies on soil erosion, monoculture, infestation, and the storage of agricultural goods – a corpus which established him as one the most prominent West African agronomist (Chilcote 1991, 10). In fact, sixty years after its publication, Cabral’s census still remains the ‘basis for understanding’ the causes of regional differences in agricultural production across Guinea-Bissau (Schwarz 2013, 83). Cabral’s most widely read texts within the Anglophone academy, however, are his speeches and reports composed during the 1960s while leading the PAIGC. These works are primarily contained within a handful of edited volumes curated for an English-speaking audience during the 1970s (Cabral 1970, 1973, 1979b), with some articles and speeches reprinted within various academic journals. Unlike most other African anticolonial thinkers, Cabral was directly engaged in the day-to-day operations of an armed struggle (Chilcote 1991, 14). Given that much of his life energy was consumed with questions directly related to these practical concerns, much of his writing exhibits a highly pragmatic and technical style. For example, his 1966 report to the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL) offers both a poetic overview of the conflict3 and a detailed and technical accounting of various aspects of the struggle. Long passages detail troop levels, rebel and Portuguese strategies and their relative effectiveness, a dense analysis of the political, economic, social, and cultural situations within the liberated territory, a tabulation of aid received by different African countries, and an analysis of the broader international context (Cabral 1966). The report concludes with a multi-page list outlining specific equipment needed by the PAIGC, including foodstuffs (condensed milk, sugar, salt), household items (sewing needles, plates, buckets), clothes, tobacco (as well 3.  Cabral writes, for example, that ‘combatants now live under the sun of freedom and national reconstruction in the liberated regions. … In the contended or partially liberated zones, the fronts are continually widened, and we fecundate, in the flames of patriotism materialized by the fire of our arms, the tomorrow of freedom, peace and progress for which we fight’ (Cabral 1966, 6).

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as matches), school items, and medical needs (Cabral 1966, 30–33). The British historian Basil Davidson, who visited Guinea-Bissau during the conflict, describes Cabral as offering a social analysis not so different than that of an engineer: Not for nothing, perhaps, was Cabral trained as an engineer. This stubborn emphasis on factually analyzing the machinery of society, traditional society, colonial society: on inspecting it piece by piece; on considering how far, and if, these pieces can still be used in the building of an entirely different machine; on deciding just what new pieces will be necessary; on conceptualizing, in short, the actual and detailed process of socio-economic change. (Davidson 1969, 78, cited in Moser 1978, 177)

This technical writing style – one focused on describing the intricate workings of a specific social machine – might come across as overly descriptive and under-theorized. As such, one might be tempted to interpret Cabral’s work as standing in sharp contrast to his claim about ‘the centrality of theory’ (Wallerstein 1971, 66). The profundity of Cabral’s thought, however, lies within the apparent disjuncture between his proclamations about the centrality of theory and his seemingly under-theorized writing. I would argue that this ‘disjuncture’ only appears as such because of the highly particular, and professionalized, vernaculars informing contemporary expectations of what constitutes scholarly thinking and writing. On the one hand, there is no doubt that Cabral was well versed in the theoretical discussions common among Marxists and anticolonial intellectuals of his time. After all, he was steeped in Marxist theory while participating in the anti-fascist student underground in Portugal. While the prevalence of Marxist terminology and concepts is found throughout his works, he nonetheless refrains from using someone else’s theory to answer his political question. To the degree Cabral draws upon traditions such as ‘Marxism–Leninism, social democracy, and Western republicanism’ he does so not based on their status within particular literatures, but rather because they were ‘best suited to postcolonial Africa and to his own Guinea-Bissau, in particular’ (Chilcote 1991, 1). While clearly aware of other revolutionary ‘experiences and their theoretical contributions’, Cabral does not ever identify individual thinkers or texts, choosing instead to build a theory ‘around the unique revolutionary conditions in his own movement’s struggle for liberation and independence’ (Forrest 1992, 33, Manji and Fletcher 2013, 8). He does not rely on theorists or revolutionaries originating elsewhere to illustrate his point, but rather draws upon the examples of his comrades standing around him. The result is a materialist theory that avoids fashioning a revolutionary theory in the abstract and then applying this theory to the ‘case’ of GuineaBissau. Instead, Cabral’s revolutionary theory wells upward from a detailed



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understanding – or survey – of his conjuncture, developing a theory of revolutionary practice originating from within this context. In this way, Cabral not only develops a critical theory that ‘contests and combats … global imperialism’ but does so by ‘emphasiz[ing] and accentuat[ing]’ the fact that the people to whom he was speaking ‘have never received training in political science or political philosophy’ and, as such, uses the sources of their history and culture as his primary texts (Rabaka 2009, 235). For Cabral, therefore, a revolutionary theory is not defined by its content and conclusions, but rather by the theoretical practice it makes possible. Cabral uses his own situatedness, rather than a stockpile of references, as the foundation from which to build not only an understanding of his particular struggle but also the world (McCulloch 1981, 505). Using his conjuncture as the starting point for a political theory, Cabral’s writing therefore moves between a detailed account of a particular struggle to a broader theorization of his struggle as immanently connected to the broader whole. Cabral theorizes the world as a complex, interconnected whole in order to better understand the tactical field upon which he lived and worked. Given the context, Cabral was simultaneously organizing an armed struggle ‘under the constraint of an ongoing colonial situation’, while also producing theory guided by the ‘postcolonial criticism that was emerging from the postcolonial experience of African states’: he was, in other words, ‘a postcolonial theorist acting within a colonial situation’ (Tomás 2011, 2). REALISM WITHOUT ABSTRACTION Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children. – Amílcar Cabral4

Among Cabral’s most influential works are a series of nine lectures presented to PAIGC cadres in November 1969. These lectures, given in crioulo – a language comprised of merging Portuguese with local Guinean languages – were tape-recorded and later transcribed into Portuguese (editorial fn. in: Cabral 1979b, 28). These speeches were intended as educational material, providing the PAIGC cadres a history of colonial rule in GuineaBissau and Cape Verde, an overview of the party organization and operating philosophy, as well as situating the particular political struggle within 4. From Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories (Cabral 1970, 86).

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a broader, internationalist context. The second of these speeches, ‘To Start Out from the Reality of Our Land – To Be Realists’, offers a concise insight into Cabral’s thinking about revolutionary theory as realist theory. Starting with the recognition that a successful anticolonial struggle requires starting with our feet planted on the ground,5 Cabral begins by asking ‘What is our reality?’ recognizing that ‘our reality, like all other realities, has positive aspects and negative aspects, has strengths and weaknesses’ (Cabral 1979a, 44). In ways reminiscent of discussions within the Western academy concerning the proper privileging of idealism versus realism, Cabral recognizes that the examination of reality first comes down to the question of whether one believes ‘reality depends on the way in which man [sic] interprets it’ or whether ‘man is part of [a] reality’ that ‘exists independently of man’s will’ (Cabral 1979a, 44–45). Cabral sides with the latter interpretation, recognizing that those who lead ‘a national liberation struggle … must never confuse what they have in their head with reality’, while still recognizing that it is important to ‘have many things in his head’ (Cabral 1979a, 45). In this way, one’s ideas of the world are not unimportant, far from it. They are so compelling that we must not allow ourselves to think that the ideas in our heads – whether our own or those we inherit from others – constitute the reality of the world. While one should observe other liberation struggles, read books and reports, or converse with those in other struggles, it is a mistake to believe that one can devise a successful political strategy based on applying the lessons learnt elsewhere; it would be an error, in other words, ‘to organize our Party on the lines of parties in France or any other country in Europe, or even Asia’ (Cabral 1979a, 45). Cabral’s realist analysis continues by offering a thorough overview of the sedimented realities that shape life in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, starting with its geographical reality, before turning to economic, social, cultural, and political realities. After examining these different realities, Cabral examines how a liberation struggle must navigate these competing and complex relationships, which are themselves simultaneously embedded within regional and international realities. He starts with geographical reality and notes that ‘we are a tiny territory of about 40,000 square kilometres, counting Guiné and Cape Verde, with Guiné nine times the size of Cape Verde – ten islands – on the west coast of Africa … about 400 miles off the shore’ (Cabral 1979a, 50). Cabral recognizes that, while most books detailing guerrilla warfare emphasize the strategic importance of mountains, Guinea-Bissau has no mountains. Instead, it has long ‘tongues’ of sea and various seasonal rivers that offer the 5.  Rather than Marx’s strategy of ‘turning Hegel on his head’ to arrive at a materialist understanding of the world, Cabral simply avoids these acrobatic contortions altogether. His theory starts from the reality that all humans experience, namely that of living with one’s feet bound to the earth.



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Portuguese Army ample opportunities to restock their garrisons. Layered on top of this geographical reality is an ‘economic reality’ – ‘we are Portuguese colonies’ and therefore dependent upon subsistence agriculture (Cabral 1979a, 52) – as well as a ‘social reality’ defined primarily by ‘wretchedness, diseases, famine’, and an appallingly low thirty-year life expectancy (Cabral 1979a, 54–55). Culturally, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau are divided by levels of literacy, differences in access to schooling, and different histories of cultural contact. Furthermore, one of Cabral’s biggest concerns is how ‘our cultural level’ relates to ‘the specific reality of war’ – namely the tendency for soldiers to wear amulets thinking they grant immunity from harm or soldiers who decide not to attack because a soothsayer prophesizes their death (Cabral 1979a, 58–59). He recognizes that these cultural dimensions offer both a ‘strong face’ and a ‘weak face’ – as they give the soldiers a courageous fighting spirit and also lead soldiers to make mistakes and act irresponsibly (Cabral 1979a, 59). Cabral concludes the lecture by returning to the political reality – the ‘greater reality we all know well, it is the fact that we were a Portuguese colony’ (Cabral 1979a, 60). He recognizes, however, that this reality is not static but radically dynamic. Bringing the lecture back around to geography, Cabral argues that the new political reality being created through struggle has the power to transform geography itself: ‘we must take advantage of’ the strength of our struggle ‘to transform even geographical reality…. For when we build dams, bridges, etc., we shall change the geographical landscape of our land, we are going to make a new human geography’ (Cabral 1979a, 60). For Cabral, this transformation of the colonial reality cannot take place within ‘an isolated reality, within our villages’, but is always situated ‘in the reality of the modern world’ (Cabral 1979a, 63). Cabral’s census of the struggle for the independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde as comprised of overlapping geographical, economic, social, cultural, and political realities gives an insight into his theorization of ‘reality’ more generally. At the beginning of the essay, Cabral explains that ‘to be realists’ involves appreciating the complex interplay of different realities: Reality never exists in isolation. For example, our comrade Manuel Nandingna is a reality, is a real fact. But he cannot exist alone, he alone is nothing; a reality is never isolated from other realities. No matter what reality we consider in the world or in life, however great or small, it always forms part of another reality, is integrated in another reality, is affected by our realities, which in turn have an effect in or on other realities. So our land of Guiné and the reality of Cape Verde, immediately there is a greater reality, Guiné and Cape Verde. But the latter reality is within the reality of West Africa, with our two closest neighboring countries. We can look a little wider, with our two neighboring countries

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first, then with West Africa, and with the reality of the whole of Africa, and with the reality of the world, although there might be other realities between these. This means that our own reality is at the centre of a complex reality, but it is the former that most concerns us. For others it would not be the same, it would be at some other focus, and theirs would be the central reality. But even if we think of ours at the centre, our reality is not isolated, is not on its own. In many of the things we have to realize that we are integrated with other realities. This is very important for us not to make mistakes. … We must at all times see the part and the whole. (Cabral 1979a, 47; emphasis added)

For Cabral, reality is fundamentally relational: ‘A reality is never isolated from other realities.’ As such, one cannot study relational realities from outside a reality. There is no vision of the world from without, only a radically immanent and situated materialism. There is no ‘Apollonian gaze’ (Cosgrove 2001), onto-theological perspective (Nancy 2007), or zero point that assumes ‘a disembodied subject beyond location’ (Mignolo 2011, xvii & xxiv). However, reality is also not singular. One is always embedded within a reality that concerns one the most. For Cabral and his comrades this meant the independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, a ‘complex reality’, comprised of ‘other realities’, and integrated within other (large and small) realities, that radiate outwards. Cabral’s vision of a world composed of interlocking and overlapping realities, operating at different strata and through multiple centres, and only knowable from within the context of a specific reality, is what I call realism without abstraction.6 Cabral’s realist theory is premised on the fundamental assumption that one studies the world in order to decipher the political ramifications of political practices within a complex and contested field. Cabral would frequently remind his cadres that ‘your ideas may be good, even excellent, but they will be useless ideas unless they spring from and interweave with the reality you live in’ (Davidson 1979, xi, quoted in: Tomás 2011, 3). In other words, how we understand reality is fundamentally shaped by the fact that we start by examining ‘our own reality’, namely the realities that most ‘concerns us’. This does not mean that the realities faced by Cabral and his comrades are not shaped by the realities of ‘West Africa’, ‘the whole of Africa’, or ‘the world’. While one must always appreciate the many levels of complexity, and to hold 6.  It is hopefully now evident that there exists a fundamental difference between Cabral’s realism and the various forms of realist theory currently circulating within the academy. I would argue that forms of academic realism – such as realist IR theory, neorealism, scientific realism, etc. – primarily concern themselves with abstraction (‘the state’, the ‘international system’, or ‘scientific knowledge’). Theory comes first, is honed and perfected, then overlaid to describe the world as a reality. Theory becomes an answer to an academically generated question, rather than a tool crafted for intervention into the contours of a specific political reality.



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them simultaneously within one’s head, the realities that receive the most attention should be the reality most ‘central’ to where one stands. To further explain his theory of nestled realities to his audience of cadres, Cabral draws upon an example from their shared reality: the military operation within Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. He argues that assuming a ‘strategic point of view’ involves recognizing that ‘there can be no peace in Guiné if the Portuguese have air bases in Cape Verde…. If we were to liberate Guiné totally, for example, the Portuguese could bombard us with air bases installed in Cape Verde’ using South African warplanes supplied ‘on a grand scale’ (Cabral 1979a, 48). Therefore, one cannot just focus on the realities of Guiné and those of Cape Verde separately: they become instead ‘a joint reality, a single reality’ (Cabral 1979a, 48). Similarly, the reality of armed struggle within Guiné and Cape Verde is situated within broader complexity of Portuguese colonialism: ‘If we in Guiné and Cape Verde were to struggle hard, and the peoples of Angola and Mozambique did not struggle at all, and if perhaps the Portuguese could withdraw all their troops from Angola and Mozambique and send them to our land, I do not know when we would win our independence’ (Cabral 1979a, 48). Taking ‘our own reality’ – and therefore that which concerns us most– as the starting point of an analysis of complex and relational realities, therefore, creates a sort of situational cosmology. In order to study ‘the reality of the world’, Cabral contends we must always remember that we are part of a complexity within a complexity, acknowledging that levels of complexity warrant different levels of attention based on the political requirements of one’s own reality. On this point, Cabral warns his comrades not to ‘treat their reality as the only reality there is, forgetting the rest’, for doing so ‘shows our failure of awareness in seeing our own reality, and how we are integrated in a greater reality, that we ourselves have created but have not yet fully absorbed into our awareness’ (Cabral 1979a, 47). Cabral’s realism does not start with the categories and convention of realist theory, nor with abstract questions requiring abstract answers – ‘How do you know that table is real?’ Cabral’s realism is instead motivated with the immediate complexities of his own practice, from which he develops a revolutionary theory for understanding how his struggle is deeply interconnected to the whole. His realist analysis is not an exercise of abstracting the world in order to describe, represent, or theorize it better. To the degree that Cabral ‘scales up’ (to West Africa, Africa, the ‘world’, etc.), he does so not to better understand some abstract world existing ‘out there’. Rather, Cabral is fundamentally interested in appreciating how other, more distant realities inform the complexity that concerns him, and his comrades, most – namely the specific reality of the anticolonial struggle in Guinea and Cape Verde.

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Cabral’s realist theory, in other words, does not describe the world simply to know it better, but rather parses out complex realities for the purpose of better strategizing interventions that are fundamental to transforming the particular contested field of which he is a part. A revolutionary theory, therefore, is a vision of the world that not only emerges within a particular reality, but is crafted to strategically engage that reality as a “phenomenon-in-motion”: When the African people say, in their plain language, that ‘no matter how hot the water from the well, it will not cook your rice’, they express with staggering simplicity a basic principle not only of physics but also of political science. We know in fact that the unfolding behavior (development) of a phenomenonin-motion, whatever its external conditioning, depends mainly on its internal characteristics. We also know that on the political level – however fine and attractive the reality of others may be – we can only truly transform our own reality, on the basis of detailed knowledge of it and our own efforts and sacrifices. (Cabral 1979c, 122)

READING CABRAL WITHIN THE NEOLIBERAL UNIVERSITY How might academics and students, living, working, and studying within institutions of higher education, think the world in ways that take seriously Cabral’s realism without abstraction? What does it mean, in other words, for academics to approach the world as a reality within other complex realities, as seen from the reality that concerns us the most? Cabral’s theory can help frame the question, but of course cannot provide an answer. After all, how one engages in such a theoretical project will ultimately be grounded within the engagement of one’s own reality. That being said, let me conclude by offering some general thoughts about what it might mean to be a realist within the academy. At the very least, being a realist with our feet planted in the ground of the academy means appreciating the degree to which we inhabit the reality of our academic institutions, which are themselves layered within a radiating complexity of realities. Doing so requires fundamentally rejecting any claim that a college or university offers any sort of privileged position from which to study a world existing ‘out there’. Rather, academic disciplines, departments, institutions, and university system are not towers from which to gaze upon an already existing world, but themselves realities embedded within other realities. Students are not training for a world existing ‘out there’ – in some distant place called ‘the real world’. Rather, the university is itself one particular reality within the world. A realist analysis of the university does not necessarily demand even more sophisticated critiques of the ‘global’ state of



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higher education in general but rather asks academics and students to situate themselves – as well as the knowledges, theories, experiences, relationships, cultural capital, and debt relationships that we help reproduce – within the realities of the colleges and universities we inhabit. In doing so, we might begin to develop knowledge practices that more successfully serve as tools (and possibly weapons) for making our world of higher education anew. If our daily reality primarily consists of teaching and attending classes, conducting research, writing papers, attending conferences, and occasionally waging disciplinary battle within the pages of the obscure academic journals that only a handful of people actually read, we might be well served to reflect upon what, within this reality, might be channelled or laundered into opportunities to transform our most immediate reality – namely the very institutions in which we live and work. One might start with the reality that most academic institutions are the historical accumulation and beneficiaries of historical injustice. In the United States, for example, most elite colleges and universities have a long history of benefiting directly from the transatlantic slave trade (Wilder 2013). As such, the institutions we inhabit – their endowments, their libraries and special collections, the land they occupy, and often the buildings themselves – are the material of past violences. This is a reality. A realist might study these histories for the purpose of demanding justice in the present – showing how historical realities continue to shape the present. For example, the Brown family – and the institution it endowed – made its vast fortune from the slave trade. However, rather than ignoring this history, starting in 2003, Brown University engaged in serious academic discussions – bringing together faculty, undergraduates, graduate students, staff, and administrators – to examine their institution’s history and, as a community, find ways to address this legacy (Allen et al. 2006). More recently, protests at Yale have demanded that the university rename the college named after alumni and defender of slavery, John C. Calhoun.7 In South Africa, the Rhodes Must Fall movement successfully demanded the removal of a statute of John Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town campus and, in doing so, created the space of an ongoing discussion about the continued relationship between colonialism and South African higher education. In the United Kingdom, student movements, such as Why Is My Curriculum White?, Decolonizing Our Minds Society, and Rhodes Must Fall (Oxford), have initiated discussions about the relationship between British imperialism and British higher education. Faculty and students might research and teach our institutions – their histories, international and worldly complexities, and the continued political implications of these realities. 7.  For an overview of Yale’s historical connection with the slave trade, see Dugdale, Fueser, and Alves (2011).

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In addition to examining the historical realities of one’s institution, taking a realist stance within the academy might also involve working to address the gross inequalities shaping working conditions within higher education. Today, the formation of a small, and highly mobile, ‘superstar’ academic class commonly exists against the backdrop of the widespread adjunctification of the labour force. In the United States, 75 per cent of classes are taught by non-tenured and non-tenure track professors. The overall average pay for adjunct teaching is $2,987 per 3 credit class (June and Newman 2013), the overproduction of PhDs creates a low-wage pool of adjunct labour (Bousquet 2008), all while the average cost of tuition has increased 2.2 times over the past three decades,8 much of which is paid for by student debt such that graduates have an average of $22,900 in student loans at graduation ($85 billion dollars of which is past due).9 A realist theory, produced by those working and studying within the university, might work to challenge the growing privatization of higher education, including the rapidly increasing tuitions and mounting levels of student debt. We might produce knowledge that assists struggles for better employment at our institutions, including the unionization of students, faculty, and staff. We might work to democratize the production of academic knowledge, including supporting open-access platforms as well as funding the work of graduate students, non-tenure track faculty, contingent workers, and those most often excluded from the distribution of institutional resources. We might challenge the geographical inequalities within the world of higher education by developing networks of mutual aid to support academics in institutions rendered marginal by existing circulations of academic knowledge and resources. We might work to expand access to higher education to non-academics and non-students, redistributing institutional wealth outside the enclosures of the academy. If Cabral is right, for those of us living and working within institutions of higher education, efforts to remake the universities, professional associations, and publishing regimes that constitute our daily reality are not isolated (or ‘local’) demands, largely irrelevant to the ‘larger fights’ taking place out there ‘in the real world’. Rather, this is our reality. Rather than ringing our hands about the dire state of higher education today, and then turning our scholarly and teaching attention towards the study of some abstract ‘global’ world far way, reading Cabral within the reality of the contemporary academy challenges us to take seriously the very real possibility that, for us, some of the most meaningful and revolutionary political struggles might actually be quite close at hand, namely within the universities and colleges in which we live and work. 8.  ‘Fast Facts: Tuition Costs of Colleges and Universities’, National Center for Educational Statistics, Washington, DC. http://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=76 [Accessed May 2016]. 9.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/student-loans-surpass-auto-creditcard-debt/2012/03/06/gIQARFQnuR_blog.html.



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REFERENCES Allen, Brenda A., Paul Armstrong, Farid Azfar, Omer Bartov, B. Anthony Bogues, and James Campell. 2006. Slavery and Justice: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. Providence, RI: Brown University. Bousquet, Marc. 2008. How the University Works: Higher Education and the LowWage Nation. New York and London: New York University Press. Cabral, Amílcar. 1966. The Struggle for National Liberation in Guinea (B) and Cape Verde: Extracts from the Report Made by Amilcar Cabral, Secretary General of the PAIGC, to the Executive Secretariat of the OSPAAAL. Havana: OSPAAL, 1966. Cabral, Amílcar. 1970. Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts. Translated by Richard Handyside. New York: Monthly Review Press. Cabral, Amílcar. 1973. Return to the Source: Selected Speeches by Amilcar Cabral. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Cabral, Amílcar. 1979a. “To Start Out from the Reality of Our Land—To Be Realists.” In Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Cabral, Amílcar. 1979b. Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral. Translated by Michael Wolfers. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Cabral, Amílcar. 1979c. “The Weapon of Theory: Presuppositions and Objectives of National Liberation in Relation to Social Structure.” In Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Chilcote, Ronald H. 1991. Amilcar Cabral’s Revolutionary Theory and Practice: A Critical Guide. New York: Lynne Rienner. Connell, Raewyn. 2007a. “The Northern Theory of Globalization.” Sociological Theory 25 (4): 368–385. Connell, Raewyn. 2007b. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity. Cosgrove, Denis. 2001. Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Davidson, Basil. 1969. The Liberation of Guiné: Aspects of an African Revolution. Edited by Ronald Segal, Penguin African Library. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Davidson, Basil. 1979. “Introduction.” In Unity and Struggle, ix–xvii. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Dugdale, Antony, J. J. Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves. 2011. Yale, Slavery and Abolition. New Haven, CT: The Amistad Committee. Duvall, Raymond and Latha Varadarajan. 2007. “Traveling in Paradox: Edward Said and Critical International Relations.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 36: 83–99. Federici, Silvia, George Caffentzis, and Ousseina Alidou. 2000. A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities. Trenton, NJ & Asmara, Eritrea: African World Press. Forrest, Joshua. 1992. Guinea Bissau: Power, Conflict, Renewal in a West African Nation. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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Gibson, Nigel C. 2013. “Some Reflections on Amílcar Cabral’s Legacy.” In Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral, edited by Firoze Manji and Jr. Bill Fletcher, 17–29. Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Grovogui, Siba. 2012. “The State of the African State and Politics: Ghosts and Phantoms in the Heart of Darkness.” In Thinking International Relations Differently, edited by Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney, 117–138. New York: Routledge. June, Audrey Williams, and Jonah Newman. 2013. “Adjunct Project Reveals Wide Range in Pay.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 4, 2013. Kamola, Isaac. 2012a. “Reading ‘the Global’ in the Absence of Africa.” In Thinking International Relations Differently, edited by Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney, 183–204. London: Routledge. Kamola, Isaac. 2012b. “US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations: 1–19. Kamola, Isaac. 2013. “Why Global? Diagnosing the Globalization Literature within a Political Economy of Higher Education.” International Political Sociology 7 (1). Kamola, Isaac. 2014. “The African University as ‘Global’ University.” PS: Political Science and Politics 47 (3): 604–607. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2007. Scholars in the Marketplace: The Dilemmas of NeoLiberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989–2005. Dakar: CODESRIA. Manji, Firoze and Bill Fletcher. 2013. “Introduction: Amilcar Cabral and the Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting.” In Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral, edited by Firoze Manji and Jr. Bill Fletcher, 3–13. Dakar: CODESRIA. McCulloch, Jock. 1981. “Amílcar Cabral: A Theory of Imperialism.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 19 (3): 503–511. Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Moser, Gerald M. 1978. “The Poet Amílcar Cabral.” Research in African Literatures 9 (2): 176–197. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rabaka, Reiland. 2009. Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, From W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Said, Edward. 1983. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic, 226–247. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Said, Edward. 1994. “Traveling Theory Reconsidered.” In Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, edited by Robert M. Polhemus and Roger B. Henkle, 251–265. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2007. Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies, Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos. London and New York: Verso. Schwarz, Carlos. 2013. “Amilcar Cabral: An Agronomist before His Time.” In Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral, edited by Firoze Manji and Jr. Bill Fletcher, 79–93. Dakar: CODESRIA.



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Tomás, António. 2011. Preliminary Thoughts on the Legacy of Amílcar Cabral. In MISR Working Paper: Makerere Institute of Social Research. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1971. “The Lessons of the PAIGC: Review of Revolution in Guinea by Amilcar Cabral; Armed Struggle in Africa by Gerard Chaliand.” Africa Today 18 (3): 62–68. Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe and Adebayo Olukoshi. 2004. African Universities in the Twenty-First Century. 2 vols. Vol. 1. Dakar: CODESRIA.

Chapter 6

Inviting Marianne to Dance Congolese Rumba Lingala as an Archive against Monument Míde Ní Shúilleabháin

I start my story in Brussels, in a park paved with the traces of the dead. Under my feet are the remnants of the gravestones that once ran row behind row as testaments to the dead. What was once a municipal cemetery is now a public park in a quiet area of the Belgian capital, the Parc Georges Henri in the commune of Woluwe-Saint-Lambert. The past has not been erased with the exhumation of the bones of the dead, however. It is here in the very paths I walk upon. In a very Belgian nudge and wink of public planning the now redundant tombstones were made into cobbles, some intact, some broken, quilted into the crazy paving of the park’s walkways. Here and there I make out a name, a dedication, a Rest in Peace but they are for the most part worn and anonymous. These gravestones without their graves, without their resting dead – those owners of the memories they had promised to uphold – what kind of monuments are they now? I leave not quite knowing whether the paths built of and on the traces of the past present a remembering or a forgetting. I start my story in Brussels, a city that is paved with the traces of the dead. The great urban projects of Leopold II funded almost exclusively from the proceeds of the king’s colonial enterprises in what was then the Belgian Congo. They can tell a story now: the avenues, museums, parks, and palaces – incontrovertibly and incontestably here. The material witnesses to a time gone by. This chapter argues that this concretizing the past, both in the physical urban fabric and in the practices of historiography that write memory into history, is characteristic of what might be called the Western modern, a particular interpretation of which is advanced below. The practices and assumptions facilitated and engrained by this modern officializing of the past encourage a certain form of collective storytelling, that in the particular European Western context can be engaged in service of the narrative of the nation and thus of those who identify themselves within these national 101

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narratives. Whereas this chapter considers this process to be largely top-down and official, in the European context the individual can also be considered complicit (albeit potentially inadvertently and/or unhappily so) in the writing of the personal into the history of the official in that the historiographical practices that facilitated this production of the individual as national subject were the same that influenced the private practice, personal expression, and self-image of the Western modern individual in his/her personal space, for example patterns of urbanization, building and dwelling, practices of education, consumption, and communication. This chapter considers the dynamic of Western historiographical narrative imposition in the colonial context, wondering what spaces for collective storytelling are left when this historical complicity is absent. It does so by exploring the narrative tensions created by the European colonial presence in sub-Saharan African, focusing on the Francophone region of the Congo Basin, analysing the historiographical practices of colonial authorities in order to understand the narrative possibilities that were left for the expression of a Congolese or African identity that, although emerging from the colonial experience, was not ‘overdetermined from without’ (Fanon 1986, 116). The chapter first explores the Western officializing of history, that writing of personal memory into the collective history that I found on the paths and streets of Brussels. It does so by visiting a site in which the ‘African story’ is told in European narrative terms, that is, not only from a European perspective but also by means of certain narrative practices. This is the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium, a site that tells the story of the Belgium relationship with the Congo through material gathered during the years of colonial occupation. I argue in this section that the history of both Belgium and Central Africa (especially Congo-Kinshasa, the centre of the Belgian colonial project) as told in the RMCA is constrained and defined not only by the material contents of the museum but also by the narrative possibilities and historiographical practices that this site represents and propagates. I characterize these practices as those of ‘monument and document’, whereby a story becomes history through physical inscription in the landscape and through writing into official annals. These practices of monument and document I consider as the characteristic archival practices of the Western European modern. The second section offers an alternative to the identity narratives of monument and document by shifting the focus of the story from Europe to the Congo Basin. It contrasts the narrative practices of the RMCA’s monument and document with that of the Congolese popular music scene of the mid- to late-twentieth century. It examines the emergence and development of the Rumba Lingala music genre and considers this form of musical expression as a new practice of archiving – of turning memory into history – not



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only in terms of giving voice to the experience of the colonized but also in terms of the emergence of a hybridization of identity between colonized and colonizer, leaving neither unchanged. It explores the origins and evolution of Rumba Lingala, considering how the hybrid nature of both musical genre and dominant language (Lingala) not only reflected the nature of Congolese society under colonization but also allowed for the emergence and assertion of a Congolese identity that was formed under but not by colonial rule. The Congolese rumba is thus seen as instrumental in creating a ‘third space’ for identity expression, allowing for a ‘being’ not exclusively determined by colonial relationships and dynamics.

AN ARCHIVE STORY: THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN THE STANLEY PAVILION Putting Africa on Paper It was a warm welcome to the archive. On my previous visits to Belgium’s RMCA I had not paid much attention to this smaller building, somewhat insignificant when set against the palatial architecture of the main museum, somewhat lost in the impressive sweep of this ‘little Versailles’.1 Now with its once-imposing neighbour made base by a new cover of scaffolding and by paths churned into a very undignified mud, the lit windows of the Stanley Pavilion, in which many of the archives of the RMCA are housed, proclaimed this lesser building to be the still-beating heart of the museum complex. The grand renovation projects for the RMCA that had made of the Stanley Pavilion the only building accessible to the public had also created a new set of pressures for the complex’s archival staff. In an ongoing project, lifetimes of documents were being transferred to new archive boxes, the acid in the cardboard of their previous containers having begun to eat away remorselessly at the papers. With the additional demands on space and time created by the need to store and manage sections of the museum’s permanent collection, the preservation of the archives had become a question of priorities. The papers of the Stanley collection were the first to be transferred to the acid-free boxes, then attention would be turned to other much-consulted collections. The rest would have to wait. The figure of Henry Morton Stanley – that ‘celebrated explorer’ of central Africa (Van Schulenbergh 1997, ii) – dominated elsewhere in the archive building. The tidy shelves of row upon row of boxes – the clinical blue of 1.  As quoted on the RMCA’s website: ‘History: From Congo Museum to RMCA’, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, accessed 12 September 2015, http://www.africamuseum.be/museum/ about-us/museum/history/Congomuseum.

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the new containers refusing to hint at any magic of memory that might be hidden inside – were disturbed by the odd and oddly incongruous objects that each new door revealed. Images of Stanley appeared in disconcerting places, accessorized by various artefacts and memorabilia, in one instance one of the explorer’s guns, its angle disturbing the clean lines of the shelves. Busts of Stanley’s regal sponsor, Leopold II, glared out of corners and over desks at unexpected times. The shelves on one room held not, as I had anticipated, the papers of the colonial past but instead a collection of sculpted heads by early twentieth-century artist Jane Tercafs. This, then, was the archive. The renovation of the RMCA begun in the late months of 2013 was the most significant upgrading and expansion of the site undertaken since the time of Leopold II. However, this ambitious project – designed not only as a renewal of the site’s infrastructure but also as a reimagining of the ways in which the museum told the story of central Africa2 – was not the first time in the recent past that the RMCA had attempted to offer a new telling of Belgian colonial history. In the aftermath of a series of works investigating the brutal history of Belgian colonial actions in central Africa and in what had been the Belgian Congo especially – one of the most well known of these publications being Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost – the RMCA launched a new temporary exhibition, ‘Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era’, with which the museum ‘aim[ed] to contribute to the highly topical debate concerning the colonial history of the Congo and Belgium’ (RMCA 2005). However, notwithstanding a stated desire to ‘give a voice to the past … through diverse narratives’ (ibid.), the ‘Memory of the Congo’ as understood in this exhibition remained a memory of a Belgian Congo, told through memories that were largely Belgian and from a viewpoint that was almost exclusively European. This was hardly surprising, considering that the archival resources upon which the museum’s ability to recount history was based were dominated by a colonial cataloguing by European ‘military, civil servants, missionaries, engineers, botanists, geologists, artists, tourists’ (van Schulenbergh 1997, i), not to mention the writings of and about Henry Morton Stanley. ‘It was as if the act of putting Africa on paper were the ultimate proof of the superiority of European civilisation’ (Hochschild 1999, 148). The efforts to tell both Belgian colonial history and the history of the Congo otherwise, as identifiable to different degrees and ends in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost and the RMCA’s 2005 ‘Memories’ exhibition, did not entail a great retrieval or discovery of new information 2. The mission statement for the museum’s renovation project. ‘Renovation: History’, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, accessed, 15 July 2015, http://www.africamuseum.be/ museum/renovation/chronology/index_html.



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but were rather a reformulation of that which was already in place – same pictures, different captions. Indeed, it was this same archive – the RMCA’s archive in the Stanley Pavilion – that supplied the bulk of the evidence that allowed Hochschild to present his indictment of the Belgian colonial regime, just as it had supplied the evidence that had allowed for the glory and honour of the Belgian colonial regime to be upheld in former times. The same boxes, a different telling. Different histories from the same pages, from the same pictures, from the same space and time. Because the history allowed by the archive is the history allowed by the particular freedoms and restraints of the logic of Western modern spatio-temporality. Not only does the archive facilitate certain rememberings and forgettings (Méchoulan 2011), but it is also a reflection of certain ways of remembering, forgetting, and knowing. And, as a consequence, of being and belonging. Looking, then, at that which constituted the modern archive is one way of approaching the possibility of imagining new ways of being, belonging, and knowing. Of finding new places from where to dream (Steedman 2011). The ‘Modern’ Archive: Monument and Document In his Politics of the Global, Himadeep Muppidi describes Adam Hochschild’s horror and bewilderment at the horrors he had uncovered in his research into the Belgian colonial practice in the Congo under King Leopold as a very ‘Western’ discovery. The atrocities Hochschild recounts, Muppidi reminds us, were not unknown to or hidden from the Africans of the Congo. They did not need to (re)discover the facts. It was the Westerners who had hidden the truth from themselves in their archives (Muppidi 2004, 1–3). This discovering of an already-there is characteristic of the Western modern archive, not only of its material archival practice of gathering in the one place but also of its ‘modernity’, a modernity in which, I claim here, the notion of a ‘past’ can be used both to create a break from what is gone in a process of constant reinvention and as a resource to draw upon in instrumentalized writings of the present. To write in terms of modernity is to engage with ‘the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent … that indefinable something’ (Baudelaire 1863), to invite confusion as to whether modernity is being understood as one or both of condition and representation (Cooper 2005, 114), to risk suggesting a nonWestern ‘traditional’ against which the ‘temporality of modernity’ (Bhabha 2004, 341) can be contrasted. The temporality of modernity – in that it can by some interpretations considered as an epoch stretching from Enlightenment to a postmodernity when the institutions of the ‘modern’ cease to exercise determining influence on society (Cooper 2005, 112) – can be linked in large part to its materiality, that although ‘indefinable’, modernity can be associated in calendar temporality with the urbanization and technological development of

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the seventeenth century onwards and with the sociopolitical administration and institutions of the Western nation-state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas Michel Foucault, among others, preferred to think of modernity as an attitude rather than an epoch, ‘a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling’ (Foucault 1984b, p. 39), the association of this attitude with a calendrically unfolding time and the newly fixed space of the nation-state also gives modernity a time and space, or rather a manner of conceptualizing and thus living time and space: now as two coordinates that can be known and measured as and at fixed points. In terms of this chapter, the significance of this characterization and experience of this ‘modern’ time and space is that it creates certain narrative possibilities and limitations. Benedict Anderson engaged with this element of modernity – and its particular role in the formation of modern national consciousnesses – when he linked the emergence the modern nation with the ‘meanwhile’ of the modern novel, stories unfolding not only chronologically but in a novel side-by-sideness, narratives not only of succession but also of superposition in time (Anderson 2006). By this, modernity is neither period nor concept, but is instead a narrative category (Jameson 2002, 40). Therefore, while in this chapter I consider the modern also in term of the material and social developments with which it is associated, for example new practices of communication and organization of population, I primarily understand the term ‘modern’ in terms of narrative possibility, formed and constrained by the temporal logic and material basis of modernity. In this temporal logic of calendrically advancing, plottable time, a break is constituted between the present and the past, allowing for a narrative form in which the past is past, exerting an influence upon but always removed from the present. I argue, therefore, that archive in this understanding is the historiographical intention and ability of monument and document to separate memory from history and create a historical distinction between a past that was and a present that is, a separation that allows the past to be ‘discovered’ in the archive. The Documentary Significance of the Modern Archive The contrast between the archive that Hochschild encountered in the RMCA and the archival practices as suggesting in the next section on Rumba Lingala is that in the first instance the archive was, as stated above, as a discovering of an already-there and the narratives that emerge are necessarily of those whose identity already is, something to be discovered rather than to be defined through practical expression. That a certain conception of identity and politics is privileged in the Western archival consciousness – that is, not only the direct practices of the archive but the relationship with history and narrative that archival practices suggest – results from the particular relationship between



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memory into history promoted through the archive. The archive may be a place in which memories are collected but once passed through the archival process – collected and catalogued and categorized – these memories become history – something that was and that is no more. In the archive, memory and history are not synonymous but rather are set in opposition (Nora 1984, xix). Memory is that something private that comes to be shared and lived, the mass of experiences and narratives that do not compete but interact, in comparison to history as the one story shared by all. The individual is subsumed when memory becomes history (Pomain 1984, 173) and remerges newly individuated, now as the subject of a historical regime (Featherstone 2006). The project of modern historiography, as epitomized by but not confined to the archive, was to precipitate and accentuate the separation of memory from history, ‘to introduce doubt to its core, to plunge the critical blade between the tree of memory and the bark of history’ (Nora 1984, xxi). The remembering of history and historiography makes a different use of the past. The past of history is external, rather than internal. It is not part of who we are but rather sets the conditions of who we can be. The archive formalizes the relationship between memory and history and gives the state – the official – a role in the formation and recognition of the individual (Steedman 2011, 66–83). The history of the modern archive – history that has broken away from and superseded memory – is a ‘scholarly history, inseparable from the memory of the nation’ (Pomain 1984, 222). This is not memory as local but history as absolute. ‘The greater our origins, the greater we become. For the object of our worship through the past is none other than ourselves’ (ibid.). Therefore, in drawing upon the documentary resources at their disposal, ‘both the historian and the archivist occupy a strategic position in the production of an instituting imaginary’ (Mbembe 2002, 26). That the archive is a necessarily incomplete telling – in choices and accidents of selection and omission, that documents are lost or forgotten, overlooked, or misread – is to a degree incidental in the narrative of identity in the archival consciousness. That there are documents and that these are stored as traces of a past can suffice in the creation of the modern narrative dynamic of past and present, memory to history. The archive suggests a place in which history can be found and thus from where a narrative of the present can be written. If you can find yourself in the archive, you can write yourself into history’s story of the present. Monumental Spaces: The Archive as Physical Presence Central to the creation of an archival consciousness as described above is the very physicality inherent to the understanding of archive. The power of the Western modern archive derives from its combination of the material, symbolic and functional (Nora 1984, xxxiv–xxxv). ‘The archive has neither status

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nor power without an architectural dimension’ (Mbembe 2002, 23). In the broader modern context, in David Harvey’s study of nineteenth century Paris as ‘the capital of modernity’ (Harvey 2006), he describes how the building of monuments in the French capital from the era of Napoleon onwards was a means of inscribing a national consciousness onto the physical landscape, making material the conception of a glorious national identity by inserting it into the physical landscape. Furthermore, while the significance of the monumental archive building has waned into the twenty-first century, with archival collections being made available online and the physical collections being moved from ‘monumental’ buildings to newly built administrative centres in which the romance of dust is replaced by clinical spacing and well-designed lighting, the emergence of the archival consciousness would not have occurred, I would argue, if there had not been an original monumental element. Archives cannot constitute the archive without the housing in their edifice, the aedes whose etymology declares it to be a temple, a sanctuary, a place of ritual. Indeed, even when the French national archives were moved to new custom-designed premises on the outskirts of Paris, the staff fought, successfully, for the original monumental building to be maintained as an archival museum. Archive as monument is a place that allows the individual to be both in space and outside the logic of modern space, thus suggesting a communion across both space and time. Archival sites act representationally much as sites of worship such as the church or temple do: they function as sacred sites, where space and time are experienced poetically, even mystically, not least in the idea of a collective mission or destiny that can be suggested by or read into archive spaces. This is reinforced by the ceremonial character of the archival visit, the restrictions and limitations on entry, the hushed tones adopted inside its space, the reverence with which the document is encountered. Therefore, the monumental power of the archive operates by providing a site in which the religious and the political can interact in an exchange of the attributes of power, providing a mechanism by which ‘the authority of the sacred and the sacred aspect of authority are transferred back and forth, mutually reinforcing one another in the process’ (Lefebvre 2007, p. 227). The monumental power of the archive also functions in its capacity to inscribe itself on the landscape, both physically and representationally. In Belgium, the disciplining of colonial memory was not confined to archival gathering but also extended to the control of narrative possibilities. The archival consciousness of the colonial project imposes a double-lock on the stories of those it colonizes. The surface lock is that of the control the colonial administrative power enjoys of monument and document, thus robbing those who are being administered of their own possibilities of writing history and creating an archival sacred space of identity. However, even this is only made possible by the more fundamental lock of the archival power of the colonial



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West: that it set the narrative terms for the recounting of identity through history. Due to Western dominance in academic, educational and even literary publication, the experiences of time, narrative and identity as encapsulated in the Western archival consciousness could be presented as natural and inevitable, thus closing out both practically and imaginatively the possibilities for alternative conceptions and expressions of time, narrative, and identity. ANOTHER ARCHIVAL STORY: WRITING IDENTITY THROUGH POPULAR MUSIC Papa Wemba is dead. In April 2016 headlines across Africa and Europe thus declared the passing of the ‘incontestable king of [Congolese] rumba’ (Kibangula 2016), who had suffered a fatal collapse while on stage during a concert in Côte d’Ivoire. The shock with which Papa Wemba’s death was met went beyond the untimeliness of a passing at the age of 67. It was the shock of losing an artist whose artistry transcended the lyricality of his music. When Papa Wemba was celebrated as ‘the voice of Africa’3 it was in no small part because in his musical expression he gave voice to African narratives often left unheard in broader international social and political contexts. Papa Wemba’s musical reach had been across genre and generation; he was a modernizer, electrifying Congolese rumba both with his personality and literally, by marrying electric guitar and keyboard with the more standard instruments of the rumba genre. If Adam Hochschild’s visit to the RMCA gave us a way into that particular archive, enabling an understanding of the Western archival consciousness as operating through monument and document, then our journey through the Congolese archive of Rumba Lingala is led by Papa Wemba, who in both life and death created a narrative space for the expression of a cosmopolitan Congolese identity, identifiable as Congolese in its expression but unprescribed within this expressive space. It is perhaps most importantly for the understanding of Papa Wemba’s significance in the politics of identity as considered in this chapter is that he does not stand alone as a musical embodiment of a Congolese or broader African narrative. The story of Papa Wemba had a before and an after, making of his own musical achievements and significance not a tale of exceptionality but rather an outstanding representation whose personal and artistic history suggest a continuity of narrative both in and through the Congolese rumba tradition. Several months before Papa Wemba took to the stage in Abidjan for what was to be his final concert, a French hip-hop artist named Maître 3.  As described by fellow musician Manu Dibango on his Facebook page on 24 April 1016 https:// www.facebook.com/ManuDibangoOfficiel/photos/a.1414318258800607.1073741829.13794364656 22120/1777639709135125/?type=3&theater.

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Gims was named as recipient of the ‘Song of the Year’ prize at the annual French national music awards (Les Victoires de la musique). Maître Gims was born in Kinshasa as Gandhi Djuna, a son of Djuna Djuanana, himself a rumba musician and one-time member of Papa Wemba’s band. However, the links between the life and work of Papa Wemba and Maître Gims go beyond this familial connection. The single for which the latter was honoured was entitled ‘Sapés comme jamais’ (which could be roughly translated in English as ‘Dressed up to the nines’) and was an ode to high fashion, a recurrent and universal theme in hip-hop and rap genres. However, while the haute couture labels that were cited and recited in the song were primarily European and indeed French (e.g. Balmain, Louboutin, Chanel), Maître Gims’ song recounted fashion brought to life sartorially in a manner that was specifically African and originally Congolese. ‘La sape’ (of which ‘sapés’ is a verb form) is a Francophone African term for a particular flamboyant and elegant style of dressing in which European styles in their wearing become uniquely and proudly African. And Papa Wemba was the king of the Sape. Papa Wemba was not only a world-renowned musician but also a leading light of the sapeurs, those disciples of the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes: the SAPE (roughly, the Society of Elegant Persons who enjoy Life). ‘La sape’ was closely associated with the popular music scene in the Congolese river basin, as explored in more detail below, but it was also a movement in its own right, where identities were expressed not only through music but also through clothing. La sape is a remarkable Congolese subculture, a proud expression of the self that both embraces and defies the sociopolitical identity politics of colonial and independent rule. The wearing of brightly coloured tailored suits, accessorized by equally striking ties, shirts, hats, etc., that characterizes La Sape was in its origins both a subversive mimicry and Congolese appropriation of the uniform of colonial authority; however, it also served later as a statement against the ‘African authenticity’ of Mobutu Sese Seko’s rule. Mobutu’s signature ‘African’ shirt suit was known as the abacost, from ‘à bas le costume’ (down with the suit!) and was the sartorial signature of an era in which the wearing of the ‘Western’ suit and tie was frowned upon as an expression of colonial subservience. The sapeurs, then, in flaunting a fashion both European and African in a style that was neither encapsulated a sense of identity that was of both colony and Congo without being wholly determined by either.4 4.  Beninese artist Angélique Kidjo said of Papa Wemba that ‘his whole attitude about dressing well was part of the narrative that we Africans have been denied our humanity for so long. People have always had stereotypes about us, and he was saying dressing well is not just a matter of money, not just something for Westerners, but that we Africans also have elegance. It was all about defining ourselves and refusing to be stripped of our humanity’ (in an interview with BBC radio on 21 April 2016; available at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03s2jct).



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La Sape, however, should not be read as a wholly political movement. Indeed, as the name given the movement reminds us, the primary motivation of the sapeur was to aspire elegance and live the good life. At its most positive, this manifested in the joyous celebration of the popular music with which it was so closely associated; at its most negative was the slavish devotion to costly luxury brands and labels. While it is perhaps this latter that is more to the fore in Maître Gims’s ‘Sapés comme jamais’, the resonance with African – or in this case Euro-African – expressions of self is maintained. Although the musical genre is very different to that of Papa Wemba, there are clear lyrical links between the two generations of musician. Not only were some of the lyrics of the French hip-hop star’s song in the Congolese Lingala language (an important characteristic of rumba music, as discussed below) but as the song progressed the repeated incantation of high-fashion labels (e.g. ‘Loulou’ et ‘Boutin5/Coco na Chanel’) gave way to a similarly rhythmic recitation of African cities (e.g. ‘Kinshasa na Brazza/Libreville, Abidjan/Yaoundé na Doula/Bamako na Dakar’). This in turn recalls a musical era immediately prior to that of Papa Wemba, notably by suggesting a lyrical connection with the hit song ‘Africa Mokili Mobimba’ (roughly, Africa Worldwide) recorded by the celebrated dance band African Jazz in 1961, a song reflecting the hopeful post-independence mood of the time, a pan-African anthem in which the names of African states and cities are listed off with pride. Writing the Congo through Rumba Lingala African Jazz were practitioners of the musical tradition to which Papa Wemba belonged and on which he built: that of Rumba Lingala. Rumba Lingala was the name given to the popular dance music that was to dominate in CongoKinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville from the 1940s onwards, a popularity and domination facilitated by the patterns of increased and increasing urbanization of the time6 as well as technological improvements and innovations in radio and record. That populations were being brought increasing closer together both physically and across radio wave to an unprecedented degree contributed to the emergence and spread of a unique, if broad, musical and cultural scene as opposed to the necessarily fragmented or regionalized cultural developments of earlier eras. The music scene was thus becoming newly universalized in the area of the Congo Basin in a manner that encouraged reinvention, renovation, and hybridization of musical forms as a means of 5.  That is Louboutin. 6.  That this emerging musical genre was overwhelmingly urban in origin and character is emphasized by Barry W. White in his ‘Congolese Rumba and Other Cosmopolitanisms’, noting that after ‘love’ and ‘heart’ one of the most commonly occurring words in rumba song lyrics is ‘Kinshasa’ or a variant thereof. The stories told by the Rumba Lingala songs are therefore predominantly urban narratives and often against the specific background – be it painted in shade or positive light – of Kinshasa (White 2002, §3).

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reflecting and resonating with this broader population, a population increasingly affecting by growing national consciousnesses in the declining years of colonial rule. The particular hybridity of this musical genre is indicated in its name, the ‘rumba’ of Congolese music of the twentieth century referring to the transatlantic influences by which it was characterized. Colonial trade and travel as well as the development of the phonograph saw the African rhythms and beats celebrated by African captives and their descendants in Cuba and other Latin American countries make their way, transformed but still resonant, back to the African continent (Wheeler 2005; Stewart 2000). However, Bob W. White, in his study of rumba and cosmopolitanism, argues that it was not only the similarity of musical tradition that led to Afro-Caribbean music exerting a determining influence on Congolese Rumba Lingala as it emerged as a musical force, but also the fact that ‘it stood for a form of urban cosmopolitanism that was more accessible – and ultimately more pleasurable – than the various models of European cosmopolitanism which circulated in the Belgian colonies in Africa’ (White 2002, §1). The resonance of Afro-Cuban music might therefore not have been solely musical but might also have been related to an identification with a form of modern cosmopolitanism other than that offered by the dominant European cultural model. The preferring of Afro-Caribbean influences over European in mid-twentieth century African popular music could thus be read as facilitating a cultural expression that sought to circumvent those European narratives of modernity that implicitly and often explicitly set the European ‘modern’ against an Africa of ‘tradition’.7 Thus it was that the Afro-Cuban bases of Rumba Lingala were doubly symbolic in making it possible for this new popular dance music ‘to function as a torch of authenticity for some and as a marker of cosmopolitan modernity for others’ (White 2002, §9). This hybridity of style – African and other, new but old – was to characterize the emerging dance music of the Congolese basin, not only melodically but also in other aspects of its presentation. If the ‘rumba’ appellation told of Afro-Caribbean influences, then there were also nods to other transatlantic genres, notably in the frequent use of the term ‘jazz’ in Rumba Lingala band names, such as the aforementioned African Jazz and famous OK Jazz in which the musician Franco, who rose to fame in the 1950s and was to dominate the rumba scene for several decades after, began his career. Whereas the ‘rumba’ of Rumba Lingala was a description of musical style (even if Rumba Lingala should be considered as distinct from its Caribbean namesake, there 7. For example the rhetorical placing of colonized populations in what Dipesh Chakrabarty described as the ‘waiting room’ of history (Chakrabarty 2000, 8), or as described by Homi K. Bhabha in his discussion of the temporality of Western modernity (Bhabha 2004, 338–345).



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are clear influences in terms of instrumentalization, rhythm, and structure), these Congolese ‘jazz’ groups had little in common musically with the US Jazz genre to which their names paid homage. Instead, the appropriation of the term could be interpreted, first, as an identification with another culturally vibrant but politically under-represented population and, secondly, less a reference to a musical style than ‘a symbol of modernity’ (Wheeler 2005, 6), and a modernity that once again was other than Euro-centric. Such hybridity and foreignness in this nonetheless familiar music prevented it being claimed or dominated by any particular tradition, region or grouping, thus allowing Congolese rumba a broad and shared appeal. Similarly, the importation from Europe of technologies including radio transmitters, gramophones, and records allowed for the rapid spread of music, thus denying any potential for any narrower originary claims and contributing to the notion of a broader ‘Congolese’ musical identity (Stewart 2002, 16–18). As Jesse Samba Wheeler states in his study of Rumba Lingala under colonial rule, ‘though other early musical styles were certainly to varying degrees hybrid creations, the complexities of Congolese society in late colonialism could be truthfully referenced only by a musical style as intertextually constituted as Rumba Lingala’ (Wheeler 2005, 9). The ‘Lingala’ of Rumba Lingala refers to the language emerged as a vernacular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, originally a pidgin of Bantu languages and dialects developed for the purpose of trade and commerce before becoming a language of wider communication.8 That Lingala was overwhelmingly the predominant language of Congolese dance music in the twentieth century not only helped avoid associations of popular music culture with any ‘ethnic’ grouping or as particular to a region or city but also enabled the music to transcend class and urban-rural divides. Not only did the widespread use of Lingala allow Congolese dance music to reach and resonate with a wider audience than would have been the case with regionalized language – Lingala thus acting as a language of wider communication in the manner of Swahili or the European colonial languages of English and French in other contexts and areas within sub-Saharan Africa, without the overt colonial connotations of music published exclusively in French – but it also contributed to the possibility of expressing a universalized ‘Congolese’ identity. That the emergence of Lingala as a language of wider communication was closely related to and indeed mirrored sociopolitical developments in the region under colonialism – for example the role of trade and missionaries in society, the mixing of cultures and languages in the process of ever-increasing mobility and urbanization – suited both the practice and 8.  Though there is some debate over the exact origins and pattern of emergence of the language; see for example Bokamba (2009, 50–53) Knappert (1979, 153–155).

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idea of Lingala to the nascent Congolese nation, just as its hybrid nature as emerging from a pidgin dialect reflected the hybridity of musical heritage as discussed above. Furthermore, the use of Lingala allowed for dance music to both assume and subvert the colonial experience. Emerging out of the necessities of the realities of colonized life, Lingala soon became a characteristic of a firmly Congolese identity, opposed to the Europeanness of the occupying powers. Wheeler’s observation that contesting colonial authority through song was not a central goal of Congolese music (indeed, the lyrical themes were more often of love, family, and society than overtly political) but that new Congolese identities began to emerge and be written through the music nonetheless holds also for the language politics of the genre, as the use of Lingala contributed to the consciousness of a national identity in face of the colonial authorities that had, in many ways, called it forth. The subversion of the colonial process was not limited to the unifying identity powers of this newly common language, however, but can also be seen in the manner in which the colonial and European languages became part of the musical language, reclaiming the colonial experience for the colonized and allowing for the emergence of new identities that might have been of colonialism but that were resolutely uncolonized. ‘The juxtaposition of local and foreign words in ensembles’ names signalled a looking inward and outward, part of the syncretizing effort to create a “third space” – a “best of both worlds” place they as the forgers of a new nation in a modern world could own’ (Wheeler 2005, 7). Whereas the archival colonial narratives that formed the basis of the RMCA’s storytelling, later subverted in Hochschild’s efforts to restore narrative balance in the telling in King Leopold’s Ghost, are almost entirely written in French, the narrative possibilities of Rumba Lingala were enhanced by the fact that not only was the narrative form different – musical expression as opposed to the ‘monument and document’ represented by the archive of the previous section – but so too was the medium. The widespread adoption and acceptance of the appellation ‘Rumba Lingala’ also had a transformative effect on the colonial language in the musical context, in that when sung as rumba, French became an instrument of the Congolese narrative. Similarly, and in a more conscious fashion, the insertion of French phrases into Lingala lyrics often represented a (re)appropriation of the colonial language and, as a result, a subversion of the colonial relationship. This effect can be observed in Franco’s ‘Lumumba, Héros National’, recorded with OK Jazz in 1967. Franco, as mentioned above, was and remains along with Papa Wemba one of the best-known artists of the genre, having come to fame with songs of love, family, and everyday life. However, as in this instance,



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his output on occasion was explicitly political.9 ‘Lumumba, Héros National’ was a condemnation of the murder of Patrice Lumumba and an excoriation of those external actors, including the former colonial occupiers, who wished to interfere with Congolese independence. The sweet harmonies and gentle rhythms of the Congolese rumba contrast with the lyrics, which tell of torture and death, hate and resistance. The interspersing of French words – notably the phrases ‘national unity’ and ‘the truth, nothing but the truth’10 – among the Lingala and the use of the French phrase in the song’s title once again reinforces the subversion of the colonial relationship.11 CONCLUSION: NEW ARCHIVAL CONSCIOUSNESSES It may have been that Rumba Lingala was the ideal musical expression of its time in that it encapsulated a hybridity of origins of influences but the ability of the musical genre to create from this hybridity a space for expression that was individual but still distinctly and proudly within an African and Congolese consciousness served, not only in the period immediately pre- and post-independence but also currently, to operate productively into the twentyfirst century. The use of Lingala and the imagery of La Sape in European hip-hop music sees these erstwhile tools in the assertion of an independent Congolese identity in the colonial context being (re)claimed to enable young   9.  As Rumba Lingala became increasing popular in its position as dominant music genre so too did the relationship between musical and political identity become more explicit, especially in the period immediately following independence, when the political character of the new state was being formed. With Congo-Kinshasa moving towards independence, the record business too began to move from European ownership to African. Whereas pre-independence most record labels and studios were in non-Congolese ownership, this began to change in the run-up to and subsequent to independence, both as a result of the success of the music genre – with domestic musicians able now to buy out, invest in, or create their own businesses – and as the political instability encouraged European owners to divest. Whereas pre-independence, political resistance in popular music had been expressed allegorically (if at all), rumba’s position as a leading form of communication and expression of the new Congolese identity was to be exploited by those politicians fighting for attention and influence in the early years of the independent Congolese state. Mobutu was widely believed to be the financial influence behind a musical group – Orchestre Révolution – that came on the scene in 1967, in parallel with the emergence of his new political movement, the MPR. This was characteristic of new attitudes towards Congolese dance music, where ‘politics and music interfaced directly as politicians exploited the popularity of particular bands and individual personalities to improve their election chances or endear themselves to the public’ (Stewart 2000, 13). 10.  For example. ‘Lumumba akofeli l’unité nationale. … Lelo la vérité rien que la vérité.’ 11.  Whereas, ‘Lumumba, Héros National’ was not only a condemnation of external interference in Congolese affairs but also a song in support of Mobutu’s leadership, Franco had also used his music to criticize Mobutu, his ‘Luvumba Ndoki’ (roughly ‘the Sorcerer who kills people’, a reprise of a traditional folk song) recorded in response to a set of brutal executions ordered by Mobutu in 1965. This was to bring Franco into direct conflict with the Congolese leader, with the singer forced to flee the country for a period during which the song was banned from the airwaves.

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Europeans of African parentage to not only express but also develop an identity that is both European and African. Thus the French rap collective Sexion d’Assaut, of which Maître Gims was a member, in their song ‘Africain’ tell a story of the second-generation immigration experience in France through references to the African heritage of many of the groups’ members. Other leading hip-hop artists, such as Marseilles rapper Soprano and Belgian Stromae, draw upon African narratives both lyrically and musically in their work to tell their new European stories, operating in the manner that Rumba Lingala once did in the Congo Basin in creating a space beyond established sociopolitical categories of being in the nation and opening up the notion of national belonging and identity to new experiences, iterations, and understandings. This is especially heightened – and consciously so – in the work of Abd al-Malik, a French rapper who spent some of his youth in his parents’ native Congo-Brazzaville. In his work, al-Malik creates new narratives of Frenchness by drawing lyrically and musically on a wide range of influences; for example on Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ in his song ‘Gibraltar’ to tell a story of African emigration to Europe, on ‘Paris Mai’ by 1960s/70s artist Claude Nougaro, which describes the streets of Paris during the May 1968 demonstrations, to transmit, in his ‘Paris mais …’, the black Franco-African experience on the streets of France’s capital city in the twenty-first century. The highly literary style of al-Malik’s rap is employed in an effort to try to think a ‘Frenchness’ in which the place of immigrant populations and their descendants is fully acknowledged and embraced (al-Malik 2013; 2014). In turn, studying the particular space of expression opened up by music – especially in its role in reconciling ‘different’ national identities in the same life experience – allows new narrative readings of the identity politics and tensions of our time. In his song ‘Je suis chez moi’, rapper Black M – formerly also of Sexion d’Assaut – draws on a range of musical styles, both European and African, to express his frustration at having his concert for the centenary of the Battle of Verdun cancelled after a campaign against his participation, led by the far-right Front National. ‘I am French/Yet they don’t want Marianne12 as my bride/Perhaps because they think I’m too dark/Just let me invite her to dance/I’ll cheer her up.’13 In the song, he combines references to the French and African aspects of his life and heritage to refuse the narrative constrictions of a modern identity politics, as manifested in its most restrictive form in France’s far-right groupings. In this, he contributes to creating a new conceptualization of what it might mean to be ‘modern’ and ‘French’ when identity is not something to be discovered, not the already-there of a certain archival consciousness but rather something to be defined, reinforced, 12.  The commonly used personification of France. 13.  Using the Francophone African term ‘ambiancer’, literally meaning ‘to add atmosphere’.



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and celebrated through practice and, in this particular case, through musical expression. The medium of popular music in the pre- and post-independence Congo facilitated communication and communion in a very ‘modern’ way – using the technologies of the time that allowed for mass replication and widespread transmission – while exploiting a cultural space that allowed for the circumvention of the historiographically archival logic of the Western modern. Where identities are tied to a relationship with the land and where control of that land is denied or wrested away, new spaces are created in which stories can be told anew, where individual memories and collective history can be reconciled in a manner in tune with a community’s self-understanding, spaces that are very often cultural rather than expressly political (Ballantine 2004, 23). Musical expression can have the potential to transcend or circumvent categories established by either tradition or imposition and thus allow for broader and more fluid interpretations of identity, including national identity, than other archival practices. Thus it was that the musical expression of popular music contributed to the creation of alternative spaces of telling and recounting in the colonial context that facilitated the expression and assertion of identities in a manner that was influenced by but never in direct response to the colonial occupation. Therefore, understanding popular music as a practice of the African anticolonial archive allows for a thinking beyond the binaries of colonial and indeed postcolonial discourse and allows us into a way into the ‘Third Space’ of cultural enunciation that itself opens up the possibility of understanding the colonial experience otherwise than as in or through a ‘mirror of representation’ (Bhabha 2004, 54). This is a reading of archive that makes possible the ‘displace[ment] [of] the narrative of the Western nation’, that enables signs to be ‘appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew’ (ibid., 53–55). Thus, this development of an archival consciousness influenced but not defined by the colonial experience allowed for the possibility of escaping the colonial trap of being ‘overdetermined from without’ (Fanon 1986, 116) and contributed to the formation of a ‘changed political and historical site of enunciation [that] transforms the meanings of the colonial inheritance into the liberatory signs of a free people of the future’ (Bhabha 2004, 55–56). ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS With many thanks to Nancy Vanderlinden, archivist at the RMCA, Tervuren, for guiding me through the site and story of the Stanley Pavilion; to Mahamat K. Dodo for introducing me to the life and music of Djuna Djanana and his son Maître Gims; to Caoimhe Ní Shúilleabháin for her logistical support in Brussels; and to the editors for their insightful comments and suggestions.

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REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer Max. 1979. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Ballantine, Christopher. 2004. “Re-Thinking Whiteness: Identity, Change and ‘white’ Popular Music in Post-apartheid South Africa.” Popular Music 23: 105–131. Baudelaire, Charles, 1863, The Painter of Modern Life. Available at http://www. columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf. Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Bokamba, Eyamba G. 2009. “The Spread of Lingala as a Lingua Franca in the Congo Basin.” In The Languages of Urban Africa, edited by Fiona McLaughlin, 50–70. London: Continuum. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. Provincializing Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Collins, John. 1989. “The Early History of West African Highlife Music.” Popular Music 8: 221–230. Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question. Berkeley: University of California Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25: 9–63. Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto. Featherstone, Mike. 2006. “Archive.” Theory, Culture, Society 23: 591–596. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Architecture/ Mouvement/Continuité. Available at: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1. pdf. Foucault, Michel. 1984b. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin. Fritzsche, Peter. 2005. “The Archive and the Case of the German Nation.” In Archive Stories, edited by Antoinette Burton, 184–208. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harvey, David. 2006. Paris: Capital of Modernity. London: Routledge Hochschild, Adam. 1999. King Leopold’s Ghost. New York: Mariner Books. Kibangula, Trésor. 2016. “RD Congo: Papa Wemba est mort, vive l’artiste!” Jeune Afrique, 24 April 2016. Available at http://www.jeuneafrique.com/320657/culture/ rd-congo-papa-wemba-mort-vive-lartiste/. Knappert, Jan. “Origin and Development of Lingala.” In Readings in Creole Studies, edited by Ian F. Hancock, 153–164. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. al-Malik, Abd. 2013. Le dernier français. Paris: Albin Michel. al-Malik, Abd. 2014. Qu’Allah bénisse la France. Paris: Albin Michel. Mbembe, Achille. 2002. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 19–26. Cape Town: Kluwer. Méchoulan, Eric. 2011. “Introduction: Des archives à l’archive.” Intermédialités 18: 9–15.



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Muppidi, Himadeep. 2004. The Politics of the Global. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nora, Pierre. 1984. Les Lieux de Mémoires (I: La République). Paris: Gallimard. Pomain, Krzysztof. 1984. “Les Archives.” In Les Lieux de Mémoire (III: Les France), edited by Pierre Nora, 163–233. Paris: Gallimard. RMCA. 2005. “Memory of the Congo: The Colonial Era.” Congo2005. Available at www.congo2005.be. Accessed 15 July 2015, Steedman, Caroline. 2011. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stewart, Gary. 2000. Rumba on the River. London: Verso. van der Geest, Sjaak and Asante-Darko, Nimrod K. 1982. “The Political Meaning of Highlife Songs in Ghana.” African Studies Review 25: 27–35 Van Schulenbergh, Patricia. 1997. La Mémoire des Belges en Afrique Centrale, Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale. Available at: http://www.africamuseum. be/collections/museum/collections/docs/memoiredesbelges.pdf. Wheeler, Jesse Samba. 2005. “Rumba Lingala as Colonial Resistance.” Image & Narrative, 10. Accessed 20 November 2016. Available at: www.imageandnarrative.be/ inarchive/worldmusica/jessesambawheeler.htm. White, Bob W. 2002. “Congolese Rumba and Other Cosmopolitanisms.” Cahiers d’études africaines [online], 168. Accessed 16 January 2016. Available at: http:// etudesafricaines.revues.org/161.

Chapter 7

Recollections of Past Events of British Colonial Rule in Northern Ghana, 1900–1956 Christopher Azaare Anabila

INTRODUCTION: CHRISTOPHER AZAARE ANABILA When I first met Chris Azaare, he introduced himself as a retired school teacher who was still teaching part time in two local schools and serving on the Parent-Teacher Association. It soon became apparent, however, that he was a man of multiple talents; Chris is also a well-known public intellectual, a trained meteorologist, a professional soccer referee, a long-term custodian of his family gods, a sculptor, a devoted reader, a prolific writer, and a researcher. Since 1976, Chris Azaare has been recording the hitherto marginalized histories, genealogies, technologies, and sociocultural practices of the Gurensi and Boosi people of the Upper East Region of Ghana. Today chiefs, earth priests, and other traditional office holders are frequent visitors to his compound in the hope of consulting his records when they encounter a difficult case of dispute resolution or a gap in their knowledge of settlement histories and clan genealogies. He is also in the process of building his house into a museum of Gurensi history and culture (see Figure 7.2). Chris sleeps very little and sometimes writes until 3:30 am, staying awake with kola nuts, coffee, and Milo. He has crafted elaborate genealogical maps of whole villages and clans. His old, dusty desk is covered with piles of multivolume, handwritten manuscripts on topics such as Gurensi pregnancy and birth, totemic animals and taboos, village and clan histories, as well as a number of studies of Gurensi oral traditions.

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Figure 7.1  Writer and Sculptor Chris Azaare. Source: Courtesy of the author

Christopher Azaare was born in Gowrie, Ghana, on 21 September 1953. Upon graduating from Navrongo secondary school in 1972, Chris moved to Tema to help with his father’s textile business and he spent the next three years in the south of Ghana, weaving and working on textile design. In 1975, he returned to his home village to teach at Gowrie primary school. A year later, in June 1976, Chris moved back to the South, this time to Legon where he completed a three-year course in meteorology. From 1980 to 1988, he worked as a meteorologist for the Navrongo Station. During the next seven years, Chris was a community mobilizer for a UNDP tree-planting project by the Vea dam. When the UNDP project was over in 1995, he completed a two-year course offered by the Institute for Marketing Studies in Kumasi and returned to Gowrie 1988 to focus on his research and to serve as a programme assistant for the Non-Formal Education Unit. Chris retired from the unit in March 2013 and is now solely dedicated to his writing and the museum. ‘The youth are not interested in their past,’ Chris remarks with a smile. In order to move forward, he suggests, Africans have to go back to their roots and reinvent their past, honouring their ancestors. Chris’s archival work reminds us that the effort to decolonize, an effort at the revitalization of culture, goes on long after the political establishment of the Ghanaian



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Figure 7.2  Chris Azaare’s Museum in Gowrie. Source: Courtesy of the author

nation-state. It also requires an epistemological and cultural revolution within Ghana to decolonize hearts and minds, and to curate the past otherwise, from the elders’ point of view. This chapter presents selections from Recollections of Past Events of British Colonial Rule in Northern Ghana, 1900–1956 – a six-series manuscript that draws on extensive personal interviews, oral histories, and archival research to record the administrative history, missionary activities, military patrols and camps, and oral narratives of resistance to British colonial rule in the Upper East Region of Ghana. This chapter’s selections draw mostly on the first series, which is entitled ‘Administrative History of the Northern Territories’.1 Whereas the title of the manuscript intends to make it available to the Western-educated reader, the series provides an alternative form of organization intended for vernacular audiences in Ghana. In Gurene Agurumyela 1.  Below is the full table of contents of Azaare’s Recollections of Past Events of British Colonial Rule in Northern Ghana, 1900–1956: Agurumyela Series 1. Administrative History of the Northern Territories 2. Military Patrols and Punitive Expeditions in the Kassena-Nankana and Frafra Districts 3. Legacies of Colonial Rule in the Kassena-Nankana District 4. Establishment of Military Camps in the Kassena-Nankana District 5. Missionary Activities in Northern Ghana 6. Inter-clan Wars among the Frafras during the Colonial Period

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means ‘a person who digs into people’s past’, a name that people have begun to use often to refer to Azaare and his research. The chapter sheds light on Azaare’s lengthy research journey. As he describes it on page 143: My concern was to record the skills, technologies, social life and wisdom of the old men and women which are fast disappearing. One would realize that both Western and missionary education has taught us a great deal about who they are, where they came from and why they are here. … We are losing things that are so dear and valuable to us in exchange of what is alien to us, losing treasuries that are priceless to our lives in exchange of wealth that can be measured in monetary terms, losing our Earth god priests (tindaanas) to acquire a catholic priest or a pastor, replacing our medicine men with conventional doctors, losing our rivers in exchanges for piped water.

Originally compiled by longhand, it should be noted that the electronic version of Chris’s work is the conjoint product of several people’s effort over many years. I have typed and edited a part of the manuscript. It is my understanding that other parts of it were typed years ago by a faculty member at the University of Ghana, Legon, as well as by the school girls who work at the Internet centre in Gowrie. Certain names of towns and villages may be spelt differently in different chapters and volumes of Chris’s manuscript. Chris provided the footnotes, unless otherwise noted. Anatoli Ignatov June 12, 2016 Boone, NC HOW I CAME BY THE AGURUMYELA SERIES Like the earlier books, the writing of this book was a task that had to be done. This is so because I encountered a few difficulties during the research in 1982. One of the difficulties I faced was the inability and reticence of the chiefs, tindaanduuma, elders, and family heads to supply information. I would note here that on 1 September 1989 when I called on the chief of Bolgatanga he contemptuously said: ‘Dear friend, I will not give you audience. You are not an Anthropologist to write about my people.’ During my visit to Yorogo, before an assembly of the chief and his elders I proceeded to ask them about a war they fought with their neighbours in Gowrie. No sooner had I posed my question than one of the elders stood on his feet and shouted: ‘Your questions are too inciting!’ He continued, ‘Naa (pleading with the chief), I will not sit down here and allow a child to enter my mouth and take something out.’



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I wish to analyze this: his remarks implied that he was not in a position to share with me the secrets of his clan. Yet at another time I visited Bongo and called on the chief and his elders to interview them. I began with the questions of what was the cause of the war between them and the people of Lungu in 1916: ‘How many were the casualties?’ Like the case of Yorogo, one of the old men (I was told later that he was a descendant of the originators of the war) sprang from his seat and waved to the gathering and shouted ‘Naa, we are not here to answer such questions.’ ‘Fom le gurunna la yɛla’. (‘You are again recalling, digging out matters, events, etc.’) I understood as my questions were reminding people to take up arms to go to war and so on. Messages had come around the villages that there is some man who goes around probing the lives of people. And so whenever I got to a town or village I was referred to as Agurumyɛla Daana (i.e. ‘the person who digs into peoples’ lives, recalls past events matters, etc.’). Hence the common name Agurumyɛla. I should state that in spite of the difficulties, some chiefs and elders were full of praises for my research. There were some situations, in which the chiefs, apart from giving me the information, also gave me a nice reception and gifts of fowls. I must mention a few of these exceptional cases. In Zuarungu, for instance, the chief and his elders said: ‘We congratulate you on your endeavors and hope not too distant we shall read about ourselves.’ During my visit to Sumbrungu and Yikene the old men in these towns expressed happiness in my research. They remarked as follows: ‘We salute you. If we had inquisitive people during our youth we should not suffer now in tracing our genealogies. Your work will make the white man fear us.’

SELECTIONS FROM PREFACE Admittedly though the Gurensi and Boosi, and for that matter the Frafras, living in the Bolgatanga and Bongo District Council Area have flourished for nearly over five hundred years, their history and traditions have for these centuries laid almost buried and forgotten. Their history has in fact been relatively neglected by comparison with the period of the Mamprusi, Gonja, and Dagomba histories. The works of early researchers, ethnologists and so forth on the Gurene and Bone speaking peoples such as Allan Wolsey Cardinall (1921), R.S. Rattray (1932), T.E. Hilton (1956, 1959) and Dr. Luvig Rapp (1967) are devoid of the oral traditions and history of these people at the local

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level. In the case of R.S. Rattray and A.W. Cardinall, their works are not only brief but they appear in a rather unusual sequence.2 It must be said that the Gurensi and Boosi have their history but it is mostly oral. This book, therefore, is the first of its kind dealing specifically with the legendary origins, genealogies, political, social and economic life of the Gurensi and Boosi peoples. This book has taken me a little over twenty-nine years to complete. The reasons for the delay have been explained in the proceeding discussions. This book has been written for four main reasons. The first reason is that historians, anthropologists, ethnologists and other social researchers have not been able to write about the Gurensi and Boosi culture and history because of their inability to trace first the history of the individual communities or towns that make up the Gurensi and Boosi. It is also probably due to the intricate problem of the origin of these people. Comparing Gurensi history to history of the Ibos of Nigeria, Leonard remarked that the Ibos history is a ‘maze within a maze.’3 Nonetheless, while sharing the same views with other historians, the history of a people is vague when emphasis is not given to the history of its people on the ground. An analogy can be made here that only a poor engineer would begin the construction of a building without fully understanding the nature of the raw materials he uses and how the various materials interact to produce the finished product. … A second reason is that a lot is rapidly changing in the towns and villages of the Gurensi (Frafra) Area and the country as a whole. Therefore, it is proper that past events be recorded before the records get lost through fires and rainstorms, Westernization, schooling, etc. This concurs with Mr. K. O. Bonsu Kyeretwie in Item 34 of his Ashanti Heroes, where he writes: In an age when European civilization is spreading through Africa and being absorbed into the cultural life of the people thus tending to oust so much of the African own cultures it is essential if not imperative for research to be made into African life and culture. Such research would save the African way of life from dying out completely and provide a priceless legacy for the present generation to leave behind for their children and their children’s children.4

Third, the Gurensi history and life have been misunderstood, distorted or exaggerated by early Western scholars. According to the Black American 2.  AI: Here by ‘unusual’ Azaare means that Rattray’s and Cardinall’s anthropological accounts ‘do not flow as usual’ and fail to provide sufficient, in-depth understanding of specific clan histories and genealogies. Rather, their books compile research in an arbitrary manner, leaping from one topic to another. 3.  Arthur Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and Its Tribes (London: Macmillan, 1906), quoted in Francis Arinze, Sacrifice in Igbo Religion (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1970), 31. 4.  K.O. Bonsu Kyeretwie, Ashanti Heroes (Accra, Waterville Pub. House, 1964).



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scholar, Prof. Jacob Carruthers, ‘World history has been written from an European perspective. There have been a lot of distortions and exaggerations. For a start, the role of ancient Egypt in civilization has been underplayed in relation to Greece. We need to put Africa in the proper place. The goal is within black people’s reach.’5 Therefore, taking cue from Prof. Jacob Carruthers, I want to put the Gurensi and Boosi (Frafra) history and culture in their proper place. Fourth, we all know that no country, town or village can progress if she neglects her history.6 This research is therefore intended to compel the present generation and those to come to have an interest for their own history because that will help them become wiser and help them to progress. It is easier to understand other fields if you know history. History helps a person know what is happening in his/her village, country, continent, and the world as a whole. One great Scottish Philosopher of the eighteenth century once said, ‘A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world.’7 Last but not least, it is clear that since the introduction of Western type of education, foreign history and culture has been emphasized, thus relegating the local history to the background. The effect of this is that both the elderly and the young are unable to trace their origins and migrations, let alone their family genealogies. Many of the old and young people do not even know their nearest ancestors and ancestresses. The few old men who can trace their ancestors do so up to three or four generations back. This was observed during my field trips to the communities. Whenever I met a cross-section of the literate folk, I posed such questions like: 1. Who was the first authentic chief of Bolgatanga? 2. Who was the founding father of the Boosi? … Many of the respondents, in fact, evaded my questions under the pretence that they were busy. By comparison, when the same respondents (the literate folk) were asked the following questions on foreign history they gave correct answers: 1. Who was the founder of Rome? 2. Who was the first king of Asante? 3. Who was Jakpa and Tohajie, the Red Hunter? 5.  Quoted in Daily Graphic, 1986. 6.  AI: Here ‘progress’, in Azaare’s view, is best understood as a certain level of literacy in one’s history that is a prerequisite for development, regardless of how communities define the latter term. 7.  David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2006), 561.

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4. Who was the father of Jesus? 5. When was Jesus born? This gave me the impression that the youth of today are not interested in their own histories and culture. At this point I should quote Ross S. Leith to support my claim: ‘The young men are content to have no past so long as they have a future.’8 My concern was to record the skills, technologies, social life, and wisdom of the old men which are fast disappearing. One would realize that both Western and missionary education has taught us a great deal about who they are, where they came from, and why they are here. Our situation is quite disheartened because we cannot tell who we are, what we are, where we came from, etc. In fact we cannot claim to be ignorant of the fact that we are losing things that are so dear and valuable to us in exchange of what is alien to us, losing treasuries that are priceless to our lives in exchange of wealth that can be measured in monetary terms, losing our Earth god priests (tindaanas) to acquire a catholic priest or a pastor, replacing our medicine men with conventional doctors, losing our rivers in exchanges for piped water. We have, in fact, lost much and gained little. We have lost our dances, our rituals and values, our material culture and medicines, and our languages. We have lost our land together with its sacredness. We must all be concerned with this great loss and act decisively to prevent further degeneration of our indigenous knowledge and traditions. Their remarks infer that the Gurensi and Boosi have for a long time been marginalized. To others, it is our own culture and history. Methodology In 1976, I realized that there were no books on the history, genealogies and cultural life of the Gurensi and the Boosi. Under these circumstances I felt compelled to undertake a positive step in this direction so as to fulfil the reasons I outlined in the previous section. In the attempt, I approached a number of old men and women and expressed my desire and intentions to write down their histories, genealogies, technologies, and sociocultural practices. I set about this in May 1976. Unfortunately, the project was suspended on account of a three year weather observation course I undertook at Legon, Accra, in the summer of 1976. In the early part of 1980, it was abundantly clear that the project would take off but due to financial constraints and serious transportation difficulties 8.  Sylvia Leith-Ross, African Women: A Study of the Ibo in Nigeria (London: AMS Press, 1939), 54.



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I could not make any meaningful start. By the middle of 1980, I underwent another training course in cooperative management at the college in Kumasi. Early in January 1982 it had already become quite clear that the research could not be carried out in the midst of a military takeover so it was postponed indefinitely. Nonetheless, I took the final decision in the middle of 1982 but it was not until on 17 May 1983 that I obtained first-hand information on the Gurensi and Boosi peoples. I carefully selected those old men and women who were witnesses to the following events: a. Babatu and his gang of slave raiders in the North-West in the period between 1860 and 1897. b. The arrival of the British military officer, Captain Donald Stewart in Bolgatanga on 24 December 1896. c. Those who resisted the British entry into their towns and villages in 1892, 1896, 1899, and 1900. d. The British occupation of Zuarungu in May 1910. e. The murder of Nangodi-Naba Na Tii in January 1910. f. Those who saw the British conquest of Tongo in 1911. g. The disturbance in Bongo in April 1916. h. Those who served in World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–45). Altogether they were about 200 respondents (both men and women) selected from about 50 communities of the Bolgatanga and Bongo District Council Areas. The ages of my respondents (using the above events as a yard stick) were as follows: 60 were over 90 years and more but less than 120. 80 were between the ages of 75–80 years. 40 were about 60–75 years old. 10 of them were between 55–60 years. And the other 10 were above 50 years but less than 55. The following were those who were 90 years and above, as well as their village/locale: Abraham Akumbilige Mborah (Gowrie), Ayele-Yamga (Gowrie), Akoma-Yamga (Vea), Asumbaseme and Abunbii-Kologo (Bolga), Avaam-Bunga (Zurungu-Daborin), Awonga-Kologo (Yikene), Anokino (Giba), Abeerese and Asona (Sumbrungu), Ateekela, Adaare Adua and Apaalazaya (Zaare), Bon-Naba Aberinga Sapeliga (Bongo), and GowrieNaba Albert Akobga (Gowrie) to mention a few. I would travel to these old men and women who occasionally met around some bonfire in the evening,

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chattered and exchanged views concerning their histories, culture, and religion. I would also sit among them and ask some questions which they claim some of them were inciting. Before making my enquiries, I presented them with kola, tobacco, and drinks and then proceeded to narrate the rationale behind the research.9 I then asked them for their co-operation and even promised them their anonymity. Interviews were almost invariably carried out in a Ghanaian language, and mostly in Gurene (the most common language of the Gurensi and Boosi). The Gurensi have it in their proverb that ‘gareseko nde bogro’. This literally means ‘detailed enquiry is soothsaying’. This has in it the idea that he who gets at the bottom of a matter by detailed questioning is like the one who has consulted a soothsayer. This is so because I would ask a series of questions about their origin, migrations, chieftaincy, social, economic, and ethnic relations.10 I would ask questions about their indigenous political system and how this system came to be superimposed by the Mamprusi and the British systems of government. I also probed into the families that contest for chieftaincy in a particular town and village, the order of succession of the chiefs, the surnames, personal appellations, names and skin names of their chiefs, the enskinning authorities and the rites, and the ceremonies associated with the enskinment of a chief and a tindaana.11 Further, I made enquiries as to the animals, birds, and reptiles which they do not eat or cause harm and some of the important beliefs and customs related to chieftaincy. A lot was also asked about their sacred places, especially the trees, mountains, caves, rivers, and grasslands, which they worship. I would ask the old men to tell me how their towns and villages came by their names. The Gurensi presuppose that an old man should not talk lies; those old men I interviewed presumably gave me frank and honest answers. There were some old men and women who would give long and winding answers and in conclusion will remark: ‘This is what I personally saw and this is what I heard from my grandparents and so on.’ … Another saying goes that no one would dare add sand to his own millet grains. Both of these sayings suggest that no one would ever dare or want to tell bad things about himself and for that matter his family or clan. Taking cognizance of the above saying, whatever information or answers were given by any old man in any village was cross-checked in collaboration 9.  Kola, in Gurensi custom, is a symbol of life. A common saying goes ‘He who brings kola, brings life’ and kola is presented as a gift during visits to traditional authorities. 10.  AI: Here Chris Azaare draws a parallel between his research and the work of the soothsayer, who also has to dig into people’s past in order to divine effectively. 11.  AI: ‘Skin’ is a term that refers to customary authority in Ghana. Chiefs sit on skins in Northern Ghana and the process of their instalment into office is known as ‘enskinment’. The name given a chief upon enskinment is known as a ‘skin name’. Tindaanas also wear skins as a part of their regalia and are given skin names.



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from another lineage or clan elders. It was then noticed that when narrations were compared with others, there was a great similarity among them which I believe testified to their veracity. What Some of the People Did Not Like During my field trips to the communities I observed that certain people did not like it to be said about their family, clan, or community that they are descendants of sister’s sons, slave people or migrants from unknown origin. Some did not want to accept the fact that their forefathers had at one time been subjugated by another. Some people argued that their grandparents had in fact contested for chieftaincy. But facts are facts and these are the very ones that have been recorded in this book. To quote Fortes: ‘If a sister’s child is buried at our place his house will become many and ours will die out.’12 In other words, be careful not to let a sister’s child or a bought person forget his stranger origin.13 In an editorial commentary captioned ‘Conflict Resolution’ in the Daily Graphic, Mr. E. K. Fosu (Ag. Central Regional Minister) was quoted as saying that those who have settled on lands belonging to other communities should let their children know of their real status so that they do not grow up to compete for or lay unnecessary claims to lands that do not belong to them.14 In the same issue of the Daily Graphic the following commentary was made: ‘We find it extremely difficult to understand why settlers tend to believe that they can lay claim to something that does not justifiably belong to them, why those who do not come from any royal family suddenly see themselves as qualified to be chiefs.’15 Where I Derived My Information One of the major sources of information for this book was the memory of old men and women. I must in fact add that even though much of what is contained in this book is legendary, there are contemporary references to the Gurensi and Boosi in the National Archive’s offices in Tamale and Accra. I devoted several years and months in the Archive’s offices cross-checking in order to have less doubt about the information given by the people. I was able to go through 12.  Meyer Fortes, The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi: The Second Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe (International African Institute, Oxford University Press, 1949), 28. 13.  AI: This discussion addresses the problem of interrupting male lineage. 14.  ‘Conflict Resolution’, Daily Graphic, Saturday, 1 April 1985 (No.13788), 5. 15. Ibid.

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thousands of books, articles, files, and bundles in the National Archives. I accomplished extensive research and obtained information from Administration (ADM) 56/1/1 TO 56/515 (Northern Region Records), and ADM 60/4/1 to ADM 60/4/6 (Gambaga District). The other archival sources are: 1. ADM 63/4/1to ADM 63/4/13 (Navrongo District) 2. ADM 68/4/1 to ADM 68/4/12 (Zuarungu District) 3. Government Gazette ADM 6/1/1- ADM 6/1/260 4. Legon Observer NP 24/1 – NP 24/9 5. Daily Graphic NP1/1-NP1/116 6. Ordinance of Gold Coast (1903–1909) 7. Laws of the Gold Coast from 1920–1954 I also read journals, theses, dissertations, magazines, diaries, letters, and newspapers to mention a few. Besides these documents, information on Gurensi culture, folklores, linguistics, religion, and technology, written by the few knowledgeable Gurensi, was consulted. In addition, during my fieldwork in the 1980s, I occasionally gathered information by talking with professional and amateur historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and so on. I also visited some of the museums and monuments’ offices in the country – Accra, Kumasi, and Bolgatanga. Many of the country’s libraries such as the Balmes Library at the University of Ghana, Legon, the African Research Library and the Regional Libraries in Accra, Kumasi, Bolga, and Navrongo were extensively consulted. Lastly, I gathered information from publications of learned societies, unpublished documents and papers, copies of field reports by visiting scholars, and those submitted by research affiliates of the Institute of African Studies (IAS) from foreign universities, etc. (See References.) Problems and Difficulties Encountered during the Research There were several problems and difficulties, which mitigated against the early completion of the project. First, the old men I visited were scattered over an area of 1940 square kilometres which I covered either on a bicycle or on foot under the blazing sun because most of the research was done between November and May. Second, ignorance and suspicion was and is still the prevailing feature of much of the Ghanaian population. Third, there was the problem of the inability and reticence of some chiefs and their elders, tindaanduuma and even Government officials to either disclose information or release inaccurate information. This was probably due to the fact that the project coincided with the takeover of the civilian Limann’s government by



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the military headed by J.J. Rawlings. Because of that regime’s concept of the committee of the Defence of the Revolution (CDR) I was taken for a spy for the Government.16 The fourth difficulty concerns people’s traditional beliefs. There was unwillingness on the part of the people to trace their genealogies for fear that they would be bewitched. Some of the chiefs, Earth god priests and tindaanduuma did not like their real names mentioned for fear that their enemies would use that to bewitch them. Despite assuring them of anonymity, many still refused to respond to my enquiries. Fifth, there was lack of books or relevant information on the Gurensi and Boosi, especially on their clan and skin histories. The absence of this fifth problem compelled me to spend several years in the National Archives offices and the Libraries. Sixth, farming activities and funeral performances during the wet season (May–October) and in the dry season (from January to April) respectively were a few of the problems that hindered my research. Seventh, a considerable problem was the lack of funds. Some of the old men boldly demanded some fixed fee from me before they could share with me the secrets of their lives. But, unfortunately, I did not have money with me to give as incentives to the old men because I was not funded by any agency or organization. In fact, there has been a wrong notion which is deeply rooted in Ghanaian society: it is that people carrying out research are often loaded with money by the government. Even though I encountered these problems and difficulties this by no means prevented me from observing many cultural practices such as the annual festivals connected with land and its resources, such as the worship of Earth gods, the ‘Ndan Koya’, and Bugum Festivals, etc. These series of delays gave me enough time and privilege to observe and take snapshots/pictures of the chiefs, tindaanduuma, etc. They further enabled me to draw or obtain maps which I feel could not have been possible if I had hurried to complete the project on time. An Apology If the reader goes through this book, he/she may realize that the names and spellings which are used for certain places and people in the days of colonial rule are in many cases different from what has been spelt today. The spellings of place names varied from Commissioner to Commissioner. It is therefore impossible to agree on a standardized spelling since this has yet not been well developed in the Gurene language. I have sometimes to be content with the 16.  The concept was informed by the idea of bringing government to the local, grassroots level but some people used it to spy on their relatives and I was often suspected to be one such spy.

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conventional Anglicized form or the typed up, often very inaccurate information that appears on the 1:250,000 Ghana Ordinance survey maps. Hypothesis The researcher assumes that the causes for loss of history, culture, religion, and genealogical memory, etc. are due to modernization, frequent migrations, and the introduction of Western history and names (Islamic names, Christian names). Expectation The expectation from this research is that 1. Once a register of skin makers and lineage or families entitled to each skin are documented, chieftaincy disputes will be greatly minimized. 2. The documentation of the history of the Gurensi and Boosi would expose their cultural and religious concepts to a wider audience outside the peoples’ own localities. 3. People will correct the anomalies as misrepresented by most researchers of the Gurensi and Boosi. 4. The information will help change the people’s negative attitude and dislike for their own history and religion. 5. It would serve as a source of valuable information for the local people, Ghanaians and the world at large. 6. It will serve as lessons to be taught in schools (both formal and nonformal institutions). 7. People will be able to trace their origins and reasons for migrations. 8. People would be able to know their kinship groups, especially which clans are interrelated by blood so that they can avoid incestuous marriages. 9. People could maintain their original names in contrast to what they are been called. 10. The tentative dates in this book would help readers to determine their grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ birth dates, etc. Appeal I am of the conviction that people who see custom and tradition as worthwhile do not wish its destruction. It is for this reason that I am fighting to preserve it in its original form – not necessarily for my own sake but for the good of mankind, and for that matter, the Gurensi. Do not say that because you are not a Gureŋa, you care less whether our custom is preserved or not.



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I am therefore appealing to everyone to come to my aid without hesitation so that what is contained here is passed to our children and our children’s children. NB Even though the Frafra District has been split into four districts such as the Bolgatanga Municipal Assembly, Bongo District (in 1989), Tongo (in 2004), and Nangodi (2012), outsiders still regard them as a single ethnic community – Frafras – and their language as Farafara. Frafra is derived from a local greeting, which corresponds to the English phrase ‘thank you’ or ‘the same to you’ (or sometimes ‘good morning’), and was corrupted by the colonial administration. In fact, these days, to call any of these four ethnic groups within the BoNaBoTo Area ‘Frafras’ has no meaning and no one will respond to it. … They have resisted the use of the name Frafra and have wanted their original ethnic names – Gurensi, Nabnams, Boosi, and Talensi – substituted.17

SELECTIONS FROM AGURUMYELA SERIES 1 ‘ADMINISTRATIVE HISTORY OF THE NORTHERN TERRITORIES’ How the Towns Were Mapped Before the advent of the missionaries in Northern Ghana, land in the Frafra and Kassena-Nankana country was mapped into Earth God (Tingana/ Tangwantu) areas. Every tinganɛ/tangwantu area was and is still believed to be the home of certain powerful land spirits called locally as Tinkuuga (plural)/Tinkugere (singular) (in Gurene and Nankan language). A few of these tingana areas, now referred to as towns and villages, are Bolga, Bongo, Balungo, Zaare, Zoko, Gorugo, Vea, Dua, Nyariga, Apatanga, Yuam, Pogmologo, Goo-Sirigu, and so on. These towns and villages derived their names from the Earth Gods (tingana). The boundaries of these tingana areas were so well-defined that every tindaana (pioneer settler) could tell where his land began and where it ended. Even at the minimal lineage level every compound owner was capable of tracing without difficulty the boundaries of his farm lands. Every tingane area (now mapped into towns and villages) had a tindaana, who in a loose speech is called ‘owner’. He was in the position of a trustee; he held the land for the general good of the community. Any member who wanted a plot of land to cultivate or to build a house on would go to him for it. 17.  NAG – A – ADM8/1/16), (1913) NAG – A – ADM 56/1/288.

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The Role of a Chief and Tindaana in Frafra, Nankana, and Kasena Societies In every town in the Frafra and Kassena-Nankana Districts there is a chief and a tindaana. These two controlling powers operate side by side with the latter having an historic priority over the former. The tindaana (custodian of the land) is the priest of the land god and has influence in spiritual matters such as sacrifice and advice in times of drought and so on. He is the link between the ancestors and the living descendants. He is responsible for the worship of the community Earth gods and deities located in his ward. Even though he is styled tindaana he never actually owns the land. He is only a mere keeper. In fact, he holds the minister for lands and forestry portfolio. The tindaana is more concerned territorially, while the chief’s power is tied to the number of people he commands. The chief’s role is to sit in court and judge cases among his subjects and give fines. He is therefore the dispenser of justice. The following is often spoken to give testimony to the differentiation of roles between the tindaana and chief (naba/pɛɛ): ‘The chief is for the people and the tindaana is for the land.’ As a matter of historical fact, no chief in these areas ever assumed (of their own accord) the role of the tindaana and vice versa. It should be added that in the beginning of the twentieth century, a revolutionary government emerged in the Frafra and Kassena-Nankana Areas. This was the British colonial government. During this period, some tindaanduuma besides their religious functions were given secular function (i.e. administration of the people). It was not possible in certain towns and villages to distinguish a chief from a tindaana. Consequently, the system of traditional government was completely disrupted and replaced by secular rule. In fact, people, and especially researchers, most often do not understand the functions and responsibilities of a chief and a tindaana. … In discussing the topics as mentioned it important we understand British colonial land policy in Northern Ghana and how chiefs came to perform the function of land allocation in the area, contrary to native custom. According to the traditional Gurensi belief, the ancestors and spirits live under the land and in some of the trees that stand on it (the tingana). Invariably, land belongs to the ancestors (yaabduuma) or Tingana, but is administered by the Tindaana. It is for this reason that the ancestors continue to take vested interest in the preservation of the land that they will leave to the living. The Tindaana acts as the link between the ancestors and the living control and propitiates the lands and gods. He allocates land on his own authority, but he is not the owner as earlier explained. He is merely holding



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it for the community. Neither he nor anyone else can sell it. Land, therefore, is communal and sacred. In view of the religious, economic, and social value of land to the Gurensi people, attempts to destroy the groves by cutting them down, taking soil without permission or appropriate rites are often fiercely resisted. In his contribution to a report upon the customs relating to the tenure of land in the Gold Coast, Mr. F.C. Scott (one-time inspector-general of police, Gold Coast), stated: There is a superstitious fear on the part of the representation of a family that if in his time any landed property of the family, is sold or by any other means it ceases to belong to the family his spirit after death would be perpetually troubled by those of his predecessors for having permitted the land of his ancestors to go into the possession of others. The fear is manifested in the prohibition of not selling out land and its resources.18

Until the aftermath of colonial rule in the Northern Ghana, the people had no written legislature that enacted laws for the management of land and its resources such as the trees and metallic ores. Before this period the inhabitants of Northern Ghana had customary rules which regulated the administration of the land. It is these rules which have since been passed onto succeeding generations. Some of which are still observed today. A few of the customary rules in regard to land are as follows: 1. One must not claim land which one’s ancestors never owned 2. One must not buy or sell out land, the trees, and their fruits (this applies also to the Tindaana). … There is the belief that if one sells or alienates land, he/she will be killed off by the ancestor spirits. The taboo around selling land is not because it is an economic asset; the inhabitants did not grow crops for sale. Instead, the taboo is present because in traditional Gurensi law, an individual has no absolute ownership of land. This is so because land in its strictures cannot be destroyed. It is also based on the theory that all land is ultimately held by the community – land rights are communal. Land is believed to be spiritual – it serves as the home of the ancestors and gods. These customary laws (though unwritten) were enough to guide them against wanton destruction to land and forest. The strict adherence to the 18.  Enclosure in Gold Coast, No 412 of 12 Oct. 1895.

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customary rules ensured proper management of land and its resources. Additionally, land litigation was infrequent. Following the aftermath of colonial rule it was important to the British to understand the land rights of the people of Northern Ghana under their rule, so that they could use them as part of their land policy (especially when making grants of land for plantation). The British Colonial officials in Ghana observed that in the Southern states of the then Gold Coast (Ashanti and the Colony) chiefs had and still have greater control over land than chiefs in Northern Ghana. Apart from social, economic, and religious significance of land, it also has a political importance. Land is a bond of political unity. It is the basis of a chief’s power. The rights of control over land by chiefs during colonial rule was so excessive that they could deprive a headman, sub-chief, or people over economic trees such as dawadawa and shea trees in their towns as punishment for misconduct or disobedience. The Ashantis have a saying (which I quote from R.S. Rattray) which goes like this: ‘Tumi nyina wo asase so’ which is interpreted in English as ‘Land is the essence of all power’ That is, all authority rests upon the land. In fact, the British colonial Administration regarded land as the basis for strengthening the authority of the chiefs in the country. In a West African Lands Committee report in 1912, Mr. C.W. Alexander (a lands commissioner in Southern Nigeria) observed, ‘The chief’s power is based a great deal on having his people in occupation of the community lands and if they acquire more or less an English freehold right, they tend to deny the authority of the chief.’ At this point we will understand how chiefs in Northern Ghana came to exert control over lands: grantors of land. The ethnographic account of the Gurensi reveals that land is inalienable – it cannot be sold. This is because land rights were and still are communal. It must be mentioned that before Pax Britannica in 1900, the traditional arrangement of making land available for farming and other commercial enterprises was the prerogative of the tindaana. Tribute for the use of land was only paid to the Tindaana in the form of one basket of guinea corn and other crops. It is noteworthy that before the advent of colonial rule a chief had no jurisdiction over land unless he happened to be himself the tindaana. But this was a rare situation in the Bolgatanga area. It was following the establishment of colonial rule in Northern Ghana that chiefs became grantors of land, relegating the functions of the Tindaana to the background. One may ask, what might have been the reasons for this change? The fact is very clear and interesting. According to the story, when Major Northcott



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first took over the administration of the protectorate/Northern Territories as the Chief Commissioner in 1898, he sought to revive the authority of chiefs over their people, so that the British could rule the people through them. This was the concept of Indirect Rule. After the formal integration of the Protectorate into the British Empire in 1902, it was the duty of the British officers to tour the country and explain the rationale behind the new system of administration. They also thought it worth understanding the land rights of the people and to respect them. During most of the tours, the commissioner found out that nobody was willing to even negotiate the selling of land. A common response was ‘We don’t sell land.’ In moving to towns and villages with existing chiefs, the answer to the question ‘Who owns this land?’ would usually be ‘The chief owns the land and everything in it.’ In moving to societies with Tindaana the answer to the question was ‘The tindaana owns the land.’ The common expression from each side was ‘Tumam nsɔ tinga’ (‘we are for the land’) and ‘Ten la A Tan den’ (‘the land is ours’) in the Gurunɛ and Talni languages respectively. Since the colonial government sought to strengthen chiefs this function of land custody of the tindaana was given to them. This gave power to chiefs to control and distribute land for development projects in their areas. The conclusion that could be drawn from all of this was that the research was conducted more often in societies with chiefs rather than in societies with Tindaanduuma.19 Those chiefs who held both chiefly and priestly functions could make gifts of land to people preceding certain obligations by the grantee. Whenever the chief gave away unoccupied land to would-be land seekers or his own people for either farming or building on it, he was given some foodstuffs from the land in return. The chiefs’ rights of control over land in the Gurensi area during the colonial rule were so excessive that the chiefs could deprive their subjects of the rights over their own economic trees. For instance, the chief of Gowrie (who is invariably also a tindaana) deprived his people in Yorogo of their farmlands and dawadawa trees in 1934. Suffice it to say that the effect of the power of chiefs over land brought in its wake bitterness, political unrest and disunity in the towns and villages. There also existed in the area a strain of relationship between the tindaana (who are the real owners of land) and chiefs. And this is still so in some of the urban towns of the Gurensiland. 19.  During the colonial era in the Upper East Region the white man was more likely to interact with chiefs and local allies, rather than with tindaanas and clan elders, who were resistant to the colonizers’ presence.

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The State of the Kassena-Nankana and Frafra Districts before and during Colonial Rule In his dispatch to the Governor on 9 December 1892, Ekem Ferguson writes: ‘Between Dagomba and Moosi there is a belt of inhospitable barbarous tribes through which caravans often have to fight their way.’ Upon his encounter with the Frafras in May 1898, Capt. D Mark commented: ‘The Frafras are under Gambaga but they are very lawless people, wear no clothes, are armed with poison arrows and spears and are constantly blocking the road for traders.’20 On the first arrival of the white man in the Kassena-Nankana and Frafra districts, there was the tendency of the people to shoot him with their bow and poison arrows if he dared to get closer to them in their communities.21 Commenting on this state of affairs in the Frafra country Ekem Ferguson states: ‘The inhabitants are a barbarous tribe who live mostly in family communities and resist intercourse even among their own selves with showers of arrows.’22 In some communities, the people, upon seeing the white man, would run away with their cattle to the bush. And soldiers who were sent to arrest the offenders were often attacked.23 The people were highly suspicious of the white man’s intentions and were not ready to submit to his rule. In places where the people could not be persuaded to submit to British rule and remained lawless, the soldiers would enter communities, burn crops, seize cattle, and destroy compounds. There were some areas, in which the leader of the patrol team was able to secure the allegiance of the chiefs who were able to reconcile their people with the white man. These chiefs were the best allies of the British and were the loyal chiefs. Many of those chiefs who offered to recognize peace treaties with the British were, in turn, declared to be paramount chiefs over their (traditionally) superior chiefs. A few of those chiefs in the Frafra country claimed that they were not subject to any other chiefs besides themselves. They were also invested with medals, lockets, message sticks, and received Union Jacks for their loyalty to the Government. The following reports give credence to the backing which the British government gave to the loyal chiefs. One report in connection with Sekoti 20.  PRO Co 879/52 366. Enclosed Report on Mamprusi. 21.  NAG-A-ADM 56/1/429. 22.  1894 Report by George Ekem Ferguson. 23. NAG-A-ADM 56/1/38 letter No 54/112/05 of 6/7/06) (proposed Establishment of post in FRAFRA Area).



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chief read: ‘In any case in view of the promise made by Capt. Stewart which was confirmed by Capt. Breckenridge in 1916, I consider that Sekoti must continue to be recognized as an independent chief only subordinate to the NA.’24 … At the coming of the white man, however, most of the chiefs either fought with them or ran away but Arongo (Adongo), the then chief of Bolgatanga displayed friendliness and later brought in the other chiefs to salute the white man. He was given a red fez by Captain Stewart and the other chiefs were made to serve him. Today, the chief of Bolgatanga has under him Kombosgo, Yorogo, Gambibigo, Zaare, Winkogo, Sherugo, and Sumbrungo. There was a growing disaffection among the chiefs and their subjects. Some communities had difficulties accepting the authority of their chiefs. The imposition of one chief over his people or another chief gave rise to revolts and rebellion. For instance, the sub-chiefs, headmen, and people of Bolgatanga and surrounding towns rebelled against Bolga Naba Adongo for conspiring with the white man. In a daily report of 24 November 1913, the then DC of Zuarungo writes: ‘On Adongo return back home with the red fez (as symbol of authority) from Gambaga, his people chased him from post to pillar and seemed to have held his life in his hands for many years blaming him for bringing the white man to these parts.’25 The imposition of Nangodi-Naba Tia over his people resulted in a rebellion and his subsequent murder.26 The people often disobeyed the white man’s orders, which he gave through their chiefs. The frequent demand of labour from the white man through the traditional rulers forced many people to leave their towns and live in the bush. There were uprisings and agitations against their Europeanmade chiefs. These took place on grounds of oppressive rule by the chiefs and compulsory recruitment into the Gold Coast Regiment (GCR). In 1917, the people of Lungu in the Bongo district revolted against the chief of Bongo, Bon-Naba Salibga for compulsory recruitment into the Gold Coast army. In those days the Kassena-Nankana district was overwhelmed with wars. For instance, the towns of Chana, Navrongo and Sandema used to fight each other with bows and poisoned arrows. It is therefore very clear that the Kassena-Nankana and Frafra countries were overwhelmed with inter-clan wars associated with land, boundary, and chieftaincy disputes rebellions, revolts, uprisings, etc. There were reports of 24.  NAG-A-ADM 68/5/5, 79. 25.  NAG-A-ADM 68/5/1, 24. 26.  NAG-A-ADM 56/1/441.

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lawlessness, hostility, robbery, thievery, disobedience to chiefs, road blocking, and resistance to the white man’s entry and above all the activities of slaveraiders led by Babatu and Samori. SELECTIONS FROM PREFACE TO AGURUMYELA SERIES 2 This is the second of my series recollections of past events of British rule in Northern Ghana. In this second series, I have continued to write on the British penetration of the Frafra and Kassena-Nankana districts through military patrols and punitive expedition. No attempt has been made by either a native or non-native to research into this aspect of the people of the said districts. This by no means is original. I discovered during my research on British military patrols and punitive expeditions in this part of the country that those old men and women who possess all the knowledge about the past particularly on the history of the coming of the white man and the wars that were fought with the white man and among themselves are fast disappearing with only a very few who know about the past. And based on this I felt it a duty to take the bull by the horns by putting what little I have learnt from the old men and women about the good and bad old days before the rapidly changing history of the people render their own recollections hazier. Like the first volume on the Administrative history of the Northern Territories (NTs) and now Northern Ghana this second series was initiated in 1982 and it has since been revised a number of times. The information that is contained here was derived from interviews with some selected old men and women chiefs and tindaanduuma who confessed having taken part in some of the local wars in their own communities or other. Some gave their versions of the events based on what they heard from their grandparents. These and some praise-singers were the primary sources of my information. Also Diaries of British colonial Administrations and the White Fathers’ Diaries (WFD) were extensively consulted at the National Archives offices throughout the country.27 Letters, reports mission journals, unpublished materials were extensively searched. This was to corroborate the facts and information given by my informants.

27.  The White Fathers’ Diaries is the official record of the White Fathers missions in Ghana, which is stored at the Navrongo and Bolgatanga catholic missions.



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SELECTIONS FROM AGURUMYELA SERIES 2 ‘MILITARY PATROLS AND PUNITIVE EXPEDITIONS IN THE KASSENA NANKANA AND FRAFRA DISTRICTS’ Chiefs’ Participation during the 1914–1918 War We are told that following the declaration of war between Germany and Britain, the latter called upon the traditional rulers (chiefs) of the Northern Territories to mobilize their people for support against Germany if they wished to show proof of loyalty and fidelity to Britain. They were asked to recruit young men of between 19 and 29 years of age. This age factor undoubtedly was a difficult thing to determine. Promises were made to recruits regarding tax exemption, reserved employment for ex-soldiers, making them chiefs, providing them family allowance and pensions using them as ‘butter group’ (i.e. as support for colonial administration). Unfortunately, the 1914 recruitment was preceded by the most severe drought in the history of the country. This was the 1912 and 1913 drought which, in turn, resulted in a very bad harvest and severe famine throughout the Northern Territories. So those who were to make excellent soldiers died from starvation. Very interestingly, there was widespread corruption among chiefs during the recruitment campaign. The chiefs who were tasked to recruit young men would lead those who could make excellent soldiers and sent out very young children. Those with the means paid to get a replacement for their own relatives or friends thus completely hood-winking the administration. Some bribed the chief not to appear on the recruitment list. There were some chiefs who sent the poorest men, the outcasts of society to make up the numbers. Other chiefs used that opportunity to get rid of those who were useless to them: the obstinate, the inveterately lazy, malingerers, or the sick. The recruitment campaign became an important source of revenue for the chiefs. In response to the bribery and malpractices associated with the recruitment exercise, the British adopted new recruitment methods. In one such method, a Recruiting party was put in place. This would summon the recruits to the main towns on a fixed day, and would select the right people section by section. Those selected would then be examined medically because, apart from those who were actually unfit, there were many young men who pretended to be so. There were others who took drugs to simulate various illnesses to perfection and deceive even the most skillful doctor.

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By this method the recruiting parties were sometimes able to eliminate ¾ of those who offered themselves for the enlistment. Sometimes only one man out of a total of military age and fitness was enlisted. There were situations when the recruiting party calls and appeals for people to enlist themselves fell on deaf ears that they made recruitment compulsory. The DC, the leader of the recruiting party and the troops would on reaching a village surround the people without prior notice. Those who were qualified were apprehended and sent down to Accra. The Committee for Recruitment comprised of Capt. Harold Wilkinson Dale-Glossop (as the Recruiting officer and Chairman), his assistant Lieutenant A. Duncan Johnstone, Capt. T.W. Breckenridge (PCNÈP), Capt. S.D. Nash (D.C. Navrongo-Zuarungu) a military Doctor, an African clerk and an interpreter. These people travelled around the Kanjarga (Builsa) and Navrongo areas and Frafra District. The officers took turns delivering a message from his majesty the king to the chiefs about the recruitment. The campaign was successful. There were some chiefs who took advantage of the demand for recruits and extended the peoples service to themselves. Among those chiefs, some of the recruits were forced to work on their farms or build their houses. They forced their political enemies to work for them. In August, 1917, the Lungu people revolted against the chief of Bongo, when he attempted to recruit them as soldiers. Also, the chiefs of Bolga, Naba Adabase, and Winkogo Naba AnintÈrega were threatened with bow and arrow shooting by their subjects when they attempted to enlist them.28 The Headman of Bari (under Tongo) was brutally assaulted by his people for the same reasons as above. In any case the offenders were arrested and sentenced to six months at hard labour. Overall Effects of the Recruitment Campaign During the preliminary phase of the Recruitment there was requisitioning of foodstuffs for the soldiers. As a result many of the young men migrated to the South of the country. The results were that there was less farming, less manpower, and fewer taxpayers. Other effects were that there was a compulsory supply of Agricultural produce. Relatives of those recruited received no assistance and when the recruits returned from military service, they often disrespected the chiefs. This caused social friction.

28.  NAG-A-ADM 56/1/488, Report for the Quarter Ending, 31 March 1918.



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SELECTIONS FROM AGURUMYELA SERIES 5 ‘MISSIONARY ACTIVITIES IN NORTHERN GHANA’ Christianity and Education Until 1909, no attempt was made by the colonial government to introduce literacy in the Kassena-Nankana and Frafra areas. This was due to the fact that there were no teachers yet to do this; it is held that education came with the white man to these areas. But this is certainly wrong and false. Members of the society who argue this often equate education with literacy (i.e. the ability to read and write) and seem to use the latter in measuring the attainment of a society’s civilization. In traditional Kassena-Nankana and Frafra Societies even though people in those days could not read and write they were educated. Education began with their children in their infancy and widened as they developed. All people contributed to the education of their children in various ways: mother, father, and other members of the family (grandparents, relatives, clan elders) and in fact anyone who came in contact with the child. They were taught the correct social gestures, proper greeting phrases, laws, manners, and behavioural patterns of the community, etc. The children also received education in craft, industry, divination, and priesthood. Oral literature was given in poetry, history, fables, rhymes, drama, and proverbs. From this list, it is clear that the Frafras and Kasenas were educated people before the colonial era. In an address by his Excellency the Governor Arnold Hodson at the durbar held at Tamale on the 17th December 1938, the Governor made the following remarks: With regard to education, an important and a controversial subject, I wish first to dispel the idea, held by so many people, that the inhabitants of the Northern Territories are uneducated. Such is not the case. On the contrary they are highly educated. The success which they have achieved in the development of local government provides good ground for this assertion. Education should not be interpreted as the ability to read and write. This is literacy. It is certainly necessary that some people should be literate but it is even more necessary that others should be so educated as to enable them to live on the land and maintain themselves as their fathers did before them. The land is your life and your wealth. Therefore, I would again impress upon you the absolute necessity for ensuring that education does not divorce your children from the land. Unfortunately, it is not a rare thing for children who have been to school and passed standard VII to despise their illiterate relations and to scorn manual work. Literacy is complementary to and not a substitute for your own skill and education. They are different and both are highly

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specialized. I have no doubt that if one of us Europeans were sent to a Northern Territory village and told to build a compound and make a farm for himself the chief would come along and say ‘what a foolish and uneducated person you are. You have not learnt to do anything useful.’ The people in the Northern Territories are well versed in the history of their tribes and the ancestry of their people. Your memories are excellent and every word spoken at an important meeting is remembered and can be, if necessary, repeated word for word. You have a knowledge of the wild animals and their habits and of the season when birds lay their eggs and hatch out their young. You are well versed in the cultivation of your lands often done under the most difficult conditions through lack of water and other difficulties . You have a knowledge of the herbs and of their curative and destructive properties. You have a complicated system of native laws through which you govern your tribes. You have a knowledge of many handicrafts. You can build native huts which in their shape and form are pleasing to the eye and most efficient as dwelling places. In fact, they are far cooler than European houses. You are skilled in the art of thatching. You can weave cloths which in design, usefulness and beauty cannot be surpassed by European craftsmen. You can control your young people and bring them up to be hard working and useful citizens. I mention these points to emphasize what I have said before that you are not uneducated people and I hope more than I can say that as your young men grow up they will not under modern conditions be divorced from their tribes and look upon their fathers and mothers and the other elders with pity and contempt. Education will advance and nothing can stop it; but I hope it will be so regulated that it will tend to encourage the younger generation to remain on the land with their people and by their increased experience and knowledge to better the conditions of their own tribes and increase the fertility of the Northern Territories on which your whole life, prosperity and happiness depend. So I do ask that you will not regard European education as the solution of all troubles and that you will be careful to see that only those who are especially fitted are encouraged to cultivate it to the exclusion of practically all else. The system of education in force in the protectorate aims at preventing the abuse and misuse of European education. It is to be hoped that it will not be altered radically in any event in the near future. Your commissioners will explain to you what I mean when I say that education is not a panacea for all ills. I want you to be proud of your country, proud of your people, and proud of your traditional dress.

So strongly entrenched was the traditional system of education in Northern Ghana among the Frafras and Kasena that for many years the people showed no enthusiasm for the western form of education introduced first by the missionaries and later by the government. In one of the Annual Reports of a district commissioner during the colonial administration of the Northern Territories (NTS) the following remarks were made: ‘It is only with the greatest difficulty that parents in the NEP can be persuaded to send their children to



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school – The natives of the Navarro (SIC) Navrongo district exhibit a complete and baffling apathy with regard to the education of their children.’29 Christianity and formal education (Western type) came to Navrongo and Bolgatanga in 1906 and 1925 respectively. These were preceded by the establishment of British military camps in Navrongo in October 1905 and Zuarungu in 1910. The missionaries’ philosophies of evangelization was to change the African from his way of life and thought about God. This would, it was hoped, have the happy effect of winning the traditional religionists to missionary ideas about God. The Roman Catholic Priests began with Gospel teaching. But the strong adherents to traditional religion were extremely reluctant themselves. They did not even allow their children to go near the White Fathers because it was largely believed that the white fathers ate human beings. And besides that Christian religion was held ‘to be a taboo’ among the people. Despite the difficulties, the missionaries in Navrongo were still able to convert some of the hospitable inhabitants into Christianity. The Kasenas formed the majority of the converts in both the region of Navrongo and Bolgatanga. By September 1908 as many as 80 of the Kasenas became proselytes. … In the initial years of the missionaries’ activities in Navrongo, they wanted their adherents to be able to read the Bible. They believed that Christianity and the Christian way of life could not be achieved successfully without Western education. They, therefore, saw the need to create a school as adjunct to the church. But they believed that it was not necessary to give anything more than basic education. The boys only needed to receive elementary instructions with the ‘good ones’ absorbed later in the Government school. Like the Missionaries, the British colonial administration wanted an educated elite, comprised mostly of the sons of chiefs that would ensure the sustainability of the ideals of the new system of administration which they introduced. This was the Indirect Rule. Besides providing education for the sons of chiefs, it was also intended to produce teachers and interpreters. … The first elementary school (St. Charles Primary) was built in Bolga in 1928. The pupils were taught English, carpentry, and other trades. The traditional system of education was so entrenched in the Frafras that many showed extreme reluctance to allow their sons to attend school.

29.  Paul Ladouceur, Chiefs and Politicians: The Politics of Regionalism in Northern Ghana (London: Longman Group, 1979), 51.

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CONCLUSION The Gurensi of many years ago were well versed in their traditional history, language, technology, craft, and the making of native designs on pottery, homes, and on human faces. Their histories were well memorized and passed onto succeeding generations. They gave excellent accounts of their genealogies. All these have been forgotten by the youth of today for the simple reason that there is no time for them to associate with their families. The effect of this is the inability of the youth to have memories of their history and culture. There is a common belief among the traditional Gurensi that the land which they are presently occupying was acquired by their first ancestors through discovery. Land belongs to the ancestors but it is vested in the tindaana for the benefit of the entire members of the community and it is to be passed onto the future generations and those yet unborn. Traditionally, it is the tindaana who has the prerogative to allocate skin and community lands to landless families, migrants, strangers, organizations, etc., but it is beyond his authority to sell or will such land. The sacred places (groves and cemeteries) are the abode of the ancestors and animals, birds, reptiles, and insects. They also protect water sources. Woe betide anyone who kills and eats these animals and reptiles or sets fire on groves and cemeteries. The community members taboo eating them and even swear by these animals in court or in argument when trying to prove the veracity of a statement made. These sacred places are vested in the tindaana. One cannot dig a grave for a deceased relative without the tindaana’s permission and cannot cut the branches of a sacred tree without the appropriate rites. There has been a changing trend in the observance of land laws and taboos and the respect for the authority of the tindaana. Communal lands are compulsorily acquired by the government without the involvement of the tindaana. There is wanton destruction of the groves and animals. If land is needed for infrastructure by the government, the chief (as the agent of the government) is approached contrary to native custom, which states that the tindaana is the land custodian while the chief rules the people. The authority of the tindaana has further been weakened by the introduction of contemporary rules and laws regarding land acquisition and the formation of land allocation committees who have been given oversight responsibility for all distribution of land – a matter of usurpation of the tindaana’s functions. All that has been discussed – the lack of people’s interest in their own culture and history, changing trends in land matters, lack of collaboration between chiefs and tindaanas and of compliance with customary laws and usage of land, deliberate refusal to adhere to taboos and beliefs among the Gurensi people – is due to the influence of education, migration, westernization, schooling, and the introduction of foreign cultures. Christianity has had



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a great effect on traditional religion with its beliefs and taboos. It is one of the tools that has been used to destroy the culture and traditions of the people. Even though education is regarded as a blessing, in some respect it is a curse. Education is a tool for the development, independence, and dignity but can also lead to the dependence of the individual and society at large. The traditional Gurensi have a saying that ‘one’s eyes need to be partially opened and if they are opened too much, they can tear’. In this case, too much education of the individual and society can lead to profound changes in the traditional beliefs and values, a caution to the ever enlightened individual. It is common to hear the youth who are unable to respond to queries about themselves to respond with ‘throw history and beliefs to dogs’ and to put it simply ‘we must forget about ourselves completely’. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book owes a great deal to the chiefs, tindanduuma, and clan elders who shared with me their knowledge and experience in our society’s tradition. They are Avaam Abunga (Zuarungu), Bonaba Alemeyarum, and Gowrie Naba Akobga and Zuarungu Naba Ayeltige, both of whom attended the first Catholic Mission School in Bolga in 1928. I am very thankful to Dr. Anatoli who showed interest in my collections and who has not only made the research possible but contributed much to its publication. My greatest credit goes to Monsignor Roger Abotiyuure from the Bolga Catholic Mission for his financial and material support and the inspiration he has often given me. Finally, I recognize the burden that this book has placed on my suffering wife and children: Dora, Patricia, Peter, Fred, and Linda. As much as I appreciate the aid given to me by my informants in writing this book, I should hold myself liable for all errors, omissions, and misinterpretations.

Chapter 8

The Skin and the Stool Re-Crafting Histories of Belonging in Northern Ghana Anatoli Ignatov

It was a hot morning in late November. We were drinking pito in the sundrenched courtyard of the earthen palace of Chief Naba Atua, soaking in every sight and sound of the family sacrifices.1 Warren, the chief’s eldest son, stirred carefully the millet water and poured the mixture out on the shrine. The chief’s petition to his grandfather intensified. His voice melded with the shrill cries of the guinea fowls and chickens in the men’s hands, the anxious bleating of the ram tied to the wall, and the occasional cough of a child watching in the background. Warren then cut the throat of the first fowl, making sure that the shrine was sprayed with blood and covered with feathers before the bird’s fluttering body was cast down. He then reached for the next fowl while the chief proceeded to plead with his grandfather to assist the festival’s visitors with a safe return home. The plea included us – the four solemiya (white person/foreigner) who had come to attend the festivities: ‘Grandfather, you would be pleased to know – you, who brought the first white man to the Upper Region – that there are white people with us here today.’ Naba Atua told us later that day that his grandfather had a very special relationship with the colonial officer, which remains encapsulated in the name of Warren, Naba Atua’s son. The name summons chronicles of lived experience that trouble clear-cut demarcations between colonizer and colonized, between actors and narrators of history. Is the chief’s remark a way of reading the present as a dense archive of the thorny legacies of indirect rule? Why did the chief choose to tell us this particular story? Why did I, the solemiya, leave the sacrifices feeling so ambivalent about my own implication in the narrated chain of events? 1.  Pito is a popular local brew in Northern Ghana made from guinea corn, millet, or maize. It is usually served in a calabash and commonly used to pour libation to the ancestors and the Earth gods.

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This ambivalence makes apparent Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s insight that the past does not exist independently from the present (Trouillot 1995, 15). According to Trouillot, ‘The collective subjects who supposedly remember did not exist as such at the time of the events they claim to remember. … Their constitution as subjects goes hand in hand with the continuous creation of the past’ (Trouillot 1995, 16). As such, the chief does not succeed a timeless past of a royal Frafra tradition and ritual: he is its contemporary. And so am I – the ethnographer who had travelled to Northern Ghana to study African traditional knowledge. Histories of colonial rule in the North became both reanimated and silenced through our joint participation in the sacrifices. Something is always left out while something else is recorded, and ‘the very mechanisms that make any historical recording possible also ensure that historical facts are not created equal’ (Trouillot 1995, 49). Such revisions of the past can lead to new networks or to previously overlooked historical connections and encounters. If the differential exercise of power makes some narratives possible while silencing others, it becomes essential to interrogate the process and conditions of production of such narratives. What does it mean to ‘look back’ into the anticolonial archive in Northern Ghana? How to attend to the power involved in constructing primary sources out of living oral traditions that are continuously renegotiated to meet new situations? Are colonial archives indispensable for anticolonial archiving? What type of theorizing is appropriate for curating memories that are deeply anchored in the materiality of place, bodies, and ritual? How to narrate the past within the present in ways that do not simply assume the shape of a homogenous nation-state (Ghana) or region (North)? This chapter explores how power operates in the production and recording of ‘tradition’ and anticolonial revolt in Northeastern Ghana. Following Trouillot’s method, I seek to attend to the fragmented multiplicity of people’s representations of resistance and to the complex webs of material sites where such histories are produced and reassembled. I focus on historical narratives that engage the relationship between British colonial rule, indigenous slave trading, and the ascendancy of the chieftaincy, which overlaid and complicated existing forms of political authority such as the office of earth priests (tindaanas). I turn to several stories that highlight the diverse ways in which people in Ghana continue to comment on colonialism and its various forms and legacies. These stories reveal struggles over collective identities as struggles over the transforming corpus of the past. This corpus, I argue, can be understood as a dynamic assemblage that draws together both imported institutions and categories and insurrectionary social texts. Such heterogeneity troubles familiar notions of non-centralized savannah societies in Ghana as passive victims of predatory slave raids and colonial labour. People have



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appropriated such categories and continue to construct lives out of the imaginary designations advanced by colonial apparatuses. These strategies can be situated at the interstices between the local, the national, and the global, removing Northern Ghanaians from the domain of an ahistorical ‘tradition’ to that of an alternative modernity (or, perhaps, an alternative within modernity). My goal is to render visible the archival power of materiality and the body. In the Upper East Region of Ghana, that power is not confined only to people and the stories they tell. It is distributed across the landscape, baobab trees, sacred groves, ‘tribal’ markings, skins, clothing, ancestral shrines, earthen compounds, colonial records, migration routes and settlements, and songs that narrate history in their own right (Figure 8.1). Bodies – both human and natural – become sites of political mobilization and anticolonial resistance. Here, one can discern a moment of autonomy possessed by the materiality of the socio-historical process vis-à-vis narrative constructions (Trouillot 1995, 13). Archives assemble, says Trouillot, and this process of assembling is an active act of production, rather than passive collection.2 The oral histories, statements, and events I privilege in the chapter are not easily amenable to recording and retrieval through chronology or genealogical lists. They belong to messy collective histories that activate vernacular and situated knowledges. As such, they cannot be immobilized into familiar ‘storage models of memory-history’, which view knowledge as recollecting what happened by an individual or collective human subject (Trouillot 1995, 14). Rather, they may be understood as shifting fragments and traces of what happened, many of which are not written in ink but are still quite concrete. History begins with bodies and bodily practices – living and dead bodies, migrating bodies and gods, arboreal bodies – and this vibrant materiality of the sociohistorical process makes way for future historical narratives. Tracking power through various ‘moments’ thus means tracking its physicality and material presences. It requires investigating how the materiality of archives conditions the uses of any subsequent historical production. In a context where the present has always something to say about the past due to an evolving oral tradition of thought and shifting landscape, stories change over time. They change not so that they become ‘wrong’ or untrue but rather in approved ways and in concert with all of the elements that make up 2.  ‘By archives, I mean the institutions that organize facts and sources and condition the possibility of existence of historical statements. … Their assembly work is not limited to a more or less passive act of collecting. Rather, it is an active act of production that prepares facts for historical intelligibility. … So conceived, the category covers competing institutions with various conditions of existence and various modes of labor organization. It includes not only the libraries or depositories sponsored by states and foundations, but less visible institutions that also sort sources to organize facts, according to themes and periods, into documents to be used and moments to be explored’ (Trouillot 1995, 52).

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the ways communities think of themselves and their own history. An echo of this contingency inhabits the materiality of land, ritual stones, skins, ancestral shrines, and the official colonial record. It can also be located in the fetishism of Southern Ghana for some of the very elements for which northerners are normally put down: their non-conformism and refusal to assimilate into the latter’s authoritative discourses of modern Ghana. It is also embodied in the contemporary revival of the work of colonial anthropologist R.S. Rattray, a truly ambivalent figure who continues to haunt constructions of the past. Rattray’s role, as someone who understood Northern communities, and also used that understanding for nefarious purposes, complicates the position of any researcher writing about political structures that normally are not recognized as such. Let me begin with some of these ambivalences first.

‘THE PROPER TINGANA HAVE RUN AWAY’: THE AMBIVALENT ARCHIVES OF INDIRECT RULE Chief: As white man has been able to discover some of these tingana, so they have run away. The proper tingana have run away because of the presence of the white man [we all laugh]. Elder: People when they are used to seeing white man, they try to shoot because he is a stranger. So upon your arrival they start running away. That was what was happening in those days. J: For good reason, for good reason. … A: They should be suspicious of the strange fellow that occupied the land. … Chief: You have brought lots of changes in our society here. That’s why lots of people have left and are following the white man’s ideas – westernization, education – killing the cultural practices here. Gurensi Chief and Elders, In discussion with author, December 12, 2012

The half-joking, half-serious remarks of the chief and elders prompted me to reflect on the workings of power in the making and recording of history. The joke encouraged me to see myself both as a stranger and all too familiar ally. It was an open invitation to embrace the ambivalence of being positioned simultaneously in the past and the present, in the sociohistorical process and in constructions about that process that, again, had been conjointly narrated by chiefs and white men. Did the chief’s joke about the ancestors’ running away summon ‘what really happened’ during the colonial encounter? According to the chief and his elders, people’s responses to the arrival of the colonizers alternated



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between migration and resistance. It neither amounts to an acceptance of the forms of rule that had been imposed by the British. Was the joke a way to ‘look back’ into a competing record of history, one which recorded the silences of the official colonial record? Do such oral chronicles enable access to a more authentic colonial experience than that which can be teased out of the numerous reports, surveys, and letters of white male administrators? The latter also relied heavily on the words of ‘ethnographic subjects’ and quoted them at length.3 It is not necessarily the historical veracity of a statement or recollection that makes it valuable and gives its constitutive power. People use ways of talking about the colonial past as a commentary on more recent events, and vice versa. The things that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century in the Upper East of Ghana, and the narratives transmitted by their distorted reporting, silencing, and invention, reveal a space of contestation pervaded by profound anticolonial sensibilities (see also White, Miescher, and Cohen 2001). This includes both oral historiography and written documentary archives. A closer reading of the large body of colonial records about Northern Ghana exposes a kind of recalcitrance of archives that exceeds the deliberate designs of British authorities. Michel Foucault begins to chart such forms of recalcitrance and ‘phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity’ in The Archaeology of Knowledge. He turns to the method of archaeology, itself a colonial discipline, to explore how any given period reveals ‘several pasts, several forms of connexion’ and moments of independence from subjectivity possessed by material documents (Foucault 1972, 4–5). For Foucault, the document is ‘no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only the trace remains’ (Foucault 1972, 7). It refuses to function as ‘the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally memory’ (Foucault 1972, 7). It becomes expressive and begins to speak for itself within a historical field unmoored from its foundations. The document can be conceived as a historically produced entity that has the role and power to shape contemporary events and future constructions of history. In this section, I provide examples of such expressivity of the British colonial record, and R.S. Rattray’s writings in particular, that reveal competing pasts and rupture any unitary understanding of the relationship of colonial officials to the imperial project of indirect rule. During the colonial period, Ghana (then the Gold Coast) comprised of three political entities – the Gold Coast Colony, the Colony of Ashanti, and the Protectorate of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast – that only 3.  For instance, Rattray’s key research informant and assistant Victor Aboya wrote a long treatise on Nankani social life that was incorporated verbatim into Rattray’s book Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland, which I discuss later in this section (see Allman and Parker 2005, 108).

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became unified into a single administrative unit after the Second World War. The Northern Territories of the Gold Coast was first occupied by British troops in 1898, and on 26 September 1901 an Order-in-Council formalized the exercise of jurisdiction by the British Government in the area (Benning 1995, 227–28).4 The British colonial administration relied on the participation of Africans in the execution of its tasks, a system that came to be known as ‘indirect rule’. Indirect rule was premised on three key principles: recognition of chiefs as native authorities and intermediaries between the colonial government and the people; the creation of native courts; and the creation of native treasuries and tax system. Indirect rule was conceived as a cost-effective form of government, making way for ‘civilizing development’ (Lund 2008, 13). However, the British soon realized that they knew very little about African societies, their political systems, languages, and customs. They commissioned a large number of anthropological studies and surveys to identify and describe customary practices. For example, by the late 1890s, British military intelligence had begun to identify as ‘Frafra’ an especially recalcitrant section of the Northern tribes. This designation was probably derived from the pejorative references of Mossi-Dagomba intruders and has had an enduring legacy of silencing pre-existing local identifications (Allman and Parker 2005, 57). Today in English-speaking conversations, and in conversations with Ghanaians unfamiliar with the Upper East, one often hears ‘Frafra’, a colonial term derived from a local greeting, which lumps together the Gurensi and the Boosi alongside the Nabnam and the Tallensi (and their respective languages as ‘Farafara’). In spite of the lack of consensus, most of the elders and knowledge-holders in the communities I have interacted with insist on the use of the name ‘Gurensi’ instead, which is another derogatory ethnic identification advanced by some of the Gurensi’s neighbours.5 Names demar4.  The subsequent reorganization of the boundaries of the former Protectorate of the Northern Territories led to the creation of the Northern region in 1957. It was subdivided in 1961 to establish the Upper Region, which in 1980 was further split into the Upper West and Upper East Regions. During the colonial and postcolonial periods, the present-day Upper East Region was divided into numerous districts, whose boundaries were redrawn every few years. For instance, in January 1898, Northcott’s administration created the White Volta District with headquarters in Gambaga, which in 1905 was transformed to the Navrongo District with headquarters in Navrongo. In 1907 the boundaries of the Navrongo District were expanded to include the Frafra, Bawku, and Gambaga districts under the name North East Province based in Navrongo. In 1910, the Zuarungu District was carved out of the Navrongo District only to be merged back with it five years later. These divisions and mergers into districts and native states continued until 1958 when the Zuarungu District was renamed the Frafra District as a means of identifying the ethnic community residing within its borders. For an extensive account of the history of administrative reorganizations of the Frafra District, see Christopher Azaare’s A History of the Bongo District (forthcoming). 5.  In my discussions with Chris Azaare and other elders, I have been told that the term was coined by Zabarema invaders to refer to the residents of the present-day Upper East and West Regions as ‘people who worship idols’. It indicates, in their view, that these people migrated from the area around Gourcy in Burkina Faso. Today the term is applied both to people from the Navrongo area (Gurunsi) and the Bolgatanga area (Gurensi).



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cate a field of power, and ‘Gurensi’ may have been preferable because it did not contain traces of the colonizers’ illiteracy. According to local intellectual Chris Azaare, ‘The treatment of the Boosi, Gurensi, Talensi, and Nabnam as Frafras and the language as “Farafara” is generally not accepted today by the people. Today, calling someone from these groups a “Frafra” has no meaning and not many people would respond to it’ (Azaare forthcoming, 28). In the eyes of outsiders – both African and white man – what set these communities apart was their peculiar ‘primitiveness’ and ‘aggressiveness’. Their nakedness was the clearest sign of savagery: ‘they are a very lawless people, wear no clothes, are armed with poisoned arrows and spears, and are constantly blocking the road for traders’ (quoted in Allman and Parker 2005, 57). According to the first Annual Report on the Northern Territories, for the year 1898–99, the ‘Frafras’ were described as ‘men whose naked savagedom was a by-word of contempt among the more civilised inhabitants of the Mamprussi towns’ (ibid.). Unlike the Builsa and Gurunsi to the West, the Frafras refused to ‘come in’ and join the ongoing recruitment of colonial soldiers. Periodically, this recalcitrance triggered punitive expeditions through Gurensi, Tallensi, and Nabnam communities, during which the ‘civilized’ Europeans burned compounds and crops and seized cattle (Allman and Parker 2005, 57). It was this construction of ‘a people in a very primitive state, as primitive as anywhere in Africa’ that drew the Gold Coast Government Anthropologist R. S. Rattray, a colonial official turned amateur ethnographer, to the Frafra region. In Allman and Parker’s view, this explains why so much of his book Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland was focused on the Nankani (which Rattray, in turn, lumped together with their neighbours the Gurensi and the Boosi) (Allman and Parker 2005, 113–14). Rattray was not exactly a well-connected ‘insider’. He was treated with suspicion and sometimes outright hostility by district commissioners in the north and by his superiors in Accra (Allman and Parker 2005, 195). Early on Rattray sounded a series of warnings concerning the trajectory of indirect rule in the North that are worth quoting at length: When the first Englishman arrived on the scene, with the usual following of detribalized Africans, after our custom he demanded to see ‘the King’, who was required to produce water, firewood, and carriers. Now, the tribal rulers, the Ten’dama, who were old aristocrats in their own way, and had moreover seen what had been the fate of their fraternity, who had appeared before the officials of other Continental powers in these parts, kept aloof and in the background. Some wholly unimportant, and worthless individual (from the local standpoint), was thrust forward to confront the strangers. Often he was a slave or a descendant of a slave, sometimes he was the village bastard, sometimes he was the only man in the village with a loin-cloth. Each and all of the above have actually

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figured from time to time among our European-made African aristocracy in these parts. This emissary was told the white man’s demands and hastened off to inform the real chief, i.e. the Ten’dana, who saw to it that the order was carried out. At first, this individual acted as a kind of intermediary between the Ten’dana and the white man, and was merely regarded with faint contempt by all the villagers, who were well aware of his real status, and in their hearts considered him a fool to act thus as a figure-head who might sooner or later have to bear the brunt of the white man’s anger. In course of time, however, many of these individuals came to dig themselves in and became more assured and confident of their positions. … The real ruler, almost before he realized it, often to his wonder and indignation, found himself becoming less and less accountable even in the eyes of his people, until at length there made its appearance in this part of Africa something which every one, African and European alike, knows to be an anomaly – a local despotic ruler. There are many of these petty unconstitutional European-made Chiefs in the Northern Territories. … I myself have seen this type of Chief stand up and declare that the land of the tribe was his and that no Ten’dana existed or had ever existed in his division. … The example he thus affords also tends to confirm the ignorant assumption of certain Europeans, who would find in such wholly unnatural conditions what they consider proof of the fact that democracy did not exist in this part of Africa. This is a great mistake. These local upstarts would not survive long were we to leave the country. (Rattray 1932, xvii)

Many of the colonial chiefs did not spring up from the clan organization. Rather, they were a British invention, ‘petty unconstitutional Europeanmade Chiefs’ (see also Thomas 1983). In many areas around present-day Bolgatanga, political organization was decentralized and kinship-based, consisting in widely dispersed compounds that early colonial officials described as ‘countrysides’ rather than towns or villages (Thomas 1983, 59). Indigenous boundaries and political authority had been mapped through a network of tingana (pl.) – sacred groves, rocks, rivers, grasslands –which marked the abodes of people’s ancestors. Other trees, rivers, and rocks marked the boundary from tingane to tingane. Seasonal sacrifices were performed to each tingane by clan elders or the tindaana (land custodian). Tindaanas mediated between the Earth gods, the ancestors, and the community; they allocated land for settlement, building, farming, animal rearing, and graveyard-siting. They were also responsible for purifying the land in the case of bloodshed and for resolving land disputes. Unlike the majority of colonial officials, who tapped into ethnocentric convictions about collective life and identified political decentralization with the absence of government altogether, Rattray recognized the influence of tindaanas within the system of intergenerational eldership that formed Nankanse political authority. He advanced a set of recommendations designed to temper the arbitrariness of indirect rule: ‘A remedy is simple and



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need cause no great upheaval. … Every rightful Ten’dana who is not actually a chief, and the Ten’dana’s hereditary Elders should act with the Chief as his councilors. Commissioners can do a great deal towards this end by merely insisting, when interviewing Chiefs, on seeing and greeting these Elders’ (Rattray 1932, xvii). Rattray’s advice was largely ignored. Gurensi and Boosi oral histories recall numerous examples of local residents who were picked out from a crowd of lineage elders and subsequently appointed as chiefs. Others were already addressed by people as ‘Naba, Naba’ – not because they belonged to a royal clan or political office but because they had excelled at musical and dance performances. According to elders, those who were pro-British and showed some sort of devotion to work were always the best candidates. There were others who worked for British officers in some capacity, for example as messengers or as guides (see also Azaare forthcoming). A good example here is provided by the chief of Bolgatanga. Some sources mention as the first chief Naba Apansinyaba who was reputed to have obtained the title by winning a dancing competition in Zoko (Awedoba 2011, 93). Others contend that the chieftaincy originated with Naba Adongo who had helped the British troops led by Captain Stewart to take possession of Bolgatanga without resistance from the people: ‘Formerly Bolgatanga was of very little importance…. At the coming of the Whiteman, however, most of the chiefs either fought with them or ran away, but Arongo (Adongo) the then chief of Bolgatanga displayed friendliness and later brought in the other chiefs to salute the Whiteman. He was given a red fez by Capt. Stewart (later sir. D. Stewart) and the other chiefs were made to serve him’ (National Archives of Ghana, ADM 68/5/5, 4). Rattray was not merely critical of the invention of chiefs. He attempted to draw attention to the ‘emergence in this part of Africa’ of ‘something which every one, African and European alike, knows to be an anomaly – a local despotic ruler’. Even those chiefs who held traditional offices had now been vested by the administration with vastly extended and modified powers. The responsibilities expected of them far exceeded their traditional responsibilities and limited enforcement powers. Rattray’s concern was echoed by A.W. Cardinall in 1919, the district commissioner in Zuarungu: There is no doubt at all that the so-called unruliness of the Frafra is due to the chiefs. … For instance here in Zouaragu is a chief elected ‘unanimously’ (a euphemism for serious dissentients [sic]) and he has less real title than my houseboy. Hence not only resentment by the people but ignorance on the part of the chief & a disinclination most pronounced to impart any [but] the least information to the commissioner. In these days of democracy it would seem an anomaly to create & support the petty chiefs. … For the personal comfort of the local administration there is no doubt but that the government by chiefs

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(i.e. strong ones) is ideal: presumably though the local administration is here not for his personal comfort but for that of the people he rules. This is not written with an idea of cavilling at the existing state of things or from any wish to change them. It is merely an attempt to portray the conditions here and the reason which lies at the back of the evil reputation for obstinacy and unruliness which the Frafra has obtained (Zouaragu District Diary 1919; see also Thomas 1983, 71–72).6

Why did people despise chiefs so much? The British had presumed Naba (chief) to imply executive and enforcement power. The chief commissioner, Captain C. H. Armitage, was also obsessed with the idea of a precolonial past when the neighbouring centralized Mamprusi state had ruled the Frafra area through a network of chiefs and attempted to re-establish those assumed political relationships. The Bongo chief was supposed to be in charge of the Gurensi, the Nangodi chief – of the Nabnam. This aspiration failed to establish Mamrugu as the apex of this network. Nonetheless, it produced successful hierarchies of chiefs and sub-chiefs who were able to supply ‘free’ (i.e. forced) labour and meet other demands of the British. If any chiefs were ever deposed, it was usually for their failure to deliver such goods to the British or influence their people, and not for the abuse of their newly acquired powers (Thomas 1983, 73–74). Rattray and Cardinall sum up vividly how, with the support and permisssiveness of the colonial authorities, chiefs like Bolga Naba and Zuarungu Naba retained and consolidated traditional offices in the North. The thick, reified descriptions of ‘tradition’ in early colonial ethnographies simultaneously acknowledge and silence the historical roots and widespread nature of the forms of resistance that were shaped by the indirect form of rule. Whereas it was difficult to recall a single major peasant uprising during this period, according to Mamdani in Citizen and Subject, ‘the anti-colonial struggle was first and foremost a struggle against the hierarchy of the local state, the tribally organized Native Authority, which enforced the colonial order as customary’ (Mamdani 1996, 24). Christopher Azaare’s research on the history of the Frafra district concurs with Mamdani’s observations that disobedience to the ‘decentralized despotism’ of chiefs and British officers alike were the default response among many Frafras: ‘People would run away when they were called upon by their chiefs to carry loads of grass to the district capital of Zuarungu’ (Azaare forthcoming, 10). Bolga Naba Adongo, for instance, upon ‘returning home with a red fez – the symbol of chieftaincy – was chased by the people from post to pillar, and seems to have held his life in his hands for many years, the people round blaming him 6.  For a more extensive discussion of Cardinall’s view, see Thomas 1983, 71–72.



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for bringing the white man to these parts’ (Quoted in Thomas 1983, 73). Rebellions against the oppressive rule of chiefs were very common from 1906 to 1934. For example, in 1909 a rebellion broke out in Yorogo against the Bolga Naba Adongo. The rebellion was inspired by his sub-chiefs in Zorbisi, Gambibigo, Soe, Tindonmoligo, Tindosobiligo, Yikene, Sokabisi, and Bukere. It was followed by a widespread revolt in 1910 by the Zuleba against Nangodi-Naba Tiiga. The murder of the chief led to military patrols and punitive expeditions, some of which were resisted fiercely, for example the British incursions on Tongo Hills in March 1911 (Allman and Parker 2005, 62–71). Another rebellion in Yorogo pitted local residents against the chief of Gowrie, Naba Akobga, in 1934. Stories of a 1917 uprising in Lungo against Bon-Naba Salibga’s compulsory recruitment of soldiers for the First World War are still vividly recalled by elders. The rebellions against Nangodi-Naba and Bon-Naba were the largest British military operations undertaken in the Frafra country, enlisting officers from the Gold Coast Constabulary regiment. These rebellions were brutally suppressed, and many of the resisters killed (Azaare forthcoming, 10). Rattray’s and Cardinall’s criticisms may have exaggerated the extent to which the British were able to disrupt and destabilize existing political institutions in Northern Ghana. For the Gurensi and their ‘Frafra’ neighbours on the edges of the Northern Territories Protectorate of the Gold Coast, the coming of colonial rule represented not so much a break with the past as a continuation and amplification of the heightened insecurity and violence of the late nineteenth century. The contours of that past emerge largely in fragments. Yet, it is possible to discern a cluster of societies whose isolation was a result not of being left behind by the forces of history and modernity, but of active resistance to the predations of state-builders and slave raiders to the north and south (Allman and Parker 2005, 71). It is these fragments, and how they fit into the contemporary uneven geography of North-South relations, that I explore next. THE ‘DOOR OF NO RETURN’: UNEQUAL GEOGRAPHIES OF REMEMBRANCE AND ENSLAVEMENT I’m learning to be British and treat with due contempt The worship of the fetish, from which I am exempt … I’m clad in coat and trousers, with boots upon my feet; And tamfurafu and Hausas I seldom deign to greet: For I despise the native that wears the native dress – The badge that marks the bushman, who never will progress. All native ways are silly, repulsive, unrefined.

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All customs superstitious, that rule the native mind. —KOBINA SEKYI, The Blinkards

It was my first visit to the former capital of Britain’s Gold Coast Colony, Cape Coast. I joined the crowds of tourists flocking to the town’s focal point, the Cape Coast Castle, reputed to be one of the largest slave-owning sites in the world during the colonial era. The castle is a World Heritage Site, explained our guide Oscar, and has become a major tourist destination for African Americans and people of African descent. Built on the site of the Swedish trading fort Carolusburg, which was originally established in 1653 and then controlled at various times by the Danish and the Dutch until the British captured it in 1664, the castle is a white, solid, and daunting fortress, towering over a rocky stretch of the coast where the rough sea keeps crushing with formidable power. The castle was constructed out of crimson bricks imported from Europe and lime-based mortar that created ‘breathing walls’ and allowed for moisture to penetrate partially the walls so that they can contract and expand in accordance with the vagaries of the weather. The castle was managed by the Royal African Company, which was in fierce competition with the Dutch West India Company. The breathing fort walls no longer feel so porous from the interior of the male dungeon where more than a thousand men were kept in chains for around six weeks at a time before they were shipped to the New World. As we walked by the urinals on the dark and damp floor, Oscar retrieved images of the waist-high faeces which filled up the dungeon. Those who did not survive were fed to the ocean. Next was the tiny cell, in which the most recalcitrant and rebellious slaves were kept – around a hundred people at a time – in complete darkness. The scars from the slaves’ nails were still visible on the wall. Our tour ended with a visit to the exit to the sea known as ‘Door of No Return’. Recently, a couple of slave descendants had brought back their relatives’ remains, and the remains were returned through the door, an event commemorated with a sign on the sea side of the door reading ‘Door of Return’. According to Oscar, the slaves came from as far as Angola. The trade was widespread and well organized, bringing together representatives of all European colonial powers and traditional rulers. The guards at the castle were mostly Ghanaian and were paid in tobacco and alcohol, rather than cash. They were armed with weapons that the British had given to the Ashanti – around a hundred thousand firearms yearly – on the sole condition that the Ashanti used them. Oscar closed the tour with an impassioned call for tolerance and commitment to avoid perpetuating injustices. As a visitor from the North, my experience in Cape Coast was a concrete reminder of the unequal power and geographies of historical production. It recalled Trouillot’s assertion that none of us can be true to the horrors of



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the Afro-American slavery as we can be true to ongoing practices of inequality and discrimination. Only in the present ‘can we be true or false to the past we choose to acknowledge’ (Trouillot 1995, 151). Sources imply choices and historical facts are not created equal, enlisting mentions and silences of various kinds and degrees. The inequalities experienced by the occupants of the castle’s dungeons are linked to uneven archival power in the inscription and presentation of traces. Sources built upon these traces privilege some events and facts over others (Trouillot 1995, 48, 54). The high visibility of the slave trade in the tourism industry can be sharply contrasted with its practical invisibility in other realms of Southern Ghanaian life (Holsey 2008, 2). That Northern Ghana was one of the most important sources for capturing the slaves who eventually passed through the Door of No Return has been an established fact within Ghanaian historiography. That fact remains, however, largely unused or very selectively deployed. Its frequency of retrieval is low in the coastal tourist industry. The life histories of the enslaved are most often alluded to without mentioning of origins, concrete names, or all the available facts within the industry. The focus on the European trading fortresses along the coastline, and on the transatlantic slave trade, in general, diverts attention from the internal diaspora and the sources and lifeworlds of enslaved peoples within Ghana. Since their restoration funded by USAID and designation as World Heritage monuments, coastal forts such as the Elmina, Cape Coast, and Fort St Jago castles have become sites of pilgrimage for diasporic Africans. They played an important role in Ghana’s bicentennial Joseph project, advanced by the Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations in 2003 to encourage diasporic Africans to ‘come home and invest’ (Kankpeyeng 2009, 210). Drawing upon the biblical imagery of Joseph’s pilgrimage to Bethlehem, the project included an annual pilgrimage along a UNESCO–sponsored slave route that allowed ‘every Joseph’ to ‘return home’. This imagery silenced the cultural and gender diversity of Ghana’s multifaith society – the numerous Muslims, ‘traditionalists’, or all the ‘Marys’ who were also making a pilgrimage – effectively identifying ‘home’ with the predominantly Christian and ‘modernized’ South. Like most heritage tours, the circular route began and ended with the coastal castles.7 Very few pilgrims visit the North, and if they 7. The official pamphlet of the project abounds in such biblical imagery: ‘All the “Josephs” of blessed memory and you will also meet the Josephs of today, those still alive, whose lives are an inspiration to us, whose lives are blazing torches of the true African spirit. … Having passed through this exhibition you will then enter the cells and dungeons of the slave fort/ prison and here we will exhibit the life stories of the “Josephs”. Those who triumphed over the extreme adversity of the slave trade, its aftermath and consequences and triumphed in all areas of human endeavour. An African, whether homelander or diasporan, visiting this experience should emerge strengthened, better able to overcome whatever challenges he/she may face through the examples of the “Josephs”.’ The pamphlet can be viewed at: http://awad.kitlv.nl /pdf//Joseph%20Project.pdf; see also Kankpeyeng (2009, 210).

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do, they rarely make it further north than the Salaga market in the Northern Region. On the other hand, the North is still frequently conceptualized by southerners as the historical pool of slaves and as a site of savagery and war, reproducing a long history of hierarchical relations between geographical locales. The slaves came from the North, it is generally agreed, and passed through the South on their way to the Americas. Southern localities became constructed as mere transit points in the slave trade, rather than as places, in which there was demand for slaves (Holsey 2008, 81–82). This unequal geography has become encapsulated in the Akan term ɔdɔnkɔ (plural nnɔnkɔfo), which originally signified ‘bought person’ and now for many southerners has come to mean more generally a person from the North.8 Der (1998) estimates that around half a million slaves or more were exported from Northern Ghana during the peak period of the slave trade, from around 1732 to 1897. The majority of these slaves were purchased by Asante and Akyem traders, for whom they likely worked in agriculture or domestic services. Thus many contemporary Akan people are of northern origin, a past which is reluctantly acknowledged because of the stigma attached to persons of servile status in Akan society (Der 1998, 32). Accounts of slave trading in northern societies before the eighteenth century are scarce in most oral traditions (Der 1998, 31). Domestic slavery, however, pre-existed the transatlantic slave trade. From the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, the Mole-Dagbani states, comprising Mamprusi, Dagomba, Gonja, and Mossi, engaged in multiple wars of conquest and expansion and came to play a ‘middleman’ role in the trade between the desert, savannah, and the forest belt (Perbi, 2011). Slave trading peaked in present-day Northern Ghana in the eighteenth century with the Asante invasion of Gonja and Dagbon. Almost all states conquered by the Asante from 1700 to 1896 were regarded as tributary states. The imposition of tribute on Gonja and debt on Dagbon led the rulers of Dagbon, Gonja, and Mamprusi (the latter conducted raids to assist their Dagomba kin in paying the debt to Kumasi) to embark upon slave raiding that engulfed the whole of Northern Ghana (Der, 11, 32). Now that the transatlantic and domestic slavery have both officially ended, the ghost of northerners’ enslavement persists as an enduring living presence. At the height of the slave trade, Europeans and southern Ghanaians alike began to characterize northern societies as savages not fit for anything but slavery. In Routes of Remembrance Bayo Holsey explores the unequal geography of 8.  According to Allman and Parker, the term is probably of Mande derivation and suggests ‘an identity outside of jural corporateness and indeed on the fringe of perceptions of humanity’ (Allman and Parker 2005, 31).



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North-South relations and how contemporary coastal residents continue to displace the stigma of past vulnerability to enslavement onto northerners: The remoteness of northerners from the point of view of Europeans, who rarely ventured from the coast, led the Europeans to view their enslavement as not just the result of geography or lack of weaponry but as the result of their status outside of the Christian, ‘civilized’ Atlantic order that linked the West African coastal communities, Europe, and the New World. … Europeans on the coast described northerners as cannibals in the interior ‘whom one could hardly call human. They have a particularly wild nature, a physiognomy like that of a tiger.’ Such descriptions were used to explain the prevalence of slave raiding: after all, it was due to the ‘wild nature’ of the North’s inhabitants. Notions of their savagery also provided a convenient rationale for the enslavement of people from the North: as they were less than human, they were natural slaves. … While Europeans constructed narratives about northern inferiority, thereby further encouraging their retreat from the Atlantic order, they simultaneously constructed narratives about coastal superiority. … Brodie Cruickshank, a European official, writes of northerners, ‘It is only by comparing the native Fantee with these, that we are sensible of the great advancement of the former, who appears a very civilized being in comparison with this foreign race.’ (Holsey 2008, 45–46)

This narrative of northerners as deserving of their enslavement due to their own backwardness and savagery is summed up in Asantehene Kwaku Dua’s remarks to the Methodist missionary T.B. Freeman in 1841: ‘The small tribes in the interior fight with each other, take prisoners and sell them for slaves; and as I know nothing about them, I allow my people to buy them as they please: they are of no use for any thing but slaves; they are stupid, and little better than beasts’(quoted in Allman and Parker 2005, 32). On the other hand, as savages that occupied the lowest ranks of the Akan scale of civilization, northern societies were also perceived as possessing privileged access to very potent spiritual powers beyond the reach of civilized Akan society (Allman and Parker 2005, 32). Admiration for northern shrines grew during a climate of great anxiety and uncertainty in the South fuelled by the defeat by the British and the destoolment of Asantehene Kofi Kakari in 1874, the loss of the Northern Territories and the build-up of political unrest. The lack of assimilation of northerners was venerated by southerners, whose own assimilation had led to a series of spiritual troubles, complicating the familiar views of northerners as an uncivilized pool of potential slaves. Northern vigour and remoteness became identified with the ability to resist both British cultural and political incursions as well as destruction at the hands of slave raiders. Four gods originating at shrines at the northern

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savannah – Kunde, Senyakupo, Tigare, and Nana Tongo – developed into important anti-witchcraft networks in Ghana. Jack Goody notes that the village of Senyon was never raided by Samori, purportedly because of the presence of the Senyon Kupo shrine. Samori feared its power and ‘the white man could do nothing’ about it (Allman and Parker 2005, 106–42; Goody 1971, 60–61; Holsey 2008, 44–45, 84–87). Today northerners continue to give the shrine as an example of the spiritual potency of Gonja land. Southern pilgrims still cover great distances to address spiritual afflictions by tapping into northerners’ ritual potency and spirit of resistance. This ongoing spiritual conversation, however, can be best understood as a one-way importation of exotic fetishes into a rapidly modernizing South, rather than as a cross-regional debate about the present condition of Ghana (Allman and Parker 2005, 181–82). The multiplicity of Ghana’s cultural landscape continues to be conceived as a succession of stages in evolutionary time. Political leaders, NGOs, pastors, and development agencies alike categorize the relations between the North and the South according to temporal categories. Terms such as ‘underdeveloped’ have come to replace ‘civilized’, without transforming the ways in which the unequal geography of NorthSouth relations maps neatly onto colonial categories and institutions. The government’s ‘Better Ghana Agenda’ has become the latest phase of Ghana’s development, which requires stimulating capital, technology, and assimilating the regional differences within Ghana into the delocalized universalism of neoliberal markets (see Government Communication Team, 2012), or, better, into the ‘imagined cosmopolitanism’ of an industrializing and prospering South (Holsey 2008, 100). The rich traditions and lifeworlds, and contemporaneous teleologies of northern societies are reduced to ‘growth constraints’ and ‘extreme rural poverty’ slowing down the march forward of the liberalizing economies of the rest of Ghana (e.g. Sachs 2013). Despite the abolition of the slave trade, the flow of human labour in Ghana still runs from the North to the South. Today northerners working in the South are frequently associated with menial wage labour (Holsey 2008, 98). The majority of the residents of Accra’s impoverished slum Agbogbloshie, popularly known as ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ and the largest e-waste dump in the world, are from Northern Ghana. During the presidential election in December 2012, I was asked by vendors in Accra why I had chosen to live with ‘these tribal people’ in the North or sometimes I was simply informed that the ‘tribal politics’ of northerners prevented them from grasping the soundness of the New Patriotic Party’s political platform. Images of the Muslim North, and Tamale, in particular, as ‘keeping us from our inheritance’, or, more generally, of northerners as people held captive by malicious forces and demonic presences, have become common place with the advancement of Pentecostal



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Christianity. Calls by pastors to ‘take back the North for the Lord’ proliferate (Goldstone 2013). Within this past corpus of unequal frequency of retrieval and recollection, northerners have advanced their own counter-narratives of the South. Accra and Kumasi are vividly portrayed as crime-ridden and troubled places where passers-by would turn a blind eye to an ongoing robbery or accident, in contrast to the strong community ethics of mutual aid that govern Tamale or Bolgatanga. The list of present injustices set in motion by the turbulent past of North-South relations is addressed through narratives of the physical superiority of northerners: In the olden days in Ghana the southerners were very smallish. A typical southerner was supposed to be a smallish person, very shortish. And they were weaklings. And the Northerners were giants. That’s why most of the slaves that came from Ghana were taken from the North, because they were very strong. Because of this strength the Northerners had, there was a deliberate attempt by the Westerners to deny the Northerners education so that they could use them in the plantation farms and cocoa farms and in the mining industry. The southerners were very shortish and weakling to provide that kind of labor. So the North was deliberately kept out of education. … That’s why after independence the government decided that the North has been denied of education for long so in order to bring them in par with their Southern counterparts (coupled with the poverty level of the North here) people should not pay school fees. Northerners do not pay as much compared to southerners. … So that is the reason. (Al-Hassan 2012)

I have been told different versions of this story on numerous occasions, and its narrators have ranged from highly educated intellectuals and government officials to respected village elders and college students. A few times, the narrative was expanded to include accounts of young northern males kidnapped by the Asantehene and forced to sleep with his wives in order to produce more handsome and physically vigorous royal offspring. The narrative of ‘giants’ archives the deliberate policies of the colonial government limit education to the South, including discouraging missionary efforts such as the White Fathers’ in Navrongo. This was the best way to maintain the status of the north as labour reserve for the mines and the plantations in the South. In 2012, the story was often accompanied by a statistic that many northerners were able to retrieve with ease: some secondary schools in the South were celebrating their hundredth anniversary – and the University of the Gold Coast started in 1948 – and yet by the mid-1950s the entire North had only six students in secondary school and one attending university (Akologo and van Klinken 2008).

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Figure 8.1  Left: A war dancer in Feo wearing the paraphernalia used to scare away enemies and slave raiders; Right: Gurunsi compound. Source: Courtesy of the author

The endurance of these competing narratives of northern backwardness and southern ‘weaklings’ demonstrates that historical production is itself historical. It raises uneasy questions of authenticity. These narratives make it clear that ‘historical authenticity resides not in the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-à-vis the present as it represents the past’ (Trouillot 1995, 148). What needs to be scrutinized here is less slavery itself than the unequal present within which representations of enslavement and resistance in Ghana are produced and reproduced. SKINS, RITUAL, AND THE ARCHIVAL POWER OF BODIES These narratives of physical superiority and spiritual potency of northerners highlight the archival power of materiality and the body. Clothing and bodily adornments provide another example. They constitute political practices that have re-enacted the resilience of community identities in the face of transatlantic and trans-Saharan forces, enslavement, and commodity circulation. Struggles over the ways in which ‘tribal’ bodies are dressed can be understood as struggles over identity and the past. Early accounts of the encounters between northerners and exotic commodities describe ‘the shreds of Mossi and European cloth hanging from trees on the approaches’ to earth shrines (Allman and Parker 2005, 61–62). For some Frafra societies like the Tallensi, it was the wearing of cloth and riding horses –identified with predatory slave raiders and white man – that embodied the hostile economies of the invader.



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The nakedness of natives defined the essence of ‘primitiveness’ and challenged British authority. The rate at which local garments were replaced by woven cotton became a key marker of the progress of the civilizing mission. The British even opened a Government Store at their Gambaga headquarters in 1898 in order to promote trade by acquainting the natives with imported clothes. Such simplistic colonial attitudes overlooked the availability and circulation of Mossi cloth throughout the region long before the arrival of white man. They also neglected local identifications of cloth with ritual impurity (Allman and Parker 2005, 61–62). The failure of colonial authorities to ‘civilize’ nakedness is recorded in the regalia of tindaanas (earth priests) and in various rituals and taboos. In Bolgatanga, everyone who approaches the tinkugere (land spirits) – the main shrine devoted to the gods that serve the whole community – removes their shoes and upper body clothes. During one of our discussions, Bolgatanga elders traced this prohibition ‘back to nature’: when their ancestors were alive, they were naked. This is why you take your shoes off – it is an ‘abomination’ to keep them on (Gurensi elders, 2013). In the same area, all articles of the tindaana’s regalia have to be made of nature-made materials such as sheep and goat skins and locally sourced plant fibres. It is forbidden for a tindaana to use cloths or other textile materials of ‘foreign’ origin. The spirits will withdraw their protection and assistance if he does so. The totality of these articles is vested with special powers; individual articles like bracelets might be where the spirit of a tindaana’s father resides. In Bongo, the tindaana’s compound is enshrined with three taboos: (1) One must not approach or enter his compound with footwear – sandals, shoes, slippers, etc.; (2) One must not ride a horse or approach the compound with a horse; (3) One must not fire a gun in the vicinity of the compound. Those who violate these taboos, I was told, will face the wraths of the ancestors and disaster will befall them. Horses were also tabooed from entering the sacred hills of Tongo where the use of horse-tail whisks in the annual Golib dance has become an enduring archive of the success of the Tallensi in resisting the British assault on their gods: ‘The British were using horses, and the people said that they would use the tails of these horses to dance the Golib’ (Yiran Boare, quoted in Allman and Parker 2005, 62).9 Today throughout Northern Ghana, animal skins are also the key political attribute of chiefs, which, as we have seen, in parts of the Upper East is a relatively new ‘traditional’ office consolidated by the British colonial administration. Skins become the materials that re-distribute political and spiritual powers. Wrapping skins around a tindaana’s body re-connects him 9.  Another record of anticolonial resistance is provided by the Feok festival in Sandema. After defeating slave raiders at Fiisa, the Builsa deposited some of the enemy weapons on the site of the battleground, which is now revered as a shrine. The defeat of the raiders is commemorated each year at the festival of Feok with sacrifices to the shrine to pay respect to the ancestors (Kankpeyeng 2009, 218).

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spiritually and materially to the hunting bodies of the ancestors and to the land. Every time an ensemble of skins is laid down for a chief’s cushions to be placed on it, the history of assimilation of such powers by new ruling elites is reiterated and reproduced (Smith 1982, 38). This history of assimilation can be traced through various rites and rituals that allow chiefs to establish and renew the terms of their alliance with the tindaanas and the basis of their legitimacy. Such rituals activate the necessary ancestral resources of political legitimacy while appropriating political agency and power from the tindaama clans through sacrificial practice and ritual reordering. The enskinment of Naba Atua, for example, includes a ritual at the tindaana’s house where the new chief is made to sit on a sacred stone kept in one of the byre (animal room) of the tindaana. During the ritual the stone is covered with a slimy, okra-like substance known as buunto/salum made from a local plant. The chief is then stripped naked and two people – a man and a woman – hold the chief by his armpits and then thrust him on the sacred stone. If he slips off his chances of survival are very slim and he will not live long ‘on the skin’. If, on the other hand, he stays on the stone without slipping off or falling off he will reign for a long period. The ritual is followed by a ceremony, in which the tindaana performs sacrifices to the tingane for the chief’s long life and wealth (see also Azaare forthcoming, 98). The ritual re-enacts the complementarity and distinction between two competing orders of political authority and sovereignty – those of the state (the hierarchical system of chieftaincy) and of the earth (the spiritual legitimacy of tindaanaship). The Naba acquires sovereignty and the means to rule in the hands of the tindaana through a ‘confirmation’ ritual that seems to ‘free’ him from the constraints of the tindaana’s control (Niang 2014, 80).10 Political authority becomes a trial between contesting sovereignties, always subjected to the vicissitudes of the invisible governances of the Earth gods and the ancestors. The chief’s enskinment illustrates how ritual curates a complex struggle over the transfer of power and authority among conflicting orders of sovereignty. This is also a struggle over competing constructions of land, territory, and boundaries. Today the administrative boundaries of districts and villages, repeatedly redrawn by colonial administrators through divisions and mergers among native states, districts, and settlements, map out chiefly jurisdictions and overlay the network of tingana and shrines that mark the 10.  Here I am indebted to Amy Niang, who identifies a widespread model of political legitimacy in West Africa, which differentiates between the ‘people of power’ associated with the state/power/ war and the ‘people of the earth’ associated with belief/rituals/agriculture. What we observe in Naba Atua’s enskinment ritual, then, may be seen as one such manifestation of competing sovereignties that work to contain adversity rather than clash violently (Niang 2014).



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boundaries from one earth priests’ jurisdiction to another. Chiefs conceptualize land as a political territory or administrative domain governed by the royal office via taxation, litigation, provision of infrastructure, and development. For earth priests, land embodies a reciprocal social contract with ancestors and spiritual agencies that must be continually renewed through rituals and sacrifices. Sometimes conflicts are recorded directly onto the skin of the land (tiƞa), shaping settlement patterns, the earthen design of compounds, and the siting of ancestral shrines. The waves of migrations set in motion by the insecurities of the slave-raiding period are imprinted upon present-day landscapes and settlement configurations in the North. In contrast to the very low population densities and nucleated settlements within Dagomba, Mamprusi, and Gonja, densities are highest in the far northeast where communities successfully resisted the slave raids (Kankpeyeng 2009, 213).11 The construction of a low entrance and flat roof of the female room (denyana) in each Gurensi house was a way of fortifying compounds during Dagomba and Mossi slave raids, and later British invaders. Today zinc and cement replace the mud used for roofing, erasing the archives of countless archers who resisted such invaders. During slave raids and wars, victims’ bodies were dumped in thick forests, rivers, caves, some of which would be later identified as tingana. Sometimes a tree may be petitioned for assistance against the raiders: ‘“We are going to war. If you are able to help us and we win and defeat our enemies then we will give you this.” So that tree is able to help them. So that can form a tingane’ (Azaare 2013). Such tingana have become living records of precolonial biodiversity and cross-species coalitions of resistance. The tingana ‘do not accept stranger trees’ such as mahogany, mango, guava, and flamboyant, all of which were brought by the British and planted in Zuarungu and its surrounding areas (Azaare 2012). Recording how the past emanates into sacred stones, baobab trees, sheep skins, or dance performances does not fit easily into the conventions of historiography. It repositions what archives might mean. People’s responses to my questions often presented me with different ways of organizing recollections and narrating collective histories. They often did so by soliciting my participation in certain bodily and spatial practices, and not by recounting narratives of past events or by lengthy explanations. Rather, I was invited to do things the way people do them, to use my body in the same way in which they use theirs (Giles-Vernick 2001; Jackson 2013, 251–69). Revelation – how things become revealed to a researcher – is part and parcel of archival 11.  Kankpeyeng also notes that Salaga is surrounded by communities created by freed slaves following the suppression of the trade – Gurunshi-Zongo, Kunshi, Shishipe, and Lamsa – whose names highlight the Upper East as an important source of slaves (Kankpeyeng 2009, 215).

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work. Sharing a calabash of pito, removing footwear, sitting on a mud rooftop or kneeling to enter the denyana – all of these bodily practices can be used to retrieve archived knowledges and organize people’s ongoing relationship to a dynamic field of history. EPILOGUE The ‘stateless’ societies of the northern Ghanaian savannah – including the Gurensi and the Boosi – have been long conceived as marginal to narratives of decolonization, resistance, and social change. In the words of colonial ethnographer Rattray, these ‘tribes’ demarcated the ‘Ashanti hinterland’. Europeans, finding neither grammar books and woven cotton clothes nor familiar hierarchical categories and institutions of political life, concluded that such categories and institutions did not exist among these ‘savages’. This classification of northerners as non-historical is tied to a conception of history that requires a linear and cumulative sense of time that allows the observer to isolate such societies in a distinct past and fixed ritual landscape (Trouillot 1995, 7). My goal has been to challenge such narratives and render visible the North within narratives of colonialism and anticolonial resistance in Ghana (which are usually focused on the South, especially the forest kingdom of Asante).12 Far from being helpless ‘tribes’ swept away by the forces of modernity, northerners held their own and shaped their own destinies in the face of increasing the competitive marketplaces of colonial and postcolonial West Africa. Some practices of power in the production of history and lived inequalities have become renewed, while others have become profoundly transformed. For instance, at the turn of the century the British introduced the ‘concept of leasing’, which did not have a local equivalent within ‘Frafra’ indigenous land tenure systems. As signing 99-year leases becomes more and more common in Bolgatanga today, I have heard ‘traditionalists’ wonder: ‘How can someone sell years? We are living in two different worlds – that is where the confusion is’ (Nyari 2012). This ambivalence, together with the legacy of colonial consolidation of chiefly powers, has encouraged entrepreneurial chiefs like Bolga Naba to begin to endorse transfers of land interest, resolve land disputes, and lay claim to the ground rent which accrues constitutionally

12.  This goal brings my project closer to Allman and Parker’s aim in Tongnaab to reinsert the Tallensi and Tongo Hills into the narrative of anticolonial resistance in Ghana (2005, 7).



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to the allodial owner of the land.13 In contrast to tindaanas’ privileged relationship with the spirits of the land, chiefs have based such claims to ownership upon the authority to ‘administer the people’ who inhabit that land. In Bolgatanga, tindaanas have formed an association in an attempt to address the influence of well-connected local and national hierarchies of chiefs. The association has embraced Western terminologies of land titles, individuals, and ownership in an attempt to render the tindaanaship legible and competitive within the fiscal and legal terms of neoliberal development. The tindaanas have enlisted some unlikely allies from the past in their struggle, mobilizing colonial constructions of ahistorical tradition in the North to their advantage: The problem is with the constitution itself, which states that ‘25 % goes to the traditional ruler and authorities’ and that ‘it belongs to the stool and the skin.’ In the South the stool refers to the chieftaincy. In the North, the skin has been interpreted by various claimants to refer to the chief who sits on skins or the tindaana who wears skins. It is the ambiguous language of the constitution that is the problem. … We have appealed to the Constitutional Review Committee to make a clarification: ‘skin here refers to this.’ We are aware that the Rattray has written about tindaanas and his work and other supporting literature is used in court to make the case heard. (Member of Tindaanas Association of Bolgatanga, 2012)

The encounter between colonial anthropology and the Gurensi has had a lasting historical impact on both. As Rattray’s The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland is making its way back into the corridors of power in Bolgatanga, Rattray himself becomes transformed from a dissenting voice to an authoritative interlocutor of the official archive of precolonial Ghana. Rattray’s comeback highlights his role both as a narrator and actor in history. Rattray not only played a significant role in the integration of northerners into the emerging corpus of colonial knowledge, but also wrote himself into this corpus.14 This development, in turn, has opened up spaces for Europeans to become re-written into the structures of contemporary African knowledges and struggles. This is an effective strategy for Africans not so much to defend tradition as to allow it to take its own course, into terrains that are often slippery and unpredictable. 13.  The allodial title is the highest customary title to land in Ghana, which is vested in a stool, skin, clan, or family and established through discovery and first settlement and, sometimes, conquest (Lund 2008). In 1979 the new Constitution handed back land in the North, which was hitherto held in trust by the government, to its ‘traditional owners’, opening up possibilities for earth priests, chiefs, families, and individuals to reinterpret the ambiguous language of the Constitution and claim ownership. In the North, land tenure interests are commonly enshrined in contesting oral histories of founding ancestors’ compacts with the land. 14.  This is also the case with Meyer Fortes and how he has been incorporated into the transforming corpus of Tallensi past (Allman and Parker 2005, 14–15).

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REFERENCES Akologo, Samuel Zan and Rinus van Klinken. 2008. “Ghana: Why the North Matters.” Pambazuka News: Pan-African Voices for Freedom and Justice 381, June 17. Al-Hassan, Musa. 2012. “The Gift: From Village Market to the World Economy.” Lecture given at the Tamale Institute of Cross-Cultural Studies, Tamale, August 8. Allman, Jean and John Parker. 2005. Tongnaab: The History of a West African God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Awedoba, A.K. 2011. An Ethnographic of Northern Ghanaian Conflicts: Towards a Sustainable Peace. Legon: Sub-Saharan Publishers. Azaare, Christopher. Forthcoming. A History of the Bongo District. Benning, R.B. 1995. “Land Policy and Administration in Northern Ghana 1898– 1976.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, New Series, no. 1 (16, no. 2): 227–66. Der, Benedict G. 1998. The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana. Accra: Woeli Publishing Services. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. Giles-Vernick, Tamara. 2001. “Lives, Histories, and Sites of Recollection.” In African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral Histories, edited by Luise White, Stephen F. Miescher, and David William Cohen, 194–213. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Goldstone, Brian. 2013. “A Fire upon the World.” Paper presented at the Department of Anthropology Colloquium, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, October 1. Goody, Jack. 1971. Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa. London: Oxford University Press. Government Communication Team. 2012. “Overview of the Better Ghana Agenda.” The Better Ghana Agenda Website, April. http://www.mybetterghana.com/BGA. Overview.pdf. Holsey, Bayo. 2008. Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, Michael. 2013. Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kankpeyeng, Benjamin W. 2009. “The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana: Landmarks, Legacies and Connections.” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 2: 209–21. Lund, Christian. 2008. Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Niang, Amy. 2014. “Reviving the Dormant Divine: Rituals as Political References in Moogo.” Journal of Ritual Studies 28, no. 1: 77–89. Perbi, Akosua Adoma. 2011. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana. Legon: Sub-Saharan Publishers.



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Rattray, R.S. 1932. The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland, vol. 1. London: Oxford University Press. Sachs, Jeffrey. 2013. “Tackling Extreme Rural Poverty in Northern Ghana.” Huffington Post, March 16. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/tacklingextreme-rural-po_b_1835615.html. Smith, Fred T. 1982. “Frafra Dress.” African Arts 15, no. 3 (May): 36–42. Thomas, Roger G. 1983. “The 1916 Bongo ‘Riots’ and Their Background: Aspects of Colonial Administration and African Response in Eastern Upper Ghana.” The Journal of African History 24, no. 1: 57–75. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. White, Luise, Stephen F. Miescher, and David William Cohen, eds. 2001. African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral Histories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Manuscript Collections Zuarungu District Office Records. ADM 68/5/5. National Archives of Ghana, Accra. Zouaragu [i.e. Zuarungu] District Diary, 6 August 1919.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Shiera Malik, Isaac Kamola, Siba Grovogui, Sara Berry, Lori Leonard, Jacqueline Ignatova, James Martel, Eli Meyerhoff, Sam Opondo, Jacob Stump, Jeffrey Ahlman, Allen Stack, Olukunle Owolabi, and Edward M. Salifu, whose comments and advice have enriched drafts of this chapter. The chapter draws on the wealth of knowledge shared with me by chiefs, tindaanas, elders, and community members of the Bongo, and the Bolgatanga districts. I thank them for welcoming me to their communities and for going out of their way to advance my research and understanding. I am also ever grateful to Chris Azaare, my cultural advisor and research collaborator, for his continual guidance and friendship.

Chapter 9

‘But for God’s Sake, Let’s Decolonize!’ Self-Determination and Sovereignty and/ as the Limits of Anticolonial Archives Timothy Vasko SILENCES This chapter is about silences. It is an attempt to curate an archive that does not exist. My aim is to map dense labyrinths and to collect and curate obscured gestures, to take reliefs of itinerant etchings on impassable and unnavigable walls towards a history of shared dispossessions. My question is simple: why was there no explicit conversation between thinkers of African decolonization, on the one hand, and American Indian activists in the United States struggling for their own independence, on the other? This silence is a curious one. This is not least because these struggles against colonial domination were largely contemporaneous with one another in the mid-twentieth century. Why has the violence and dispossession enacted against African bodies, in both diaspora and continental contexts, been treated in isolation from those enacted against the original inhabitants of the United States and their descendants?1 What follows are some tentative answers to these questions. They take the form of both an inventory of some passing but pressing utterances by both black and American Indian anticolonial thinkers, as well as contextual explanations of the reasons for the foreclosed conversations they might have provoked.

1.  A note on terminology: The terminologies I have chosen are either, admittedly, grossly broad (Africa), or seemingly antiquated. By ‘Africa’, I generally mean to specify that large grouping of states that precipitously threw off the shackles of colonial rule beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the early 1960s, though of course this process hardly stopped then. I attempt to specify further at the beginning of this chapter’s third section. In choosing the terms ‘American Indian’, and ‘Native’, I have generally sought to keep pace with the self-appellations by people identified with these groups in the time and place I discuss in this chapter. I only use ‘indigenous’ when I mention the present political and scholarly afterlives of those discourses and struggles studied here.

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Recent research has shown that there have been hitherto overlooked and under-appreciated dialogues, communally and textually, between Native populations in settler colonies such as New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, and black diaspora populations in Britain, the Caribbean, as well as the structures of colonization and decolonization in Africa itself (Coulthard 2014; Mamdani 2015; Shilliam 2015; Wolfe 2016). The question still remains, however, as to why these remain minor exceptions to the general rule of silence between these two contemporaneous and like-minded forms of colonial struggle. The discourses of self-determination and sovereignty envisioned in both the African and Western Hemisphere contexts were largely prevented from conjugating a shared struggle against colonial governance. This was because the legal and governing regimes in each respective context of struggle strategically managed and tightly specified conditions and limits of self-determination and sovereignty. For African independence, achieving postcolonial freedom was constrained by the conditions of the post-war international system of states represented by the United Nations (UN), and articulated through an authoritative legal discourse embodied in the UN Resolutions 1514 and 1541. For Native territories and populations in the United States, the conditions and limits of independence were constrained by the urgent necessity of maintaining basic, fiduciary treaty relationships in the form of federal commitments to the social and economic infrastructural support for, and the recognition of distinct political identities of, Native populations. These relationships were threatened by policies of ‘Reorganization’ and ‘Termination’. Most studies of mid-century American Indian activism make, at best, passing gestures towards decolonization in and among the non-aligned nations, such as those in Africa. Likewise, histories of the latter often return this silence or fleeting acknowledgement of anticolonialism in the United States in kind (Prashad 2008; Chaat-Smith and Warrior 1997). The obviousness of this historical divide remains difficult to dismiss because of the basic differences in the legal and structural aspects of the struggles that African anticolonialists faced vis-à-vis imperial powers and later at the international level. In this context, postcolonial sovereignty was recognized as legitimate only if certain forms of governmental structure were adopted and enforced that, very often, were themselves holdovers from the forms of colonial population and territorial management. In other words, postcolonial states and societies very often inherited political, economic, and social structures characteristic of the prior colonial order. The claim to inherent postcolonial sovereignty, for instance, was said to confer a retroactive legitimation of ‘agreements’ between local, native authorities, and colonial entities prior to independence. What is more, standards of economic development were



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accepted and undertaken at the national level as a precondition and later as a disciplinary measure to continue even nominal political independence from colonial powers. In short, the conditions of decolonization were tightly constrained by the normative and legal imposition of sovereign nation-statehood and the economic arrangements that form of political life was supposed to enable, both of which were enforced by international law (Grovogui 1996; Mamdani 1996). The conditions and limits of colonial power and resistance to it were somewhat different in the United States. Primarily, Native populations in the United States faced policies of Reorganization and, ultimately, Termination. Reorganization policy was set into motion by the US Congress in 1934 with the passage of the Wheeler-Howard Act which, ‘set out to recognize and foster the presence and role of tribes as political, socioeconomic, and cultural communities on reservations throughout the nation … [which] resonates to this day in the form of IRA tribal constitutions that became the framing governance documents of almost 100 of the more than 560 tribal governments recognized by the federal government’ (Bruyneel 2007, 125). By 1953, however, Termination Policy was passed as House Congressional Resolution (HCR) 108. In both cases, the federal government carefully managed the forms that self-determination and sovereignty would take. Under Reorganization, for instance, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) allowed for a certain degree of tribal self-government, so long as this conformed with a set of predetermined governing principles, and very often, boilerplate constitutions drafted and assigned by BIA agents. Under Termination the treaty agreements supposedly upheld under Reorganization would, the federal government dictated, be henceforth ‘terminated’ so that Native individuals could be encouraged to assimilate, culturally and economically, into American settler society (Fixico 1990; Phillip 2002). Termination therefore involved a whole array of governing strategies and policies. These included attempts to establish and reorganize standards of tribal education and governance that were supervised by federal agencies. They also involved the dismantling of state trusteeships over federally held lands in favour of their proprietization for purchase by Native individuals. Tax exemptions ended. The federal government attempted to definitively settle claims of federal breaches of treaty agreements and unlawful land seizures. These strategies ultimately amounted, quite literally, to the termination of federal ‘wardship’ over tribes as sovereign units. This was effected through the termination of federal recognition of tribes as legal units as such. ‘Red Power’, most notably associated with the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM), was borne out of Native responses to what they understood to be the American federal government’s strategy to undercut what was left of any meaningful status

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for Native populations, which had already been severely attenuated by their designation as ‘domestic dependent nations’ since the nineteenth century.2 Anticolonial discourses and projects in both the United States and the African context found their conditions and limits of possibility within these contexts of colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial structures and techniques of governance. The legal reasoning and documentation that these regimes produced form an archive of the strategically managed forms that selfdetermination and sovereignty could take. These structures and techniques, in other words, were both the object of critique and simultaneously the enabling constraint of visions of self-determination and sovereignty that thinkers of anticolonialism in both Africa and the United States put forward. Thinkers of African anti- and postcolonialism remained constrained by the form of the nation-state, even in some of their most radical moments. Likewise, Native anticolonialists often maintained a programme of articulating national selfdetermination and sovereignty for Indian tribes within the minimal terms of an exclusive and fiduciary relationship of mutual recognition between tribes and the federal government that had been allotted through nineteenth-century treaties. The sustained focus of each of these anticolonial programmes on the articulation of self-determination and sovereignty, ultimately, came at the expense of more expansive historical understandings of international politics as being doubly constructed around the genocide of Native people and the enslavement and colonization of black African populations. The possibility, therefore, of conjugating anticolonial struggle and political community between Africa and Native America, on the basis of a highly differentiated but nevertheless shared history of dispossession, was forestalled by the exigencies of predetermined and strictly enforced forms of self-determination and sovereignty offered to people in these contexts by colonial powers as concessions to their demands. The thinkers I use to demonstrate this point are, admittedly, obvious ones: Frantz Fanon here stands in as an exemplary thinker of African independence. The Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. works as his American Indian counterpart. Neither the legal documentation and reasoning, nor the thinkers I examine in these contexts should be taken as total representations of either the historical processes or articulations of anticolonialism in the midtwentieth century. The obvious question here is why I have chosen to read legal documentation as the backdrop against which I bring these thinkers’ ideas into relief. Another, equally pressing question is why I have chosen these particular thinkers. 2.  This paralleled like-minded transformations of governance in the other settler colonies such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, which I do not discuss here primarily for considerations of space. For accounts of these transformations, see Coulthard (2014), Povinelli (2002), and Shilliam (2015).



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My response is that both the legal reasoning and documentation, as well as Fanon and Deloria’s respective thought, constitute two interrelated archives along lines that Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) has defined as ‘the institutions that organize facts and sources and condition the possibility of existence of historical statements’. The legal documents and logics I examine here represent what Trouillot calls the process of archival assembly through which ‘institutionalized sites [mediate] the sociohistorical process and the narrative about that process’ (52). As we will see, both Fanon and Deloria were keenly aware of, and explicitly engaged with, the legal reasoning and attendant material structures of political power in their respective contexts. This observation is nothing new. It has been made by a number of revisionist historiographies of a great number of anticolonial movements and thinkers, including but not limited to Fanon and Deloria and the struggles in which they were embedded (Bruyneel 2007; Wilder 2015). Nevertheless, the tendency of this revisionism has been to emphasize alternative engagements with or conceptions of self-determination and sovereignty, suggesting a need for closer attention to the way in which these legal, structural, and symbolic forms exerted and continue to exert authoritative power upon and through anticolonial discourse. While Fanon and Deloria negotiated these limits very tactically and creatively indeed, it is not enough to argue that they reformulated these concepts. The overlapping archives of UN Resolutions and of Termination legislation helpfully demonstrate how colonial powers represented their capacity to manage, enable, and ultimately contain African and Native American aspirations for self-determination and sovereignty. They are the representation of the forms of political representation available to anticolonial groups. These forms of political subjectivity, in other words, facilitated the transformation of the old partition of the world into racial classifications and hierarchies represented in terms of trusteeships, zones of influence, and/or full colonies, into developing or failed states and zones of humanitarian crisis (including American Indian reservations). The legal documents and their logics which I read below are thus one record among many of what Alfred Sauvy (1952), the French economist and demographer who first coined the term ‘Third World’, referred to as the need, ‘adapter le contenant au contenu [to adapt the container to the contents]’. The contents might change, Sauvy suggested, but so long as the container remained the same, they would remain manageable, modifiable, and legible to colonial powers like the Britain, France, and the United States. As such, even if Fanon and Deloria, among other thinkers, renegotiated the content of self-determination and sovereignty, colonial powers offered over as concessions by colonial powers, they maintained the forms of modern political subjectivity in individuals, citizens, and/or states, which were conducive to strategies of postcolonial and neocolonial governance.

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Examining Fanon and Deloria in light of this archive of documents and logics is particularly helpful then, because these authors are also something akin to Trouillot’s archival institutions themselves. The centrality of their respective thought to discourses of decolonization positions both Fanon and Deloria today as institutionalized origins in each context. Their texts tend to condition the possible forms that responses to, or articulations of, anticolonial politics as self-determination and sovereignty today. As individuals, they were both obviously what Trouillot (1995) calls ‘agents’, ‘actors’, and ‘subjects’ of the history of mid-century anticolonial struggles in Africa and the United States, respectively.3 But moreover, and more importantly, they can also be read as serving an authoritative and institutional function as ‘authors’ as Michel Foucault (2010) has defined to this concept: namely they are the founders of a particular kind of discursivity known as post-war anticolonial thought. Foucault’s notion of founders of discursivity can thus help us think of authors such as Fanon and Deloria as ‘[having] created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded’ (114). This is to say, crudely, that here Fanon and Deloria work as representations of a particular constellation of ways of thinking, speaking, and acting in anticolonial modes. To be sure, to treat Fanon and Deloria as institutionalized origins is not to suggest that they are the inventors of anticolonial thought en toto. Instead, it is to ‘try to isolate in the founding act’, of their discourse and the discourses that follow from them, a certain way of thinking, saying, and enacting anticolonialism that flows from the pens of each author. It is therefore also to examine ‘an eventually restricted number of propositions or statements to which, alone, one grants a founding value, and in relation to which certain concepts or theories … might be considered as derived, secondary, or accessory’ (Foucault 2010, 116). This restricted number of propositions and statements make up the limited possibilities of self-determination and sovereignty that animate much of contemporary anticolonial discourse pertaining to Africa and Native America; they are the eventuality that we inhabit today. Moreover, the highly institutionalized nature of Fanon and Deloria as characteristic thinkers of anticolonialism should also highlight the deeply gendered dimensions of the anticolonial archive that remain very troubling indeed. The anticolonial discourse that both Fanon and Deloria each initiate therefore marks an origin that should be simultaneously revered and exceeded, analysed selectively and put to work in heterogeneous modes. The way in which we identify each thinker with the processes and discourses of anticolonialism 3.  That is, in Trouillot’s words, ‘as agents [they are] occupants of structural positions … as actors [they are] in constant interface with [their] context … [and] as subjects [they are] voices aware of their own vocality’ (23).



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in both the mid-twentieth century and in our present tend to produce a certain degree of difference from their original enunciations. Whence, for instance, the importance that this chapter places on brief, disjointed, and forestalled textual moments in which each author gestured to the colonial histories and experience in the other’s context. This is the work of returning to figures like Fanon and Deloria as institutionalized origins of contemporary anticolonial discourse. We must meticulously and patiently consider these textual moments that disclose internal, and yet obfuscated, gestures towards paths on which they were not set. MARGINS Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, colonial powers attempted to tightly circumscribe and manage postcolonial freedom in strictly defined terms of self-determination and sovereignty that, as we will see, established the limits that thinkers like Fanon and Deloria were forced to immediately confront. I have already sketched the broad contours of these strategies in each context above. Below, I detail more closely the distinct but interrelated legal tactics Western countries enacted to maintain postcolonial and neocolonial structures of Western European and settler-state hegemony. However, to understand the cost of the epistemic and material violences that the archive of these legal tactics exacted, it is necessary to begin with some curious and marginal moments in Fanon and Deloria’s respective writings. Here we will find fleeting and forgotten moments that might help us to expand the moral, political, and historiographic horizons of studying and, one hopes in so doing, contesting colonialism, its afterlives, and its living legacies, especially as they have affected both African populations on the continent and in the diaspora, as well as indigenous populations in North America. Fanon’s gestures toward a differentiated but nevertheless conjugated analysis of colonialism and slavery in and between Africa and the Americas began somewhat earlier than his engaged activism in the Front de Libération Nationale’s (FLN) struggle against French settler colonialism in Algeria, which was represented in texts he drafted after joining the movement in 1954. Indeed, these gestures are evidenced almost a decade prior ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’ contained in the aforementioned Resolution 1514 of 1960, as well as Fanon’s classic The Wretched of the Earth, drafted shortly before his death in 1961. As early as 1952, Fanon had diagnosed what he understood to be a psychic trauma characteristic of both black experiences of colonialism and slavery, and those confronting Native populations in the Western Hemisphere. This diagnosis was included as a part of his ‘clinical study’ of ‘The Black Man

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and Psychopathology’ that comprised the sixth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks (2008),4 and indeed, one upon which a crucial dimension of his critique of the Négritude movement turned. For Fanon, the trauma that colonialism and slavery had caused, albeit in different ways, to both black and Native populations in the Western Hemisphere could be identified through at least two symptoms. The first of these symptoms manifested itself in sociopolitical patterns that revealed the colonial psyche. The second was observable in psychic disturbances the colonized experienced under the sociopolitical condition of colonization. In the first instance, Fanon diagnosed a specific kind of trauma that worked to form both the colonizers’ perspective of their colonized subjects, as well as the perspective that the colonized held of both themselves and their colonizers. The cultural and structural conditions of colonialism set the scene, for Fanon, in which white, colonial populations came to identify black and American Indian bodies with a spectral presence of savage, primeval threat. For whites, these populations became the symbolic and material targets ‘whereby … energy accumulated in the form of aggressiveness can be released’. Tarzan stories, Explorers’ tales, Mickey Mouse adventures, and comic books, Fanon wrote, were all characteristic examples of tales of dangerous and thrilling adventure for the consumption of white children. Their purpose was to inculcate and reinforce a sense of racial superiority necessary for maintaining colonial hierarchies. In these stories, Fanon observed, ‘the Wolf, the Devil, the Wicked Genie, Evil, and the Savage are always represented by Blacks or Indians’. Citing the American cultural critic Gershon Legman, Fanon reminded his readers of the fact that only in Southern Africa and the Americas had the colonial project successfully decimated the Native populations to the point of near oblivion. ‘Only America, then,’ Fanon argued through a Legman quote, ‘could have the need to appease the national conscience by forging the myth of the “Bad Injun” so as to later introduce the historical figure of the noble Redskin unsuccessfully defending his territory against the invaders armed with Bibles and rifles,’ adding in a passing footnote that ‘the Caribs experienced the same fate at the hands of French and Spanish adventurers’, in the early waves of European conquest in the Western Hemisphere (124). That Fanon saw a continuity between African and American colonial projects was not, it seems, insignificant to the broader implications of his thought. Indeed, during a reflection on Négritude and ‘what the place of black genius in the universal chorus will be’, Fanon argued, with and against the movement that Senghor, Diop, and Césaire propounded, that ‘a genuine culture cannot be 4.  Throughout this chapter, I will be quoting from the most recent publications of the texts in question as noted in the parentheses. However, my citations will be from the texts as they are dated in this chapter’s main body.



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borne under the present conditions. Let us talk of black genius once man has regained his true place’. Here, Fanon’s problem seemed to lie with Négritude’s Jungian tendencies which, even if the movement had inverted Jung’s moral trajectories, Fanon argued, remained too inattentive to the way in which cultural and structural conditions of colonialism would shape the unconscious archetypes that animate communities’ and individuals’ psychoaffective lives. As Dominic Combe (2014) has argued, the complicated position that Fanon staked out vis-à-vis Négritude was overall indicative of his political philosophy, and therefore to his epistemological and ontological understanding of colonialism and the way in which it produced its subjects. It is telling then that Fanon attempted to provincialize Jungian universalism by highlighting the specificity of ‘an archetype: an expression of bad instincts, of the darkness inherent in every ego, of the uncivilized savage and the black man who slumbers in every white man’. That, as Jung had claimed, the universality of this archetype was proven by its presence in so-called primitive peoples was also a delusion, Fanon argued. ‘All the peoples he studied’, he observed, be they ‘Pueblo Indians from Arizona or the Blacks from Kenya in British East Africa … had more or less traumatic contact with the white man’ (Fanon 2008, 164). It was not possible, therefore, to return to a pure and unadulterated precolonial consciousness, the source from which an anticolonial and postcolonial poesis might inspire new forms of universal humanity, as the proponents of Négritude supposed. For Fanon, there were at once many forms of human expression, and at the same time, only two: that of the white man, and that of those whom the white man had terrorized, traumatized, and thus pushed to the edge of violent reaction to retroactively justify the whites’ initiating provocations. As we will see below, Fanon’s final response to this problem in The Wretched of the Earth was to embody this humanism in the postcolonial nation-state. So, while theorists of African anticolonialism like Fanon doubtlessly remained focused primarily on the conditions of African populations and the diaspora that had suffered as a result of European colonialism on the African continent, they were also haunted by the scale and scope of colonial violence that was evident in the encounter between Europeans and Native populations of the New World. In many of these texts, the violence of the Second World War, and in particular the German extermination of Jewish populations on the European continent, was a necessary rhetorical device that, ultimately, placed that violence in the context of the much longer history of violence by which European colonialism was marked. This is perhaps one of the great rhetorical scandals, for instance, of Fanon’s essay on ‘Medicine and Colonialism’ (1965). In that essay, Fanon compared the medical administration of the Algerian people by the French colonial state to the medical ‘treatments’ given to French soldiers by German doctors in Nazi prisoner of war camps, thereby effectively equating French colonial policy with what Europeans generally

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understood to be most horrific and tortured crucible of European history and civilization (123). Similarly, the historiographic recollection of the genocide of Native populations in the New World was a readily available metaphor to adequately forge an image of what Africans and the diaspora had been up against. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the same essay Fanon likened the apolitical attitude that native Algerian doctors and other intellectuals held towards collaborating with the colonial state to that classic figure of frontier homicide in the United States, the cowboy.5 Algerian doctors’ and professionals’ willing participation in colonial governance was not, Fanon wrote, ‘a question of values or of principles, but of the incomparably better standard of living the colonial situation provides him’. During periods of colonial crisis, Fanon observed, the intellectual tended to collude with the state in the form of a ‘militia chief or organizer of “counter-terrorist raids”’. This was because ‘in the colonies, in normal times – that is, in the absence of the war of liberation – there is something of the cowboy in the intellectual. In a period of crisis the cowboy pulls out his revolver and his instruments of torture’ (Fanon 1965, 134). Anticolonialists who treated the African context, as Fanon did, were not alone in pointing out, however fleetingly, that the elimination of Native populations in the Americas was a crucial precedent and stage in the conditions of colonialism as a global formation, effectively conjugating the historical and structural violences of colonialism in Africa to that enacted against Native populations in the United States.6 As with Fanon, moreover, the consonance of these historical processes and their ongoing structural effects suggested a potential point of departure for an epistemic reorganization of knowledge production and attendant political programmes towards anticolonial ends. Nevertheless, the immediate exigencies of Termination and a sustained faith in the fiduciary relationship of the treaties as a path towards self-determination and sovereignty, encouraged by earlier policies of Reorganization as I will discuss later, prevented thinkers like Deloria from potentially more robust explorations of the possible ways of thinking about, speaking about, and acting within and against colonial power. Seven years after Fanon’s passing, Vine Deloria would make a historiographic point similar to that the Martinician psychiatrist had made. Fanon, however, began with a focus on the constitution of the colonized subject, only later building out a vision of national and international politics responsive to the violent conditions from which this subject emerged and by which this subject was confronted. Somewhat differently, Deloria did so with an eye towards future accounts of international politics. 5.  The late Patrick Wolfe’s (2006) essay ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, is the classic account of frontier homicide in the United States. 6.  See, for instance, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (2001); CLR James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1968); and Kwame Nkrumah’s Towards Colonial Freedom (1962).



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In 1968’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1988), Deloria sought to (re)cast American foreign policy in the light of its history as ‘a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations’, in which ‘the Indian wars of the past should rightly be regarded as the first foreign wars of American history’. Importantly, Deloria argued that the wars the United States had waged against Mexico, as well as against the Sioux, Apache, Ute, and Yakimas throughout the nineteenth century, needed to be understood as wars of conquest similar to those that the British and the French had waged in India and Africa. ‘When one considers American history in its imperialistic light, it becomes apparent that if morality is to be achieved in this country’s relations with other nations a return to basic principles is in order,’ Deloria concluded. Given the land-based nature of American imperial warfare waged against Native populations, Deloria argued that ‘definite commitments to fulfill extant treaty obligations to Indian tribes would be the first step toward introducing morality into American foreign policy’ (51). It is suggestive, if typical, that honouring the fiduciary relationship of the nineteenth-century treaties (which, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, usually served to punctuate the end of American military belligerence directed towards Native populations) would be, for Deloria, the first point of departure for thinking about a more moral future for US foreign policy. As we will see below, this is because Deloria and Native activism generally was constrained by the terms of self-determination and sovereignty set by the treaties that were under threat and/or entirely dismantled through the implementation of Termination Policy. This meant that these forms of self-determination and sovereignty, largely stipulated by settler federal governments and by a labyrinthine legal logic that underpinned the post-war international states system’s erstwhile recognition of postcolonial independence in Asia and Africa, tightly managed the conditions under which Native thinkers such as Deloria could envision independence at all. Nevertheless, Deloria’s conjugation of the history of colonialism in the Americas with colonialism elsewhere suggests alternative paths that anticolonial politics and scholarship might have taken with this history of shared dispossession in mind. Deloria would affirm this when he later argued that ‘we have more in common with the Africans and Vietnamese and all the non-Western people than we do with the Anglo-Saxon culture of the United States’ (Quoted in Bruyneel 2007, 148).7 7.  More complicated still was the obviously anti-black way in which Deloria, nevertheless, somewhat deftly diagnosed the potential risks the American Civil Rights movement ran in its appeal to the US Constitution as a model of and space for accessing rights of black people in the United States in his essay on ‘The Red and the Black’ in Custer (1988, 168–96). Because this matter is indeed a very complex one, I will hopefully address it elsewhere. For some helpful tentative treatments on the complex relationship between black and red populations in the United States, see Frank Wilderson’s (2010), Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms is instructive.

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Whatever solidarities that Fanon and Deloria may have respectively expressed with the colonial context in which their counterparts were writing, these are today little more than muted solidarities. So, while these texts have been poured over countless times prior to this treatment of them, it is telling that these moments have remained relatively silent. The point here is not to attempt the slow and difficult work of building them into something other than what they are currently – passing moments of affinity. The point, rather, is to highlight these moments in the archive of each thinker’s writings to demonstrate what the architectonic force of self-determination and sovereignty forestalled. To interrogate the internal and thwarted gestures in these seemingly marginal comments in Fanon’s and Deloria’s respective writings, is to attempt to think of something other than what their texts seem to have already founded, to find something new in already very familiar texts. But it is also to catalogue the epistemic violence that self-determination and sovereignty, as a particular archive of modern political subjectivity deployed in and as strategies of colonial governance, one which has universalized itself and adapted to contingencies to maintain its simultaneously tenuous and hegemonic claim, exacts against the anticolonial modes of thinking, speaking, and acting in the respective works Fanon and Deloria. It is to these archives which I will now turn. CONTAINERS As I noted in the introduction, the conditions under which the freedom of formerly colonized populations, including many of those in Africa,8 would be managed upon attaining independence can be traced back from a series of UN Resolutions leading up to General Assembly Resolution 1514, the ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’ adopted in 1960. This Resolution followed from the USSR chairman Nikita Khrushchev’s call for such a declaration in his address to the General Assembly on 23 September 1960. During that session, fifteen new countries were admitted into the Assembly of the UN, including Cameroon, Togo, Somalia, Cyprus, Senegal, and Nigeria (Asamoah 1966).9 The declaration was adopted on 14 December of that year, with 89 votes in favour, 0 votes against, and 9 abstentions. The latter came from a more or less predictable group of states: Australia, Belgium, the Dominican Repub  8.  This is excepting, primarily, the occupation of former German Southwest African territories by then-Rhodesia and South Africa, the legality of which Ethiopia and Liberia quickly challenged before the International Court of Justice in 1962 (Grovogui 1996; Mazrui 1967). 9.  Also included were Malagasy (now Madagascar), the Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), the Congo (then Leopoldville and Brazzaville, separately), Dahomey (now Benin), Chad, the Central African Republic (then simply Central Africa), Gabon, and Mali.



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lic, Portugal, Spain, France, the Union of South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom. When the final and unaltered draft of Resolution 1514 was submitted by Cambodia as the representative for 26 Asian and African countries, the international community had seemingly recognized and conferred the legitimacy of decades of prior anticolonial struggles, coalitions, parties, congresses, and the like. Among the seven principles included in this declaration were those which stipulated that the subjection of populations to foreign rule, especially through means of violence, were a severe violation of both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of the UN. Moreover, the declaration underscored the inalienable rights of all peoples to self-determination on matters of political status, as well as modes of cultural, social, and economic development. Perhaps most importantly, necessary to all of this was the principle that any attempt to disrupt or compromise the territorial integrity and political autonomy of the new nations was unacceptable (UNGAR 1514, 1960).10 Somewhat more conspicuous than Resolution 1514, however, is an associated Resolution from the same year, Resolution 1541, entitled ‘Principles Which Should Guide Members in Determining Whether or Not an Obligation Exists to Transmit the Information Called for under Article 73e of the Charter’ (UNGAR 1541, 1960).11 Taken together, the principles included in Resolution 1541 specified both the historical trajectories and spatial forms that that colonial freedom could take. The Resolution began by establishing its historical narrative: Article 73e in Chapter XI of the Charter was, in the minds of its authors, always directed at ‘territories which were then known to be of the colonial type’. This historical context, necessarily, set the coordinates for future trajectories. Resolution 1541 noted, in this sense, that Chapter XI of the Charter ‘embodies the concept of Non-Self-Governing Territories in a dynamic state of evolution and progress towards a “full measure of selfgovernment”’. In this way, Principle VI of Resolution 1541 stipulated under what conditions ‘a Non-Self-Governing Territory can be said to have reached 10.  See also Audiovisual Library of International Law, ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples — Procedural History’, http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/dicc/dicc. html. 11.  According to Article 73, Chapter XI of the Charter of the United Nations, member states which maintained sovereign jurisdiction over distinct territories and populations, presumably in the form of colonies that did not govern themselves, had accepted ‘as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost … the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories’. In order to ensure the execution of this trust in the forms of, for example, (a) the political, economic, social, cultural, and educational preservation and advancement of these populations; as well as (b) encouraging the development of self-government; colonial member states were (e) instructed to ‘transmit regularly … statistical and other information of a technical nature relating to economic, social and educational conditions in the territories for which they [were] responsible’, excluding official Trust Territories as defined by Chapters XII and XIII of the Charter. See UN, Charter of the United Nations and the Statute of the International Court of Justice, 1945. https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CTC/uncharter.pdf

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a full measure of self-government’. These conditions included a territory either becoming a sovereign independent state or freely associating with an already independent state or fully integrating within an already independent state (UNGAR 1541, 1960). These conditions will be important to remember when we turn below to a discussion of the ways in which the overlapping nature of Reorganization and Termination policies in the American context tightly managed and circumscribed the forms that American Indian selfdetermination and sovereignty to take. Here it is enough to note, however, that Resolution 1541 can be read a representation of the authoritative discourses which articulated the sovereign nation-state as the enabling constraint of visions of African postcolonial self-determination and sovereignty in the post-war rearrangements of colonial and neocolonial power. The history of colonialism was to be redirected into a future of independence that, in some fashion or another, was spatially managed by and confined within the sovereign nation-state. This was, and remains, the double bind of decolonization. On the one hand, the moral and political will driving independence movements, especially violent independence movements in Africa and throughout the colonial world, had forced the hand of colonial powers to grant postcolonial sovereignty at the international level. On the other hand, these achievements nevertheless reconfigured colonialism into neocolonialism by allowing for the management of postcolonial populations through the technology of sovereignty-as-political personhood itself. This was because self-determination was codified (and remains so) in the discourse of international law through a historiographic understanding of the development of the modern international that privileged a political and epistemological orientation grounded in the centrality of sovereign nation-statehood as the primary vehicle through which political freedom could be attained (Finnemore 1996, 153–86). This was as true for scholars and practitioners of international law as it was for thinkers of African decolonization. The latter, however, struggled within and against this double bind in ways that scholars and practitioners of international law have yet to fully appreciate. This double bind was reflected in the theoretical tensions between the aspirations for, at a minimum, a continent-wide, Pan-African reconfiguration of the fundamental structures of political subjectivity, and at a maximum, a nonaligned world politics that, as the final communiqué from Bandung put it, was rooted in ‘the development of Asian-African cultural co-operation [as well as with] cultural contacts with others’ (1955). To be sure, no thinker of decolonization in Africa, or anywhere else for that matter, argued that the moral or political will behind independence originated in the international system of states that was represented in the UN and its members. Even legal scholars who maintained sympathies and faith in the ability of the UN to facilitate and support the political ambitions of the colonized in this way agreed. As one



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such scholar put it at the time: ‘The colonial system is an example of a case where the law has lagged behind social developments and the Declaration is an attempt to remedy this’ (Asamoah 1966, 164). Nevertheless, for such scholars and practitioners, the achievement of sovereign nation-statehood was enough to mark the postcolonial condition as the end of political freedom for colonized populations in itself. But, for those thinkers who, today, are more frequently associated with the complex and multifaceted reflections on what decolonization meant and what forms it might take, the sovereign nation-state remained a problematic point of departure for conceiving of and enacting postcolonial politics. It therefore also constituted the horizon of political possibilities available to Africa and Africans in a positive mode. This was true, it should be noted, for thinkers of African independence from Kwame Nkrumah (1962, 1970), to CLR James (2012), to Ali A. Mazrui (1968), among many others. Fanon, however, understood these tensions more clearly than most, even as he struggled to articulate a path beyond them before his untimely death in 1961. Fanon’s thoughts on the matter in his final text, 1961’s The Wretched of the Earth (2004) remain illustrative in this regard. While, for Fanon, ‘the emergence of the new nation and the demolition of the colonial system are the result of either a violent struggle by the newly independent people or outside violence by other colonized peoples, which has an inhibiting effect on the colonial regime’, colonial regimes had, perhaps surprisingly, responded with policies of decolonization as a means of securing both their capacity to manage colonized populations and to maintain their economic and political interests in that colony. Citing the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu as an example, Fanon would diagnose the colonial response to violent colonized resistances in general and on a global scale as being ‘gripped by panic’. Consequently, he argued, ‘their plan is to make the first move, to turn the liberation movement to the right and disarm the people: Quick, let’s decolonize. … Let’s vote a blueprint for Africa. … Let’s modernize it but for God’s sake let’s decolonize, let’s decolonize. … The colonizer replies with the strategy of containment – respecting the sovereignty of nations’ (30-1). Under these conditions, it should now be clear how discourses of anticolonial freedom constitutive of and corresponding to the legal context of decolonization need to be understood as both enabled and constrained by the conditions stipulated in Resolutions 1514 and 1541. The latter should now be understood to have been attempts to manage the kinds of self-determination and sovereignty that postcolonial entities could have achieved, in order for the former colonial powers to remain capable of knowing and policing their political aspirations and behaviours. Even if, as Gary Wilder has argued for instance, thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor attempted ‘to envision new forms of cosmopolitanism, humanism, universalism, and planetary reconciliation, forms that were concrete, rooted, situated, and embodied

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in lived experiences and refracted through particular but porous lifeworlds’ (Wilder 2015, 6), the fact remains that these and other attempts to reimagine the relationship between the metropolitan republic and the colonized were systematically and legally constrained within terms of the sovereign nationstatehood by the very nation-states they sought to transform. Thus, for Fanon the formal adoption of decolonization by colonial powers not only evidenced the force of the moral and political will of the colonized but also signified the colonizers’ cunning attempts to reconsolidate their power over their former holdings. While, of course, this largely took the form of the economic extortion and/or strangulation that Nkrumah had theorized in his famous study Neo-Colonialism (1970), Fanon (2004) identified the sovereign nation-state, that prerequisite for and threshold of postcolonial freedom as stipulated in Resolutions 1514 and 1541, as in many ways a facilitating technology for managing and constraining the conditions of colonial freedom. As Fanon put it, ‘independence has certainly brought the colonized peoples moral reparation and recognized their dignity. But they have not yet had time to elaborate a society or build and ascertain values … . Situated in a kind of indeterminate state they have fairly quickly convinced themselves that everything is decided elsewhere for everyone at the same time’ (40). The solution, then, was to take the form of the Third World’s effort to ‘not be content to define itself in relation to values which preceded it. On the contrary, the underdeveloped countries must endeavor to focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them’ (55). While such a solution recalled visions of the cultural cooperation grounding non-aligned world politics articulated at Bandung (1955), or the redefinition of self-determination along racial and Pan-continental lines (Mazrui 1967), for Fanon, as for others, it was a solution that would arrive at a later stage in the historical march towards freedom. Accordingly, any such solution would have to be preceded by the formation and fortification of the postcolonial state. Fanon (2004), for his part, argued in this vein that ‘the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists’, and amounted to nothing less, he continued, than a new humanism, and a new conception of humanity altogether (178–80). Only to the extent that national sovereignty was asserted and restored in all its unique modes, styles, and cultural manifestations, would the conditions of a universal justice be possible. We should, to be sure, in no way underestimate the significance of the achievements of African political will and the thought which articulated it at a moral, structural, and philosophical level. These achievements perhaps are more significant, and more substantive, than any other in the twentieth century. As Siba Grovogui (1996) has noted, ‘The current postcolonial crises suggest that the results of the dominant African strategy [of appropriating



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Western political and juridical idioms and attempting to adapt them to their own struggle] have been mixed at best’. Nevertheless, he continues, the primary objective of such strategies of ‘[affirming] African subjectivity (personalité africaine) at home and abroad’ was somewhat more successful than its secondary objective ‘to contribute to the creation of a postcolonial environment favorable to the ideal of interdependence among national communities’ (196). That thinkers of African anti- and postcolonialism remained constrained even in some of their most radical moments by the form of the nation-state is a testament to the architectonic force of that political formation, in all of its disciplinary structures, logics, and practices. It reveals, quite paradoxically, that the modern political subjectivities of the state and the international remain at once the condition and the limit of political thinking, as Fanon’s thought seems to suggest. The state, as both the condition for and object of the critiques of the structure of international politics (Bartelson 2001; Walker 2009), conceived within the logic of sovereign system of sovereign states, finds few expressions more clear and with stakes rarely as high than is obvious in the aporetic relationship of Resolutions 1514 and 1541 to the decolonizing process. The immediate exigencies and complications involved in building a new nation-state, understandably, occupied the majority of the energies of postcolonial thinkers and governors. Not the least of these complications was an immediately hostile international system of states, controlled by former colonial masters and emerging Great Powers like the United States, who shared the ambition to reconsolidate control over formerly colonized peoples. How to overcome engineered divisions on the basis of class and ethnicity, how to institute modernizing development programmes in a national economy that simultaneously responded to and drew from the traditional modes of subsistence of the people, how to cultivate a new and educated generation of men and women capable of running the country in the future, and how to protect the minimum national sovereignty of the nation while simultaneously maintaining good relations with neighbours and allies were all complex problematics to which postcolonial governments and thinkers have addressed themselves, with varying levels of success. These seem to be obvious reasons as to why Fanon, for instance, could hardly occupy himself with yet another colonial situation and work to support the ambitions for liberation among American Indians. But, just as importantly, the conditions of colonial reconsolidations of power in the United States similarly prevented American Indians from more thoroughly exploring a shared colonial predicament with African and Asian struggles such as those that Fanon discussed. Moreover, and less obviously, these reconsolidations worked in greater concert with the terms of decolonization than was perhaps appreciated by either party at the time.

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CONTENTS Chronologically, the legal processes that set into motion the complex of strategies designed to transform the management of colonized Native populations in the United States began, at least, in 1934 with the passage of the aforementioned Wheeler-Howard Act, also known as the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). This significantly precedes the legal processes and mechanisms through which the decolonization of African and Asian territories was effected. As we will see, however, the transformation of colonial governance in the United States from Reorganization into Termination legislation in 1953 rendered the ongoing development of these strategies not only contemporaneous, but at a minimum logically and legally consonant with the assumptions built into the international management of African postcolonial sovereignty. Understanding the historical conjunction of these seemingly disparate strategies of colonial governance, then, helps to explain how in fact it is possible to see them as disparate in the first place, and so why it was that thinkers such as Fanon and Deloria were not in more sustained conversation with one another. This explanation, ironically, reveals not only that their very separation is part of a differentiated but unified complex of logics and strategies colonial governance, but also that the epistemic violences enacted against such a historiographic perspective is necessary to adequately comprehend and attempt to work towards an extension of the archives of anticolonial thinking, saying, and acting that these authors set into motion through their respective discourses. The IRA, according to its stated purpose, was designed ‘to conserve and develop Indian lands and resources; to extend to Indians the right to form business and other organizations; to establish a credit system for Indians; to grant certain rights of home rule to Indians; to provide for vocational education for Indians; and for other purposes’ (IRA 1934). An extension of the New Deal programmes in the United States throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Reorganization set the terms upon which debates around the legal and political status of American Indians, and so the US federal government’s obligations to them, were organized. The policy was primarily designed to promote tribal self-rule (including matters of law and order) and economic development, involved the reorganization of tribal governments and development projects on reservations according to, and ultimately under the supervision of, constitutions drafted by progressive lawyers and administrators working for the BIA, the main branch of the US Department of the Interior that administered American Indian concerns. For Deloria (1988), writing some three and a half decades later, the IRA was one of the few laudable achievements in the otherwise deplorable history of relationships between the US Congress and Native territories and populations. As he saw it, ‘this act … provided for self-government of the



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reservations by the Indian residents. Written into the law as a prohibition on further allotment of Indian lands and provisions for land consolidation programs to be undertaken by the tribal council in order to rebuild an adequate land base’ (48). Reorganization, for Deloria, signalled some commitment on the part of the US federal government to not only honour treaties delineating the territorial boundaries of and cessions to settlers by Indian nations, but additionally, to allow for some measure of independent self-government and sovereignty, even if it was understood essentially as being ‘trusteeship’ in nature. In other words, Reorganization was a policy aimed at promoting independence and self-determination, albeit under the tightly constrained conditions of domestic dependent wardship that defined US–Native relations since 1831 (Bruyneel 2007). By 1953, however, this approach to the colonial governance of American Indians was more or less reversed. On 1 August, the US Congress passed what has come to be known as ‘termination’ policy in the aforementioned House Congressional Resolution 108. According this policy, Congress sought to, ‘as rapidly as possible’, make the Indians within the territorial limits of the United States subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States, and to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship … [and] upon the release of such tribes and individual members thereof from such disabilities and limitations, all offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the States of California, New York, and Texas and all other offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs whose primary purpose was to serve any Indian tribe or individual Indian freed from Federal supervision should be abolished. (HCR 108, 1953)

Partially, this transition from Reorganization to Termination was the result of American Indian resistance to the ‘debilitating’ effects of federal wardship ‘on reservations where government officials intruded into all aspects of segregated Indian life’, resulted in the formation of para-governmental and pan-Indian organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). The NCAI, in response to these conditions, aimed ‘to preserve Indian cultural values, uphold treaties, and promote the common welfare of all Native Americans. [Their] platform recommended the protection of trust property, first-class citizenship, and the settlement of tribal claims. It also asked federal officials to consult with Native Americans and to strictly follow the legal provisions of IRA charters’ (Philip 2002, 14). Partially, too, it was a response to significant shifts in American Indian communities that were prompted by the departure of thousands of people throughout the early 1940s from the reservations to participate in the effort to fight the Second World War.

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But, above all, Termination was perhaps most pointedly described by Deloria (1988), who, in decrying the turn away from Reorganization politics that the passage of HCR 108 signified, dubbed the new legislation the latest ‘weapon in the battle for Indian land’ (55). Termination resulted in massive dislocations of American Indians from reservations to the major cities such as Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles. It shut down schools on reservations, it dissolved health care services, and most importantly, it revoked federal recognition for hundreds of tribes that relied on this recognition to enforce the federal government’s obligations to Native people. Importantly, Termination dissolved Federal Trust over Native people and the protection of other territories, opening them up for sale on open markets and resulting in a massive loss of capital. Although the US federal government began to reverse these policies in the mid-1970s, their effects are still felt by most American Indians today (Bruyneel 2007; Walch, 1983). Given what Deloria rightfully called the ‘disastrous’ outcomes this policy produced, it was a very devastating weapon indeed. ‘Too often’, Deloria (1988) argued in this sense, ‘termination has been heavily disguised as a plan to offer the Indian people full citizenship rights’ (75). However, as a number of recent historical work has shown, the relationship between Reorganization and Termination was perhaps more complicated than Deloria had then estimated. This was because, as much as Reorganization promoted a minimum of tribal self-rule, it too was an attempt to produce a certain form of political subjectivity for American Indians that was intelligible and so easily managed by a colonial government. Even if, as Deloria thought, the language of Termination which portrayed this legislation as a benevolent attempt to promote full citizenship rights for American Indians was a ruse to disguise the imperial ambitions which lay beneath, this language itself was one of the primary mechanisms of that imperial project. This is not insignificant. In this way, as Kevin Bruyneel (2007) has argued, Reorganization and Termination were ‘overlapping’ policies (125). What held them together was the production and the careful management specific forms of self-determination and sovereignty. And these worked in tight conjunction with the forms of self-determination and sovereignty that would later be articulated in UN Resolution 1541. An understanding of both Reorganization and Termination as policies designed to produce tightly specified and circumscribed forms of selfdetermination and sovereignty for American Indians is important if we want to understand how they prevented thinkers such as Deloria from conjugating their struggle against colonialism with those of, say, Fanon. Here we will recall that Principle VI (a) of Resolution 1541 (1960) prioritized the achievement of a sovereign nation-state as the condition and limit of colonial



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freedom.12 Traditionally, this principle has been understood as the so-called saltwater or blue water thesis. According to this reading of Principle VI, the ‘saltwater thesis’ distinguished colonized populations who were eligible for independence from those who were not (Anaya 2004; Roy 1998; Tully 2000). This distinction was effectively determined by the fact of the geographic separation of colonizer from colonized by a body of saltwater. It was developed, on this account, ‘to preclude from decolonization procedures consideration of enclaves of indigenous or tribal peoples living within the external boundaries of independent states’ (Anaya 2004, 54). The reason for this argument seems obvious enough. Principle IV of Resolution 1541 (1960) only specifies ‘an obligation to transmit information in respect of a territory which is geographically separate’. In this way, postcolonial independence in the form of a self-determining and sovereign nationstate would only be considered for those territories and populations removed from their colonial oppressors by ‘blue-’ or ‘saltwater’. And, because the territorial integrity of postcolonial states could not be compromised, neither could that of existing states, which may nevertheless be engaged in relations of domination similar to those from whom the decolonizing states were finally breaking away. This problem forms the basis of the case made in contemporary claims for indigenous self-determination and sovereignty at the international level: namely that Native peoples in the American context constitute, at a minimum, ‘ethnically’ and ‘culturally’ distinct population. Indeed, this became one of the primary bases upon which American Indian activists, among other indigenous groups globally, began to push for international legal recognition in the early 1970s (Anaya, 2004; Henderson, 2007; Lightfoot 2016; Lyons, 1994; Niezen 2003). Principle V of Resolution 1541 (1960), however, complicated matters by stipulating that ‘once it has been established that such a prima facie case of geographical and ethnical or cultural distinctness exists, other elements may then be brought into consideration. These additional elements may be, inter alia, of an administrative, political, juridical, economic, or historical nature’. To address these potential complications – which is to say, to determine what ‘these additional elements’ that the Resolution mentions might look like – the opening preamble of Resolution 1541 directed readers’ attention to Resolution 742 of 27 November 1953 for the ‘list of factors’ that were initially identified and annexed as the basis for the subsequent development of, and culmination in, the Principles of 1541 (1960). Read in conjunction with Principle VI from Resolution 1541, Indian tribes would likely have been 12.  This is a principle that remains in place today in the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in Article 46 (1) (UNDRIP 2007).

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understood – under the terms articulated by that Resolution and Resolutions 742 (1953) before it – as either associating or integrating with the American federal state. This would have been possible by highlighting either the treaty arrangements that Reorganization had buttressed or through the assimilation into ‘full citizenship’ that Termination was coming to facilitate. To understand why this reading would have been possible, we must understand the function of, and parameters contained in Resolution 742. Resolution 742 was, crudely put, a preliminary list of conditions under which, as its title indicated, ‘factors which should be taken into account in deciding whether a Territory is or is not a Territory whose people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government’. The dating of Resolution 742 is not insignificant. This is because the kinds of policies envisioned in Resolution 742, adopted in November 1953, and which are cited as the basic factors informing the Annex of Principles guiding Resolution 1541, were in many ways consonant with the logic embedded in HCR 108 (1953), which we will recall was adopted in August of that same year. This consonance between UN Resolution 742 (and so, later, 1541 [1960]) and Termination legislation can at least partly explain the separation of African forms and discourses of decolonization at the international level from that of their American Indian contemporaries. On first glance, Resolution 742 (1953) seems to render Native people ineligible for any consideration of independence on the basis of their lack (from the perspective of governing bodies) of geographical distinctiveness from settler states. That is, it sets the stage for the ‘saltwater thesis’. American Indian tribes had no territorial control and were treated as the wards subject to a restricted and highly unequal set of concessions under the guise of American federal ‘trusteeship’. However, this ineligibility also needs to be understood in terms of the forms of economic and cultural independence that Resolution 742 specified. For example, Resolution 742 relied on some measure of ‘internal selfgovernment’ to indicate that colonized populations territories at that time were indeed independent. Under the terms of Reorganization, Native territories and populations in the United States were, by some accounts, in some possession of territorial government. They had some degree of legislative, executive, and judiciary sovereignty; there was popular participation within the governance of the community and, a certain degree of autonomy in determining the social, economic, and cultural affairs of the community. However problematic these forms of self-government and their relationship with BIA might have been for Native people, Reorganization had at least, on paper, enabled them, as Deloria himself had argued. Alternatively, Resolution 742 also allowed for the ‘free association of a territory’ on equal footing with the governing power, which, either by design or by happy coincidence, rendered Termination policy sufficient to the task



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international law had set for colonial powers. Here the indices for the achievement of such a status would have been the ‘opinion of the population’ in doing so, which Termination legislation at least partially sought to incorporate into its logic of granting American Indians full citizenship rights. Also covered by Termination legislation were considerations of ‘political advancement’, ‘constitutional considerations’, and ‘legislative representation’. Termination could alternately point to the ‘advancement’, which American Indians would experience by politically integrating with the American polis and demos (as one American sociologist, who was later cited by the South African Apartheid government in defence of its colonial occupation of Southwest Africa when it was brought to the International Court of Justice by Ethiopia and Liberia in 1962, argued [Mason 1964; IcJ 1966]); or, it could point to the ongoing constitutional negotiations over the status of treaties and Congress’ plenary power to recognize or dissolve them; or, it could point, once again, to the advantages American Indian individuals would experience by gaining legislative representation in elections for the House of Representatives, by voting as individuals (UNGAR 742, 1953).13 Read in light of the conditions that Resolutions 742 (1953) and 1541 (1960) would measure as the status of colonial occupation, Reorganization and Termination, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, would have then seemed to render Native territories and populations in the United States as at least partially ‘independent’ communities. Under these conditions, the outer limit of American Indian self-determination and sovereignty was not and could not have been factors indicating independence and self-determination at the international level. This is largely because the conditions of independent association with and within a colonizing power as defined by Resolution 742 were not only consonant with the strategies for managing Native self-government through Reorganization. They were also consonant with the logic of ‘independence’ as it was conceived by Termination. Where Resolution 742 stipulated that legal status and internal constitutional conditions had to allow for citizenship, suffrage, local rights and status, local officials, internal legislation of local government, and economic, social, and cultural jurisdiction over local government, the overlapping policies of Reorganization and Termination complied with (or perhaps even anticipated and informed) these conditions. Either way, it was because of this triple circumscription and management of forms of self-determination and sovereignty – in the overlapping logics of Reorganization, Termination, and Resolutions 742 and 1541 – that American Indian activists and thinkers like Deloria continued to struggle to maintain 13.  This, obviously overly optimistic reading, of Reorganization and Termination, is evidenced in the documentation of the various administrative logics, and troublingly affirmative treatment of them, in Phillip, Termination Revisited (2002).

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their status as wards of the American federal government. These were the three spaces in which American Indian Sovereignty could be expressed. This is not to say, to be sure, that the above readings of Termination and Reorganization, or perhaps of Resolutions 742 and 1541, were those that were accepted entirely by American Indian activists and thinkers. Nevertheless, Deloria’s view of many of the arrangements to which such readings would have pointed was not out of step with them. As we have seen, Deloria was not hostile to the arrangement of powers between the American state and tribal governments as stipulated by Reorganization. This was because, at a minimum, these arrangements provided for the recognition of sovereign Indian nations by and through a fiduciary relationship with the US government. It mattered little to Deloria (1988) that the fiduciary nature of this relationship restricted the parties capable of recognizing any such sovereignty to two: the United States and the Native signee. Evaluating the need for continuing such Reorganization-era arrangements in the BIA, Deloria argued that ‘on the whole, the organizational structure of the BIA provides one important feature which makes it capable of handling matters in a manner beneficial to the Indian people. That feature is that tribes are recognized as legal entities of the equivalent rank by the office regardless of what level the office is on. Thus a tribe is able to exercise its fundamental sovereignty at all levels of government … . Tribes … never lose their basic legal rights as governing bodies’ (130). The arrangements were far from perfect, Deloria seemed to admit, but they had at least provided a basic level of political agency for American Indians. Furthermore, in the face of the exigencies of the logics of ‘independence’ and ‘self-determination’ underpinning termination, Deloria exhibited more pragmatic tendencies in his anticolonial programme. These tendencies were not entirely removed from this imperative to maintain the fiduciary relationship between the BIA and Native populations. In his attempt to ‘redefine’ Indian Affairs for the coming decades, Deloria wrote, ‘The eventual movement among American Indians will be the “recolonization” of the unsettled areas of the nation by groups of Indian colonists’. This process of recolonization, he continued, would extend the ‘revival of Indian social and legal patterns’, as well as the ‘corporate structure … for development and use of small corporations as tools of development and recolonization’, for which the IRA had already sown some seeds (264). Not the least of these efforts would include the repurchasing of land for tribal reestablishment, and the conscription of ‘urban Indians’ dislocated by termination policies to urban centres such as Los Angeles, Denver, Minneapolis, and Chicago, into the procedures of tribal governance (255–64). In these ways, then, Deloria sought to turn the weapons of Termination back against the American state by redefining them. The extent to which he was successful in doing so, one supposes, depends on the extent to which one sees an articulation of self-determination and



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sovereignty that largely remains within the limits defined by the American state as separate from the weapons it wielded. So, Deloria remained relatively unable and uninterested in forging a more international view of decolonization, despite, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, punctuated moments in his thought to the contrary. This was because American Indian self-determination and sovereignty was carefully managed and circumscribed in such a way as to be disciplined into thinking in the terms of fiduciary arrangements. This is not, however, reducible to the fact that American Indian territories and populations were geographically contiguous with the United States, though this remains a serious factor. Rather, we must also consider the fact that as overlapping policies, Reorganization and Termination, Resolution 742 (1953) and eventually Resolution 1541 (1960), produced specific forms of self-determination and sovereignty that managed the terms upon which both American Indians and African and Asian populations could achieve nominal degrees of anticolonial freedom. Whether there was a direct, causal relationship in the historical development of Reorganization and Termination, on the one hand, and the UN Resolutions, on the other, remains an important question that, unfortunately for now, will only be answered by future research into this archive. There is no immediately available record of which countries, specifically, voted on Resolution 742 in 1953. Here, however, the formal and logical correspondences between the two are compelling enough to offer the beginnings of an explanation as to why the marginal moments explored in both Fanon’s and Deloria’s writings above remain marginal. LIMITS The achievements of anticolonial struggle during the first half of the twentieth century provoked significant shifts in the way in which politics, philosophy, morality, economy, culture, and the like were conceived from within and from without the West (Ahluwalia 2010; Young 2004). Curiously, however, as Gayatri Spivak (1999) has argued, the significance of these accomplishments has been severely attenuated by the contemporary arrangement of the human sciences, placing the decolonized and the still colonized in the position of the ‘native informant’ for the convenience of orthodox modes of neocolonial knowledge production. These epistemic arrangements, Spivak very helpfully reminds us (in a manner that is, disturbingly, increasingly rare), reflect and exist in correspondence with the material arrangements through which states, the post-war international system of states, and the fortifying institutions of finance capital continue to govern. Indeed, they rely on the (re)arrangement of the human sciences in order to do so. Pointing towards the potential epistemic rearrangements that might be gleaned from rereading Fanon and Deloria,

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as I have done in perhaps an all-too-tentative manner in the texts examined above, should remain wary of this danger. Similar co-optations of anticolonial struggle and critique, after all, were what allowed the badly needed selfdetermination and sovereignty of colonized peoples to be redirected towards the ends of continued colonial domination, as we have seen. This is to say nothing of the multiple limits that, in each text and thinker’s work, continue to confront us as their contemporary readers. Not the least of these limits are the complex, and in many ways insufficient, treatments of women, gender, and sexuality that we often associate with each author. Fanon’s highly problematic treatment of male and female sexualities within and across racial hierarchies, and Deloria’s association with AIM which has a very spotty record, at best, of its treatment of gender issues, suggest that much more work than I can currently offer on the question of the institutionalization, in many senses of this term, of anticolonial discourse. Moreover, and more importantly, the continued reification of these discourses (of which I am, at present, admittedly quite guilty) participates in preventing the unique epistemic views towards colonial power which, Spivak and others have highlighted, the thought of anticolonial women offer. This is no cheap ‘identity politics’, either. If we are to begin to understand the limits of selfdetermination and sovereignty, we must begin to understand how the archive of self-determination and sovereignty, even within the Western canon of political thought, has been constituted through the delimitation and administration of women’s genders, sexualities, and bodies under highly specified and tightly, often violently, managed conditions of legibility (Brown 1995; Honig 2013). As the political orders that this archive has helped to constitute has encountered non-European and non-white women, the differentiations, specifications, forms of management, and their constitutive violences have been even more pronounced, albeit unthinkable and unsayable by definition (Hartman 1997; Simpson 2014; Spivak 1999). But if I have participated in such a reification, without attempting to exonerate myself, I would hazard to say that such is the risk that one runs when one attempts to explore and diagnose the order(ing) of any archive. Archives, we know, represent simultaneous claims to origins and orders of rule (Derrida 1995). But, because of this, they exist in an aporetic relationship to the history of that order and its laws; at once preceding it by virtue of its constitution through the archive, and always contingent upon the success of that constitution. Fanon and Deloria are only intelligible to us as thinkers of self-determination and sovereignty because, ironically, the self-determination and sovereignty which they articulated was codified in an archive of legal logics, governing strategies, and the documents that serve as the evidence of these processes. But, the continued success of those archives relies upon the primacy of place we accord to self-determination and sovereignty as the



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organizing grammar of anticolonial thought. So too, perhaps, it is with the voices through whom we enunciate what counts as anticolonial thought itself. Above, I have simply fumbled through the labyrinths of colonial legal tactics and strategies of management, as I have sought to take impressions of etchings that have been left on their walls and long forgotten; to curate the marks of a silent history that has yet to be told, of an archive yet to be built.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Tiffany Hale, Shiera Malik, Isaac Kamola, Siba Grovogui, as well as three undergraduate readers at Trinity College and DePaul University, for their careful readings and constructive criticisms of this chapter. Any errors or shortcomings are solely my own.

REFERENCES Texts Ahluwalia, Pal. Out of Africa: Post-structuralism’s Colonial Roots. London: Routledge, 2010. Anaya, S. James. Indigenous Peoples in International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Asamoah, Obed Y. The Legal Significance of the Declarations of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Bartelson, Jens. The Critique of the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. Bruyneel, Kevin. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.indigenous Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Combe, Dominique. “‘Le Noir Et Le Langage’ Fanon Et Césaire.” Rue Descartes 83 (2014). Deloria, Vine. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press, 1965. ———. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 2008. ———. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

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Finnemore, Martha. “Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention.” Cultures of National Security, edited by Peter J. Katzenstein. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Fixico, Donald Lee. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Vintage, 2010. Grovogui, Siba N’Zatioula. Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 Henderson, James Youngblood. Indigenous Diplomacy and the Rights of Peoples: Achieving UN Recognition. Saskatoon: Purich Publishers, 2008. Honig, Bonnie. Antigone, Interrupted. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. James, CLR. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1968. ———. A History of Pan-African Revolt. New York: Pluto Press, 2012. Lightfoot, Sheryl. Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution. Basingstoke: Taylor & Francis, 2016. Lyons, Oren. Voice of Indigenous Peoples: Native People Address the United Nations: With the United Nations Draft Declaration of Indigenous Peoples Rights. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishing, 1994. Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. ———. “Settler Colonialism: Then and Now.” Critical Inquiry 41 (2015): 596–614. Mason, P. “Separate Development and South West Africa: Some Aspects of the Odendaal Report.” Race 5 (1964): 83–97. Mazrui, Ali A. The Anglo-African Commonwealth: Political Friction and Cultural Fusion. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1967. ———. Towards a Pax Africana; a Study of Ideology and Ambition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Niezen, Ronald. The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Nkrumah, Kwame. Towards Colonial Freedom: Africa in the Struggle against World Imperialism. London: Heinemann, 1962. ———. Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Panaf, 1970. Philip, Kenneth R. Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to Selfdetermination, 1933–1953. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Prashad, Vijay. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New York: New Press, 2007. Roy, Audrey Jane. “Sovereignty and Decolonization: Realizing Indigenous Self-determination at the United Nations and in Canada.” Master’s Thesis, 1998. Accessed July 22, 2016. http://web.uvic.ca/igov/research/pdfs/audrey_roy_thesisfinal.pdf.



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Sauvy, Alfred. “Trois Mondes, Une Planète.” L’Observateur (Paris), August 14, 1952. Accessed July 22, 2016. http://www.homme-moderne.org/societe/demo/ sauvy/3mondes.html. Shilliam, Robbie. The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. Smith, Paul Chaat and Robert Allen Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1996. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995. Walch, Michael C. “Terminating the Indian Termination Policy.” Stanford Law Review 35 (1983): 1181. Walker, R. B. J. After the Globe, Before the World. London: Routledge, 2009. Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham: Duke UP, 2015. Wilderson, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (2006): 387–409. ———. Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race. London: Verso, 2016. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 2004.

Legal Documents International Court of Justice. Pleadings, South West Africa. Vol. 5. The Hague, 1966. United Nations. Charter of the United Nations and Statute of the International Court of Justice. 1945. https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CTC/uncharter.pdf. ———. General Assembly. “Resolution 742: Factors Which Should Be Taken into Account in Deciding Whether a Territory Is or Is Not a Territory Whose People Have Not Yet Attained a Full Measure of Government.” 1953. Accessed July 22, 2016. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/086/07/ IMG/NR008607.pdf?OpenElement. ———. “Resolution 1514: Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.” 1960. Accessed July 22, 2016. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/152/88/IMG/NR015288. pdf?OpenElement. ———. “Resolution 1541: Principles Which Should Guide Members in Determining Whether or Not an Obligations Exists to Transmit Information Called for under Article 73e of the Charter.” 1960. Accessed July 22, 2016. https://documents-dds-ny. un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/153/15/IMG/NR015315.pdf?OpenElement.

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U.S. Congress. Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934, S.3645, 73rd Congress, Congressional Record, Ch. 575: 984. 18 June, 1934. http://legisworks.org/congress/73/publaw-383. pdf. ———. Concurrent Resolution of the Eighty-Third Congress First Session, 1953 – Indians, HCR 108, 83rd Congress, Law Relating to Indian Affairs: 614. http:// digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/vol6/html_files/Images/v6p0614.jpg.

Chapter 10

The Hip-Hop DJ as Black Archaeologist Madlib’s Beat Konducta in Africa and the Politics of Memory Seth M. Markle When I purchased Madlib’s 2010 album Medicine Show #3: Beat Konducta in Africa, I did so at a moment when I was seeking some much-needed distance (and relief) from a PhD dissertation near completion, a study that examines the impact of Tanzanian nationhood on US and Caribbean Black Power politics and identities during the 1960s and 1970s. As I casually listened to the album, it became painfully obvious that such a temporary escape was impossible as Madlib transported me right back to this historic era of African anticolonialism. Like many hip-hop fans nurtured on the music and culture during the late 1980s and early 1990s, my historical, cultural, and political consciousness as a teenager was partially forged by the Afrocentric hip-hop visions of the ‘Golden Era’. Groups and artists like Public Enemy, KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, X-Clan, Jeru the Damaja, Digable Planets, Queen Latifah, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Dred Scott, Eric B., and Rakim, and among many others spoke of the African drum, the ancient Egyptian pyramids, transatlantic enslavement, and warrior tribes. These tales of Africa’s redemption ended up laying the groundwork for life devoted to studying Africa and African diaspora history. Thus, as I became consumed by Madlib’s Africa vision, I found myself drawn to his sense of the past and intrigued by the hip-hop producer’s capacity and ability to flirt with the methodologies and theoretical approaches associated with the historian’s craft. In this chapter, I take up the notions of archiving, curating, and storytelling as a distinctive praxis of the hip-hop producer/DJ. Since hip-hop’s inception in the early 1970s, the DJ has profoundly shaped hip-hop’s development as a music and counter-culture (Chang 2006). Narratives about the creative and community building roles played by pioneering DJs such as Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Grand Wizard Theodore, to name but a few, have shown the DJs’ collective 207

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agency in the making of hip-hop and its evolution, leaving little doubt as to their privileged position in hip-hop’s origin story. However, when it comes to the growing academic discourses around hip-hop aesthetics and politics, too many scholars tend to narrow their analytic lens to critical interrogations of rap lyrics, elevating the emcee/rapper as the primary agent and subject of intellectual inquiry for examining the limitations of hip-hop as a space for black cultural and political expression. Despite this shortcoming, studies that focus on hip-hop have also revealed its relationship to history, particularly to other music genres and cultural and political movements from which hiphop practitioners’ draw their inspiration and knowledge. Tricia Rose gives much-needed mention to the DJ’s sense of history in her groundbreaking text Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, describing the DJ practice of sampling through the use of digital technology as a tool of ‘alternative cultural expression’ that allows the beat maker to edit (i.e. chop and loop) and order samples taken from historical records (Rose 1994). On the same theme, ethnomusicologist Joseph Schloss, author of Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, suggests that when hip-hop producers’ use digital sampling ‘to create sonic collages’ then it should be regarded as an ‘aesthetic choice consistent with the history and values of the hip-hop community’ (Schloss 2004). Since a very young age, Madlib has been developing a cutting-edge sound aesthetic through non-stop experimentation. Between 2010 and 2012, he was immersed in an intense creative process, churning out thirteen albums in a self-proclaimed improvisational fashion as part of his Medicine Show series. This chapter examines the third instalment, Beat Konducta in Africa, and the ways in which Madlib, an African American sample-based hip-hop producer, utilizes multiple samples from different genres culled and curated from his own personal archive of vinyl records (as well as CDs, cassette tapes, and films) as ‘dialogue and commentary’ on the historical significance of African and African diaspora music and pan-Africanist struggle. With this in mind, I want to offer some reflections on the relationship between sample-based hip-hop production and black memory-making by addressing the following questions: How has the hip-hop generation conceptualized and contributed to the construction of an African anticolonial archives? In what ways have hip-hop artists, particularly the DJ/producer, engaged with such an archive to sonically narrate cultural and political memories of post-war African liberation? What do these hip-hop narratives tell us about hip-hop artists’ diaspora consciousness, most significantly, a consciousness premised on an imagined return to the homeland: Africa? It is my contention that the hip-hop DJ is a crucial agent for understanding the hip-hop community’s sense of the past and how sample-based production



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allows hip-hop artists to engage with ideas, themes, and questions about panAfricanism taken up by the Civil Rights/Black Power generation. Like many African Americans, Madlib inherited a complex set of ideas about Africa and its symbolic centrality to understanding questions about identity formation, racial oppression, cultural production, history, and memory among black peoples. To study the African diaspora as a ‘process and condition’ requires a number of critical lenses for looking at the various and complex ways in which subjects and communities imagine, invent, and reinvent Africa across time and space (Patterson and Kelley 2000). Still today, Africa as ‘home’ remains an epistemological and ontological preoccupation of black diasporan peoples and movements, serving as a foundational element in the making of their intersectional identities (Edward 2001; Butler 2001; Hall 1990).1 What is crucial for understanding how Africa functions in this album is directly tied to how Madlib collects, selects, and manipulates historical artefacts from the post-war period of African decolonization in a manner that constructs an historically rooted, diasporic hip-hop narrative of return to the homeland. In attempting to locate Africa and its historical past in the late hip-hop imagination, I will explore elements of practice and style, particularly the implications associated with the art of sampling in order to unearth and highlight the artistry and role of the DJ in archiving and narrating the past. Part of my intention here, admittedly, is not only to steer us away from a tendency to rely on rap lyrics for the crux of our textual analyses but also to build upon previous studies, which have argued that a consciousness of Africa and African history is a salient feature in the African Americanbased hip-hop expressive cultures (Cheney 2005; Chang 2006; Collins 2006; Perkins 1996; Stewart 2005). In lieu of recent warmly received hip-hop albums produced by other DJ/producers that sample from different African music genres such as Dr. No’s Ethiopium by Oh No, Fela Soul by Amerigo Gazaway, and Ghostfunk by Max Tannone, it is perhaps an appropriate time to revisit not only Africa’s imprint on US hip-hop but also sample-based hiphop production as a medium through which diaspora identities are made and remade, hidden histories are unearthed, and dominant nationalist narratives of African anticolonialism are reinforced. This idea of what constitutes an archive, how it is constructed, and the meanings attached to its selected material is taken up in the theoretical work of David Scott and Michael Hanchard. Together, they insist that we view the archive not only as a physical space but also as a ‘generative discursive 1.  For contemporary theorists of diaspora, important as it is to be cognizant of Africa’s symbolic, cultural, political, and geographical relevance to diaspora formations, understanding racial and gendered hierarchies in the context of global capitalism, and locating other spaces of longing/belonging are fruitful breaks from narrow approaches that reduce diaspora to a singular place of origin and belonging.

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system’ of potential statements of knowledge (Scott 2008). For it is in its construction where we learn how the past is conserved, critiqued, and reused. The archive is thus a critical site and concept for examining the politics of the African diaspora, particularly the predominant representations of Africa in the collective memory of racially oppressed communities. According to Hanchard, black memory-making is defined as a ‘horizontally constituted’ and ‘collectively instantiated process’ that ‘exists outside the parameters of state-controlled national histories’ (Hanchard 2008). As a cultural-political project undertaken by non-state actors, it is premised on the preservation and ‘memorialization’ of racist oppression and anti-racist resistance to said oppression (Hanchard 2008). Black memory-making is not historicism, and one need not be a trained archivist or historian to engage with the past. Rather it is ‘mode of understanding and representation’ whereby such narratives are ‘allusive’, ‘partial’, ‘fragmentary’, and ‘non-linear’ (Scott 2008). In highlighting the implications and possibilities of hip-hop ‘memory practices’ and particular communities’ mode of remembering and ‘re-membering’, Scott urges us to look to specific generational actors and their intimate relationship with archival materials while Hanchard stresses the importance of how ‘objects of memory’ (the materials that make up an archive) are manipulated for diaspora self-fashioning purposes. As Scott argues, the ‘quotidian construction of the archive’ is premised on the impulse of these actors to engage in a ‘distinctive labor of an archaeologist’ (Scott 2008). When understood in the context of the black radical protest tradition, this form of ‘elementary labor’ is associated with a ‘more expansive type of archivist’: the black archaeologist. And, as Hanchard explains, the black archaeologist performs ‘highly selective, idiosyncratic ways of classifying information and knowledge of objects’: They seek to recreate a sound or a feeling of yesteryear, resuscitate a waning political tendency or form of political mobilization. In the process these chroniclers marked the distance between past and present, not only in epochal and temporal terms but in terms of style, taste, judgment, ideological conflicts and dispositions. (Hanchard 2008)

In the case considered in the following section, I position Madlib, an African American hip-hop producer/DJ, as a black archaeologist who possesses an acute sensibility towards the very idea of an archive, enabling him to form a ‘fundamental discursive reality’ in his own right through a critical engagement with some of the constitutive themes of black memory such as repatriation, international African solidarity, postcolonial nation-building, and women’s liberation (Hanchard 2008). Sample-based hip-hop production represents an exercise in this kind of archaeological activity characterized



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by the assemblage and reassemblage of ‘45s and 12 inch vinyl classics’ into varied aural narratives that tell and retell stories about the hip-hop generations’ relationship to and memories of the past (Hanchard 2008; Scott 2008). When examining key discourses associated with era of African decolonization and international African solidarity, Madlib redresses four dominant diasporic representational discourses of Africa taken up by Black Power activists, intellectuals, and artists who came of age during ‘the long 1960s’ (Joseph 2009):2 Repatriation and expatriation; African cultural identity; anticolonial nationalist resistance; and postcolonial nation-state formation. With these themes in mind, I aim to answer the following questions about Madlib’s sample-based hip-hop production and how it renders an analysis about the concepts of the archive, black memory practices, and the making of African diasporic identities and their interconnection: What do motherland claims mean to diasporan people seeking to engender an authentic, cultural way of being? In what ways are political conceptions of global African unity articulated? What is the relationship between women’s liberation and anticolonial nationalism? To what extent does the nation-state form act as an agent of liberation in Africa and her diaspora? The ways in which Madlib grapples with these questions call attention to the Black Power movement’s legacy within the hip-hop music and culture in the United States in the twenty-first century (Rose 1994; Steward 2005; Gladney 1995; Aldridge and Steward 2005). Interestingly, Madlib reproduces and challenges certain modes of identification with Africa that Black Power activists, intellectuals, and organizations employed. By framing Madlib as an ‘archaeologist of collective black memory’ and Beat Konducta in Africa as a ‘construct of homeland’, I suggest that he manages to ‘memorialize’ two overlapping historic moments of the 1960s and 1970s: the US Black Power movement and African anticolonial nationalist struggle (Scott 2006; Butler 2001). For today’s hip-hop generation, Madlib’s Beat Konducta in Africa offers many keen insights into how the DJ can breathe new life into history. Through referencing pan-Africanist heroes, through expressing solidarity with frontline African nation-states and southern African liberation movements, and through sampling and merging genres such as African psychedelic rock, Afrobeat, highlife, soukous, and funk, he recovers the sources that ‘make memory possible, that keep alive events and figures, the sensibilities and mentalities, the knowledge and rationalities that have been part of the shaping and reshaping of the traditions of who were are’ (Scott 1999). In Beat Konducta in Africa, Madlib remembers a 2.  Black Power historian Peniel Joseph uses the phrases ‘the Long 1960s’ to capture the overlapping strategies and ideological tendencies between the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement in an effort to rethink the ways in which historians have tended to draw clear lines of difference between the two. The use of the phrase ‘the long 1960s’ encapsulates three decades (1950–1980).

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dynamic political and cultural moment of modern African and African diaspora history by conversing with a set of constitutive narrative elements often associated with the historical period under question. MADLIB: A BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Thirty miles west of Los Angeles lay Oxnard, a multi-ethnic and multiracial suburban enclave where Otis Jackson, Jr., also known as Madlib, grew up in a family of musicians. His father, Otis Jackson, Sr., is a soul singer; his mother, Dora Senesca Jackson, is a blues musician and songwriter; and his uncle, Jon Faddis, is a trumpet player who has performed with the likes of jazz legends such as Charlie Mingus and Duke Ellington. Together, they played a shaping hand in Madlib’s musical tastes and historical knowledge, exposing him to the sounds of jazz, soul, classical, and rock (Schraeder 2004). Not only did they ‘train’ his ears in music, but they also helped to cultivate a love for vinyl records. ‘I knew more jazz than rap’, Madlib said in a 2007 interview. ‘I was always in the studio with [my dad] when I was real young. I was three years old in the studio with him everyday while he was recording, and my mom wrote most of his music. When I was a young age my grandfather had all my uncle’s records, so I used to go through all that shit. That’s how I really learned about jazz’ (quoted in Madlib: King of Beats 2002). By the age of six, Madlib was a jazz connoisseur building up his own vinyl archive by raiding the collections of his father and uncle (Velazquez 2004). ‘My pops had me at the studio since I was born’, he remembered. ‘That’s why I got into the music. He would let me go up on the controls and mess with stuff’ (Nelson 2016). By the age of seven, he was producing his own beats. In the mid-1990s, Madlib was producing beats and rhyming for the hip-hop group Lootpack. Joined by DJ Rhome and Wild Child, the group released its first album, Soundpieces: Da Antidote in 1998, which was released on Stones Throw Records, a Los Angeles–based independent label with a reputation for releasing alternative, cutting-edge music and giving its artists a lot of creative freedom and control. Two years after Madlib joined the Stones Throw family, he released his debut album Unseen (under the alias Quasimoto) to critical acclaim (Hassan 2009). In the eleven years that passed between his first album and the Medicine Show #3 series, Madlib (under a host of aliases) has released over fifty albums (including collaborations) and produced beats for well-known artists such as Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), Busta Rhymes, Erykah Badu, and Talib Kweli while covering a range of genres such as jazz, broken-beat, and Bollywood.3 3.  Between 2006 and 2010, Malib released 10 albums before the release of Medicine Show #3: Beat Konducta in Africa. Notable releases include Champion Sound (with the late J-Dilla) (2007), Yesterday’s Universe (2007), and Madvillainy 2: The Madlib Remix (2008).



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Ever since the recording industry recognized the profitability of hip-hop music in the early 1990s, hip-hop adherents have found ways to condemn the state of hip-hop. As 2009 gave way to 2010, rap music’s ability to generate profits in the billions of dollars led to an existential crisis. Mainstream acts like Lil’ Wayne, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Rick Ross, and Flo Rida ruled the airwaves and racked up six Grammy awards in the process. Yet rap music’s popularity, its transformation to pop music, compelled many to set out to explain the political ramifications of hip-hop’s crossover and subsequent gross commodification. In 2009 and 2010, the arguments about hip-hop’s demise were often attributed to the glorification of sexism, misogyny, violence, and materialism in rap lyrics; the decline of social justice messages in rap lyrics; rap musicians’ decision to cater to white suburban audiences; state harassment and surveillance of socially conscious artists; and the saturation of rap music due to the Internet. Whatever the symptom, the rapper became the definitive scapegoat, marked as a facilitator of a process of cultural deterioration. These forces led many critics to search for a saviour but often with a gaze fixed on the rapper community. Having released ten albums from multiple artists in the previous year to much acclaim (but not massive record sales), Stones Throw entered 2010 with momentum, seeking to answer questions about hip-hop’s fragmentation and its lack of political and cultural food for thought by continuing to offer a space for progressive hip-hop music.4 Madlib took advantage of this aching void as well as independent label support by launching his Medicine Show series under the auspices of his newly formed record label Madlib Invasion. On 23 March, he released the series’ third album, Beat Konducta in Africa. As much as this creative project was a reflection of his diverse musical tastes, it was also a showcase of the depth and diversity of his personal hip-hop archive. CRATE DIGGIN’ AS AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRAXIS David Scott argues that in order for the ‘sources that make memory possible … the sensibilities and mentalities, the knowledge and rationalities, that have been part of shaping and reshaping the traditions of who we are’ that a ‘practice of recovery’ and the subsequent construction of an archive needs to be undertaken (Scott 2008). Like the black archaeologist, the DJ possesses an ‘obsessive’ impulse ‘to collect, to order and classify’, and thus engages in excavation practices. Madlib has travelled the world to mom-and-pop shops, suburban and rural garage, and yard sales and thrift stores searching for rare records for sampling purposes. And it is through this process of what the 4. For a full catalogue of Stones Throw Records releases, go to https://www.stonesthrow.com/ catalog.

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hip-hop community refers to ‘crate digging’ or ‘digging in the crates’ that facilitate the making of hip-hop archives. To hip-hop producers, claims to authenticity are strongly tied to the quality and quantity of one’s personal vinyl collection and the extent to which time and energy is devoted to its construction. As such, crate digging ‘carries with it a sense of valor and symbolizes an unending quest for the next record’ (Schloss 2004).5 Madlib claims adherence to crate digging principles in the song of the same name. Released in 1998 on Lootpack’s debut album Sound Pieces: Da Antidote, the lyrics to ‘Crate Diggin’’ map the process through which hip-hop producers acquire historical–musical knowledge by collecting vinyl records. The chorus of the song, rapped by Madlib, reads as follow: What do you know about crate diggin’?/ What does crate diggin’ mean to me?/ Diggin’ for them unordinary sounding loops/ Even it’s unclear to thee/ (Lootpack 1999)

Such lyrics hint at philosophical tenets that inform the agency of the hip-hop producer/DJ. The rarer the record, the more coveted and valuable it is because it speaks to the hip-hop producer’s aversion to producing sounds from the same source material that, in turn, produces a stereotypical kind of hip-hop sound already well known to the public and, more importantly, to the tight-knit community of hip-hop producers. ‘Never Top 40’, Madlib further explains, ‘just raw addict vintage that I kick with the rest of my archives’ (Lootpack 1999). The archaeological ethos of the hip-hop producer, or what Schloss calls his ‘digging mind-set’, is critical for understanding the unique position within a larger hip-hop community comprised of dancers, MCs/rappers, spoken word poets, and graffiti writers. By embracing this authentic praxis, the hip-hop producer/DJ becomes a traveller and researcher (and not to mention a smallscale thief if the record prices are too high) (Lootpack 1999).6 Madlib’s lyrics suggest that the DJ can only achieve an original style and gain legitimacy as 5.  In further defining the term, Schloss writes: ‘The “crates” part of the term “digging in the crates” operates on both a literal and figurative levels, not unlike the two senses in which MCs use the term “microphone”. … On the most concrete level, “crates” refers to the fact that inexpensive odd, or notyet priced records are often stored in milk crates on the floor of used record stores; these are precisely the records that producers are interested in. On a similarly literal level, the term “crates” also refers to producers’ habit of storing their own records in such crates at home. This is a particularly useful system for producers who are also deejays because they can use the crates to transport records to live shows. On a more figurative level, the crates become a gloss for a producers’ record collection, in both quantitative and qualitative senses. Producers, for instance, commonly count their records by crates rather than individual albums.’ 6.  Madlib further raps: ‘Down in San Francisco to New Orleans/Lookin’ for the dopest loops to sympte/Lookin’ at these high ass prices, my nigga/Tells me to back ish don’t tempt me/Cuz the last time I got caught up in that game/I bagged so much shit, I put the store to shame/.’



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a DJ by possessing an impulse to collect oft-kilter sound sources all the while adhering to a certain code conduct. Put differently, Madlib does the work of the archaeologist by directly participating ‘in the construction of what might be called an institution of memory and idiom remembering’ (Scott, 2008). What constitutes the legitimacy and skill level of the DJ is determined by how one physically searches, locates, and selects the sounds of the past to sample that will be crucial components of any composition or ‘object of memory’. A dedication to one’s craft will result, in the words of Madlib, in some ‘dirty ass loops’ – a classic hip-hop sound. Building an archive from searching, collecting, and storing rare records is an educational experience as well, enhancing and expanding the hiphop producer’s historical consciousness. This experience of self-education allows for a critical engagement with the archive through the use of digital sampling technology. Like the black archaeologist, the DJ collects, amasses, studies, and organizes his ‘objects of memory’ informed by the knowledge acquired from the objects themselves (Hanchard 2008). In a 2005 interview, Madlib further commented on crate digging as a theory and practice of selfeducation – a principal learning tool about the past: I’m a record lover. ... Basically, records are my teacher; that’s how I get my influences. Everything I know, my records taught me. ... But you should know your craft. Hopefully I know mine. Being hungry for more knowledge definitely helps. (Murphy 2005)

Stones Throw rap artist Guilty Simpson commented that Madlib’s archive contains records ‘from almost every nation’, adding, ‘He doesn’t just buy the record to sample. He wants to understand each song. He doesn’t need to know the language to realize musicality’ (Weiss, 2010). Another collaborator, jazz/hip-hop artist Karriem Riggins, remembers travelling with Madlib to the Midwest to dig for records in the attics of personal homes and that Madlib was ‘always reading music books and liner notes of old records’ (Weiss 2010). Like the black archaeologist, the DJ selects the vinyl based on a set of criteria, and the implications of those choices are predicated on a commitment to searching, collecting, and storing knowledge. In 2014, it was reported that Madlib’s vinyl archive, stored in milk crates, weighed in at 4 tons! ‘I’ve got about three or four rooms of records, and two rooms of instruments’, he once revealed. ‘I’ve probably got more than four tons [of records] by now. I’m constantly buying records’ (Ali 2014). After this process of recovery and classification, the hip-hop producer confines oneself to the studio to ‘recreate, manipulate and combine’ samples using digital technology (Schloss, 2004; Self, 2002). Madlib prefers to keep

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it simple, choosing to use turntables, a few basic samplers like the SP-303 or SP-12, and Roland VS-1680 digital workstation for mixing: My studio’s basic: mad records. I don’t have no computers. I don’t have any big set-ups people have. I just have my 303 sampler or SP 12, or whatever I use and just records. And a little eight digital boards. That’s all I need. … It doesn’t limit my possibilities. (Urban Smarts 2004)

And in staying true to the original hip-hop DJ techniques, he also continues to record music onto cassette tapes (Nelson 2016). According to Madlib, it is not the cutting-edge sampling technological equipment that produces quality work, but rather how such technology is utilized. To best facilitate creative production, Madlib prefers to work at a recording studio he built inside a former Masonic Temple in Highland Park, Los Angeles, largely because it provides easy access to his massive vinyl archive as well as a sense of solitude (Weis 2010). A ‘studio hermit’ by trade, who regards the use of marijuana as a ‘channelling’ medium, he employs a ‘hit-and-run’ approach to samplebased hip-hop production, one that is more tailored to feel than technical perfection (Chairman Mao, 2006).7 Created out of humble conditions, his sound aesthetic is intended to convey an intentional rawness that harkens back to an old-school hip-hop sound aesthetic created by old-school techniques and informed by jazz performance philosophies.8 For instance, the jazz principle of improvisation is another important facet of Madlib’s methodological approach to making music/memory. ‘One take, like a free jazz dude’, he once said when asked about how long it takes for him to make a record (Murphy 2005; Chairman Mao 2006). By opting to make music in a moment of spontaneity, as jazz critic Stanley Crouch states, he is working ‘right in the heat and pressure of the moment, giving form and order in a mobile environment, where choices must be constantly assessed and reacted to in one way or another’. There exists an ‘aesthetic dignity’ whereby artists ‘achieve and express as they go about inventing music and meeting the challenge of the moment’ (Crouch 2006). With this stream of consciousness in mind, one that arises out of an intimate and familiar space of production, Madlib’s creative process – from recovery to the selection of samples to its manipulation – helps us better contextualize the making of Medicine Show #3: Beat Konducta in Africa as a discursive construct. 7.  In a 2004 interview, Madlib remarked: ‘I wanna be in the studio, but you have to sell records, so you have to go do some shows. Show I can take ‘em or leave ‘em. I’m a studio dude. My main love is being in the studio.’ See Adrian Schraeder, ‘Madlib’, Urban Smarts, October 14, 2004, http://www. urbansmarts. com/interviews/madlib.htm; Jeff Weiss, ‘The Madlib Mystique: An Exclusive Interview with Underground Hip Hop’s Most Elusive Producer’. 8.  Madlib cites jazz artists Thelonious Monk and Sun Ra as two of his major artistic influences.



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BEAT KONDUCTA IN AFRICA AS A ‘CONSTRUCT OF HOMELAND’ Across forty-three tracks lasting just a little less than 80 minutes, Madlib draws upon the dominant representational discourses of Africa championed during the Black Power era in the United States, re-assembling and arranging varied samples culled from his massive vinyl archive. In the remainder of this chapter, I am interested in framing these samples as ‘objects of memory’ and teasing out the implications of some of the samples that he utilizes to memorialize post-war African liberation in a language of diaspora. A closer look at the ways in which Madlib puts his archive to ‘critical use’, including the samples selected and chopped (edited) and thus inscribed with new meaning, will reveal how African anticolonialism is remembered by promoting modes of African diasporic identification based on Black Power critical discourses of the past. During the Black Power era, African Americans sought to redefine themselves in opposition to their American national identity by looking towards an Africa emerging out of European colonial rule as independent nation-states. Many Black Power adherents went so far as to claim Africa as their true home and source of cultural identity. On a surface level, one need not go much further than the song titles in order to get a sense of the type of ‘homeland relationship’ (Butler 2001) to Africa that Madlib seeks to re-establish. For example, seven of forty-three tracks contain the word ‘Africa’ or ‘African’, including, but not limited to ‘The Struggle to Unite (One Africa)’, ‘African Map Watch’, and ‘African Bounce’. Six song titles are presented in an African language (i.e. Kiswahili, Ancient Egyptian, Fante, and Chichewa) such as ‘Mtima’, ‘Unika’, and ‘Kanika’ while thirteen song titles evoke Afrocentric concepts and ideas such as ‘Chant 2’, ‘Heritage Slip’, ‘Tradition’, ‘Brothers and Sisters’, and ‘Natural Sound Waves’. In further framing the album as a return to the homeland, Madlib’s introductory track is appropriately titled ‘Motherland’, which paints the image of a physical return to Africa by way of an airplane flight. He samples the voice an African woman flight attendant to create this image while at the same time positioning the album as music for these returnees to listen to for the duration of the flight. After ten seconds of a sampled ‘traditional’ African drum rhythm, the flight attendant says, ‘Welcome to Flight 002 to Africa. Flight time will be 10 hours and 45 minutes. Cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet. So with your relaxation, enjoy some cool vibration’ (Madlib 2010). Beyond the literal meaning of the title, Africa as ancestral homeland is given added meaning through the incorporation of other samples. The use of ‘traditional’ African percussion, which opens the track, centres the drum as a key symbol of African cultural production. What follows is the use of a live recording of a rap artist speaking to his audience to further illustrate a diasporic homeland relationship Africa:

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Africa in the place to be/ How many people in the house love their mother?/ Throw your hands up in the air if you love your mother/ Now, if you really love your mother let me hear you say, ‘Hooooo!’/ (Madlib 2010)

The mixing of sampled African percussion with the above-mentioned commentary suggests a continuum between traditional African music and contemporary hip-hop music with the former serving as the foundation to the latter. Madlib pushes forth this motherland trope in another track titled ‘Mtima’, where he repeatedly samples the phrase ‘Let us speak about the motherland’ from the hip-hop track ‘A.F.R.I.C.A.’, which appears on Stetsasonic’s 1987 album On Fire (Madlib 2010; Stetsasonic 1986). These statements of identification with Africa serve to articulate a kinship bond to the continent and, when viewed in its entirety, ‘Motherland’ intimates a close cultural–musical affinity between Africa and ‘her’ diaspora. After all, hip-hop would be nothing without the beat. Madlib continues to operate within this dominant representational discourse of Africa through the critical use of other voice samples in other songs. If the use of a flight attendant voice sample in ‘Motherland’ is meant to convey a physical diasporic return to Africa, then the use of samples taken from interviews with African American expatriates and tourists draw this narrative of return out further, capturing the African American experience of being ‘home’. In ‘Chant 3’, for example, the voice sample briefly narrates: ‘I’m very glad to be here. I speak for myself. … It is a pleasure to be here … to receive such a warm welcome from the people of this country. Also we come … to the motherland … where we came from … our ancestors’ (Madlib, 2010). The use of this sample draws attention to both the idea of return and its actuality, highlighting how the homeland relationship in conceived in terms of Africa’s reception of diaspora returnees, an act carried out by thousands of African Americans during the 1960s and 1970s, especially to independent nations such as Ghana and Tanzania (Gaines 2006; Markle 2013; Markle 2008). In order to further establish a diaspora homeland relationship to Africa, Madlib positions Africa as a foundational site of African and Afro-diasporic cultural production by using a voice sample that relays pertinent geographic and demographic information. In ‘Raw Introduction to Afreaka’ the following information and insights are conveyed: This is Africa. … Land of All Black People. … Twelve and a half million square miles of the richest real estate on the face of the earth. … Home of five hundred million Africans. (Madlib 2010) Mother country to one hundred and fifty million Black People scattered around the globe. (Madlib 2010)



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The immensity of Africa is sometimes difficult to comprehend, particularly for the Americans who themselves come from a big continent. Still, Africa is four times the size of the area of the United States. It embraces a full fifth of the land area of the globe and it constitutes the second largest landmass in the world. It contains more than fifty countries, forty-three of which are united through the Organization of African Unity. (Madlib 2010)

As a starting point to defining what Africa is, Madlib provides listeners with pertinent statistical, geographic, and demographic information very reminiscent of social science research on Africa that characterizes the continent within fixed spatial parameters. Yet the nature of this focus is modified for a black diaspora audience as Madlib goes to great lengths to use and reuse this sample in order to challenge the limits of national-territorial identity. The power of Africa is evident in its population size that extends beyond its continental-territorial borders to the Caribbean and the Americas. This articulation of belonging to Africa is evidenced in the use of phrases: ‘This is Africa, land of all black people’ and ‘Mother country to over 150,000,000 black people scattered all over the globe’. Very similar to the Black Power rhetoric employed in the past, Madlib’s message of identification draws attention to how black marginalized groups sought to challenge national-territorial markers of identity construction. In another track titled ‘Hunting Theme’, this voice sample is utilized again yet this time relaying statements that are meant to memorialize African ancient civilizations and societies and their leaders. As both Hanchard and Scott argue, one tendency of ‘Afro-modern political actors’ is to preserve the memory of the precolonial period and thus ‘rehabilitate forgotten figures and events’ (Hanchard 2008; Scott 2008). This ‘enduring preoccupation’ with a time period that preceded Western imperialism and colonization leads to the making of ‘representative icons’ that serve as models of state leadership and anticolonial resistance, The Africa of Almamy Samori Toure … the Africa of Behanzin, King of Dahomey … King of Kano … the Africa of King Zulu and Shaka … of Hannibal, Menelik … Africa … whose independence Marcus Garvey devoted his entire life. … Africa … for whose sovereignty Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral and Felix Moumie were assassinated. … This is Africa. (Madlib 2010)

For diaspora subjects, pan-Africanist iconographic readings of the past are essential in establishing a protest tradition. African anticolonial thought and action did not begin with post-Second World War movements and parties. As pointed out by Black Power advocates in the 1960s, there exists a long history of African resistance to colonialism; the struggle for liberation is as old as European colonialism itself. Madlib, too, places the wars for national

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liberation in Africa after 1945 in a broader temporal context by remembering key African and African diasporan historical figures of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Emperor Menelik’s victory over the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in Ethiopia in 1896 to Congo’s independence, which led to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1960–61. ‘Yafeu’, for example, uses voice sample to stress the importance of remembering Africa’s precolonial past as a tool to combat Western historical narratives that have omitted Africa’s contributions to the world in the historical record. Rather than reinforce long-held racist stereotypes that depict Africa as a primitive and savage land, Madlib challenges these prevailing anti-black tropes: Africa … Africa … Africa … On the west coast … Africa … The Africa of Behanzin, King of Dahomey … King Zulu … The Africa of …(Madlib 2010) Africa is also the seat of the world’s oldest settled culture that is Ancient Egypt whose pharaonic civilization dating back many millennia was one of the greatest civilizations in the history of man. Although many people would want to forget that the civilization generally recognized as the world’s oldest … Africa … was African born … Africa … along the banks … Africa! ... of the Nile River … Africa! ... These same people would ignore the richness of the black cultures that strived during the greatness of empires such as Mali … Africa! ... Ghana … Africa! ... Mali … Africa! … Africa! … Africa! ... (Madlib 2010) For centuries the creative genius of the Black people have had a decisive influence on the development of universal art (Africa!) … (Madlib 2010) Mali, Ghana and Songhai … centers of learning, education … in an age, which is often favorably compared to medieval Europe …(Madlib 2010)

Madlib does not deviate from Black Power desires to critically engage with Africa’s precolonial history for the purposes of racial empowerment by venerating ancient African societies (Van Deburg 1993). Throughout Beat Konducta in Africa, Madlib seeks to not only convey Africa as a generative source of Afro-diasporic cultural identity, but also as a source of political resistance. He does so by sampling from the 1996 compilation album Radio Freedom: Voice of the African National Congress and People’s Army (Umkhonto we Sizwe).9 Radio Freedom originated in a hideout in Johannesburg in 1963 at time when state repression of anti-apartheid activism had intensified. By 1969, it was a well-established alternative source of information to Apartheid government-controlled news (‘Medicine Show No. 3’ 2010; ‘Album Review’ 2010). Run by ANC activists exiled in Tanzania and Zambia, it broadcasted drama plays, speeches, news reports, music, and poetry to keep people (South Africans, supporters, and sympathizers) abreast 9. Also known as MK, Umkhonto we Sizwe was the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), which fought against apartheid military voices between 1962 and 1990.



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of the ANC’s activities and ideology and sought to mobilize and galvanize support and commitment to its cause (Mosia 1994; Radio Freedom 2009). Madlib samples from this compilation in songs such as ‘Jungle Music’, ‘The Struggle to Unite’, ‘Tradition’, ‘Spearsthrow for Oh No’, ‘Tear Gas and Bullets for Freedom’, and ‘Red, Black and Green Showcase’. In doing so, he harkens back to the 1970s/1980s era when African American involvement in dismantling the apartheid regime peaked, characterized by mass marches, financial and material support, and US government lobbying (Minter 2007; Brooks 2008; Plummer 1997; Von Eschen 1997). In sampling from Radio Freedom, it is important to address how Madlib ‘chops’ (i.e. edits) this sample source from his archive to deliver a different message than was originally intended. For instance, in ‘Jungle Soundz’, aspects of the black South African radio host’s sign-on comments are sampled resulting in the phrase, ‘voice of the African Nation’ to describe the function of the album (Madlib 2010). The original version, however, claims the show is the ‘voice of the African National Congress’ (Radio Freedom, 1996). By cutting out the letters ‘a’ and ‘l’ and the word ‘Congress’, one can see how the meaning of the phrase transforms from a reference to a specific antiapartheid organization to a message far more pan-Africanist in its orientation. This allows for Madlib to convey a consistent message of African unity that dominates the album. The sample – ‘voice of the African nation’ – is used repeatedly in tracks such as ‘Tradition’, ‘Spearsthrow for Oh No’, ‘Tear Gas and Bullets for Freedom’, ‘African Map Watch’, ‘Chant 3’, and ‘Bonus R’. This is not to say, however, that Madlib seeks to promote notions of political solidarity by strictly remembering the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. For example, in ‘Brothers and Sisters’, he uses the Radio Freedom source material to revisit critical questions about the nature of resistance to apartheid and its implications. Madlib’s revisions to the original version, as seen below, does very little to alter a political message about loyalty and commitment to the struggle and understanding the need to eliminate the apartheid system first and foremost. (Words and phrases from the original version that are included in Madlib’s version are in italics.) The original version reads: Because it is though these institutions that Botha and Malan are able to control our lines. Anybody, then, who participates in these structures, who like the community councilors, deliberately take steps to defend and protect these institutions is without a doubt an enemy of the people. It means that such a person is aiding and abetting apartheid. Such a person cannot be spared. There is only one fate that is facing the apartheid regime. There is only one way that the evil system of apartheid can take and this is the road to destruction. Already Pretoria is approaching the precipice. It is on the edge of bottomless abyss of shame and disgrace in which all-oppressive and colonial regimes have fallen. It goes without saying that the agents of Pretoria, the defenders and

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perpetrators of this system, must go with it. They must follow it. The apartheid regime has outlived itself. Its destruction is long overdue. And its continued existence is a constant reminder to us that we have a war to fight. (Radio Freedom 1996)

Madlib’s version reads: … are able to control our lines. Anybody, then, who participates in these structures … is without a doubt an enemy of the people. … Such a person cannot be spared. There is only one fate that that is facing the apartheid regime … and this is the road to destruction. Already Pretoria is approaching the precipice. ... It goes without saying. They must go with it. They must follow it. … Its destruction is long overdue. And its continued existence is a constant reminder to us that we have a war to fight. (Madlib 2010)

In ‘Black Memory versus State Memory’, Hanchard argues that acts of memorialization are directly bound up with acts of forgetting. As this dialectic suggests, forgetting allows a ‘collectivity of people …the opportunity to marginalize traumatic or even joyous experiences’ and moments (Hanchard 2008). In the example above Madlib forgets the gendered tensions specific to the nationalist struggle of the ANC. Probably the most striking example of this consequence of remembering through sampling unfolds in ‘The Struggle to Unite (One Africa)’. Here, Madlib samples from a speech made by ANC president Oliver Tambo titled ‘The Year of Women’, which was broadcast on Radio Freedom in 1985 (Schloss 2004). When looked at comparatively, Madlib’s engagement with the speech drastically changes the meaning of the original version. The original version reads: In the name of the National Committee of the ANC, I declare the year of the women. And charge the democratic and patriotic forces of our country with the task of joining in the efforts to mobilize our women to unite in struggle for people’s power. In our beleaguered country the women’s place is in the battlefront of struggle. It will be our special task this year to organize and mobilize our womenfolk into a powerful united force for revolutionary change. The task falls on men and women alike. All of us together as comrades in struggle. (Radio Freedom 2009)

Madlib’s version reads: I declare the year … . And charge … our country with the task … to unite in struggle for people’s power. In our beleaguered country … in the battlefront of struggle. … It will be our special task this year to organize and mobilize … into



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a powerful united force for revolutionary change. The task falls on men and women alike. All of us together as comrades in struggle. (Madlib 2010)

As historian Shireen Hassim claims, Tambo’s speech was an important intervention in South Africa’s fight to dismantle the apartheid system. Efforts by South African anti-apartheid male leaders such as Tambo to advance a discussion about gender equality led to critical policy changes that both facilitated and impeded women’s political agency both in the ANC and MK (Hassim 2004). ‘The Year of Women’ was a celebratory moment – a critical intervention in an ongoing debate about the importance of women’s liberation in the anticolonial struggle that produced a number of internal tensions. Such tensions were evident in the Black Power movement as well where women activists often imagined a liberated future that had taken into account the intersection between race, class, and gender oppression. At stake was whether or not national liberation would usher in women’s liberation at the same time. For a majority of black nationalist men, challenging patriarchy, sexism, and other gendered norms of behaviour were of secondary concern. Madlib bolsters the practice of silencing women’s participation and marginalization within black and African-led sociopolitical movements. The implications of these sampling choices are twofold. On one hand, Madlib redresses and validates an incredibly important clandestine institution-in-exile – Radio Freedom – and its contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle while putting forth a message of unity and racial solidarity absent a critique of gender inequality. (It should be noted that women’s voices and musical contributions are hard to locate throughout the album.) On the other hand, by re-inscribing new meaning into a sample taken from a speech on women’s liberation, Madlib operates with a Black Power framework that all too commonly rendered ‘the women question’ moot (Collier-Thomas and Franklin 2001; Ransby 2005; Gore 2011; Theoharis 2009). Although Madlib’s conception of diaspora does not take into account the multiple oppressions that black women have faced, he associates diaspora belonging to Africa with a pan-African consciousness, exposing his listeners to mediums through which liberation ideals were pursued. What must be remembered is the resiliency of the spirit during a time of revolutionary violence, primarily captured in the voices of resistance against apartheid and in the rhetoric of political pan-Africanism, and embodied in the heroic figures of resistance to varied colonial conquests. The sampling of ANC speeches and radio broadcast commentary, etc., indicates a militant worldview of a shared black and African experience related to struggles against racism, colonialism, and imperialism.

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However, crafting a pan-Africanist politics is not Madlib’s only concern. Musically, Beat Konducta in Africa is an eclectic mix of sounds – multiple conversations between cities, nations, genres, and musicians. Madlib is equally interested in the exploration of polyrhythms, tempos, funk bass lines, as well as musical traditions, and all the particularities of their idioms and cadences. In working within Black Power discourses of cultural nationalism, his sampling of African music highlights difference within that black-shared experience while also establishing its cultural kinship to African American music, specifically hip-hop. By sampling modern African music produced during the era of decolonization, Madlib also comes into dialogue with the question of the postcolonial nation-state and its attendant national identity building projects. Over the course of the album, he gives iconic status to relatively lesser known African musicians/artists and bands such as Koola Lobitos (Nigeria), The Kelenkye Band (Ghana), Question Mark (Kenya), and The W.I.T.C.H. (Zambia), allowing for the recovery of some forgotten pasts in the history of postcolonial African music. To illustrate this point, I want to briefly examine the implications of Madlib’s sampling psychedelic rock music from Zambia. Arising out of the mining town of Ndola, Emmanuel Chanda, Chris Mbewe, Jon Mbewe, Gideon Mulenga, and Biondi Sinkala came together to form We Intend To Create Havoc, also known as The W.I.T.C.H. It was the early 1970s and this five-piece band experimented with wah wah pedal effects, fuzz guitar solos, and gospel-inspired group harmonies to create songs that captured the immense loss of optimism in the nationalist project among Zambians (The W.I.T.C.H. 2010). Madlib is celebrating a sound and culture fused together from a combination of influences. The W.I.T.C.H. looked to the African diaspora for sources of inspiration that spoke to these feelings of urban youth angst. The group appropriated sounds not only from the Rolling Stones and Fela Kuti but also from the electric guitar blues of Jimi Hendrix and the soul/funk of James Brown. Zambian rock – or ‘Zamrock’ – exemplifies, for Madlib, a moment of inspiring cross-cultural exchange and musical innovation, a message that resonates among present-day hip-hop generations living in a hyperglobalized world. During the decolonization era, Black Power activists were prone to elevate certain nations as paragons of nation-statehood and representational sites of belonging for politicized diaspora communities. Under the leadership of President Kenneth Kaunda, a self-identified pan-Africanist, Zambia became a symbol of Africa’s future for its industrialized economic power and for the liberationist ideals found in Kaunda’s philosophy of African humanism. However, by the early 1970s, the Zambian economy had crumbled under the weight of a global oil crisis, and the collapse of prices of its primary export, copper (Kuanda 1996; Ferguson 1999; Ferguson 1992).



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During this time the Zambian state grounded its view of citizenship in idealized notions of rural-based cultural and socialistic values. Largely an outgrowth of state anxieties over rapid rural migration to the cities, sharp economic decline, and the ‘urban immorality’ of rebellious youth, the state went to great lengths to shape what it meant to be Zambian (Ferguson 1992). It promoted an African personality that treated the rural peasant as a generative force of unchanging traditional values that could be harnessed and used to defend Zambians from the culturally imperialist influences of the West. The dynamic urban music cultures and youth identities that coincided with urbanization and industrialization, and expressed in psychedelic rock and other musical forms, undermined this statist perception of loyal citizenship. What the state saw as consequences of capitalist modernity in the ‘wah wah’ heavy, sound distortion musings of bands such as Rikki Ililonga & Musi-O-Tunya, Amanaz, The Peace, Chrissy Zebby Tembo & the Ngozi Family, The Blackfoot (or Blackfoot), and The W.I.T.C.H., Madlib saw as a dynamic force of Afro-cosmopolitan style and identity influenced by the character of colonial and postcolonial urbanization particular to the Zambian Copperbelt. Whereas Black Power advocates of the past tended to downplay state authoritarianism among progressive postcolonial states, Madlib breaks away from this mode of identification with Africa. In re-affirming the universal character of Africa-derived music, he recovers and remembers some alternative musical forms that, until quite recently, remained hidden from Black Power and national-state narratives of African decolonization. In the end, there is a reason as to why Madlib employs the sampled phrase, ‘This is Africa’ with regularity in multiple tracks, reminding his listeners that Africa represents multiple soundscapes that have little to with a politics of resistance. Sample-based hip-hop production can shape our understanding about how the past is archived, curated, and narrated. Drawing exclusively on his own personal archive of old records, Madlib has crafted a richly textured musical– historical narrative of return to the homeland that memorializes the pan-Africanist project of the post-war era. He boldly embarks on a journey into this past, revealing how the hip-hop producer shares certain traits and philosophies with what Hanchard and Scott have termed the ‘black archaeologist’. With the framing of the hip-hop producer in this way, we can trace the contours of beat production – from ‘digging in the crates’ to the critical, creative use of samples – to assess how a politics of black memory functions in the late US hip-hop imagination and articulates an African diaspora identity and consciousness. In the case of Medicine Show #3: Beat Konducta in Africa, Madlib performs acts of remembering and forgetting through a critical engagement with Black Power representational discourses about African liberation. This practice of recovery, Hanchard argues, is ‘intrinsic’ to African diasporic self-formation. Yet, as this chapter has suggested, it is the hip-hop

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producer – not the MC/rapper – that offers nuanced insight into the question of what constitutes an African anticolonial archive due to the archaeological labour associated with hip-hop sound production practices. Madlib’s ‘esoteric’ historical knowledge, which he acquired via the construction and reading of his own anticolonial archive, results in a story about Africa and its implications for how her descendants in the Africa diaspora see themselves as cultural and political beings. And the narrative that unfolds in this album under review, put simply, is one that bounds African Americans to their ancestral homeland, encourages pan-African political resistance and unity, and privileges African-derived cultural models of music production. The trajectory of Madlib’s career illustrates the distinctive ways he has negotiated with the predatory practices of the music industry and managed to cultivate an aesthetic style uniquely his own without having to completely forfeit artistic freedom and control. In a 2005 interview, he weighed in on the lowly state of hip-hop and the challenges progressive artists faced: ‘It’s not about the music anymore. You gotta do something different to stay in it. I’m with the times, but I want to have the past in my shit, too. Past, present and future is where I’m at’ (Murphy, 2005). I trust that Madlib’s refusal to make music strictly for financial gain, combined with his commitment to incorporate the past into his music, still holds meaning for hip-hop scholars and practitioners interested in studying the intersection between hip-hop aesthetics, diaspora identity formation, history, and memory. Acknowledgements There are a few people I would like to thank who helped me out tremendously in putting together this chapter. James Ford, Hillina Seife, and Michael Ralph provided critical feedback of an early draft of this chapter when presented on a panel titled ‘“The World Is Yours”: On Hip Hop and Global Liberation’ at the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora conference in November 2011. I would also like to thank Isaac Kamola and Shiera Malik for asking me to contribute to this book and for providing useful comments that aided towards the completion of this work. REFERENCES BOOKS AND ARTICLES Aldridge, Derrick P. and James B. Stewart. 2005. “Hip Hop in History: Past, Present, and Future.” Journal of African American History 90, no. 3 Special Issue “The History of Hip Hop”: 190–195.



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Brooks, Pamela E. 2008. Boycotts, Buses, and Passes: Black Women’s Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Butler, Kim. 2001. “Defining Diaspora: Refining a Discourse.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 10, no. 2: 189–219. Chang, Jeff. 2006. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Cheney, Charnise. 2005. “In Search of the ‘Revolutionary Generation: (En)Gendering the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism.’” Journal of African American History, 90, no. 3 Special Issue “The History of Hip Hop”: 278–298. Collier-Thomas, Bettye and V.P. Franklin, editors. 2001. Sisters in Struggle: African American in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: New York University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2006. From Black Power Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Crouch, Stanley. 2006. Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz. New York: Basic Books. Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2001. “The Uses of Diaspora.” Social Text 19, no. 1 (Spring): 45–73. Ferguson, James. 1992. “The Country and the City on the Copperbelt.” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (February): 81–92. Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Gaines, Kevin K. 2006. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Gladney, Marvin J. 1995. “The Black Arts Movement and Hip-Hop.” African American Review 29, no. 2 (Summer): 291–301. Gore, Dayo F. 2011. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: New York University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 223–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hanchard, Michael. 2008. “Black Memory versus State Memory: Notes toward a Method.” small axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 45–62. Hassim, Shireen. “Nationalism, Feminism and Autonomy: The ANC in Exile and the Question of Women.” The Journal of South African Studies 30, no. 3 (September 2004): 433–456. Joseph, Peniel. 2009. “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field.” Journal of American History 96, no. 3: 751–776. Kuanda, Kenneth D. 1966. “A Humanist in Africa.” The Journal of Modern African Societies 4, no. 4 (December): 553–555. Markle, Seth M. 2008. “‘Book Publishers for a Pan-African World’: Drum and Spear Press and Tanzania’s Ujamaa Ideology.” The Black Scholar 37, no. 4: 16–26. Markle, Seth M. 2013. “Brother Malcolm, Comrade Babu: Black Internationalism and the Politics of Friendship.” Biography 36, no. 3: 540–567. Minter, William. editor. 2007. No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950–2000. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

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Mosia, Lebona. 1994. “From Revolutionary to Regime Radio: Three Decades of National Broadcasting in Southern Africa.” Africa Media Review 8, no. 1: 1–24. Murphy, Bill. 2005. “The Phantom Menace.” Electronic Musician. June 1. http:// emusician.com/remixmag/artists_interviews/musicians/remix_phantom_menace/. Patterson, Tiffany Ruby and Robin D. G. Kelley. 2000. “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World.” African Studies Review 43, no. 1 (April): 11–45. Perkins, William Eric. 1996. “The Rap Attack: An Introduction.” In Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture. Edited by William Eric Perkins, 1–45. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Plummer, Brenda Gayle. 1997. Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Schloss, Joseph G. 2004. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Scott, David. 1999. “The Archaeology of Black Memory: An Interview with Robert A. Hill.” small axe 5 (March): 80–150. Scott, David. 2008. “Introduction: On the Archaeologies of Black Memory.” small axe 12, no. 2 (June): i–xvi. Self, Henry. 2001–2002. “Digital Sampling: A Cultural Perspective.” UCLA Entertainment Law Review 347: 347–359. Sisson, Patrick. 2007. “The Stop Smiling Interview with Madlib.” Stop Smilinge 30: 62–67. Stewart, James B. 2005. “Message in the Music: Political Commentary in Black Popular Music from Rhythm and Blues to Early Hip Hop.” Journal of African American History 90, no. 3 Special Issue “The History of Hip Hop”: 196–225. Theoharis, Jeanne, Komozi Woodard and Dayo F. Gore, editors. 2009. Want to Start a Revolution: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: New York University Press. Van Deburg William L. 1993. A New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Von Eschon, Penny. 1997. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-colonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

DISCOGRAPHY Lootpack. Soundpeices: Da Antitode. Stones Throw Records, 1999, Compact disc. Madlib. Medicine Show No. 3: Beat Konducta in Africa. Madlib Invazion, 2010, Compact disc. Radio Freedom: The Voice of the African National Congress and Umkhonto Wa Sizwe. Rounder Records, 2009, Compact disc. Stetsasonic. On Fire. Tommy Boy Entertainment, 1986, Compact disc. The W.I.T.C.H. Introduction. Recorded 1973, Now-Again Records, 2010, Compact disc.



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ELECTRONIC SOURCES Ali, Reyan. “Madlib Muses on Methods Behind His Madness.” Spin Magazine. March 20, 2014. http://www.spin.com/2014/03/madlib-freddie-gibbs-pinata-interview/. “Album Review: Medicine Show No. 3: Beat Konducta in Africa.” The Word Is Bond. May 13, 2010. http://www.thewordisbond.com/arhivies/6851. Chairman Mao. “Most Known Unknown.” XXL Magazine. January 29, 2006. http:// www.stonesthrow.com/news/2006/01/most-known-unknown. Diwon. “Madlib Interview.” Shempseed. March 16, 2011. http://shemspeed.com/ madlib-interview-revisited. Hassan, Aliya. “Madlib: All Hail the King of Beats.” Rap Pages Magazine. February 10, 2009. http://www.rappagesmagazine.com/index.php?...madlib-all-hail-theking-of-beats.htm. “Interview: Madlib – Interview on Adult Swim.” The Word Is Bond. June 20, 2010. http://www.thewordisbond.com/archives/7427. Madlib: King of Beats [Video]. (2002). Retrieved October 1, 2011 from http://www. redbullmusicacademy.com/video-archive/lectures/madlib __king_of_the beats. “Medicine Show No. 3: Beat Konducta in Africa.” LA Record. April 23, 2010. http://larecord.com/album-reviews/2010/04/23/madlib-medicine-show-no-3beat-konducta-in-africa. Murphy, Bill. “The Phantom Menace.” Electronic Musician. June 1, 2005. http:// emusician.com/remixmag/artists_interviews/ musicians/ remix_phantom_menace/. Nelson, Jr., Keith. “Hip Hop Legend Madlib Talks Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, and Cassette Tape Bliss.” Digital Trends. May 14, 2016. http://www.digitaltrends.com /music/madlib-kanye-west-mf-doom-red-bull/. Ransby, Babara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: The University North Carolina Press, 2005. Schraeder, Adrian. “Madlib.” Urban Smarts. October 14, 2004. http://www. urbansmarts.com/interviews/madlib.htm. Urban Smarts. “Madlib Interview.” Stones Throw. October 19, 2004. https://www. stonesthrow.com/news/2004/10/madlib-interview. Velazquez, Valeria. “Sound Pieces: Madlib Interview.” Hip Hop Elements. November 20, 2004. http://www.stonesthrow.com/news/2004/11/sound-piecesmadlib-interview. Weiss, Jeff. “The Madlib Mystique: An Exclusive Interview with Underground Hip Hop’s Most Elusive Producer.” La Weekly. June 24, 2010. http://www.laweekly/ com/content/print Version /970704/.

Chapter 11

Archiving Thomas Sankara’s Presence Metamorphoses of Memory and Revolution in Burkina Faso Allen Stack

Responding to Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, Christopher Okigbo penned the following couplet in his ‘Lament of the Silent Sisters’. We carry in our worlds that flourish Our worlds that have failed ... —Christopher Okigbo (1971, 41)

This chapter focuses on this couplet by Okigbo, but specifically on the ellipsis at the end of the second line. As with the loosely connected dots of the ellipsis, the archiving practices described in this chapter render visible and audible upon the contemporary landscape the loose connectivity of the many silences that attend the failures of our flourishing worlds. Just as those persistent dots, these archiving practices insist on giving presence to anticoloniality’s life in the form of a future that disempowers the present colonialities in favour of popular ownership and agency. An ellipsis is understood to insert a pause or break. By it something is conjured for the world – something that escapes the over-determined line of thought’s present unfolding as intended by the temporal exigencies of grammar’s linearity. The ellipsis points to something that persists, insists, and strains for an expressivity that is neither contained by nor beholden to the words nor the worlds that precede it. The ellipsis of Okigbo’s couplet draws back together a complication of failing and flourishing worlds – a complication that exceeds grammar, language, theory, and most of all history.

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SILENCES AND ELLIPSES Silences are melodies Heard in retrospect —Christopher Okigbo (1971, ‘ Lament of the Silent Sisters’ 43)

In the dried seasonal riverbeds, women crushed rocks, sifting them, and making piles of different size gravel and sand. The gravel was sold daily to entrepreneurs who came to the outskirts of Ouagadougou with their trucks and carried the gravel away for construction, paying these women 100f (20 cents) to fill the truck. Ouaga was on the cusp of an enormous building boom that would see concrete structures multiply around the city and whole swathes of downtown levelled and emptied of its population. In 2004–05 evacuations happened at gunpoint while residents protested. Of the women crushing and sifting gravel that day my companion asked me: Do you have this in your country? ... The ones who fill their trucks with this gravel will maybe only pay these women 100f (about 20 cents). ... There is nothing the women can do. ... If they ask for more money, they won’t get it. ... Can we help them? It isn’t possible. ... There are too many of them!

This was over thirteen years after the assassination of the beloved revolutionary president Thomas Sankara. His four-year-long revolution in the mid1980s was directed precisely by the kind of socialist idea that these women could live better. And that the country’s, and indeed Africa’s, fiscal resources must not go to repaying international creditors but instead must be spent on these women and their families. Sankara’s presidency ended in 1987 when Blaise Compaoré came to power in a coup d’état. Sankara and his aides were assassinated and buried hastily in unmarked graves on the outskirts of the capital, Ouagadougou. Since then, his grave has been made into a shrine, a site of ceremonies and pilgrimages. The primary motive for his assassination issued by his diplomatic efforts to build solidarity among African countries for a collective refusal to repay the creditors of African sovereign debts. Following the 2014 Burkinabé popular uprising which sent Compaoré from office and into exile, the judiciary began investigating the role of Compaoré and his aides in Sankara’s assassination; likewise they opened investigations into the assassination of the journalist, Norbert Zongo, and into other political dissidents who were disappeared or murdered during the Compaoré presidency. They also began looking into embezzlement and corruption by the Compaoré government. In September 2015, a counter-revolutionary coup,



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orchestrated by anti-democratic loyalists of Compaoré’s regime, erupted at the very moment when these inquiries opened and bodies were being exhumed. This counter-revolution was defeated by popular protest, which reinstated the democratically elected government. Today, new editions of Sankara’s speeches circulate openly on the streets of Burkina Faso for the first time ever.1 In spite of the political repression that followed his assassination, Sankara’s speeches are still being read, heard, dubbed, and reiterated in discourses across Burkina Faso. At the height of the Reagan–Thatcher era, Sankara insisted that the world needed an Africa that was free from imperial impositions not just for the sake of black well-being but for the restoration of humankind’s dignity – ‘for a world of peace and respect’. On the other side of the Atlantic, two decades after his assassination, I found copies of Sankara’s speeches being sold outside the Giant supermarket in Columbia Heights, Washington, DC, by a community organizer. In the city of Brescia, Italy where there is a sizeable community of Burkinabé ex-patriots, the Catholic clergy invite the Burkinabé expats every year to celebrate the life of President Sankara as the modern president who more than any other enacted the teachings of Jesus in his government. His salary was the lowest of any head of state in the world. All of these encounters with the memory of Sankara – from the streets of Washington, DC to the clergy in Brescia, Italy – point to the imaginal impact that his revolution bore outside of Burkina Faso – an impact potent across many places and settings. Even if Sankara is virtually invisible on curricula in Western academia, he is well known and well remembered. One could certainly situate Sankara in a long genealogy of anticolonial revolutionary movements. The early twentieth-century Volta-Bani war was one of the most formidable and decentralized military resistances to colonial occupation of its time as it almost eliminated French occupation of western Burkina Faso (Şaul, 2001). There was the revolutionary politics of Burkinabé representative, Ouezzin Coulibaly; his outspoken foresight of what the Marshall Plan would erode; and his ambiguous and sudden death (Grovogui 2006). Further back, well-known anticolonial wars of the nineteenth century were led by Samori Touré and others. Those struggles were preceded by the eighteenth-century Mukhtariyya movement and its vision of West Africa as the centre of an emerging renaissance in the world – a renaissance that would be impelled by a broad-based Sufi movement with enough social influence across polities to leverage petty dynasts for peace and social reform (Ould elBara 2008, 193–212). And, at the height of the slave trade, the revolutionary 1. See the Ouagadougou editions currently in circulation: Sandwidi, Simplice, ed. 2015. Les grands discours du Président Thomas Sankara: Tome 1–2. Ouagadougou: Les Éditions Arc-en-ciel.

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abolition of slavery in the Senegal River Valley by AbdulQadir Kan’s movement influenced the early British abolitionist Clarkson (Ware III 2014, 125–141) and had precedents in the seventeenth-century anti-slavery revolts led by Nasir al-Din and Njaay Saal (ibid.). These earlier events of mobilized resistance need noting in order to refute the commonplace reading of African socialists in the twentieth century as petty adherents to a Marxist politics learnt from Europeans and translated into their own ‘local’ or ‘cultural’ contexts. It also helps explain how Sankara’s movement, and the transnationalist resistances of Northwest Africa that preceded him, created archiving practices that maintained the presence of a revolutionary vision in Burkina Faso, despite the extensive international and domestic suppression that defined the quarter-century-long Compaoré dictatorship – itself an international armament and institutionalization of a Reagan–Thatcher neoliberalism. This chapter investigates how collective memories are re-enacted through the re-emergence of archival fragments, how curation practices accompany their re-emergence, and how the changing modalities of their affective circulation impact public expressions of discontent and mobilization. Archiving practices help sustain possibilities for a collective to retake the public spaces of political life – reversing the dislocation of power and of resources that coloniality attempts to continually re-enact, reinstitute, rearm, and re-enforce. This chapter examines these loosely connected dots across a brief period of Burkinabé history to develop insight into how we might connect broader historical moments of re-emergent anticoloniality across Northwest Africa and the oceans. My interest here is in developing a deeper more robust pedagogy of resistance to colonial incursion. I call the hope for such a pedagogy the hope of an Afrodidact. An Afrodidact does not seek to define what Africa is or means any more than the Metrodidact of Cyrenaica sought to define what motherhood is or means.2 Rather, like Metrodidaxis, Afrodidaxis invokes a concrete but undefinable source of instruction whose appellation as such upsets existing assumptions about knowledge and value as well as their interconnection, collection, and distribution in favour of an alternative arrangement of knowledge and value.

2.  Aristippus the Younger was said to have insisted on being called the Metrodidact having learnt philosophy from his mother, Arete, whom his grandfather, Aristippus, had instructed. Despite the undoubted esteem that would have come with being called by his given name, as it associated him with Aristippus, who was a direct pupil of Socrates – an important lineage for any philosopher of his milieu to trace; it would appear he enjoyed contesting the gender contours of these knowledgeproducing milieus of Sophistic jousting by insisting on the appellation Metrodidact and connecting his thought more closely with Arete than these other more respected masculine figures and filiations.



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CURATING ANTICOLONIAL VISIONS And he said to the ram: Disarm. And I said: Except by rooting, Who could pluck yam tubers from their base? —Christopher Okigbo (1971, ‘Initiations’ 9)

I and a few others would get together over tea at the home of an elementary school teacher. From time to time, he would share new magazines and articles with the rest of us. In those same moments of passing around and discussing articles and books, our host would eventually emerge with a few pieces from his small library of older articles, magazines, and books that he had collected over the years. On this day, the discussion had gone from President Compaoré’s new national holiday – the National Day of Pardon – to the disappearance of Norbert Zongo, who had been investigating Compaoré brother for murder. Zongo’s voice and writings resonated as a kind of public refusal to forget the violence and murder that the regime had deployed as it came to power and on which it continued to rely. This day, fourteen years after Sankara’s death, was the first time that my acquaintance shared a small archive in the form of a footlocker of books, magazines, and clippings mostly from African and world political history but containing some natural history and other material. This would not be the last time that I encountered his private trove of historical accounts nor others like his. Many other people shared collections of private documents that were passed around and discussed in these informal courtyard settings. That year, 2001, was the fortieth anniversary of Lumumba’s assassination. Jeune Afrique published a feature article on his assassination and disappearance. My friend pulled out this recent acquisition, which gave an account of the political intervention that led to Lumumba’s imprisonment, and it included Lumumba’s final letter from prison. My acquaintance explained to me that in Lumumba’s letter he told his family that he had ‘come too soon’. The odd thing is that the letter presented in the article never makes that claim. One could read Lumumba’s final letter as moving in this direction because he speaks of how bright the future is for the Congo, but he says nothing about ‘coming too soon’. Nevertheless, the idea that Lumumba had ‘come too soon’ made sense from our vantage point – forty years after his assassination – and in relation to the Congo’s tragic independence. The assertion that Lumumba came before his time implies that the fate of Lumumba’s vision did not die with him, nor Sankara’s with him.

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The textual relics of these leaders and of their movements insert a temporal paradox into the present. This is the paradox of their significance for the present. The genealogical tradition approaches the archive as potentially revelatory of the present’s origination. Yet, the archival text or relic – in presencing that which is no longer present – also marks the present’s break with the past. These strewn elements and texts of the past may bear some account of the present’s origination, but may offer no account of the present’s futurity. This may yield an anxiety that the present’s futurity has no use for these relics and memories. The memories of dispersed aspirations unachieved – memories that these relics conjure – may demand that we save, hide, and share them with care; it may demand that we reread and reteach their lessons and that we, in doing so, thereby project them out into the future. ARCHIVING FRANÇAFRIQUE AND DENORMALIZING THE FEELING OF COLONIALITY’S DISLOCATION OF POWER The city of Soolum awoke that day with the sullen air of a capital that just, to its own general surprise, awoke to the realization that it was no longer the center of the country’s decisions. The grey sky, mixed with the breath of an unusual wind, accentuated the malaise and at once gave the birds a foreboding presence. Soolum seemed a city adrift. —Bassidou Saré (2011)

A key feature of anticoloniality is its maintenance and generation of alternative originations and trajectories for the present. These trajectories do not explain ‘how we got here’ so much as they explain ‘how we must get somewhere else in spite of where we are’. The present as the consequence of colonial impositions is also an aberration from the clarity of those anticolonial visions that have ‘come too soon’ or ‘will come otherwise’. This requires refusing to approach archives with the aim of homogenizing space, time, or place as does formal theory. Archives that carry anticoloniality exist because anticoloniality continues to generate its own spaces for imagining and expressing alternative social histories/trajectories and for implanting them in our habitats and sensibilities in spite of the present’s failure. Colonialism here does not refer to a historical experience. It refers to the apparent dislocation of power and of agency from a social landscape. But, for power to be located elsewhere and yet be effective, its dislocation must be present – that is concretely presenced by as many elements and enactments of power’s dislocation. These archival troves denormalize the residues and props of a sequestered public life; they expose the arbitrary order of coloniality by reminding us of the inhumanity and violences that these concrete dislocations and their presencings require.



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On three separate occasions, I was given three different books on Le Françafrique that were dedicated to documenting post-independence ties between the French political elite and African presidents like HouphouëtBoigny of Ivory Coast, Oumar Bongo of Gabon, Mobutu of Zaire, and others.3 I was entrusted to borrow a photocopied book that spoke specifically of France’s role in the assassination of Sankara. I was told to read this book and that I should make my own photocopy. I made my own photocopy and returned it. The title – Liberty Confiscated: The Franco-African Conspiracy – said it all. In it, the journalist, Bernard Doza, gives a detailed and well-documented account of the diplomatic and political cooperation between Houphouët-Boigny’s establishment, Compaoré’s entourage, and French politicians, ambassadors, and agents. Doza had been embedded within Compaoré regime in the years after Sankara’s assassination. The diplomatic orchestrations of murder and extortion were carefully compiled, recounted, and revisited in these intimate courtyard settings. In fact, recounting stories of corrupt African leaders who financed the campaigns of French politicians is a common theme in these discussions, as are the clandestine violences that never quite succeed in fully obscuring themselves.4 The careful attention of these readers to good research and journalism led me to believe that Burkinabé readers may often be more informed of the realities of French politics than most, and perhaps this assertion extends beyond French politics. The desire to preserve a record of the international scope of coloniality and violence in the contemporary political reality was palpable in the way these texts were kept, circulated, and discussed. To be sure, there was the valid assumption that these events were being forgotten or ignored elsewhere – for example among Western academics, publics, and researchers at the international financial institutions (IFIs) whose influence in determining Burkinabé policies behind closed doors was often felt to outstrip the citizenry. What had changed in the twenty years of Compaoré’s rule had obscured the presence of Sankara himself from the streets of the city, but it had not erased these archival troves of ongoing violences and perpetrations. Accounts of Sankara’s international resistance were stashed with accounts of Françafrique at large and with other markers of the political violence deployed in the service of coloniality’s unrelenting presence here and elsewhere. These stacks also contained articles on Ceausescu, Mao, and others. In 2006, I interviewed Sankarist politician Bénéwendé Sankara – founder of the Sankarist party UNIR-MS (Union pour la renaissance/Mouvement sankariste). He spoke of feeling the dislocation of power and situated it within a

3.  The first two books I was given were: Françoi-Xavier Verschave’s La Françafrique: Le plus long scandale de la République (1998) and Patrick Pesnot’s Les Dessous de la Françafrique: Les Dossiers secret de Monsieur X (2008). 4.  Mobutu: Roi de Zaire was a popular film documentary in this regard.

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web of leaders. This particular monologue captures a tone and content that is common in Ouagalais narratives of contemporary coloniality. Today, with international pressure and all that, [Blaise Compaoré] has recognized that he has to play at democracy a little and open things up a bit. That is also because here people weren’t standing for it. They resisted. But the geopolitical position of Burkina is an extremely strategic one in Africa. Which means that even those states which are a little far away like Gabon – everyone [in those places] tries to buddy up with Blaise Compoaré. Because there’s Qaddafi who is behind him. There’s Chirac. There’s Idris Deby who has petroleum. One has to take Blaise as a friend in fact. [Blaise] also has his mercenaries, which we don’t see. Which is to say that if Burkina today is destabilized, the entire sub-region would feel the effects in one way or another. If, on the other hand, Burkina happens to play it stable, the sub-region would partake equally in that. It’s not a question of economic interests. It is essentially a question of political interests. And I saw last time on CF [satellite TV] a conference on the ambitions of Senghor that Bobo-Dioulasso was supposed to be the capital of the West African Federation, and that the topographical studies had even been completed. But the Ivoirians did everything they could to stop it. There you have it. Houphouët did all he could to destroy Senghor’s federalist vision. So now the states just battle for their own interests. They squabble as they can on the international stage. But often it’s not the real image of Burkina and other countries that they present internationally. It is the image made by these leaders. It is this same image that these guys – the international financiers as they say – want to see. We feel it from the European Union. We feel it from the World Bank. Will it continue? Will this really allow our population to free itself and to experience growth and real development – a future as it were? [shrug] In the mean time, Burkina is cited as an example of a country that cooperates.5

How is it that this dislocation of power comes to be ‘felt’ as such? What compilation of processes aesthetically produce power’s dislocation as a distant web of networks connecting the European Union, the World Bank, with 5.  Author’s interview with Bénéwendé Sankara of UNIR-MS, March 25, 2006.



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African and French politicians? How does it come to be felt that Burkina Faso’s political life has been determined by a hegemonic exigency that Burkina Faso be seen as a country that cooperates with Western governments and IFIs? How does it come about that a half a century after independence, the presence of dislocated political agency is felt as an international imposition effectuated by the image of African leaders as acting against the interests of their country? Why is it not felt by the curators of these archives and articulators of these discourses as the presence of political dynamics internal to the country – after all this is how comparative politics typically understands political life? The archiving and reading practices described above focus on expanding memory and not on synthesizing these accounts of colonial violence and anticolonial resistance. The name ‘Françafrique’ appears not as a theory of postcolonialism or neocoloniality nor as a coherent space of interaction; it is a name – a proper name that uniquely ascribes and circumscribes the vagaries of power’s dislocation across countries, cities, and peoples in memorable and congruent ways. It is a multitude of stories, histories, violences, and forced disappearances that have, each in their own particular way, managed or effected some dislocation of power and agency; the possibility of its efficacy hinges on continued performances of the impossibility of solidarity and federation – the impossibility of life otherwise. And yet with the relics of remembering and recounting, what is retrieved – or at the very least rendered retrievable – are possibilities for alternatives to contemporary colonial performances and to the colonial present that requires them. Representations of space come to be contested for Bénéwendé Sankara, who feels that the representation of Burkina that the leaders put forth is false: ‘It’s not the real image of Burkina that they present internationally. It’s the image of the leaders.’ There is no simple explanation for the aesthetic imbrications of a political space and the leaders whose portraitures of their states become identifiable with that abstract space.6 Over the course of the interview, we revisited Sankarist internationalism as an alternative that in turn rereads the anticolonial visions of independence, federalisms, international solidarities, justice, and unity as articulated and planned for by Senghor, among others. Bénéwendé Sankara’s recourse is not to posit an alternative authentic representation of Burkina as replete with tropes of indigeneity and ‘local culture’. Rather, he appeals to the previously apparent internationalist aspirations of the people and suggests that this earlier vision cannot be dismissed as past or naive. Here, a real image of the country that is actively obscured is one which many Burkinabé hold onto and can potentially rearticulate. 6.  Ouologuem’s novel Bound to Violence (1968) speaks to this phenomenon.

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BETWEEN THE COURTYARD AND THE STREETS The courtyard is at the centre of the colonized’s history in black Africa. ... An intermediary place between the street and the family, the courtyard is, in Upper Volta,7 a place where the notions, ‘public’ and ‘private’ lose their force. Numerous groups hold the courtyard to be a space of work, of encounters, or of sociality. ... This approach privileged the courtyard as a place for political and social assertion and a space for the formulation of public opinion. ... With the installation just prior to independence of the Yaméogo regime and its one party state, the right of assembly was suppressed, and the courtyard returned to its prior status offering a degree of cover. If ideas circulated in the courtyard, radical contestation of power happened mostly on the streets. —Laurent Fourchard (2001)

On 30 March 2001, one month after my arrival, the then president of Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaoré, invented a national holiday. He invited rural chiefs and a host of other dignitaries to Ouagadougou. The event at the stadium was intended to mark his government’s resolve to respect and uphold the fundamental human rights of his people. It was meant to symbolize a break from the occasions of violence and extrajudicial murders that had stained the president’s and the regime’s reputation. I met a chief only a few weeks later in a small village in southeastern Burkina Faso. He expressed some offence at not having been invited, but he then went on to speak positively about the event. ‘Blaise, I don’t think, will repeat any of his previous mistakes.’ The vagueness of the chief’s language in referring to things like extrajudicial murders as ‘former mistakes’ echoed the vagueness with which the president himself referred to the tumultuous events that threatened the legitimacy of his government and the stability of life in the capital. These vague sentiments underpinned the National Day of Pardon. Its rhetoric fuelled the cynicism of the youth in Ouaga and elsewhere who renamed ‘Journée Nationale de Pardon’ the ‘Journée Nationale du Patron’ – ‘A National Day of Pardon’ to ‘The Boss’ National Day’. Neither the president nor his supporters could say what exactly he was asking people to forgive. A local schoolteacher remarked, ‘Why can no one find the words to say what it is we are forgiving? Tell me what exactly happened so that we can discuss it.’ Compaoré’s National Day of Pardon also produced a social space that clearly drew representations of the public square or public space away from the openly public cosmopolitan square at United Nations Plaza and the Avenue of Independence – the site of massive protests in the previous years – and 7.  Upper Volta was the former colonial name of Burkina Faso.



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towards a social gathering of rural and urban elites under intense security. Orchestrated for television broadcast across the nation, this representation carried heavy symbolic accoutrements meant to indigenize nationality and traditionalize public space. That day, I sat listening to the radio news with a new acquaintance who unearthed a stack of old books and invited me to read a passage from his copy of Norbert Zongo’s collected opinion pieces. My acquaintance said, ‘Look, the regime’s desire for forgiveness is nothing new. We have seen it before. What they want is for us to forget what they did to Sankara and the rest of them. Norbert Zongo knew that we could not. Look at what he wrote in 1997 when the president tried to make us think he was worthy of our forgiveness by going to see the Pope.’ He handed me Zongo’s editorial: They told us: ‘It’s finished. President Compaoré is not going to kill anymore!’ His visit to the Vatican may have confirmed his intention to banish violence from his politics. But the cavalier way with which he latched himself onto these fundamental texts8 proves that anything can still happen. Today, he is not ignorant of the fact that his people as a whole have been slapped down. Their anger ruminates. The President Compaoré knows today that he is squeezing his people and that reactions will come. How will he impose himself on the intellectuals who grasp the dimensions of his dictatorship and the drama that it represents for our people? There is only one solution for him: to imprison, to kill, to make disappear. ... There is no other alternative. There has never been a half-hearted dictatorship! There will not be a dictatorship in Burkina that is unattained. Mister President has most certainly fallen back on violence and it will soon make for widows and orphans by the dozens. Neither the Pope, nor the cardinals, nor prayers can do anything about it. When one man decides to dictate his law to an entire people, he could know no other censor but repression. President Compaoré has made his choice. It is absolute. Requiem! Requiem! Requiem!

Following Norbert Zongo’s assassination in December of 1998, the streets filled with protesters, and it led to violent clashes in April 2000. Teachers and students joined union leaders, but their ranks were deepened by hosts of informal labourers, petty vendors, and the like. The protesters repeatedly filled the Avenir de l’Independence that connected the United Nations roundabout near the Grand Market to the presidential palace, and they demanded an end to the regime. They repeatedly and violently clashed with military forces. At that time and in the years after, it is said that on-duty presidential guards wore 8.  A reference to the UN Charter on Human Rights.

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civilian clothes underneath their uniforms and carried alternative civilian ID cards in case they had to abandon their post and ‘go civilian’. Civilians were unarmed, but the readiness of the guards to ‘go civilian’ points to their inclination to abandon their post rather than use their weapons against the protesters. Approximately one year before Norbert Zongo’s assassination, the outspoken Burkinabé reggae artist, Black So Man, was in a fatal car accident. The car accident occurred near a military checkpoint. Reportedly, soldiers removed Black So Man from the car and transported him to the hospital. He was shortly thereafter evacuated by helicopter to Ivory Coast where he remained in a coma until his death in 2002. Popular memory of this event starts with the awareness that car accidents were suspicious events; they were supposed to have been a common method for offing someone. As other passengers were not injured, the story goes that Black So Man was taken, beaten, and left for dead at the hospital. When people found out about the accident, they filled the streets again, and marched on the presidential palace chanting that if Black So Man dies, Blaise will fall. This protest, as the story goes, prompted the regime to evacuate Black So Man to a hospital in Abidjan with the facilities to treat coma patients. His only album ‘Tous le monde et personne’ is still sold in stores across Burkina. His reedy voice is danced to in bars and played as mp3s on cell phones today. In his song ‘J’étais au procés’ – ‘I was on trial’ – Black So Man addresses the president by the title ‘Dear President’: De la démocratie à l’autocratie Le trésor publique est privatisé Les fonctionaires ne sont plus bien payés Les taux de chommage augmentent de jour en jour Les étudiants sont martyrisés La misère se lis sur tous les visages sans avoir peur de prisonnier d’élimination physique Voici la part de culpabilité de nos chères dirigeants

From democracy to autocracy The treasury is privatized Civil servants no longer well paid The rate of joblessness rises day by day The students are martyred Misery is visible on every face without fear of imprisonment or physical exterminated This share of the guilt belongs to our dear officials

The archives thus far described here have been private caches of books, articles and clippings circulated among friends. Secondly, they include musical vibrations and choruses that proliferate and echo in the streets and bars of Ouagadougou. Lastly, it is important to look at the city-spaces and soundscapes replete with their morphologies and rhythms, as imbrications of narratives, poetic threads, and sensorial pulses. These are also sites of



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archival work and affective contestations where the sensoria of these spaces are permeated by relics and memories.

RENOVATION OF DOWNTOWN OUAGA AND THE EXILE OF ITS POOR OR – BECOMING A CITY ON A CIRCULAR The goal is to build Greater Ouaga in relation to its institutional, metropolitan and touristic evolution so as to lend it the stature of a brilliant city, flame of the West African sub-region. The governor of the Center Region, Boureima Bougouma, has stressed the critical importance of the Greater Ouaga project for present and future generations. He has repeatedly insisted: “Every city has its infrastructure, its history, its spirit ... one must develop without destroying. And we will have to reconcile modernity, authenticity and originality.” —Bachirou Nana (2008)

In 2000, the government initiated an urban plan for the renovation of downtown Ouaga. The plan was called Project ZACA (Zone d’activités commerciales et administratives). Pronounced ‘Zaka’, the acronym has an important meaning in Mossi. Zaka means ‘household courtyard’. The densely populated neighbourhoods of Koulouba lies right in the middle of downtown. This was the site of massive protests and upheaval in the late 1990s and into 2000. To the south lies the airport; to the west lies the Grand Market, the Grand Mosque, and the cathedral and the palace of the dynastic monarch, the Mogo Naaba; to the north the governmental offices; to the east are embassies, the UN office, and a small neighbourhood of upscale residences similar to those that lay further west called ‘Petit Paris’ for the luxuriousness of the houses. Contrastingly, Koulouba’s dirt roads were filled with cramped housing, many small businesses including food stands, street vendors, mini-shops, and bars. Residences in Koulouba were mostly single-story buildings, built of concrete brick and sometimes mud. Typically, several families lived in small blocks of six two-room apartments. This area of downtown was not just home to Burkinabé residents and businesses; Malian ex-patriots and Senegalese, among others, whose commercial activities were integrated with regional and global networks also lived there. Project ZACA planned to resettle the population of Koulouba on the outskirts of town in order to allow for a new vision of downtown that included

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high-rise buildings and efficient infrastructure. Virtually all Koulouba residents opposed Project ZACA. But their voices carried little weight. In 2004, the entire residential downtown was flattened in two successive operations. Many landholders and almost all residents were – to put it mildly – dissatisfied with the compensation and resettlement scheme. Residents I spoke with in June of 2004 made comments like: ‘They are fighting poverty without even taking into consideration the poor ... ‘What will happen to these people? They never even asked that question ... ‘They just told us that we had to be in favour of the initiative without ever asking us what we thought of it ... ‘We want Ouagadougou to be beautiful, but not in the absence of its people …’

Those who were driven out of downtown were resettled in a handful of communities as far as 30–40 kilometres outside of town. Most had no means of transportation, maybe a bike or mobylette. This was before most people had acquired cell phones. An artisan’s physical location was her or his contact information. Often the only way for clients to contact their trusted tailor, shoe repairman, or hairdresser was to go visit her or him in the place of business. This dislocation of formal and informal business from Koulouba meant that people lost their entire clientele, and wherever they eventually landed or were officially resettled no one could find them. When mentioning the fate of the relocated of Koulouba, the Ouagalais’s first words were that ‘they suffered’ followed by descriptions of insanity: ‘There were people just wandering the streets dazed, nothing to their name, and with nothing for them to do. They were there wandering around where downtown had been flattened with their eyes glazed over.’ The dislocation heightened security concerns as many of the dislocated youth turned to crime. The name Project ZACA and its meaning ‘courtyard’ is ironic in light of what Fourchard tells us about the social and political role of the courtyard as a space for ideas to circulate (Fourchard 2001). It is not coincidental that neighbourhoods whose residents played an important role in protests that almost toppled the government in the late 1990s and early 2000s were destroyed. They housed a sizeable portion of downtown residents and virtually all its lower income residents and also included small highly trafficked courtyards that were regular meeting places. Anyone going downtown to the Grand Market or elsewhere would know several people who lived in Koulouba or did business there and would visit these courtyards. They would greet neighbours and converse with people of various economic and linguistic profiles. When Koulouba was initially vacated and the buildings knocked down, projections held that it would be rebuilt within the next two years. When this was explained to me in 2005, I could not imagine that enough investors



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could be found to rebuild Koulouba. At that time, I had not even realized how much money would be going into the upscale suburban Ouaga 2000 neighbourhood. By 2006, no construction had occurred in Koulouba. Rumour spread that the whole of downtown rested on an aquifer, which meant that no high rises could be built. This was an amusing rumour, for one had only to look at the UN building and the few high-rise hotels along Avenue Kwame Nkrumah, to know that the lack of construction had nothing to do with any aquifer. With time the famous aquifer became a joke, and the press mentioned it laughingly in their articles on the fate of downtown under Project ZACA. While Koulouba was being demolished, an area known as Ouaga 2000 was beginning to form. It was about five kilometres south of the city – on the other side of the airport beyond a neighbourhood called La Patte d’Oie. Ouaga 2000 was designed to house upscale residential communities. In order to buy a plot of land there, building plans and financial capabilities needed preapproval. The president built his palace there on a grander scale than the downtown palace. A team of the best electricians from the national electric company SONABEL worked for over a year, from 2004–2006, just installing the electrical system. Foreign embassies and offices were relocating there in light of its heightened security and infrastructure capabilities and new hotels cropped up. Ouaga 2000’s avenues were broad and its street signs orderly. The suburb had sprouted up quite rapidly. In 1999, my drive through Ouaga 2000 consisted of us looking at a few thinly spread-out villas and my host guessing at which African dignitaries these had been built to house. At many junctures, life in Ouagadougou expresses aspirations as regional hub. The largest African Film Festival in the world (FESPACO) is hosted there as is the International African Arts Festival – SIAO. Large complexes now house both of these biannual events, but these festivals were innovations of Sankara’s internationalism and renaissance, innovations appropriated and awkwardly dissimulated from their earlier intention. The imagined centrality of Ouagadougou is reiterated in the urban planning discourses circulating at the height of the city’s transformation in the years 2004–2009; this came when Koulouba was flattened and development began to accelerate in Ouaga 2000 and elsewhere with the demarcation of land on the perimeter of the capital. With the lagging of Project ZACA, the boom in real estate investment on newly demarcated land on the outskirts of the city attracted investment. High-end investors and builders favoured Ouaga 2000 over Koulouba. Alongside the vacating of central Ouagadougou came the acceleration of land demarcation on the outskirts of the city. The ‘Grande Circulaire’ that runs around the city became a densely travelled thoroughfare. What had been sparsely trafficked and bare became dense and bustling, but these new centres were just as far from any of the landmarks of public and international life as they had been when the circular had been relatively vacant and had

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still felt like the edge of the city where the countryside was being kept back only by that circular strip of pavement. The lots that lined it, many of which were empty, gradually filled with vendors and informal roads and paths and markets. The intersections where the roads coming in from the provinces met with the circular became focal points for commerce and nightlife. With the vacating of the city centre of its residents – site of so much upheaval in the late 1990s and early 2000s – Ouaga was becoming a city on a circular, and thinking about urban planning now meant focusing on what governor Bougouma called “Greater Ouaga”. In the newspaper column from Sidwaya as cited at the beginning of this section – a publication with close ties to the Compaoré regime – governor Bougouma expresses the vision that Greater Ouaga must appear to be ‘a brilliant city, flame of the West African sub-region’. Bougouma’s planning imperative that we must ‘reconcile modernity, authenticity and originality’ in making a display of the city’s ‘infrastructure, its history, its spirit’. Implied is a nativist vision of the nation’s capital monumentalized in the shape of a city replete with the architectural and planning accoutrements the likes of which would complement the decadence of the patrons in attendance at National Day of Pardon. Situating Ouagadougou in the middle of Francophone and African political life, however, conjures alternative historical imaginaries. Bougouma’s vision has an international gaze but internationality is an aesthetic feature of splendour here. This vision contrasts sharply with Sankara’s vision of Burkina as a nation where the Burkinabé citizenry are heir to the world’s revolutions. Secondly, Bougouma’s gesture to nativist aesthetics and grandeur facilitates the obfuscation of the nation’s peasantry. Bougouma’s image for the capital and for development falls aesthetically in line with an image of the nation that the elites would seek to project even if it requires overlooking the plight of its majority; again it runs contrast to Sankara’s political commitment to bettering the life of the rural peasantry even though both turn towards the international as a space for imaginal fodder. The Greater Ouaga Project originated in 2009 was a renewed promise to redress the disaster that Project ZACA had visited on the cityscape. But it now required a wholly grander scope and scale, comprising areas like Koubri and Komsilga which were previously situated far outside of the scope of urban Ouagadougou. Much of the construction boom in Ouaga and Bobo – and to a more limited extent in towns across the country – had been fuelled by an acceleration in the demarcation of land that began in the early 2000s coupled with an influx of investment from Burkinabé emigrants abroad. With the isolation of individual neighbourhoods, and the inability of protesters to join in public space as they had in the late 1990s, the city has sprawled into the countryside. Mud-brick cities cropped up well outside town in anticipation of further land demarcation, and checkpoints in and out of the city disappeared. Lines between the city and its rural surroundings have dissolved. This has also meant the intensification of social links



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between the countryside and the capital and the blurring of the line between rural peasant and urban labourer. METAMORPHOSES OF ARCHIVAL SENSORIA And there are here the errors of the rendering ... —Christopher Okigbo (1971, ‘Initiations’ 9)

Before the neoliberal renovation of downtown Ouagadougou, Sankara was remembered as much for his international anti-imperial militancy and revolutionary spirit as he was for his everyday physical presence among the people of Burkina Faso within the social spaces they cohabited. In 2001–2, people still regularly told stories about the things they had seen or had heard Sankara do in the streets and about the capital. Anecdotes abounded of Sankara’s international grandstanding at the United Nations or in France where, for example, he refused to participate in any of the rituals of the Françafrique networks. In contrast to those African presidents at Franco-African summits photographed like feudal satraps with the French president in the middle, ‘Sankara arrived, had his meeting with Mitterand, and got right back on the plane without even taking a sip of French water’. But, these stories were closely coupled with intimate memories of his physical appearance in the cities and towns of the country. The streets where Sankara would pass on his bicycle to work in the 1980s looked visibly similar to the streets of Ouagadougou in 2002. The kiosks where he stopped to play foosball with the youth still existed, bore the same name, and probably furnished the same stools and tables. The streets were the same as when he participated in women’s day marches. People remembered when Sankara came to their town to ask questions about the problems of the country and of the town. They readily shared stories and pointed to where he met with them. In 2002, the landscape and the memory had not changed much since Sankara’s assassination – at least not as much as it would in the following decade. But at that time, even though memories of his presence were frequently recounted with clarity, they were only recounted in intimate settings. In fact, my penchant for engaging in discussions about Burkina’s political history had one of my hosts worried at one point. He told me to not talk about Sankara with people I had only just met, and if someone brought him up to avoid the conversation. But, it seemed to me that as soon as I became friendly enough with someone they broached the subject, even if I did not. In the Ouagadougou of 2011, Sankara’s international persona still resonated from kiosks where his militant anti-imperial speeches at the UN

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General Assembly and his speeches about the need for Third World solidarity in renouncing the debt rang out of speakers on Ouaga’s streets dubbed over hip-hop beats rumbling across the traffic and into the corridors. But, stories about Sankara’s life in Ouagadougou were not nearly as common. This was not out of fear. In fact the fear of being targeted for talking about Sankara had largely disappeared. Memories of his everyday presence in people’s lives appeared to have been as grounded in the many places that recalled his presence, but many of those places had disappeared with the gutting of downtown and the transformation of the landscape. The new Ouagadougou had dissimulated itself and with it those spaces that seemed to readily conjure the recounting of these memories – memories of Sankara’s physical presence and of his revolution’s existence here. Of course, Sankara’s life has been documented by Burkinabé scholars and people who were close to him, and those books circulated in the courtyard circles described above – always with critical questions about who the author was and questions about authenticity. These articles and books were – just like other anticolonial relics and documents – kept in cabinets and drawers under lock and key, but the everyday humanism of his presence had faded from the landscape of the city’s memory. I first visited Ouagadougou in 1999. I had travelled from Accra to Ouagadougou to attend the Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television of Ouagadougou (FESPACO). That year the famous Ivorian reggae musician Alpha Blondy was the main act at the opening ceremonies in the Stade du 4 Août. This was just over one month after the Burkinabé journalist, Norbert Zongo, had been assassinated for investigating crimes by the regime. Alpha Blondy had composed a new song commemorating him, and he performed it in a packed stadium with Compaoré and other dignitaries in attendance. The title of the song was ‘Journalistes en Danger’, and the opening rang out as follows: Au clair de la lune mon ami Zongo Refusé de bâillonner sa plume Burkina Faso Et Zongo est mort; brulé par le feu Que justice soit faite pour l’amour de Dieu

By the clear of the moonlight my friend Zongo Refused to muzzle his pen in Burkina Faso And now Zongo is dead, gone up in flames Let justice be done for the love of God

Compaoré was taken aback. It was said that, as Alpha Blondy was forced from the stage, he pointed at Compoaré and started chanting: ‘Assassin ... Assassin ... Assassin ...’ The entire stadium began echoing his chant. In their retelling of events people say that you could see the president trembling. It came on the heels of a turbulent few months. In the years afterwards and still today, the event echoes in the streets of Ouagadougou as the song, ‘Jounalistes



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en Danger’, regularly rings out of the kiosks, bars, and courtyards across the capital, country, and region, recalling by name the slain journalist, Zongo. But seven years later something about the song had changed. In 2005, Alpha Blondy gave a concert in Ouagadougou after repairing his relations with the regime. The concert went off without a hitch. Alpha Blondy had grown older, so had the regime. The National Day of Pardon instituted in 2001 was coupled with quasi-democratic reform and attempts to refurbish the president’s tarnished image. Compaoré had fashioned himself as a diplomat for peace in Ivory Coast and in the region; his new international image was of a reconciliatory man and a bulwark of stability in the region. Shortly, after the Alpha Blondy concert in 2005, when ‘Journalistes en Danger’ came on the radio, an acquaintance in the transport business said to me, ‘This guy [i.e. Alpha Blondy] … one day he criticizes the regime; the next day he plays their political game for them. What are we to make of that? What are we to make of [Alpha Blondy’s] support for us now? This song makes me think that we are worthless to him.’ The pop star’s new-found toleration of the regime’s political image affected the song’s meaning. Hearing the song no longer conjured that moment in 1999 when an entire stadium had the president trembling at the musician’s call for justice. Now the song seemed to mark how far we were from that time when protests regularly flooded to the gates of the presidential palace laying plain the frailty of the regime’s hold over power, and how far we had come from that time when it was common knowledge that the presidential guard wore civilian clothes beneath their uniforms so that they could run away and disappear into the crowd if they had to. The song and the frustration that it generated had changed insofar as the frustration could no longer be focused on the regime itself and the desire to make the regime account for the offences it had committed. This truck driver’s frustration at hearing ‘Jounalistes en Danger’ was no longer directed in solidarity at the regime. Now it focused on what to make of the singer himself and the fact that he had disowned his earlier plea for justice and critique of the regime. The fact that the song simply would not disappear in the same way that the militancy on the part of the singer had subsided made the song’s significance inchoate. There was a frustration over the singer’s forgetting or readiness to stop caring; the frustration distils into a kind of disillusionment and doubt about one’s own inability to stop caring. Hearing the song in 2005, in light of the singer’s reconciliatory disposition towards the Compaoré regime, gave rise to new frustrations that morphed into doubts over what the song is really worth, over what the memory of protest and indignation can actually mean, over what the archive of events and their transcription in the present is doing. The song does not go away, yet our experience of it changes. These changing aestheses of discontent were accompanied by changes in the manifestation of dissatisfaction, protest, and revolt.

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By 2011, dissatisfaction had morphed into military violence, dysphoric looting, and blundered coups. These collective upheavals and the everyday subtleties of dissatisfaction were morphing over the course of this urban transformation along with the transitioning geography of the country’s sensorial life, social rhythms, and the president’s shifting personae. Yet the protests over Zongo’s death in 1998–9, the protests in 2004 over the fate of the famed Grand Market after it was accidentally burnt down, protests against the gutting of Koulouba in 2004–05, the gun battles between police and military in 2007, the riots against food inflation in 2008, and the attempted coup and looting by military forces in 2011; all of these bore the spatial features and expressivity of Ouagadougou’s transformation at these different junctures. Some of these events appeared bent on inscribing memories of earlier resistance or on marking the presence of these histories on the new landscape. Other events appeared to shed any connection to past memories of solidarity. These latter seemed determined to violently expose the brokenness of the forgetful enthusiasm that these new spaces appeared to monumentalize. Even as the new insisted on its distinctness and privileged trajectory, it could never totally disconnect or dissimulate itself from the residues of those older aspirations. Even though these memories were themselves changing – at times becoming something different than memories, at times veering towards deeper recesses; still, the aspirations and frustrations that exuded from these memories never disappeared. Within the newness of these old spaces, the desire to make these new spaces either remember – and to remember better – or to deface them as punishment for their forgetfulness; these desires kept resurfacing. Even when memories were scattered and embroiled in emotive recesses – audible erratically over rhythmic beats blaring from distorted club speakers, shaking eardrums, pulsating nervous systems, and hips – yet the accompanying aspirations and memories returned. Dysphoric manifestations of discontent – like the looting, delinquency, and gun battles – germinate in the cracks and brokenness of colonial spaces. On the other hand, the euphoria of anticolonial agency unfurls across an alternative imagining and re-situating of these cracks and of their felt dissatisfactions. It is a reinventing of the trajectory and meaning of the present and of the role for those people whom coloniality would rob of their voice and future life. Imaginaries that illustrate, locate or communicate a trajectory towards these horizons of aspiration can grow heavy and heady in spite of all managed efforts to sap them. These broader imaginaries can initiate a collective enactment of the contingency and reversal of power’s dislocation. Engagements with archival relics can resuscitate aesthetic and affective dispositions; anticolonial curation and pedagogy can be the stuff of such a production.



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FROM ANTI-INFLATION RIOTS AND MILITARY DYSPHORIA TO THE ‘BLACK SPRING’ OF 2014 OR – THE WOMAN AND HER CHILD IN THE FRONT OF THE BUS Burkina Faso is a worksite, a vast worksite. There is not enough time to visit and pay homage to the many workers here and there who every day insist on transforming the world. —Thomas Sankara (1986)

In February 2008, riots broke out in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioualasso, the first and second largest cities in Burkina. They expressed outrage over inflated costs of living. Burkina was one of many African countries that experienced anti-inflation riots that year. Shopkeepers stayed closed on days when protests were organized. Policemen were deployed in full force; they were stationed in the most numbers along the few roads leading into Ouaga 2000 in an attempt to keep protesters in La Pâte d’Oie and out of Ouaga 2000. Other protests occurred in Hamdallaye on the north side of town, in Pissi to the west, and near the University of Ouagadougou in the east. The boutiques downtown, along Kwame Nkrumah Avenue, just north of the airort reported broken windows and looted merchandise. The largest group of protesters took to the circular road along La Pâte d’Oie; they burnt tyres, and busted up traffic lights. They stopped the few passing cars. Eventually, the police teargassed them, and the protest unravelled. In the aftermath of the riots, the joke was that all the protesters had accomplished was to destroy their own neighbourhoods. There was no space that was a focal point for the city, no one had access to anything that symbolized a public life. The city had been balkanized. The year prior in 2007 there had been an argument between a police officer and a young soldier in the military over a traffic violation. It resulted in a massive gun battle that saw a contingent of junior officers breaking into arms depots, holding up vehicles and taking to the streets to hunt down police officers. Police officers hid their families with neighbours and kept out of sight. Afterwards a disapproving soldier admitted discontent among the junior ranks, ‘The younger soldiers are not like the older ones; the new recruits know there rights. … They know when they are being mistreated. … They are no longer content with bad living conditions and a salary that only affords them enough money to drink cold beer.’ One phrase that was apparently heard coming from the mouths of the junior officers who raided the munitions lockers was the following: ‘Go ahead and

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keep building up Ouaga 2000, one day it will be our pied-à-terre.’ In the wake of this security incident, the word was that Compaoré was securing munitions and vacating many of the munitions storage facilities in order to secure larger, more centralized stockpiles in the loyalist southern region around Po. Later, on my bus trip to Ouagadougou, passengers debated whether change was possible through elections. Most were in agreement that it was not. They agreed that Compaoré would change the constitution again and run for another term. They laughed at his brazenness, and the fact that he had refused to say anything yet. They knew him well. He changed the constitution in 2005 after his new presidential palace was just built in Ouaga 2000. He commented then that he did not build the new presidential palace only to turn around and move out of it. One woman in the bus pressed the issue. She was a young outspoken mother, and her quiet husband sat at her side smiling and nodding his head in agreement. Their one-year-old baby sat on her lap smartly dressed and glowing. She became more impassioned and raised her voice turning her head in both directions to make sure everyone behind her in the car heard what she was saying, speaking emphatically as if she was at a rally. ‘It is because we are scared to die that our protests fail. We can only take our future in our hands if we are no longer afraid to lay down our lives. We need to find in us the heart of the Arab.’ Just a few months earlier a friend had told me that the end of the Compaoré regime is in sight. It was not until that bus ride that I believed him. The young woman issuing rally-cries on the bus did not come out of nowhere. The intensity of the conversation had grown slowly and almost imperceptibly. The passengers had been calmly discussing the political turmoil of the previous year. No one voiced any support for Compaoré, and only a few thought that elections could still work in the country. The president’s predicament was common knowledge: he would either have to change the constitution again and continue his presidency by monopolizing election funding and fragmenting the opposition through bribery, or he would step aside and face the possibility of exile and/or judgement for his crimes. The choice he would make seemed obvious. But the whole conversation in the bus began with people looking out their windows and casually commenting to one another about how the country had changed. They looked out at the landscape, the countryside, the cityscape. They saw cell phone towers and new roads, and they saw it all as their own, as the work of the Burkinabé people. Neither lenders nor Compaoré politicians could lay claim to the transformation of Burkina Faso. This place was theirs. There was an assuredness to the way they discussed their future, an assuredness that the people who had transformed this country could manage their own affairs. And today the Burkinabé people seem assured of their



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ability to oversee a revolution as well as trials and just hearings for the criminals that participated in the corruption and violence of the former regime. The National Assembly building was lit on fire for trying to pass legislation extending Compaoré’s presidency. That this public building was destroyed because politicians refused to listen to the people, and no one was killed or shot at in the process, is evidence of deep and rich traditions of humanism and republicanism that flourish today in Burkina Faso and that have flourished there in the past. People and public life remains valued over property and monuments. Only a tiny minority of presidential guards who had been specifically trained to fire if protesters tried to unseat the president engaged in violent killings over the course of this revolution.

PEDAGOGICAL CONCLUSIONS OF AN AFRODIDACT Our curriculum brings a promise to satisfy some yearning, as faint or as wellformed as it might be, to imagine collectivities that can thrive outside of hegemony’s death-grip. —M. Jacqui Alexander (2005, 8)

Independence and national self-determination in the mid-twentieth century was presented as a solution to the colonial affliction. Independence was supposed to guarantee a certain dignity in acknowledging a political space for Africans to speak truths and to transform these truths into action. In the presence of these archival fragments which describe the violence committed on the bodies, families and countries of those Africans who worked to realize their visions for independence and for African political life in the world – bodies whose voices expressed that future with such clarity of vision; in the presence of these texts, most contemporary political spaces appear violently, deliberately, and unnecessarily broken. However, these spaces, and the aspirations and the promises of independence, cannot be discarded. That these leaders came too early implies a future that is open to our realization of those visions – it implies our agency within those visions. Holding onto and curating these archives is, therefore, tightly bound up with sustaining the aspirations and the wills to enact them. If social science is to have any connection with popular anticolonial uprisings like the Burkinabé revolutions of the 1980s and 2010s – any understanding beyond the banality of the existing commonplace vocabulary about ‘uncertainty’, ‘instability’, and ‘security concerns’ – then it needs to engage these archived moments of colonial violence for their complexity; it needs to

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grapple with the aspirations alive in our remembering of them; and, moreover, to be open to the possibility of illuminating these aspirations for our students. Social science then does not need to analyze and synthesize, but rather to remember, cherish, curate, and teach these anticolonial visions – and teach them not as bygone chapters in a linear history from which the present moment is receded, but rather as open-ended questions and imperatives born of a disjointed present, a present which both forgets and remembers what it had promised itself. Sankara’s message, which obviously carries great traction in Burkina Faso, might – just like that of many anticolonial voices – yet speak to a whole host of social settings where popular protests in the financial centres of the world are met with violence and where property and police protection are valued more than the lives of the people who make those cities and where banking interests are valued more than children’s right not to be thrown out of their foreclosed homes. People in Burkina Faso are again reading the speeches of Sankara and taking seriously, as Sankara dictated, their moral obligation not to pay certain debts. What are our moral obligations vis-à-vis the financial behemoths that have engineered our spaces and lives along certain colonial imperatives about space, productivity, property and the spawning of liberal patriarchal family units? If Africa and the anticolonial movement were at the centre of a twentiethcentury transformation – a transformation that defeated the institutionalized racism of European imperialisms and initiated the enshrinement of human rights as we know them (Persaud 2001) – then archives of anticolonial thought are every bit as central to fashioning a present movement capable of realizing political spaces for undoing the proliferation of apartheid-like armaments, walls, and racial distinctions. And, these archives are every bit as central to undermining the myriad of new and familiar ways whereby financial appropriations and geographic securitizations work to entrench coloniality’s dislocation of power and its refusal of a collective future. Can this chapter be something other than an Africanist account of, or postcolonial ethnography of, Burkinabé politics? What might allow us to open up our pedagogy to those ranging and diverse humanisms that float across space, time, and culture, and to envision, express, and enact a future that desperately needs to be reimagined. Imaginal work for such a vision is being conjured, remembered, and reinvented in all kinds of spaces today, yet this work appears absent from the diplomatic practices of industrialized countries and from the core International Relations and social science curricula. Our students need to learn why some people care so much about these texts and why they care so much about recounting the memories that these texts invoke because these relics and things Africana – anticolonial and revolutionary – contain some of the most valuable lessons in rolling back escalating problems of fascism, gender violence, and dehumanization.



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REFERENCES Alexander, M. Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing. Durham: Duke University Press. Doza, Bernard. 1991. Liberté Confisquée: Le Complot Franco-Africain. Paris: Bibleurope. Fourchard, Laurent (2001) De la ville coloniale a la cour africaine. Paris: L’Harmattan, 359–63. My translation. Grovogui, Siba. 2006. “Daniel Ouezzin Coulibaly” in Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nana, Bachirou. “Urbanisme: Le schéma d’aménagement du grand Ouaga ‘relooké’” Sidwaya, Sep. 12, 2008. My translation. Okigbo, Christopher. 1971. “Lament of the Silent Sisters,” in Labyrinths. London: Heinemann, 41. Sandwidi, Simplice, ed. 2015. Les grands discours du Président Thomas Sankara: Tome 1–2. Ouagadougou: Les Éditions Arc-en-ciel. Ouologuem, Yambo. 1968. Bound to Violence trans. Ralph Manheim. Oxford: Heinemann. Ould el-Bara, Yahya. 2008. “The Life of Shaykh Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti,” in The Meaning of Timbuktu, eds. Jeppie, Shamil and Souleymane Bachir Diagne. Cape Town: HSRC. Persaud, Randolph. 2001. “Re-envisioning Sovereignty: Marcus Garvey and the Making of a Transnational Identity”. Africa’s Challenge to International Relations Theory, Kevin Dunn and Timothy Shaw, eds. New York: Palgrave. Pesnot, Patrick. 2008. Les Dessous de la Françafrique: Les Dossiers secret de Monsieur X. Paris: Nouveau Monde. Saré, Bassidou (2011) Les Oubliés de l’histoire. Ouagadougou: Découvertes du Burkina, 13. My translation. Sankara, Thomas. 1986. Les Grands disours du Président Thomas Sankara, Simplice Sandwidi, ed. November 1. Ouagadougou: Les Éditions Arc-en-ciel, 56. My translation. Saul, Mahir and Patrick Royer. 2001. West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War. Athens: Ohio University Press. Verschave, Françoi-Xavier (1998) La Françafrique: Le plus long scandale de la République Paris, Edition Stock. Ware III, Rudolph. 2014. “Almaami ‘Abdul-Qadir Kan and the 1776 Revolution” in The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa. Chapel Hill: UNC Press. Zongo, Norbert. 2000. Le Sens d’un combat: Receuil d’éditoriaux. Ouagadougou: Centre National de Presse Norbert Zongo, 61–2. My translation.

Afterword Archives, Life, and Counter-Archives Sam Okoth Opondo

STASIS/ANTI-STASIS ‘The archive is a status.’ Through acts of ‘discrimination and selection,’ it grants a privileged status to those documents deemed archivable by setting them apart (Mbembe 2002, 20). It is also a ‘chronophagic’ meta-status (Mbembe 2002, 23). It creates an order of archive-ability that allows states to ‘eat time’ or its consumers to ‘eat’ of the state. The archive is always the threat to the state that the state must own (Mbembe 2002, 23). Through its material and imaginary condition, the archive arrests, shelters, or allows documents and statements to move within authorized circuits. It allows them to move through codes that make them secret and sacred yet, public and mysterious. As such, the archive is also an apparatus – a strategic and heterogeneous set that lies at the intersection of relations of power and knowledge where it actively establishes relations between beings (Agamben 2009, 3). Between human beings. As both status and apparatus, the archive serves a quasi-religious function.1 Its minute rituals arrange times and beings by ‘activating and regulating separation.’ An order of sacrifice that sets things and documents apart or takes them out of common use. However, this act of setting apart does not go uncontested by counter-apparatuses of profanation ‘that restore to common use’ that which the archive, in its sacrificial form, sets apart or divides (Agamben 2009, 19). It is this tension between apparatuses that set things apart and those that seek to put to common use that which was set apart by colonial orders that 1.  Jacques Derrida reads the etymology of the archive as that which operates and originates in the ‘order of the commencement as well as in the order of the commandment.’ See Derrida, Jacques, and Eric Prenowitz. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. p.1

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one discerns in reading Politics of African Anticolonial Archive. Here, one finds multiple conceptions and practices of the archive and numerous counter-practices that seek to decolonize archives or to map and archive the practices (and thought) of anticolonial figures. Read together, the essays revisit the meta-theoretical question: what is an archive? and by re-orienting it towards the anticolonial event, we are left disoriented. We are left asking another set of questions: Which one? Where? How is the archive? Rather than offer a schematic rehearsal of what the chapters in this book do or do not do, this ‘afterword’ mobilizes a series of fragments to ‘look back’ into elements of Politics of African Anticolonial Archive and attempts to think with and through their insights: their slights, sleights of hand, and the resultant disturbances, silences, and … ellipses. (DIS)ORIENTATIONS Politics of African Anticolonial Archive is a disorienting text but the disorientation is productive. It enables us to do more than seek familiar or unfamiliar anticolonial stories in ‘our’ familiar archives. It defamiliarizes us with the idea and status of the archive by presenting spatial practices and textual communities that turn cities like Ouagadougou into extensions and manifestations of revolutionary archival fragments. Here, the city and its inhabitants contest the narratives of the state and its status through quotidian counter-archival practices – book exchanges, the creation and destruction of courtyards, musical chants, and poetic rants. As Sankara-related stories of life, hope, and dissent emerge from private libraries and circulate in public spaces (clandestinely), they bring back to life that which the necropolitical designs of the postcolonial state and Francafrique deny. They perform a necromancy that disturbs the necropolitical state’s neocolonial status. The tension between the private library and the public archive is a tension between the living and the supposedly ‘dead’ text. Between the text that circulates in everyday life and the archivable one that requires the necromancy of the archival dig to call it up or to call it forth from the space that sets it apart, buries it, or arrests it. In this book, the tensions are revealed through an attempt to map the relationship between Lusophone African anticolonial thought and Francophone Anticolonial thought by reading their shared texts. It is an archival dive that notices the absence of copies of the anticolonial journal Présence Africaine from the holdings of the National Library in Lisbon and their existence at the Letras library due to the donation of the personal collection of the Portuguese writer and translator Alfredo Margarido. This archival finding highlights the silence and violence of archives. It also enables us, in 2016, to rediscover the words and worlds of ‘African students



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who “spoke to the world” anonymously from their clandestine activities in this same city of Lisbon in the 1950s, then the heart of Portugal’s fascist colonial empire.’ Similar connections between thinkers of African decolonization and thinkers from other parts of the world can be mapped so as to reveal the silence of archives. The violence of the law, and ultimately, of theory. In an ambitious reading of the connection/disconnection between anticolonial thinkers in Africa and contemporaneous American Indian anticolonial thinkers, we are made aware of missed opportunities and the need for shared depositories as a means of addressing shared dispossession. The inter-articulation of the revolutionary thought of Frantz Fanon and the Lakota thinker Vine Deloria Jr. reveals the continuity between African and American colonial projects that remains under-theorized. It also puts into relief the inverted logics of UN resolutions (1514 and its addendum 1541) that make it possible for some anticolonial thinkers to get caught up in the law/language/ logics of national self-determination, while others are subjected to those of termination – an archival silence/absence that inscribes national selfdetermination and sovereignty into the projects of decolonization and settler colonialism. Here, the book calls up anticolonial stories, not only to recall anticolonial pasts but also to call for a different mode of relating. A different legal, diplomatic, and jurisprudential order. Through such critical treatments of the location and circulation of anticolonial texts and archives, we are invited to rethink the status and definition of the archive. Is it ‘a repository and collection of artifacts’ that encompasses ‘the contents of museums and libraries,’ such that the term archive stands for the ‘entire extant historical record’? Or, is the archive a specific kind of repository (of documents, manuscripts, and images)? Is it something distinct from libraries which are considered ‘repositories of published books, journals, and other media’? What about museums – the repository of multiple cultural objects? The book makes us ask the meta-theoretical question: What is it that sets archives apart from, or makes them a part of libraries? How are we to think of archives, more so an anticolonial archive, in the age of ‘digital archiving’ and its dynamics of circulation, mediation, and use (Manoff 2004, 10)? ECSTASIS Through the critical treatment of the archive, its documents, and monuments, the anticolonial event becomes more than a series of purgations of colonial histories, fantasies, and designs. It becomes more than a state of catharsis. Doubtless, the cleansing effect of anticolonial practices invites us to embrace the new, to experience the forms of ‘release’ that accompany the move from, or desire to move towards something other than the colonial order. But the

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anticolonial process also presents us with other senses and orientations. It also presents moment of ecstasis – a standing outside of oneself as one is carried away or towards something else. Towards others or the otherness of the self. It is this sense of ecstasis and the ‘temporary release from a fixed identity and subjectivity’ that one gets when reading the essays in Politics of African Anticolonial Archive. In part, this ecstasis is derived from the contributors’ conscious attempt at ‘looking back’ at anticolonial practices in Africa as a way of looking forward or looking in(to) the African present in critical ways. By looking back (otherwise), the book raises critical questions about how anticolonialism is theorized and the everyday practices that offer alternative readings of archives that already exist. The book also engages in an act of curation and imagination of an african anticolonial archive that is yet to come. Ultimately, the act of ‘looking back’ raises significant questions about the status of archives and the privileging of not only certain ways of making sense, but also of sensing the world. With this book, we are summoned not only to look into other archives but also to listen otherwise. Ecstasis! In its excitation of the senses, the book moves towards other senses and senses of the archive. Rather than privileging sight, the sites that the ‘volume’ engages present us with a sonic/phonic archive of the anticolonial that enables us to connect to practice, spaces, times, and people that the narratives of the state actively disallow. Through the sounds of the hip-hop DJ Madlib (a black archaeologist), the Lingala rhythms of T.P. OK Jazz, Abd al Malik’s Gibraltar (and its transversal echoes of Aimé Césaire’s epic poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) and Alpha Blondy’s reggae chants, the book points to the ‘archival’ status and poetic power of popular music. A polyrhythmic site that can, and has generated a new archival consciousness where Africa and its diasporas are re-mapped (sonically). Through the digging up and mixing of historical and vinyl records, through acts of sampling, translation, and political compilation, these songs generate a system of alternative discursive statements, senses, and knowledges. The conditions under which these rhythms are produced and the kinds of worlds and worlds of knowledge that they make possible are significant for anticolonial critique. In their own ways, the songs of freedom that the book assembles are statements to the power of archives, the state of knowledge today, and the need to know and archive otherwise – if we are to archive at all. It is in this sense that the book presents both an ecstasis and an anti-statis – a resistance to the state and status of the archive. For instance, by ‘retelling what has already been retold,’ and through sartorial or even satirical engagements, the popular musical genres that the book engages present us with an archive that is not stacked up with familiar documents or one devoid of ‘documents.’ This act of putting anticolonial practices on vinyl records interrupts the historical record



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while experimenting with different genres of expression, expressions that enable an encounter with other genres of man. When most effective, this mixing, this sleight of hand, is more than a shifting of familiar documents or monuments into the ‘hands of others.’ It is a pluralization of the content of archives through old and new rhythms, new connections, and irregular juxtapositions that enable us to imagine an anticolonial archive where both the status of colonialism and the status of the archive are challenged. It is a move that provokes us to reflect on the politics specific to the appropriation and abrogation of the archive. It is a call for us to pay attention to the poetics of an anticolonial archive – through its aesthetic creations and expressions. PLURALIZING ARCHIVE-ABILITY While not explicitly engaged in all the chapters, the essays raise a significant question: ‘what is the status of anticolonial archives?’ This interrogation of the status of archives in general, and the African anticolonial archive(s) in particular reveals how archives, all archives, present a tension between forces that seek to ‘spread one or another form of staseis, by blocking other movements, standings, and possibilities’ (metastaesis), and various forms of antistatis – ‘forms of resistance to dominant regimes of representation, antidotes to particular metastaseis’ (Constantinou 2004, 13).2 By marking this tension and recognizing the discriminatory practices that mark colonial archiving, the book presents forms of curation, digging up, and re-narration that questions the colonial notions of archivability and the power that derives from it. An order of ‘archive-abilty’ that inserts some documents into archives while others, together with their human subjects, are directed to other spaces or denied the quality of archivability. The plurality of texts and contexts that this book brings together provokes us to ask whether the anticolonial archive presents a radical break with both the discriminatory logic of the archive and the discriminatory practices of colonialism. The tragic version of this story and the recognition of the archival bind reveals that anticolonial archives could highlight the struggles against colonialism’s discriminatory practices that govern different people differently while remaining caught up in archival discrimination predicated on the dynamics of archive-ability. As welcome as the simultaneous interrogation of ‘archive fantasy and colonial fantasy’ may be, the quest for an 2.  I am grateful to Costas M. Constantinou for pointing me to the relationship between different forms of staesis and their relationship to the state. This relationship is well captured in Constantinou’s, (2004), States of Political Discourse: Words, Regimes, Seditions. London: Routledge.

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anticolonial archive can also be read alongside the quest for a state of one’s own and the more insidious desire for an ‘archive of one’s own’ – an archive envy if you will allow us to appropriate a familiar Freudian diagnosis of lack. This is the tension that the book highlights but as it openly admits, fails to engage in detail. That is, the book asks two related but yet to be resolved questions. First, does the anticolonial archive work as a document, monument, and record of the anticolonial struggle or is it a struggle with the colonial and discriminatory status of the archive – colonial or otherwise? Second, can the anticolonial archive (assuming it exists as such) resist colonialism and colonial archives by reading them against the grain while opening a space for not only the dissolution of colonialism and colonial archives, but for its own dissolution? This counter-archival orientation is predicated not on the creation of alternative archives where practices superfluous to the archive are inserted into this monumental space (through ethnological and historical research), but where spaces superfluous to the archive are valued as sites of life and knowledge. In short, we are left desiring not only the refusal of colonial archives, but also the refusal of archival logics as we know them – the refusal of the discriminatory logics of archivability and the order of archive-ability. LOOKING ‘BACK’ INTO COUNTER-ARCHIVES What does it mean to ‘look back’? This question haunts the text. Its spectral character invites/incites the authors to ‘look into’ colonial and anticolonial practices and archives and in doing so, they also ‘look forward’ to a politics, an archive, and a knowledge yet to come. Looking back presents us with a politics for the anticolonial archive. It stages multiple forms of curation and profanation that supply us with statements, documents, and practices that enable us to read colonial archives and archives in general against the grain. That is, the acts of digging up historical, musical, and museological records, re-arranging, and re-mixing them, and then writing about them constructs other archives and realities. From the plurality of moves that makes up this book, it is clear that an anticolonial archive does not exist as a single institution or as a coherent set of documents. Its fragmentary character draws our attention to archival modes of circulation rather than institutionalization – movement rather than statis – complete with it rhythmic interruptions of epistemological and geographical boundaries. The cutting and connections of this archival practice creates connections between African, African American, Native American, and other anticolonial sites, practices, and documents. But there is more going on here than a new mode of cataloguing documents and constructing monuments. The plurality of documents and



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non-documentary or undocumented subject and objects that make up the anticolonial archive interrupts the logics of archivability that sets some documents apart thus creating sacred texts and religious spaces. Rather than creating a sacred anticolonial space or text, the move towards anticolonial archives seems to gesture towards profanation – a putting to common use that which had been set apart by colonial and postcolonial institutions and forms of knowledge. Through its acts of profanation, this book reveals the sacredness of authority in the postcolony while contesting the authority of the sacred and the sacred text – anticolonial or otherwise. It creates new circuits of circulation, and rhythms of popular texts (music) that point to modes of communication, communion, and ex-communication that both colonial and statist archives seek to discipline. CURATING A POLITICS FOR THE ANTICOLONIAL ARCHIVE Nowhere is the disturbance of the order of colonial archive-ability clearer than in the volume’s treatment of documents and non-documentary texts and objects in a manner that goes beyond the concerns of the orthodoxy of diplomatics – that age-old auxiliary European science ‘dealing with the types and elements of documents.’ As such, the book is concerned with more than questions of authenticity, veracity, and the form of documents.3 By paying attention to the anticolonial doubling and folding (diploun) of documents (diplomas) and meaning, the book pluralizes our conception of the archive, the document, and the science/art of diplomatics. Rather than gazing and folding into itself such that we can get an authentic meaning of the archivable document and the anticolonial event, the anticolonial archive (as presented here) has a diplomatic and duplicitous orientation. It ‘forges’ relations between anticolonial thinkers, spaces, and practices in ways that enable us to question both the colonial order and the coloniality of archives. This raises a crucial question. What type of document or object/subject is fit for inclusion in the archive? What kind of practice, object, and document is destined for the anticolonial archive? In short, what is its diplomatics? In curating the anticolonial archive and bringing it to book form, the book performs a necromantic act as well as a counter-archival act. It calls up the dead or makes alive that dead text. Through translation, compilation, and transcription (of indigenous knowledge that could die out), editing, mixing, and sampling, the book puts into circulation texts and cultures that 3.  The science of diplomatics was concerned with ‘the authenticity of charters or diplomas … and other early medieval legal documents in archives by the study of their form.’ This is the idea of diplomatics developed by the French Benedictine monk Dom Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) in his masterwork De re diplomatica libri VI see Skemer, Don. ‘Diplomatics and Archives.’ The American Archivist. 52.3 (1989): 376-382. p.377.

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the colonial archive threatens with death. However, like all archives, the anticolonial archive is also potentially a space of death. Therefore, we must interrogate the type of archiving and order of archive-ability that animates it. In part, this places emphasis on the fact that anticolonial practices, violent or otherwise, are always an attempt to make live that which the colonial order subjects to death. In calling for the anticolonial archive, we must ask whether it produces the death drive characteristic of the colony, or the archive drive that creates the colonial archive. We must ask whether it is a space animated by a different life force, one that puts into circulation and brings to life that which colonialism and the archive put to death or set apart. A force and a politics that presents a counter-archival disturbance to cliché representations and habitual managerial/curatorial orientation towards African lives, archival spaces, and the time-space that they produce. At stake here is the recognition that not all documents are destined for the archives due to the discriminatory process of collecting, organizing, and conserving the human record. In spite of our suspicions of the criteria of ‘archivability’ and the colonial library, we must also ask how archiving otherwise can create orientations towards knowledge that can enable us to relate to the knowledge of African pasts more politically and ethically. With these ethico-political concerns, I would like to pose a few more questions. Not as a closing, but as a pause. A call to more pensive engagement with archives. That is, given the entanglements (genealogical, historical, and material) between the archive and other spheres of knowledge, governance, and life, can one decolonize the archive without decolonizing other spheres of knowledge and life? Does mapping the anticolonial archive necessarily translate to decolonization of the archive? Is it always a decolonial practice? How can we support ‘new utopias’ where advent of self-government becomes the generative event that initiates other movements, other forms of life, and other ways of living together? How are we to relate to faithful or transgressive readings of colonial archives and moments of recursivity which, though not explicitly anti-colonial, help reveal the barbarity of both colonialism and the archive? The objective here is not to learn how to treat anticolonial archives, documents, or monuments in the ‘right’ way or to set them ‘apart’. The objective is to profane them. To ‘restore their use to common men’ such that they ecstatically escape the hold of experts, institutions, and books that freeze their capacities – an anticolonial ecstatis if you like (Agamben 2007, 2009).



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REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. (2009). What Is an Apparatus? trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. (2007). Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books. Constantinou, Costas M. (2004). States of Political Discourse: Words, Regimes, Seditions. London: Routledge. Manoff, Marlene. (2004). “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy. 4(1): 9–25. Mbembe, Achille. (2002). “Power of the Archives and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, Carolyn Hamilton et al. eds. Cape Town: David Philip. 19–26.

Index

academy, 7–9, 34, 42n8, 84n1, 87, 90, 92n6, 94, 96 African anticolonial thought, 2–4, 7–12, 39–42, 44, 46, 47, 49, 53, 54, 58, 220, 258 African diaspora, 207–10, 212, 220, 224, 226. See also diaspora African leaders, ix, 237, 239 African students, 59, 61, 62, 74, 258 African studies, x, 8, 132 African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde. See PAIGC Afrodidaxis, 234 agnotology, 40, 48 Algeria(n), 76, 85, 183, 186 American Indians, 194–97, 199–201. See also Indigenous peoples; Native Americans Andrade, Mário, 58, 62–64, 64n6, 66–68 anthropology, 19, 23, 28, 29, 40n3, 45, 46, 173 anticolonialism, 6, 9, 11, 14, 70, 71, 73, 77, 178, 180, 182, 183, 185, 208, 209, 217, 257; anticolonial archive, x, xiii, 3–9, 11–14, 40, 40n4, 42, 43, 49, 50, 54, 59, 61, 67, 70–73, 77, 117, 152, 182, 208, 226,

258–64; anticolonial resistance, ix, x, xiii, 153, 169n9, 172, 172n12, 219, 239; anticolonial struggle(s), 3, 5, 7, 13, 61, 65, 67, 69, 72, 73, 182, 189; anticolonial thinking, 5, 10, 42, 194; anticolonial thought, 2–4, 7–12, 39–42, 44n11, 46, 47, 49–54, 49n12, 58, 62, 68, 71, 182, 203, 220, 254, 258 anti-imperial, 83, 247, 248 apparatus(es), 51, 52, 153, 257 archive-ability, 257, 261–64 archive fantasy, 60, 61, 261 archiving, 5, 11–13, 17, 26, 27, 29, 36, 59, 61, 67, 102, 152, 207, 209, 231, 234, 239, 259, 261, 264 area studies, x, 7, 41, 43, 44 Aristotle, 17 Agurumyɛla, 125 Bacon, Francis, 21 Bandung, 190, 192 Berlin Conference 1884–5, 28, 85 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 179, 199, 200, 195 Black Power, 207, 209, 211, 211n2, 217, 219, 220, 223–26 bodies, 6, 24, 152, 153, 168, 169, 171, 177, 184, 198, 200, 202, 233, 253

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268 Index

Cabral, Amílcar, 7, 9, 12, 39, 41, 42n7, 50, 58, 63, 65–68, 73–76, 83–94, 84n1, 86n2, 87n2, 87n3, 90n5, 219 calculus, 26, 30 Cape Verde, 58, 76, 84–86, 90–93 Césaire, Aimé, 43n9, 49n12, 50, 63, 74, 185, 192, 260 chiefs, 13, 121, 124, 125, 130–33, 130n11, 136, 138–44, 139n5, 147, 148, 154, 156, 158–61, 169, 170, 172, 172n13, 173, 240 Christian, 20, 26, 31, 134, 163, 165; Christianity, 74, 146, 147, 148, 166 civilization, 19, 25, 29, 36, 61, 73–76, 126, 127, 144, 165, 186, 219, 220 Cold War, ix, 5, 10, 11, 43 colonialism, x, xi, xii, xiii, 2, 4, 8, 10, 11, 32, 39, 51, 65, 66, 72, 73, 85, 93, 95, 113, 114, 152, 166, 183, 184–87, 190, 192, 197, 220, 224, 236, 259, 261, 262, 264; neocolonialism, ix, xii, 32, 190; colonization, ix, x, 20, 32, 103, 178, 180, 184, 219 colonial record(s), 153, 154, 155 communication, 12, 48, 64, 65, 68, 102, 106, 113, 115n9, 117, 263 consciousness, ix–xiii, 18, 34, 62, 65, 106–9, 112, 114–17, 185, 207–9, 215, 217, 223, 226, 260 constitution, 17, 152, 172n13, 173, 179, 188n7, 195, 203, 252; constitution of, 12, 29, 31, 70, 187; constitutional, 33, 199, 200; constitutionally, 172; unconstitutional, 158 Congo, 13, 28, 64, 101, 102, 104, 105, 110–12, 116, 117, 189n9, 220, 235; Committee for the Study of the Upper Congo, 28 countryside(s), 86, 158, 245, 246, 247, 252 Cuban Revolution, 85, 86 curation, 6, 40, 234, 250, 260, 261, 262; curating, 5–9, 11, 12, 38, 40, 42,

43, 49, 50, 152, 207, 253, 263; curate, 7, 11, 13, 38, 40, 41, 50, 123, 170, 177, 203, 254 culture, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, 3, 7, 10, 18, 25, 28–30, 60, 62, 63, 72–75, 89, 113, 114, 121, 122, 126–29, 132, 133, 147, 148, 185, 188, 201, 207, 208, 209, 211, 220, 224, 225, 239, 254, 263 Darwin, Charles, 27, 30 decolonization, ix, xi–xiii, 4, 10, 12, 33, 35, 41, 43n9, 66, 172, 177–79, 182, 190–92, 194, 197, 198, 201, 209, 211, 224, 225, 259, 264; decolonial, 24, 51, 264 Deloria, Vine, 13, 180–83, 186–88, 188n7, 194–97, 199–203, 259 Derrida, Jacques, 5n3, 7, 49, 59, 257n1 dependency, ix, x diaspora, 7, 163, 177, 178, 183, 186, 208–11, 209n1, 199–220, 223, 224, 226, 260 discipline(s), 10, 11, 19, 22–24, 28–30, 34, 40n3, 45, 53, 94, 263 Domestic Dependent Nations, 180 earth priest(s), 13, 121, 152, 169–72, 172n13. See also Tindanna(s) and Ten’dana economic(s), xi, xiii, 2, 3, 8–11, 28, 40n3, 41, 43, 47, 83, 86–88, 90, 91, 126, 130, 136–39, 178, 179, 187, 189, 189n11, 191, 192, 195, 198–200, 224–25, 238, 244; economy, x, 27, 42, 193, 201, 225; political economy, 19, 23, 29 ecstasis, 259, 260 education, xi, xii, 85, 102, 122, 124, 127, 128, 144–48, 154, 167, 179, 195, 215, 220; educational, 90, 109, 189, 215; higher education, 11, 61, 84, 84n1, 94–96 ethnography, 254; ethnographic, 138, 155; ethnographies, 160 exile, 221, 223, 232, 243, 252

Index

Fanon, Frantz, x–xiii, 13, 39, 41, 43, 49n12, 180–88, 191–94, 197, 201–3 Foucault, Michel, 7, 59, 60, 70, 106, 155, 182 fragment(s), x, 153, 161, 234, 253, 258; fragmentary, 5, 210, 262; fragmentation, 5, 76, 213; fragmented, 49, 111, 152; fragmenting, 252 Francafrique, 236, 237, 239, 247 Francophone, 58, 102, 110, 116n13, 246, 258 FRELIMO, 57, 58n2, 66, 72, 75, 85 future, vii, xi, 2, 6, 14, 26, 33, 35, 36, 42, 43n9, 47, 67, 71, 89, 117, 128, 146, 147, 153, 155, 187, 190, 193, 201, 223, 224, 226, 231, 235, 236, 238, 243, 250, 252–54 Galton, Francis, 25n7, 28, 29 gender, 52, 53, 72, 73, 163, 202, 223, 234n2; gendered, 182, 209n1, 222 genocide, 13, 180, 186 Northern Ghana, 13, 121, 123, 123n1, 130n11, 135, 136–38, 141, 142, 146, 151, 152, 155, 161, 163, 164, 166, 169 globalization, 3, 83–85 Guinea-Bissau, 58, 58n2, 72, 76, 83–93, 86n2 Hip Hop, 110, 111, 115, 116, 207–16, 216n7, 218, 224–26, 260 history, x, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 13, 19, 20, 22, 23, 40n3, 41, 43, 47, 48, 53, 60, 61, 62n4, 72, 75, 77, 85, 89, 90, 95, 101–7, 109, 110, 112n7, 123, 125–27, 127n6, 128, 133–35, 142, 143, 145, 147, 148, 151, 153–55, 156n4, 160, 161, 164, 170, 172, 173, 177, 180, 182, 185–87, 189n10, 190, 195, 203, 207–9, 211, 212, 220, 224, 226, 231, 234, 235, 240, 243, 246, 247,

269

254; African history, 7, 43, 47, 209; collective history, 102, 117; colonial history, 104, 220; Gurensi history, 121, 126; historiography, x, 49, 101, 107, 155, 163, 171; history and culture, ix, 10, 89, 121, 127, 147; natural history, 23, 25, 235; shared history, 13, 180 home(s), 8, 28, 122, 135, 137, 141, 147, 151, 160, 163, 193, 194, 209, 214n5, 215, 217, 218, 219, 235, 243, 254; homeland, 208, 209, 211, 217, 218, 225, 226 House Congressional Resolution (HCR), 94, 179, 195, 196, 198 human sciences, 26, 202 humanities, 19, 22, 26, 30 humanity, x–xii, 6, 19, 31, 32, 110n4, 111, 164, 185, 193 humanism, x, xi, xii, 19, 185, 192, 193, 225, 248, 253, 254 von Humboldt, Alexander, 25n6, 27, 28 hybridity, 112–15 identity/identities, x, xi, xiii, 4, 6, 9, 29, 32, 41, 43, 45, 49, 52, 53, 72, 102, 103, 106–10, 113–15, 115n9, 116, 117, 152, 164n8, 168, 178, 202, 207, 209, 211, 217, 219, 220, 224–26, 260 imaginaries, 2, 10, 11, 13, 26, 27, 33, 43, 44, 46, 246, 250 imperialism, ix, 2, 14, 25, 32, 49, 73, 74, 83, 89, 95, 219, 224, 254 independence, ix, xiii, 3, 9, 48, 64, 65, 73, 75, 83, 84, 86–88, 91–93, 111, 115, 115n9, 117, 148, 155, 167, 177–80, 183, 187–92, 195, 197–200, 219, 220, 235, 237, 239–41, 253 Indigenous people, 197n12 indirect rule, 138, 147, 151, 154–57, 159 intellectual(s), vii, x, 3, 5, 7–9, 13, 23, 25, 26–28, 36, 41, 44, 46, 54, 69,

270 Index

71, 72, 77, 84–86, 88, 121, 157, 167, 186, 208, 211, 241 International Court of Justice, 188n8, 199 International Law, 13, 65, 179, 190, 199 International Relations, 8, 29, 32, 42, 70, 73, 77, 254 Islamic, 31, 134 James, C. L. R., 191 jazz, viii, 111–14, 212, 215, 216, 216n8, 260 Judaism, 31 knowledge, 4, 8–10, 13, 14, 17–23, 28, 30, 31, 33–36, 39–42, 48, 49, 54, 59–61, 64, 70, 71, 73, 77, 92n6, 94–96, 121, 128, 142, 145, 146, 152, 153, 160, 172, 173, 186, 208, 210–15, 226, 234, 249, 252, 257, 260, 262–64; production of, 9, 54, 72, 84, 96, 202, 234 Kramer, Mike, 84n1 land(s), 18, 28, 66, 75, 85, 91, 93, 95, 117, 128, 131, 133, 135–39, 141, 145–48, 154, 158, 166, 169–73, 172n13, 179, 187, 194–96, 201, 219, 220, 245, 246; landscape(s), 18, 34, 91, 102, 108, 153, 166, 171, 172, 231, 236, 247, 248, 250, 252 La Sape, 110, 111, 115 Leopold (king), 28, 211, 104, 105, 114 liberation movement(s), 58, 58n2, 64, 191, 211, 282 Lisbon, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 66, 68, 85, 86, 258, 259 literacy, 53, 91, 127n6, 144, 145 ‘look back,’ 5, 152, 155, 258, 262; ‘looking back, 5, 6, 29, 260, 262 love, 2, 32, 111n6, 114, 212, 216n7, 218, 248 Lumumba, Patrice, 1, 2, 8, 114, 115, 219, 220, 231, 235 Lusophone, 12, 58, 61, 65, 67, 258

Machel, Samora, 67, 68, 75, 76 Madlib, 13, 207–26, 215n6, 216n7, 216n8, 260 mathematics, 18, 21, 22, 23n4; mathematical, 32 Marx, Karl, 7, 28, 42n7, 90n5; Marxism, xii, 9, 88; Marxist(s), x, 88, 234 Mazrui, Ali A., 191 medicine show, 207, 208, 212, 212n3, 213, 217, 221, 226 memory, 26n8, 38, 59, 69, 101, 102, 104, 106–8, 131, 133, 153, 155, 163n7, 207–11, 213, 215–17, 219, 222, 226, 233, 239, 242, 247–49; memories, viii, 2, 4, 13, 14, 27, 58, 67, 101, 104, 107, 117, 145, 147, 152, 208, 211, 234, 236, 242, 247, 248, 250, 254 meta-status, 257 modernity, 33, 34, 43, 105, 106, 108, 112, 112n7, 113, 153, 161, 172, 225, 243, 246 music, 6, 8, 13, 14, 102, 109–17, 115n9, 115n11, 207–9, 211–13, 215–18, 221, 224–26, 260, 263; musical, 102, 103, 109, 111–17, 111n6, 115n9, 159, 212, 213, 218, 223–25, 242, 258, 260, 262; musician(s), 1, 109n3, 110–12, 115n9, 212, 213, 224, 248, 249 narrative(s), 13, 25, 28, 34, 42, 43, 49, 71, 72, 101, 102, 104, 106–10, 110n4, 111n6, 112, 114, 116, 117, 123, 152, 153, 155, 165, 167, 168, 171, 172, 172n12, 181, 187, 207–12, 218, 220, 225, 226, 238, 242, 258, 260 nation-state(s), 106, 123, 152, 179, 180, 185, 190–93, 197, 211, 217, 224 Negritude, 9, 58, 69, 184, 185 neoliberalism, 10, 42, 234; neoliberal university, 7, 8, 12, 94 New Deal, The, 195

Index

Nkrumah, Kwame, ix, 7, 48, 191, 192, 245, 251 North-South relations, 161, 165–67 Otis Jackson, Jr., 212 PAIGC, 58n2, 64, 66, 73, 76, 83, 86–90, 86n2 Pan-Africanism, 13, 209, 223 Papa Wemba, 109–11, 114 Paris, 58, 59, 62–64, 66, 72, 108, 116, 243 philosophy, 6, 18, 22, 23, 27, 36, 41, 42n7, 45, 51, 89, 90, 185, 201, 225, 234n2 poetics, 50, 261 Portugal, 58, 59, 61–66, 74–76, 85, 87, 88, 189, 259 postcolonialism, 180, 193, 239 Présence Africaine, 58, 59, 61, 65n7, 74, 258 profanation, 257, 262, 263. See also sacred Project ZACA, 243–46 Radio Freedom, 220–23 realism, 12, 30, 32, 90, 92–94, 92n6 reason, 17–20, 22, 26, 33; reasoning, 18, 180, 181 rebellions, 141, 161 reification, 46, 48, 50, 202; reify, 45, 49; reifying, 14, 37, 46 relationality, 46, 47; relational, 47, 92, 93 Renaissance, 18, 19, 21, 23–25, 27, 30–32, 233, 237, 245 reorganization, 178, 179, 186, 190, 194– 201, 199n13. See also termination repression, 66, 221, 233, 241 rhythm(s), 112, 113, 115, 217, 242, 250, 260, 261, 263; rhythmic, 111, 250, 262 Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), 102–6, 103n1, 109, 114 Rumba Lingala, 13, 102, 103, 106, 109–16, 111n6, 115n9

271

rural, 23, 43, 76, 113, 166, 213, 225, 240, 246, 247 sacred, 13, 108, 109, 130, 136, 147, 148, 158, 169–71, 189n11, 257, 263 ‘Saltwater Thesis, 197, 198 Sankara, Thomas, 1–3, 6, 7, 14, 232–35, 237, 241, 245–48, 254, 258 Sauvy, Alfred, 181 security/insecurity, 42, 46, 51, 53, 161, 240, 244, 245, 251, 253 self-determination, 8, 41, 178–83, 186–90, 192, 195, 197, 199–203, 253, 259 silence(s), 6, 74, 155, 160, 163, 177, 178, 231, 232, 258, 259; silenced, 59, 152, 163 social science(s), 10, 19, 21, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30, 34, 49, 219, 253, 254 solidarity, 2, 13, 26, 43n9, 62, 64–66, 77, 86, 87, 210, 211, 221, 223, 232, 239, 248–50 sovereignty, 6, 13, 20, 32, 33, 43n9, 170, 178–83, 186–88, 190, 192–95, 197, 199–203, 219, 259 Spivak, Gayatri, 202 status, 19, 25, 31, 35, 88, 108, 131, 158, 164, 165, 167, 180, 189, 195, 199, 200, 224, 240, 257–62 Stones Throw Records, 212, 213n4 teleology, 19 termination, 178, 179, 181, 186, 187, 190, 194–201, 199n13, 259 theology, 20, 26, 27, 31, 33 theory, xi, 9, 41, 42n7, 48–51, 85, 86, 88–90, 90n5, 92–94, 92n6, 96, 137, 215, 231, 236, 239, 259, 281; political theory, 6, 29, 39, 41, 44n10, 45, 89; postcolonial theory, 4; revolutionary theory, 83, 84, 89, 90, 93, 94; southern theory, 84 Tindaana(s), 124, 128, 130, 130n11, 135–39, 139n5, 147, 148, 158,

272 Index

169, 170, 172, 173, 175; Ten’dana, 158, 159. See also earth priests tradition(s), 2, 23, 24, 27, 32, 44, 45, 46, 70, 74, 75, 84, 88, 110–13, 117, 121, 125, 128, 148, 152, 153, 160, 164, 166, 173, 210, 211, 213, 217, 220, 221, 224, 236, 253; traditional, x, 47, 60, 88, 105, 115n11, 121, 130n9, 133, 136–38, 141, 142, 144, 146–48, 152, 159, 160, 162, 169, 172n13, 173, 193, 217, 218, 225 trauma, 183, 184 Tricontinental Conference, 83 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 26, 26n8, 152, 153, 163, 181, 182, 182n3 United Nations, 2, 178, 189n11, 240, 241, 247; Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), 197n12; General Assembly, 1; Resolution 1514, 183, 188, 189; Resolution 1541, 189, 190, 197, 198, 201; Resolution 1742, 198–201; university, 7, 8, 12, 58, 61, 68, 69, 74, 84, 85, 94–96, 124, 132, 167. See also education

urban, 76, 86, 101, 111n6, 112, 113, 139, 201, 224, 225, 240, 243, 245–47, 250; urbanization, 23, 102, 105, 111, 114, 225 US Department of the Interior, 195 violence, 5, 6, 32, 41, 52, 53, 60, 66, 95, 161, 177, 183, 175–86, 188, 189, 191, 194, 202, 213, 223, 235–37, 239–41, 250, 252–54, 258, 259 Wheeler-Howard Act, 179, 194 world(s), x, xi, 2–4, 6, 8, 10–12, 17, 20, 21, 24, 26, 28–30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 42, 43n9, 44, 46, 47, 49, 54, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 73–77, 83–85, 89–96, 90n5, 92n6, 110, 114, 126, 127, 129, 134, 156, 161–63, 166, 172, 181, 185, 187, 190–92, 196, 213, 219, 220, 224, 226, 231, 233, 235, 245, 246, 251, 253, 254, 258–60; New World, 22, 25, 27, 32, 34, 36, 162, 165, 185, 186; Third World, xii, 1, 86, 181, 192, 248; World Bank, 2, 10, 238

About the Contributors

Professor Pal Ahluwalia has been the pro vice-chancellor (Research and Innovation) at the Universality of Portsmouth since October 2014. His main research interests lie in the areas of African studies and social and cultural theory. His work is widely published and is internationally renowned for breaking down disciplinary boundaries and challenging orthodoxy. In October 2008, Professor Ahluwalia was appointed chair in transnational diasporas and reconciliation studies for the United Nations Educations, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). His latest book is Out of Africa: PostStructuralism’s Colonial Roots (2010). Christopher Azaare Anabila is a public intellectual, elder, and retired schoolteacher from Gowrie, Upper East Region, Ghana. His writings include A History of the Bongo District, 500 Taboos of the Gurensi People, Tindaanaship amongst the Gurensi, and numerous other volumes on Gurensi genealogies, histories, and oral traditions of thought. Shiera S. el-Malik is an associate professor in the Department of International Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. Her research is guided by an interest in the intersection of politics of knowledge and lived experience. She has published articles in the Review of International Studies, African Identities, and Journal of Contemporary African Studies, among other journals and edited volumes. Siba N. Grovogui is originally from Guinea, where he lived and studied. After Law School there, he served as a law clerk in 1979 before moving on to the court of appeals of Boké in 1980 as assistant judge. He later served as legal counsel for the National Commission on Trade, Agreements, and 273

274

About the Contributors

Protocols in Guinea. Grovogui received a PhD in political science, with a minor in international law, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988. He held teaching positions at the University of Michigan (as a Du BoisMandela postdoctoral fellow), Eastern Michigan University (1993–1995) and the Johns Hopkins University (1995–2013) before joining Cornell University. Grovogui teaches in the areas of international relations, international law, and political theory. He joined Cornell University to teach African political thought. Grovogui is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). His essay in this book is assembled from an evolving manuscript under the provisional title of Future Anterior: The International, Past and Present. Branwen Gruffydd Jones is reader in international relations in the School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University. She previously taught for several years in the Department of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is editor of Decolonizing International Relations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Her current project, African Anticolonialism in International Relations, examines the political thought and practice of the liberation movements of Portugal’s African colonies in the broader continental and global context of decolonization. She is a member of the international collaborative project Amílcar Cabral, da História Política às Políticas da Memória funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal. Anatoli Ignatov is an assistant professor in the Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University, Boone, NC. His research interests include African political thought, environmental political theory, critical development studies, and indigenous ecological knowledge. Anatoli’s work has appeared in Political Theory, GeoHumanities, Theory & Event, borderlands, and Law, Culture and the Humanities, as well as other edited volumes. Isaac A. Kamola is an assistant professor of political science at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He co-edited The Transnational Politics of Higher Education, and has published articles in African Identities, International Political Sociology, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Journal of Higher Education in Africa, PS: Political Science and Politics, Third World Quarterly, Polygraph, and Transitions, as well as numerous edited volumes. Seth M. Markle is an associate professor of history and international studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His work focuses on the histories of political and cultural exchange between Africa and the African Diaspora.



About the Contributors

275

He is the author of A Motorcycle on ‘Hell Run’: Tanzania, Black Power and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964–1974 (Michigan State University Press, 2016) as well as published articles and chapters that have appeared in The Black Scholar and Biography journals and in the edited volumes Revolutionary Paperwork: Radical Print Culture and the Black Power Movement, The Hip Hop Atlas, and The Companion to Public History. Míde Ní Shúilleabháin is a lecturer in international relations at Dublin City University. She previously worked as a political adviser in the European Parliament. Sam Okoth Opondo is an assistant professor in political science and Africana studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. His research focuses on the dynamics of ‘mediating estrangement’ and the ethics and aesthetics of cohabitation in settler colonial and postcolonial societies. He co-edited (with Michael J. Shapiro) The New Violent Cartography: Geo-Analysis after the Aesthetic Turn (Routledge, 2012) and has written journal articles and book chapters on the often-overlooked amateur diplomacies of everyday life, postcolonial cities, aesthetics, ethics, and cultural translation in Africa. Allen Stack received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University and is currently the manager of Faso Farm in Old Chatham, NY. Timothy Vasko is a PhD candidate at Cornell University in the Department of Government, in the fields of international relations and political thought.