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- Convenors:
-
Peter Bloom
(University of California, Santa Barbara)
Stephan Miescher (University of California, Santa Barbara)
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- Location:
- C4.02
- Start time:
- 27 June, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the inter-regional and transnational dynamics implied by the role of archives on the African continent. We seek papers addressing the production and destruction, the making and unmaking, of conventional and alternative archives and monuments.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores the inter-regional and transnational dynamics implied by the role of archives on the African continent. Whereas scholars have identified political parties, paramilitary organizations, religious groups, corporate entities, and NGOs as arbiters of state power, we are interested in examining the making and unmaking of conventional archives and other forms of cultural and artistic expression in preserving and engaging with the past. Archives and monuments imply the production, preservation, and promotion of national identity. Yet their frequent neglect and even destruction reveal a deeply ambivalent relationship to the past. This panel builds on discussions held at the conference, "Archives of Post-Independence Africa and its Diaspora," in Dakar, June 2012, which was organized by CODESRIA, the African Studies Centre Leiden, and the University of California African Studies Multicampus Research Group. Various participants described, for example, how significant archival documents taken from the national archives in DR Congo have reportedly found their way into the hands of street vendors using them as paper to wrap prepared food. The construction of massive national monuments, such as Heroes Acre in Harare, as another example, celebrates a post-independence vision of African identity, while also serving as a politically charged exclusionary historical staging ground. We seek papers that query how various archives, from national to alternative forms, have fared under the postcolonial state, and finally, examine the extent to which they have served as instruments of state power.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jean Allman (Washington University )
Paper short abstract:
During his rule, Nkrumah attracted around him a group of expatriate women, who served in official capacities and became his close confidantes. These women have shaped in profound ways how we can and will remember the African Revolution and its iconic leader.
Paper long abstract:
Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana's independence struggle and its first head of state, was a major theorist of pan-Africanism and arguably the most important figure in what was known in the 1960s as the "African Revolution." During his rule, Nkrumah attracted around him a cohort of expatriate women, who served in various official capacities, but who also became his close confidantes and remained so, even after the 1966 coup. This trusted cohort has shaped, in profound ways, how Nkrumah is remembered today and what evidence historians have at hand to reconstruct not only the history of Ghana's first Republic (1960-1966), but the story of the African Revolution. Based on private papers and correspondence (some only recently accessible), newspapers, and government documents, this paper explores the role of the secret and the intimate in the consolidation, the disruption, and ultimately the historical reconstruction of state power in post-colonial Africa. It argues that this circle of women not only erected a protective wall around Nkrumah in his present, they constructed an equally impenetrable wall around his past: conspiring through the destruction of correspondence, through their own writings, and in the crafting of their archival deposits, to preserve a particular masculinist, revolutionary image of Nkrumah, as the lone and ever-dedicated warrior against colonialism and neocolonialism, rarely faltering, his eyes always on the prize. In these ways, they have helped preserve a very particular "Nkrumah" for posterity and have shaped how we can and will remember the African Revolution and its iconic leader.
Nate Plageman (Wake Forest University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how one of Ghana's most prominent genres of popular music, dance band highlife, which is often lauded as a medium that catpured everyday urban realities, also reveals much about state efforts to create a "Ghanaian" identity and arbitrate a "national" past.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which one of Ghana's most prominent genres of popular music, dance band highlife, encapsulates both "on the ground" realities of everyday life in mid-twentieth century urban Ghana as well as the newly independent state's efforts to create a "Ghanaian" national identity. In particular it engages 1) the intimate, yet subjective, importance that the music had for urban residents during the middle decades of the 20th century; 2) the ways in which the Ghanaian state coopted highlife in order to buttress its own attempts at consolidating social, political, and cultural power. In the process, it asserts that the music warrants recognition not simply as a form of "popular culture" that can be read to access "ordinary" persons' consciousness or identity, but a politically charged, elastic, and deceptively complex medium that can be used, like other archival sources, to arbitrate the past.
The paper's reflections on highlife's suitability as a kind of historical "repository" are important for several reasons. At one level, they demonstrate how the music's ability to embody a diverse array of concerns, including those of male musicians, urban audiences, and government authorities, makes it a promising source of information. More importantly, however, they unveil that highlife can be used not merely as a way to reconstruct the past, but to arbitrate its contents, importance, and meaning.
Peter Bloom (University of California, Santa Barbara) Stephan Miescher (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Paper short abstract:
This jointly presented paper focuses on the archival absences in two institutional archives of contemporary Ghana: the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (Bloom) and the Volta River Authority (Miescher). These silences are examined in relation to bureaucratic functionality and strategies of omission.
Paper long abstract:
When the will to amass the weight of archival evidence to make meaningful arguments about a particular context is stymied by missing or discarded documents, what then? We examine what exists within these absences, and their relationship to coercive forms of state power. This jointly presented paper is based on two case studies at national institutions in post-independence Ghana: the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (Bloom) and the Volta River Authority (Miescher). We explore a series of archival gaps and absences as part of our ongoing research projects which underscore the relationship of these archives to political prerogative. While oral history is one significant methodological approach to account for these silences, we emphasize these gaps as an expression of power. It is here that the realm of secrecy, rumor, innuendo, and speculation emerge as a means of re-inhabiting the archive against the grain of its intention. The credo of the professional researcher is often allied with the detective in search of clues and motivation of characters at "the scene of the crime." If the institutional setting may be said to stand in for this scene, the archive as allied with the institution then serves as the repository of memory and denial. In our examination of archival practices, we ask how absences not only reveal institutional objectives, but also shed light on their ambivalent relationship to state power.
Brenton Maart
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on contemporary photography and historical collated archives of selected buildings in apartheid native reserves to propose a novel category of monument for consideration in academic scholarship
Paper long abstract:
South African native reserves (also known as homelands or bantustans) served as the heart of the apartheid system. Established as early as 1913, the homelands sought to segregate black from white South Africans by subsidising the construction of decentralized architectural and bureaucratic support structures. At the fall of apartheid in 1994, the homelands were incorporated back into the country and their subsidies were withdrawn, leaving behind rural areas now characterized by severe poverty. In many ways then, the legacies of apartheid, in these areas, continue.
The research question at the heart of this paper understands that the buildings in the homelands expressed aspects of the ideology of high apartheid; that political change has ensued, apartheid has been dismantled, as has the homeland system, with concomitant ideological changes. The investigation seeks to analyse this shift in meaning by drawing on a contemporary photographic archive of the architectural structures and a collated digital archive of documents relevant to the history of the buildings.
Current scholarship recognizes two key forms of monument: conventional and counter- (or anti-) monuments. The research fieldwork indicates the possibility of a third, as yet unexplored form, which I have termed the inadvertent monument. By developing new tropes of commemoration, these buildings, through an altogether passive attribution, may be considered as inadvertent monuments. The crux of the theoretical component of the paper will formulate substantive and rhetorical definitions for this new type of monument to the folly of apartheid's ideology of oppression.
Carolyn Hamilton (university of cape town)
Paper short abstract:
The paper reassessrs understandings of political incorporation through exploration of ancestor archives across the late pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods in the region that is today southern Swaziland and KwaZulu-Natal.
Paper long abstract:
Colonial archives are organized in such a way that they foreground forms of political incorporation and dislocation framed in terms of tribe and, subsequently, ethnicity. Formal collections of oral traditions, in turn, tend to focus on lineage politics. The proposed paper seeks to reassess these understandings of political incorporation through exploration of alternative archival assemblages, notably through what I term ancestor archives. In particular, the paper focuses on forms of negotiation of the presence of ancestors in the land by incoming political powers, across the late pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods in the region that is today southern Swaziland and KwaZulu-Natal. The paper is based on the book manuscript that I am currently working on which theorises and explores ancestor practices as a form of archive pertinent to the understanding political processes.
Shamil Jeppie (University of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
Offers a perspective on private and public manuscript collections in Timbuktu, Mali, especially in light of the history of social and political disruptions in and around Timbuktu.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how collections have been constituted in Timbuktu. It looks closely at the work of probably the most energetic copyist and collector of the twentieth century in the region, Ahmad Bul'araf. Part of his collection became the basis of the official archive-library in Timbuktu named after the town's most famous scholar, Ahmed Baba (16th century). This paper examines the fate of Bul'araf's private collection and that of the public archive in the post-colonial period. The paper also reflects on the recent period of instability and how previous episodes of state breakdown in the region affected the traditions of collecting and preservation.
Dominique Malaquais (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on research centered on the production of an archive dedicated to Pan-African festivals and based on a rich corpus of press archives, the paper considers uses to which a festival held in Kinshasa in 1974 was put to consolidate the power of Zaïre’s then ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko.
Paper long abstract:
Nine years after he took power in a military coup, Mobutu Sese Seko organized a massive festival called Zaïre 74. Today, Zaïre 74 is best remembered for a single event that took place during the festival and was watched on television sets planet wide: the now-mythical "Rumble in the Jungle" that pitted boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman against one another for the title of heavyweight champion of the world. Zaïre 74, however, was much more than the Ali-Foreman match. It was a brilliant, nefarious instrumentalization of a concept developed on the African continent and in its diaspora over the course of two decades, from the late 1950s to the late 1970s: the Pan-African festival of culture and arts. Drawing on research centered on the production of an archive dedicated to Pan-African festivals of the 1960s and 70s and examining a rich corpus of press archives from Zaïre, Senegal, Nigeria and Algeria, this paper considers the wide-ranging uses to which Zaïre 74 was put by the Mobutu machine in the construction of its hegemonic project. A core focus of the paper is the relation that Zaïre 74 bears to three other festivals of the period: the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar 1966), the First Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers 1969), and the Second World Black and African festival of Arts and Culture, or FESTAC (Lagos 1977).
Viviane Dittrich (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Paper short abstract:
This paper contributes to the conceptualization of the making and unmaking of the archives of two tribunals in Africa, the ICTR and SCSL, and examines their dynamic role and meaning for the construction and reconstruction of justice and peace.
Paper long abstract:
Vis-à-vis the imminent closure of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals the question of their archival legacy has become increasingly topical. With a focus on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) in Africa this paper aims at an enhanced understanding of the role and meaning of their archives in the local, regional and international realm. As living archives they are a precious treasure-trove of records documenting particular crimes and (hi)stories as well as the international experiment of international criminal justice on the African continent itself. The focus here is on their archives as one of the most visible tangible legacies of the tribunals and as spaces of construction and reconstruction regarding truth, memory and power. Archiving is not only about shelving the past but always about interpreting and reinterpreting, past, present and future. Based on field research this paper contributes to the conceptualization of the making and unmaking of the archives, specifically of the archival legacy in light of collective memory shaping and contestation regarding narratives and memories of the Rwandan and Sierra Leonean conflict and peace. For instance, the nomination of the ICTR judicial records for the UNESCO/ Jikyi Memory of the World prize and the inclusion of the SCSL archives in the Peace Museum will be examined. The dynamic interaction of the construction and reconstruction of the archives is explored in light of their preservation, protection, promotion and permanent questioning.
Filipe Santos (Instuto Politécnico de Leiria) Maria Antonia Barreto (IPLCEA-IUL)
Paper short abstract:
In this article we present the structural guidelines of the already existing Guiledje Memorial, about the "Luta de Libertação", and the Cacheu Memorial, still being built, about the cultural heritage of the XVI and XVII century slave traffic in this region.
Paper long abstract:
In this article we present the structural guidelines of the already existing Guiledje Memorial, about the "Luta de Libertação", and the Cacheu Memorial, still being built, about the cultural heritage of the XVI and XVII century slave traffic in the northern region of Guiné-Bissau.
The objectives of these memorials are: preserve and promote the cultural heritage, making histoty and culture acessible to the local populations, reduce poverty and create economical grownth in the regions and promote the multicultural acquaintanceship in Guiné-Bissau.
Shiera el-Malik (DePaul University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper asks how should scholars read 20th c. African political writings today? I argue that it offers insights in six areas: Theory and Practice, Socialist Economics and Humanist Philosophy, Racism and Anti-racism, Social and Political Identity, Violence, and Self-determination and Statehood.
Paper long abstract:
This paper asks how should scholars read African political writers such as Biko, Cabral, Kaunda, Lumumba, Mondlane, Neto, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Senghor, Soyinka, Thiam, Touré, etc. from the present historical moment? The conditions for the emergence of political thought in Africa between 1940-1980 rest on imperialism and colonial governance, shifting geo-political relationships during and after WWII, and a post-WWII transition in social relations of capital. Together, these point to a 'crevice moment' in which the conditions were set for an audible conversation about politics, power, and social change. The content of these writings speaks to the 'Bandung moment' in which ideas of humanism, sovereignty, and self-determination drove resistance against oppressive regimes. David Scott (2004) argues that this project has been foreclosed. According to him contemporary thinkers are faced 'with the virtual deadend of the Bandung project that grew out of the anticolonial revolution…. [This exhausted story] cannot enable us…to give point to the project of social and political change' (57). Instead of devising a new path, this paper examines the components of that earlier path in order to consider what residues exist in contemporary political action that carry anticolonial remnants. I argue that the material is an important record of a heavily theorised political action and make the case that anticolonial thought offers insights in six areas: Theory and Practice, Socialist Economics and Humanist Philosophy, Racism and Anti-racism, Social and Political Identity, Violence, and Self-determination and Statehood.