Center for African Studies

Knowledge Production and African Intellectual Histories

March 27-28, 2025

Convenor: Philip Janzen, University of Florida, Department of History

Conference Abstract

Scholars have long considered the contributions of African intellectuals across the continent: early forms of social organization and public healing in the Great Lakes region; oral traditions in Central Africa, the political discourses of peasants in East Africa; the creation and study of Islamic texts in West Africa; the careers and writings of missionary-educated intermediaries; the spread of print culture in the early twentieth century; and the nationalist intellectuals of the 1960s. More recently, scholars have also turned to questions of knowledge production in and about Africa—not only in history, but also in literature, anthropology, global health, and other disciplines. This conference will explore the newest approaches to the study of African intellectual history and will also consider the dynamics of knowledge production in and about Africa. The presenters will focus on a series of questions: Who are African intellectuals? What kinds of knowledge have been produced about political, social, and cultural institutions in Africa? By whom? Toward what ends? Using what sources, languages, and methods? And how have scholars in Africa and other parts of the world questioned the colonial legacies of knowledge production? Across five panels, scholars of history, archaeology, anthropology, literature, geography, and other disciplines will offer their ideas and perspectives on these themes and questions.

RSVP

Speakers

David Bresnahan, University of Utah, Department of History

Livingstone Died in Central Africa: A Corpse, Language, and Intellectual Histories of an Imperial Watershed 

Abstract:

East Africa’s incorporation into Oman’s Busaidi Sultanate is a signature moment in the historiographical turn that seeks to center Africa’s place in the Indian Ocean world. The Busaidi era is typically seen as a period of intensive global integration, during which East Africa’s interior became more directly connected to the Indian Ocean economy. Yet there is little understanding of how African societies understood this momentous political and commercial change. This paper examines this global story from the perspective of the Mijikenda speaking societies living immediately inland from the port city of Mombasa. It focuses on two entangled concepts, honor (heshima) and debt (kore), which informed Mijikenda speakers’ relationships with Mombasa. For centuries, Mijikenda communities maintained trading and political relationships with Mombasa by claiming honor and tributes, while coastal merchants occasionally seized debt captives to ensure that these partnerships remained fair and balanced. When the Busaidi dynasty captured control of Mombasa from the 1830s, it altered the balance between heshima and kore and challenged inland communities’ understanding of their associations with coastal interlocutors. In following Mijikenda speakers’ concepts of honor and debt, I demonstrate how a familiar story of East Africa’s increasing global connections during the nineteenth century looks radically different from the vantage point of communities on Mombasa’s mainland.

 

Chapurukha Kusimba, University of South Florida

Current Themes in Archaeological Research in East Africa

Abstract:

Like in the rest of the continent, archaeology in East Africa evolved from a colonial context. Major structural transformations have occurred in archaeology’s practice. Although some later prehistory topics embrace a post-colonialist and posthuman analytical framework, the core of archaeological practice in East Africa is grounded in processual scientific archaeology. Archaeology in East Africa blends integrated ecological and historical perspectives in the writing of the region’s deep history. The application of new dating techniques, isotopic, genetic, and archeometallurgical analyses, and the integration of new analytical methods drawn from evolutionary biology, anthropology, geophysics, and geochemistry have dramatically increased, generating new information and spawning further research questions. Community archaeology, identity archaeology, and archaeology of listening are emerging new areas of research in response to descendant communities’ and national states’ concerns. Heritage studies have become crucial research topics as managers decry archaeological sites loses. Collaborative research involving multiple research institutions is now the norm. How will site losses affect archaeological research? What role will museum’s collections play in future studies as field research diminishes in light of US divestment in international and diversity research?

 

Rhiannon Stephens, Columbia University

Recovering responses to drought in East Africa before 1900.          

Abstract:

This paper addresses the question of how we can recover the diversity and variability of social responses to drought in East Africa prior to 1900. It focuses on specific examples that allow for the integration of estimates from new interpretations of paleoclimate data. Drawing on historical evidence from comparative historical linguistics and oral traditions, the paper argues that there was no single social experience of, or response to, drought. Instead, political, economic, environmental, and social factors shaped responses, which ranged from catastrophe and exploitation to generosity and the assertion of norms of proper behavior. Paying closer attention to the variation in how regional dry anomalies manifested themselves at local scales and to differences in their duration allows for a better understanding of the importance of intraregional relations and interactions in responses to such anomalies. Critically, the paper makes the case that not only is this approach essential in moving beyond generalizations about past responses to drought, it demonstrates the viability of this methodological approach in a context with limited written sources before the twentieth century.

 

Sean Hanretta, Northwestern University, Department of History

Researching the Ahmadiyya: Global Muslim Intellectual Networks, Responses to Ahmadi Preaching, and the Shaping of British Policy in the Gold Coast, 1921-1925 

Abstract:

Recent masterful studies of the Ahmadiyya in Ghana have revealed the role that Muslim scholars played in shaping the colonial administration’s responses to the arrival of the movement in Saltpond in 1921. Islamic leaders seem to have “circled the wagons” to prevent the Ahmadiyya from spreading into the interior of the colony, particularly into Kumasi where the powerful al-Hajj Umar of Kete Krachi, via his student, Sarkin Zongo Mallam Sallow, exercised decisive influence. Umar’s opposition to the Ahmadiyya was in part an effort to defend religious orthodoxy as it was understood by Muslims in the savanna region against newer movements emerging in the south. But it was also a nuanced position informed primarily by Umar’s own research into the movement, research that drew on his own historical knowledge and on a transnational network of Muslim intellectuals stretching from the Gold Coast through Cairo to South Asia and beyond. Umar channeled a global debate about the Ahmadiyya that distinguished between its Lahore and Qadiyan branches and his shifting opinions demonstrate both his tolerance for approaches to Islam that transcended doctrinal factions provided they stayed within the core tenets of the faith, and his willingness to use his authority to reject any that strayed beyond those tenets. Colonial knowledge and policy about Islam in the region was not merely dependent upon local intermediaries who represented the beliefs of their communities. It floated, largely unawares, on top of a fast-moving global network of research and analysis.

 

Sandra Greene, Cornell University, Department of History

Thoughts/Actions/Legacies: Nyaho Tamaklo, Elite Intellectual

Abstract:

Studies on political leaders in precolonial Africa focus largely on how they shaped the political, economic, cultural, and military cultures of the polities over which they exercised authority. Rarely are such individuals defined specifically as intellectuals. That term, in recent times, is more likely to be applied to individuals often defined as part of the subaltern, the seemingly far less powerful: peasants, laborers, and healers, female and male, who were able to influence their communities in ways less visible than elite actions. Yet, I would argue that in some instances, elite actions were also influenced by a larger vision, one that could offer an alternative for how the world can and should be understood. Historians interested in unearthing this larger vision, particularly during precolonial times, face the enormous challenge of limited data. But in this paper, I suggest ways this can be overcome by exploring the life of one prominent political leader in the polity of Anlo, located in what is now southeastern Ghana. That individual was Nyaho Tamakloe. His vision not only challenged norms about slavery and the enslaved but was one that he implemented, and which left a lasting legacy. How do we get at the inner thoughts of such individuals? What and who influenced those thoughts? Can he really be defined as an intellectual? These questions will be addressed in this paper.

 

Admire Mseba, University of Southern California

Archaeology, Language and History: Knowledge Production and the Histories of the Zimbabwean Plateau’s Early and Later Farming Communities 

Abstract:

Two major takes inform our understanding of the linguistic landscape and the histories of social and political complexity in precolonial Zimbabwe. The first is the idea that until the turn of the first millennium, the region was occupied by people who spoke a language closely related to Nyasa languages. These were replaced by an immigrant population speaking a language ancestral to what we now call Shona languages in the eleventh century. This new group produced the economic and political transformations marked ultimately by the emergency of states such as Great Zimbabwe. The other perspective agrees that political complexity on the Zimbabwean plateau began in the eighth century, but this was the work of long settled farming communities. In this paper I revisit the methodological foundations upon which these two takes are based to argue that proto-Shona speakers may have settled on the Zimbabwean plateau before the eleventh century and may have had a tradition of political complexity that went back further than the late first millennium that is captured in archaeological materials.

 

Ainehi Edoro, University of Wisconsin-Madison

African Literature and the Problem of the Archive

Abstract:

The paper looks at changes in the conceptualization of African literature as a context of knowledge-making, moving from concerns about canon, authorship, language, and nationalism in the 20th century to a present where digital and algorithmic systems determine the grounds of literary knowledge, its making and its consumption. The paper will explore how these shifts have altered the kinds of questions we ask about African literature and also pose some preliminary question about how the current AI might be introducing new complications.

 

Cilas Kemedjio, University of Rochester,

I’m not your Native Informant: The Novel as Site of Decolonial Knowledge Production from Chinua Achebe to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

Abstract:

“I’m not your native informant,” echoes James Baldwin’s statement that provides the title to Raoul Peck’s film (I’m not your Negro). The native informant stands for the subaltern role assigned to barely Africans in the production of Africanist knowledge. Such inferior positioning could translate into a denial of African agency in the production of knowledge about Africa (Appiah 1992). This presentation proposes that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in Half and a Yellow, posits creative writing as a site of a decolonial knowledge production. The novel, proceeding from debates surrounding decoloniality, frames Ugwu, the indigenous houseboy turned writer, as a defiant postcolonial voice who wrestles the story of the Biafra war from British art amateur Richard Churchill. The reader could almost hear Ugwu uttering this statement. “I’m no longer your native informant.” I argue that Ugwu is a graduate of the decolonial/indigenous-oriented university staffed by the University of Nsukka lecturers who meet at Odenigbo’s house before the Biafra war. In the first section, I read Adichie’s road to emancipation as an intertextual gesturing to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart final scene in which the British District Commissioner projects to use Okonkwo’s suicide and its cultural interpretations as raw material in the book he is writing. In the second section, I propose that we consider the decolonial project of rescuing the Biafra story from humanitarian bondage as a challenge to the colonial order of discourse and its legacies. I further suggest that, through the witnessing of universal black suffering and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, the novel charts the road to decoloniality with the active consciousness of what Ngugi Wa Thiong ‘o refers to as the Idea of Africa, materialized here in the intertextual mobilization of the pan-Africanist imagination.

 

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Emory University

Thinking in Poetry: African Lifeworlds and Literary Worldmaking

Abstract:

Creative writers, asserts anthropologist and political scientist Wale Adebanwi, ought to be acknowledged by social theorists “as social thinkers themselves who engage with the nature of existence and questions of knowledge in the continent – and beyond.” This talk investigates how twenty-first-century African poets writing in English engage with existence and knowledge. Not just a means to express individual emotions or to represent society, poetry can be a way to reflect on and understand subjectively inhabited social worlds—what some philosophers call lifeworlds—and thus a mode of social thinking. Poets such as Susan N. Kiguli, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and Romeo Oriogun engage with questions of language, nation, and sexuality, among others. In their quests for freedom amidst historic and continuing unfreedom, they make, in turn, new worlds in language.

 

Benedito Machava, Yale University

The Decolonization of Mozambique and the Historical Record: Revisiting 1974

Abstract:

In the early 2000s, as African history entered a new historiographic moment of undefinition, Stephen Ellis suggested that historians of Africa look at new sources and new ways of writing histories of postcolonial Africa that spoke to the most relevant concerns of contemporary Africa. One important caveat of Ellis’ manifesto for new histories of Africa was “the effort to penetrate the thinking of those who were implicated in the events of the past” (Ellis, 3). In his mind, newspapers offered the great possibility of writing such histories because, among many other things, newspapers offer a “more accessible and more comprehensive documentary record for historians” (Ellis, 15). Despite the many shortcomings of newspapers, especially the fact that they are not “journals of record” and therefore are partial and sometimes inaccurate, Ellis argued that they are “outstanding” sources. “Handled with prudence, the press can be a prime source not only for political history but for all manner of social history as well” (Ellis, 18). But, what if a story in a newspaper was a fabrication or willfully distorted and it made into the cannons of official and unofficial historiography? How can we use newspapers to “write about what actually happened”, if their editorial agendas produced silences, distortions, and erasures in the historical record?

In this talk, I want to revisit a crucial moment in the process of Mozambique’s decolonization that has been told from the perspective of those who emerged triumphant from it. I examine the same newspapers that distorted an important event in the process of Mozambique’s decolonization to not just set the record straight, but to highlight the power of the press written record in shaping historical narratives. While I challenge certain methodological assumptions from Elli’s opus, I take inspiration from it to tell a story that complicates our understanding of the past and its dead ends. Like Ellis, I believe that it is “important to see the past not just as the embryo of the present”, even when the historical pattern suggests so, “but also as a period in its own right, replete with unfulfilled ambitions and disappointed hopes, ideas that once seemed important but that did not actually result in outcomes that are still with us today” (Ellis, 3). The political imagination of those who witnessed the window of opportunity for a democratic alternative open and close in the moment of Mozambique’s decolonization is a good example of Africa’s contemporary history’s contingency and dead ends.

 

Rudo Mudiwa, University of California – Irvine

“You Paid with Your Blood”: Building a Feminist Public in Post-Independence Zimbabwe 

Abstract:

In October 1983, the Zimbabwean government conducted Operation Clean Up, a campaign which targeted prostitutes, vagrants, and squatters in urban areas. I argue that the prostitute became the representative figure for this broadscale cleansing of “undesirables” in ways which galvanized public condemnation of the government but also erased the other less immediately sympathetic or publicly disavowed targets of violence. This was owing, in part, to the indiscriminate nature of Operation Clean Up, which yoked sex workers with formally employed women of all class positions in the same criminal category. But it was also due to a political moment in which the pursuit of women’s rights became a crucial metric for evaluating a state’s development. These conditions tilled the ground for the backlash against Clean Up, bringing a provisional and ultimately ephemeral feminist public into view.

 

Liz Jacob, University of Massachusetts – Amherst

The Specter of Matriarchy: Debating Matrilineal Inheritance in 1950s Côte d’Ivoire  

Abstract:

In the years preceding independence, Ivoirian Christian activists and intellectuals regularly decried the institution of matriliny, or the tracing of descent and inheritance along the maternal line. Elite women and men criticized matrilineal inheritance as a source of succession disputes, denouncing a system that left widows destitute and children disinherited by their fathers. Moreover, by promoting ties to matrilineal kin, the institution compromised the integrity of the nuclear household, which many educated Ivoirians viewed as an essential element of a modern, developed society. Put simply, matrilineal inheritance was the “number one enemy of the family in Côte d’Ivoire.”

In their writings on this topic, however, francophone intellectuals did not use the word matrilinéarité, meaning matrilineality. Instead, they consistently deployed the term matriarcat, meaning matriarchy. What can we make of this misusage? This paper argues for interpreting activists’ calls for the abolition of matriarcat as a form of parapraxis—a persistent misnaming that revealed deeper social concerns and political ambitions. By conflating matriliny with rule by women, writers mobilized societal fears of female authority without formally articulating them. In so doing, they critiqued matriliny as unequivocally damaging to women, without acknowledging the ways matriliny could grant women rights to status and property. Such a system, after all, would constitute matriarchy. Through an analysis of newspaper opinion pieces, political pamphlets, and theatre production, this paper traces how intellectuals used critiques of matriarcat to advance a vision of a patriarchal conjugality for the emancipation of women.

 

Claire Wendland, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Our African boys”: Mission-grounded Medical Knowledge about Africa from the Jim Crow U.S. to Colonial Nyasaland 

Abstract:

In the first decade of the 20th century, several young people circulated from colonial Nyasaland to the Jim Crow South in the United States and back under the protection of missionaries. One was Daniel Malekebu, educated in the Providence Industrial Mission of Chiradzulu, Nyasaland and informally adopted by Black American Baptist missionary Emma Delaney. Malekebu followed Delaney to the United States at age 15, earning his own passage, to enroll in segregated educational institutions. He eventually graduated in 1917 from Meharry Medical College as Nyasaland’s first medical doctor. He married Flora Zeto, a woman brought as a child from the Congo by another Black American missionary, Clara Howard, and subsequently educated at Spelman. After a stint in Liberia, the couple ultimately reopened Providence Industrial Mission—which had been shut down after the Chilembwe Rebellion—and expanded its educational, evangelical and medical functions dramatically. Until their deaths in the late 1970s, they also gave many lecture tours in the United States, some with local civic organizations and some in African-American churches. In this talk I will describe the (very) early stages of a project studying the kinds of knowledge produced in these lectures—knowledge about Africa, about medicine, and about shared work for liberation.

 

Mark Hunter, University of Toronto, Department of Human Geography

Whoonga is a Heroin-based Street Drug: The Making and Persistence of the Antiretroviral-drug Legend

Abstract:

Against the backdrop of the dramatic rise of heroin use in South Africa, this paper critically examines the emergence and persistence of what it calls the “ARV-drug legend”: the widely circulating claim that an “African” street drug called whoonga/nyaope contains antiretroviral (HIV/AIDS) medication. From around 2010, this narrative gained significant traction in both the media and academy, despite evidence that “whoonga” is a heroin-based drug, essentially the same as “sugars,” which had been reported within “Indian” communities since the early 2000s. Why have repeated and convincing rebuttals not subdued the circulation of the legend? This article utilizes interviews with heroin dealers and users, media reports, and secondary sources. While critical of the media and academy’s circulation of the legend, the paper argues that drug stereotypes are not simply imposed from above. Apartheid policy tied segregation to “race” and “culture” and created lived experiences that have modified but not transformed in the democratic era.

Ramah McKay, University of Pennsylvania

“Thinking with and against safety: can ethnographies of global health in Mozambique speak to abortion access struggles in the US?

Abstract:

This paper thinks across two examples: ethnographic accounts of pharmaceutical access in global health sites, especially in Mozambique, and online participation in workshops and webinars on access to abortion medications in the US. The paper starts by observing how the movement of pharmaceuticals outside of state and health system settings has been understood as both a strength and a problem for global health. Where the pharmaceuticalization of health has been the subject of anthropological and ethnographic critique, for abortion access activists, pharmaceuticalization enables mobility, discretion, and opportunities for political “work around” that are valued, even as they also create dilemmas in how safety, care, and access are defined and experienced. Many such efforts also devolve emotional and relational labor onto young volunteers, much as global health programs have similarly mobilized unpaid community labor. Ultimately, the paper asks whether drawing connections across geographic, political, and medical contexts can help to challenge fixed analytic positions between “north” and “south” and to highlight instead shared spaces of struggle.

 

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