tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/african-history-17922/articlesAfrican history – The Conversation2024-03-12T13:52:34Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2234582024-03-12T13:52:34Z2024-03-12T13:52:34ZColonial statues in Africa have been removed, returned and torn down again – why it’s such a complex history<p>In 2020, the <a href="https://www.mprnews.org/crime-law-and-justice/killing-of-george-floyd">murder of George Floyd</a> in the US served as a catalyst for the global <a href="https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/BLM">Black Lives Matter movement</a>. It sparked widespread protests against police brutality and systemic racism. It also ignited <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall">debates</a> about historical symbols of oppression, such as statues of figures associated with racial injustices. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-06-12/pulling-down-statues-of-racists-africas-done-it-for-years">These debates presented colonial statues</a> in Africa as having been contested and toppled for many years, ever since African states gained independence. Indeed, colonial statues were at the heart of the colonial world, symbolising its violence, white supremacy and the erasure of precolonial history. But colonial monuments in African public spaces have much more complex and often overlooked histories.</p>
<p>As a scholar of African heritage, I recently published a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13527258.2023.2294738">study</a> examining colonial statues and how they have been regarded in postcolonial Africa. My historical investigation highlights three major phases. </p>
<p>First, in the era of independence of African states, from the 1950s to 1980, some statues were removed from public spaces, but many remained. </p>
<p>Second, the 1990s and 2000s were marked by the “return of empires”: statues that had been removed were put back in public spaces and new neo-colonial monuments were constructed. </p>
<p>Third, the renewed challenges to colonial statues from the 2010s faced some strong resistance. Understanding this history is crucial, as it exposes the challenges of truly moving beyond the colonial world and order.</p>
<h2>Colonial statues at independence (1950s-1980)</h2>
<p>As African countries gained independence from the 1950s to the 1980s, colonial statues faced three main fates: recycling; defacement or toppling; and on-site preservation. </p>
<p>Recycling involved relocating statues from former colonies to former colonial metropolises. Most went from Algeria to France and from Kenya to England. The statues of <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f3760af0-6545-11e4-91b1-00144feabdc0">Lord Kitchener</a> and <a href="https://equestrianstatue.org/gordon-charles-george/">General Gordon</a>, for example, were sent from Khartoum in Sudan to England in 1958. The reasons for these repatriations were multiple and included the desire to keep alive memory of colonial times and to feed colonial nostalgia. </p>
<p>Defacing or toppling was the second phenomenon, which occurred across the continent, from Algeria to Mozambique. One instance was the defacement and toppling of the <a href="https://www.academia.edu/51780170/The_Maid_of_Algiers_Deploying_and_dismantling_Joan_of_Arc_as_a_globe_trotting_icon">statue of Joan of Arc</a> in Algiers in 1962. These acts of violence were necessary responses to the violence of the colonial order and represented a break from the past. They also symbolised the cleansing of public spaces, to destroy symbolically the power imbalances, racism, inequalities and urban exclusions that defined the colonial world. Some of these toppled statues were then sent back and recycled in the former metropolis. </p>
<p>However, across Africa, many colonial monuments remained untouched, for various reasons. Some African leaders at independence were pro-Europe, having been educated there or having worked there during colonial times. And at independence, privileged links were forged between the former colonies and the metropolises. This was the case with some former French colonies. As a result, the leaders of former French colonies did not want to change the key symbols of the colonial world. </p>
<h2>The empires strike back (1990s-2000s)</h2>
<p>From the 1990s, many colonial statues dismantled and hidden during the independence era were reinstalled. Aid from former imperial powers to former colonial countries is one explanation. An example is the controversial <a href="https://contestedhistories.org/wp-content/uploads/Democratic-Republic-of-Congo_-Leopold-II-Statue-in-Kinshasa.pdf">re-erection of the statue of former Belgian king and Congo “owner” Leopold II</a> in front of the main train station in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 2005. It’s easy to see why: the millions of US dollars in aid that Belgium gives the DRC every year.</p>
<p>The turn of the millennium also saw (neo)colonial statues deliberately erected to celebrate 19th century explorers and missionaries. In countries that were once part of the British Empire, such statues were built to attract tourists. For example, a new <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13527258.2023.2294738">statue of David Livingstone was erected in 2005</a> for the 150th anniversary of his arrival at Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls) in Zambia. It was paid for by airlines, travel agencies, luxury lodges, TotalEnergies and local authorities. </p>
<p>However, this statue of Livingstone can also be seen as an international event, linked to colonial monuments built with France’s cooperation. This is notably the case of the <a href="https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article-abstract/109/436/367/146718?redirectedFrom=fulltext">2006 Savorgnan de Brazza</a> memorial erected in Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo. This project of Algeria, Congo, France and Gabon <a href="https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article-abstract/109/436/367/146718?redirectedFrom=fulltext">reburied</a> the remains of the Italian-French explorer De Brazza, his wife and their children in the memorial. </p>
<p>The project mixed geopolitics and bilateral aid, cultural diplomacy and colonial violence. Echoing imperial rivalries, the memorial and its statue also served as distinct markers of France’s spheres of influence, and its attempt to counteract its decline in the region.</p>
<h2>Renewed contestations (from the 2010s)</h2>
<p>(Neo)colonial monuments were increasingly contested in the 2010s. Such protests have accelerated in recent years and have become more visible, thanks to social networks.</p>
<p>The most famous case is the <a href="https://twitter.com/RhodesMustFall">Rhodes Must Fall movement</a>. This led to the removal of the statue of the British colonialist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cecil-Rhodes">Cecil John Rhodes</a> on the campus of the University of Cape Town in South Africa in April 2015. This movement opposed neoliberal economic systems which had failed to respond to fundamental change, especially in areas such as education.</p>
<p>The movement quickly spread to other countries, inspiring other protests such as “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/14/racist-gandhi-statue-removed-from-university-of-ghana">#GandhiMustFall</a>” in Ghana, Malawi and England. Statues of the Indian leader <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mahatma-Gandhi">Gandhi</a>, considered a racist, were contested. Another movement is “<a href="https://faidherbedoittomber.org/a-propos/">Faidherbe must fall</a>”, aiming to remove the statue of the French colonial administrator Faidherbe in Saint-Louis/Ndar in Senegal and in Lille in France.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-background-story-to-a-statue-of-gandhi-and-the-university-of-ghana-117103">The background story to a statue of Gandhi and the University of Ghana</a>
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<p>Some of these movements have drawn attention to the link between colonial or racist statues and aid. For example, the #GandhiMustFall movement prevented the construction of a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-46051184">Gandhi statue in Malawi in 2018</a>. This project was linked to a <a href="https://sikhsiyasat.net/india-offers-to-double-aid-for-malavi-as-malavian-government-agrees-to-install-gandhi-statue-despite-local-opposition/">US$10 million aid deal from India</a>.</p>
<h2>A complex issue</h2>
<p>While acknowledging successes in removing colonial statues, it is important not to overlook the substantial support for (neo)colonial monuments all over Africa. </p>
<p>Such support can be explained by pressure from former colonial powers and the links of elites with these countries. Financial constraints, international aid and the potential of tourism are also factors. Then there’s the conviction that all vestiges of the past, even the most painful, must be preserved.</p>
<p>The statue of the French military commander <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53148608">Philippe Leclerc</a> in Douala in Cameroon, for example, still stands, despite being attacked several times by Cameroonian <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/7/7/the-activist-purging-cameroon-of-french-colonial-monuments">activist</a> André Blaise Essama.</p>
<p>As a result, (neo)colonial statues still have a bright future ahead of them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223458/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sophia Labadi has received funding from the Humboldt Foundation and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.</span></em></p>The fate of several colonial statues in Africa continues to be a subject of controversy.Sophia Labadi, Professor of Heritage, University of KentLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2248862024-03-02T12:59:12Z2024-03-02T12:59:12ZAli Hassan Mwinyi: the Tanzanian former president who oversaw the transition to market economy<p>Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Tanzania’s second president <a href="https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/news/east-africa/former-tanzania-president-ali-hassan-mwinyi-dies-at-98-4541336">who has died aged 98</a>, pushed through tough economic and political reforms that transformed the East Africa nation from socialism to an open economy and a multi-party democracy. He was president from 1985 to 1995.</p>
<p>He did all of this in the shadow of Julius Nyerere who had led Tanzania since independence in 1961 and turned the country into a one-party socialist state. Tanganyika joined together with Zanzibar in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanzania. Nyerere stepped down in 1985 but remained chairman of the party that had ruled Tanzania since independence.</p>
<p>Mwinyi’s presidency was always going to be a test, coming at a difficult period. The country was in a serious economic turmoil. Nyerere had admitted that the <a href="https://books.openedition.org/africae/713?lang=en">Ujamaa policy</a> – Tanzania’s socialist experience – had failed. Nyerere decided it was time the country tried another leader. He stepped aside in 1985. During that period, the country had experienced drought, the impacts of the oil shocks and the <a href="https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199791279/obo-9780199791279-0242.xml">Kagera War</a>, which Tanzania fought to oust Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=kxptJf0AAAAJ&hl=en">political science scholar</a>, I have studied the politics, political parties and democratisation of Tanzania and Zanzibar in the last 10 years. It is my view that it took Mwinyi’s careful balancing act to ward off Nyerere’s influence after taking the presidency. He had to take bold decision amid the shadow of Mwalimu Nyerere who remained as the chairman of the ruling party CCM.</p>
<p>Mwinyi will be remembered for steadying the economic ship and setting ground for <a href="https://theconversation.com/tanzanias-benjamin-william-mkapa-a-life-of-achievements-and-regrets-143422">President William Mkapa</a> to consolidate economic liberalisation. Although there are controversies as to whether he was truly a Zanzibari. This notwithstanding, his elevation as the first Zanzibari Union president somewhat helped to ease the Union tensions. In the postscript of his memoir, Mwinyi reflects on several issues and prided his legacy on the economic reforms he initiated. </p>
<h2>Early life</h2>
<p>A trained teacher, Mwinyi was born on 8 May 1925 in Mkuranga, Coast region, Tanzania Mainland. Between 1933 and 1942, he attended primary school at Mangapwani and Dole – Zanzibar. He studied for Diploma in Education from 1954 to 1956 at the University of Adult Education in Dublin, United Kingdom. He specialised in English and Arabic languages. He taught at Mangapwani and Bumbwini schools in Zanzibar. He later served as an ambassador, and minister in various government ministries before becoming president of Zanzibar.</p>
<p>A rank outsider, Mwinyi’s elevation to the presidency of Tanzania was rather fortuitous. Nyerere had other preferred successors. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aboud-Jumbe">Aboud Jumbe</a>, the man who Mwinyi succeeded as president of Zanzibar in 1984 was Nyerere’s preferred successor. Nyerere had always wished a Zanzibari to succeed him as a way of galvanising the Union which was formed in 1964. However, the tense political period between 1983 and 1984 culminated with Jumbe falling out of favour, and being <a href="https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/news/national/aboud-jumbe-he-dared-and-paid-the-price-2564240">kicked out</a> as the president of Zanzibar and as vice president of the Union government. By virtue of being president of Zanzibar and vice president of the Union, Mwinyi became Nyerere’s compromise successor. Nyerere had described Mwinyi as honest, humble, and a loyal socialist.</p>
<h2>The reforms</h2>
<p>Mwinyi was not a socialist. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/45341629">At the time he was taking over as president</a> of Tanzania, Mwinyi compared himself to an anthill, succeeding the colossal socialist ideologue. He carefully negotiated and struck a balance between loyalty to Nyerere and driving the reforms. Chief among his reforms was re-initiating negotiations with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – two institutions Nyerere had fallen out with. These negotiations meant that Tanzania was transitioning to a liberal market-led economy. </p>
<p>During Mwinyi’s first term in office, he <a href="https://www.elibrary.imf.org/downloadpdf/book/9781557752321/ch003.xml">launched</a> the three-year Economic Recovery Program in 1986. The aim was to spur positive growth, reduce inflation and restore sustainable balance of payments. </p>
<p>With this programme, there was an <a href="https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557752321/ch003.xml">upturn</a> in the country’s economy with the GDP growing at an average rate of 3.9% compared, to 1% during the 1980-1985 period. There was also a 4.8% increase in agricultural productivity, a 2.7% upsurge in manufacturing as well as a significant growth in external investment. The downside to these reforms was the rise in corruption and misappropriation of public funds. These economic reforms necessitated political reforms. President Mwinyi was able to rally the ruling CCM party, which was reluctant to accept International Monetary Fund and World Bank conditions. </p>
<p>In 1992, the Mwinyi administration acceded to constitutional amendments with a return to multiparty politics.</p>
<h2>Foreign policy</h2>
<p>Mwinyi also changed Tanzania’s foreign policy. Tanzania had modelled itself as a champion of <a href="https://theconversation.com/tanzania-south-africa-deep-ties-evoke-africas-sacrifices-for-freedom-202448">pan-Africanism and African liberation</a>. This was the key pillar of the country’s post-independent foreign policy. </p>
<p>In line with Tanzania’s position regarding apartheid South Africa, Mwinyi called for tough sanctions as a means of defeating white minority rule. </p>
<p>The transition from Nyerere to Mwinyi in 1985 heralded a new foreign policy with major conflicts in the Great Lakes Region. As President Mwinyi was settling into his second term, conflicts in the Great Lakes began, with Tanzania feeling the need to act as a mediator. In the 1990s, Tanzania was the key facilitator in the Rwanda domestic crisis. The Rwanda Genocide of 1994 had immediate impact on Tanzania with massive inflows of refugees. </p>
<p>President Mwinyi admitted in his <a href="https://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/mzee-rukhsa">autobiography</a> that the Rwanda Genocide was one of his greatest foreign policy challenges. He recalled the circumstances leading to the events of 6 April 1994, the start of the genocide. He had called for the meeting to discuss the peace and security in Burundi and Rwanda in Dar es Salaam. </p>
<p>After the meeting ended, Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira and Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana left in one plane which was shot down, sparking off the genocide in Rwanda. Tanzania received many refugees fleeing the killings. In 1995, Tanzania’s city of Arusha became host of the UN backed International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to investigate those charged with genocide. During Mwinyi’s second term in office, plans to revive the East African Community began with the signing of an agreement to establish the permanent commission for East African Cooperation in 1993. This process culminated with reformalisation of the East African Community in 2000.</p>
<p>But it is Mwinyi’s contribution to liberalisation that will be his enduring legacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224886/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicodemus Minde is affiliated with the Institute for Security Studies. </span></em></p>Ali Hassan Mwinyi successfully drove economic and political reforms in Tanzania, all in the shadow of his predecessor, Julius Nyerere.Nicodemus Minde, Adjunct Lecturer, United States International UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2218072024-02-08T14:00:35Z2024-02-08T14:00:35ZBooks: folklore and fantasy combine in Langabi, a supernatural historical epic from Zimbabwe<p><em>In 2023, award-winning Zimbabwean author <a href="https://www.icorn.org/writer/christopher-mlalazi">Christopher Mlalazi</a> published a new book, <a href="https://jacana.co.za/product/langabi-seasons-of-beasts/">Langabi: Season of the Beast</a>. He’s the author of novels like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/16/zimbabwe-running-with-mother-robert-mugabe">Running with Mother</a> (2012), <a href="https://amabooksbyo.blogspot.com/2009/07/reviews-dancing-with-life-tales-from.html">Dancing with Life: Tales from the Township</a> (2012) and <a href="https://allafrica.com/stories/201405060380.html">They are Coming</a> (2014). His books grapple with diverse social and political issues in Zimbabwe. As a scholar of African literature, including speculative fiction, I have <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0021989415615646">researched</a> Mlalazi’s previous books, especially his depiction of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-artists-have-preserved-the-memory-of-zimbabwes-1980s-massacres-143847">Gukurahundi Genocide</a> in Zimbabwe. Langabi is a novel that draws on the storytelling of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ndebele-South-African-people">Ndebele</a> people to recount the tale of a young man who finds himself in a heated political battle playing out in a historical kingdom. I spoke to Mlalazi about it.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Gibson Ncube:</strong> My first question is about categories. Into which <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/genre-literature">literary genre</a> would you place Langabi? I’m asking because it’s the first novel to be published by Mother, a new <a href="https://jacana.co.za/imprint/mother/">imprint</a> of Jacana Media that’s dedicated to fantasy, science-fiction, Afrofuturism and horror.</p>
<p><strong>Christopher Mlalazi:</strong> Categorisation can be challenging for a writer. When I first started writing the story, I told myself I wanted to write something that sounded like folklore. I wanted to write the kinds of stories our grandparents used to tell us when we were children in the village, <em>inganekwane</em> as they are called in the Ndebele language. I could say it is <em>inganekwane</em>, it has all the elements of one – supernatural creatures, a young protagonist with a quest, magic, song… From a western perspective, the novel can be categorised as fantasy, or mythology. I would like to place the story at the intersection of folklore, fantasy and mythology.</p>
<p><strong>Gibson Ncube:</strong> Langabi is a shift from the kinds of themes you’ve broached in the past. What inspired you to write it?</p>
<p><strong>Christopher Mlalazi:</strong> When I began writing this story, I just wanted to experiment outside the contemporary political satire for which I am well known. I initially wished to write a story that would be light, adventurous, and also explore ancient southern African cultural and religious beliefs. But as the storyline progressed, I realised that as I was writing folklore, I was compelled to dig deep into the consciousness – as far as I knew it – of the characters that populate a story of that time. To not write far from the truth of their ways of life. I also had to write about it with pride, as it is part of the genetics of my people. And then somehow I found myself writing about the politics of that ancient time, about ruthless kings, the selfishness of the political elites, and I was back on home ground again.</p>
<p>I started writing the novel in 2012 and even then I wanted to write about a coup in that <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/ndebele-history">ancient time</a>. At first, I wanted to keep that political drama on the sidelines, but eventually it engulfed the whole story. I followed the wind and the characters and let them lead me to the unfolding of this story.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/african-science-fiction-rereading-the-classic-nigerian-novel-the-palm-wine-drinkard-145768">African science fiction: rereading the classic Nigerian novel The Palm-wine Drinkard</a>
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<p><strong>Gibson Ncube:</strong> The descriptions of people and places are very detailed. What kind of research did you need to do?</p>
<p><strong>Christopher Mlalazi:</strong> I did a lot of research on this story. The main character and his family are blacksmiths and iron workers, so I had to buy and read this big book about ancient <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/african-iron-age-169432">African metallurgy</a>, how iron was processed in ancient times, and the beliefs around being an iron worker. There were many <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58509896-african-myths-legends">superstitions</a> around iron working, with some people believing that the iron workers practised witchcraft, or magic. At the same time, they were held in high respect for this magical skill. Some were the wealthiest in their societies through demand for iron tools. </p>
<p>I also had to research ancient southern African attire, animal skins for making what people wore at that time, hut building and types of soils used, especially colourful soils for decorating houses, or used as makeup. I researched names of flora and fauna, although I did invent a few of my own, especially trees. I also read a few fantasy books just to get a feeling of how other writers handle this kind of writing. I read books like (US author George R.R. Martin’s) <a href="https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/A_Game_of_Thrones_A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire/JPDOSzE7Bo0C?hl=en&gbpv=0">A Song of Ice and Fire</a> series, on which the TV show <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944947/">Game of Thrones</a> is based, also <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/book/black-leopard-red-wolf/9780241981856">Black Leopard, Red Wolf</a> by Jamaican writer Marlon James, Nigerian writers Ben Okri’s <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/ben-okri-how-i-wrote-the-famished-road">The Famished Road</a> and Amos Tutuola’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/african-science-fiction-rereading-the-classic-nigerian-novel-the-palm-wine-drinkard-145768">The Palm Wine Drinkard</a> and a few others. I watched survival documentaries to get a visual of surviving under harsh conditions in the jungle.</p>
<p><strong>Gibson Ncube:</strong> As in your other novels, humour underlines a serious story. What place does humour have in your writing and literary vision?</p>
<p><strong>Christopher Mlalazi:</strong> Stories are supposed to be read for relaxation no matter how serious the matter that they are treating. I try to infuse humour into the stories, plays and poetry that I write. I love seeing people laughing, even at themselves. I know that if you write political satire people end up thinking you are a serious and angry person who does not see the funny side of life.</p>
<p><strong>Gibson Ncube:</strong> Finally, the back cover suggests it’s part of a trilogy. When should readers expect the next instalment and what can they expect in it?</p>
<p><strong>Christopher Mlalazi:</strong> Yes, I want to make the story into a trilogy, and I already have a few ideas about what the next instalment will be like. But I’ve started on another completely different fantasy story which is quite advanced as I write this, and I want to finish it first before I go back to the Langabi series. I might start working on the next book in the Langabi series at the end of this year; time will tell.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221807/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gibson Ncube does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Christopher Mlalazi, award-winning novelist, was inspired by the stories he was told by his grandparents as a child.Gibson Ncube, Lecturer, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2223122024-01-30T17:26:36Z2024-01-30T17:26:36ZV&A’s decision to loan looted Asante gold back to Ghana has implications for other British museums<p>The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has announced a loan agreement with the Manhyia Palace Museum in the Asante region of Ghana to return gold and silver royal regalia that were looted from the country by the British in 1874 and 1895. The decision <a href="https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2024/01/va-and-british-museum-to-loan-asante-gold-to-ghana/#">was announced</a> on the 150th anniversary of a sequence of wars of aggression, waged by the British empire against the Asante kingdom in Africa’s Gold Coast (modern day Ghana).</p>
<p>This agreement is part of a renewable framework of exchanges agreed not with the Ghanian government but with the current monarch of the Asante kingdom, a constitutionally protected region of the state of Ghana. The exact length of the agreement is unclear but <a href="https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/british-museum-and-va-to-loan-asante-gold-looted-from-ghana-1234694073/#:%7E:text=The%20British%20Museum%20and%20the,collection%20of%20the%20Asante%20king.">most accounts suggest</a> that this is a three-year deal. </p>
<p>The agreement concerns <a href="https://vanda-production-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/2024/01/25/10/35/55/e42169b6-3bd9-4ed0-b409-d344609a4688/GHANA%20RELEASE%20FINAL.pdf">17 objects held at the V&A</a> and <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/asante-gold-regalia">15 objects from the British Museum collection</a>. These include a sword of state and a gold peace pipe. </p>
<p>British forces took the treasures when plundering the Asante capital Kumasi during the third and fouth <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/anglo-ashanti-wars-1823-1900/">Anglo-Ashanti wars</a> (1873–74 and 1895-96). The looting was an act of opportunism but also served a political function to humiliate the residents of the Asante kingdom. </p>
<p>Today, these artefacts are seen in Ghana as <a href="https://www.theafricareport.com/334763/ghana-uk-returning-looted-gold-artefacts-to-asante-king-on-loan/">missing parts of the country’s national heritage</a>. They bear great spiritual value for the Asante people.</p>
<p>The director of the V&A, historian Tristram Hunt, presented this loan deal as a template for <a href="https://amp.theguardian.com/culture/2024/jan/27/vas-return-of-looted-ghana-gold-is-a-new-way-to-tackle-britains-painful-past">the solution</a> to the “contested colonial heritage” of items in European museums. Hunt suggested that contemporary Asante goldsmiths could be commissioned to create artworks that would “fill the gap” left in the collection by the loaned artefacts.</p>
<p>The V&A has been at pains to argue that this deal and other similar initiatives <a href="https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/restitution-and-repatriation">do not constitute repatriation agreements</a>. This is important because such an agreement would contradict <a href="https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/reviewing-the-national-heritage-act-1983/">the National Heritage Act of 1983</a>, which prohibits national museums from repatriating antiquities in their collection.</p>
<p>The agreed framework of exchange allows the state of Ghana to reap the benefits of the temporary return of the Asante treasures without having to make concessions on the question of legal ownership of the artefacts. In short, having the treasures return to Ghana on a loan deal with a regional partner allows the Ghana state authorities to continue arguing for repatriation and restitution.</p>
<p>This is perhaps why Hunt argued that this partnership “<a href="https://amp.theguardian.com/culture/2024/jan/27/vas-return-of-looted-ghana-gold-is-a-new-way-to-tackle-britains-painful-past">allows us to move beyond the Parthenon sculptures debate</a> – a reference to the requested repatriation of several sculptures extracted from the Parthenon in Greece in the early 1800s. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-parthenon-marbles-george-osborne-wants-to-return-the-statues-to-athens-but-can-he-a-legal-expert-explains-197364">The Parthenon marbles: George Osborne wants to return the statues to Athens, but can he? A legal expert explains</a>
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<h2>How the agreement might impact other cases</h2>
<p>This agreement suggests that since national museums in the UK are banned from returning controversial cultural artefacts to their places of origin, loan deals and dynamic exchanges are the way forward. </p>
<p>The British Museum and the Greek government currently pursue this line of thinking. Despite the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67551732">recent diplomatic episode</a> in which Rishi Sunak cancelled a scheduled meeting with the Greek prime minister in response to the latter’s comments about the Parthenon sculptures, the Greek government has changed its approach on the Parthenon marbles question. </p>
<p>Officials are now presenting the problem not as one of ownership and restitution but as one of reunification. This means that they are open to solutions along the lines of the Asante case. But the key difference is that in the Greek case the agreement would have to be between two national museums – the British museum and the Parthenon Museum – with the involvement of the Greek state. The extent to which such a solution would be popular with the Greek public remains to be seen.</p>
<p>This deal may have implications for other cases around the world. The other obvious example is that of the <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/benin-bronzes">Benin bronzes</a> – a cluster of 16th century statues looted in 1897 from the west African kingdom of Benin, now part of the Nigerian state – currently held in the British Museum. Despite the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/arts/design/benin-bronzes-nigeria-ownership.html">complex Nigerian cultural politics</a> the Asante loan agreement will impact the debate on the status of these artefacts. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/restitution-and-repatriation">"Renewable cultural partnerships”</a> – an elegant term to describe loans – are by no means enough. The elephant in the room is the existing legal framework, forged in period of decolonisation and diminishing western influence, that forbids the repatriation of antiquities. </p>
<p>Over 60 years on from when a ban on repatriation was <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1963/24/contents">first introduced</a>, the world is a different place. Big European museums have nothing to fear from repatriation requests and agreements. The enormity of their collection guarantees that there will almost never be a void to fill.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Georgios Giannakopoulos does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The elephant in the room is the existing legal framework, forged in period of decolonisation and diminishing western influence, that forbids the repatriation of antiquities.Georgios Giannakopoulos, Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London/ Lecturer in Modern History, City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2159232024-01-02T07:10:47Z2024-01-02T07:10:47ZCoca-Cola in Africa: a long history full of unexpected twists and turns<p><em>A new book called <a href="https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/bottled/#:%7E:text=Sara%20Byala%20charts%20the%20company%27s,but%20rather%20of%20a%20company">Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African</a> tells the story of how the world’s most famous carbonated drink conquered the continent. It’s a tale of marketing gumption and high politics and is the product of years of research by critical writing lecturer <a href="https://www.sarabyala.com">Sara Byala</a>, who <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sara+byala&btnG=">researches</a> histories of <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7208/9780226030449/html">heritage</a>, <a href="https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Water-Waste-Energy_sm-1.pdf">sustainability</a> and the ways in which capitalist systems intersect with social and cultural forces in Africa. We asked her some questions about the book.</em></p>
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<h2>What do you hope readers will take away?</h2>
<p>There are three main takeaways. The first is that while Africa is largely absent from books on Coca-Cola, the company’s imprint on the continent is enormous. It is present in every nation. Most estimates put Coke as one of the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2016/01/21/africa/coca-cola-africa-mpa-feat/index.html">largest private employers</a> in Africa, if not the largest. Beyond official jobs, the company has been shown to have <a href="https://docplayer.net/11916251-The-economic-impact-of-the-coca-cola-system-on-south-africa.html">a multiplier effect</a> that means that for each official job, upwards of 10 other people are supported. </p>
<p>The second takeaway is that Coke’s story in Africa is an old one. It starts with its use of the west African <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160922-the-nut-that-helped-to-build-a-global-empire">kola nut</a>, from which it takes its name (if no longer <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/pop-quiz-whats-in-a-coca-cola-if-its-not-coca-or-the-kola-nut/">its source of caffeine</a>). Arriving in Africa in the early 1900s, it’s a story that is deeply and, often surprisingly, entangled with key moments in African history. This includes the end of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a> in South Africa and the advent of postcolonial African nations.</p>
<p>Third, I want readers to see that while we may assume that a multinational company selling carbonated, sugary water is inherently a force for ill, both the history of Coke in Africa and my fieldwork suggest a far more complicated story. Coca-Cola is what it is today in Africa, I argue, because it became local. It bent to the will of Africans in everything from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@GlobalCopaCocaCola/about">sport</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/cokestudioAfrica">music</a> to <a href="https://www.coca-colacompany.com/social/project-last-mile">healthcare</a>. Its ubiquity thus tells us something about African engagement with a consumer product as well as the many ways in which ordinary people wield power. </p>
<h2>How did Coca-Cola first arrive in Africa?</h2>
<p>Coca-Cola doesn’t export a finished product from its corporate headquarters in the US. It sells a <a href="https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/coca-cola-system">concentrate</a>, which comes from a handful of locations around the globe, including Egypt and Eswatini. This concentrate is sold to licensed bottlers who then mix it with local forms of sugar and water before carbonating and bottling or canning it. </p>
<p>Coca-Cola <a href="https://www.coca-cola.com/xe/en/media-center/95-years-operations-community-impact">lore</a> says that the company first secured local bottlers for its concentrate in South Africa in 1928, its first stop on the African continent. By combing through old newspapers, archival documents, and pharmaceutical publications, however, I found evidence to suggest that Coke may in fact have been sold in 1909 in Cape Town as a short-lived soda fountain endeavour. This is just 23 years after the product was invented in Atlanta, Georgia. </p>
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<p>It was neither easy nor assured that Coca-Cola would take off anywhere in the world upon its arrival. The early chapters of my book detail the often ingenious lengths that bottlers had to go to to get Coke off the ground. This included creating a new line of sodas to support the fledgling product called <a href="https://www.coca-cola.com/za/en/brands/sparletta">Sparletta</a>. This includes <a href="https://www.coca-cola.com/ng/en/brands/sparletta">green Creme Soda</a> and <a href="https://www.coca-cola.com/ng/en/brands/Stoney">Stoney ginger beer</a>, both still available for purchase. Later chapters explore the routes by which the product spread across the continent, by detailing everything from the co-branding of petrol stations with Coca-Cola, to the rise of Coke beauty pageants, the birth of local forms of Coke advertising, the proliferation of Coca-Cola signage, and much more. </p>
<h2>What role did it play in apartheid South Africa?</h2>
<p>Coca-Cola was entrenched in South Africa before the advent of the racist, white minority <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a> state in 1948. While the company largely attempted to stay out of politics in South Africa, much as it did elsewhere in the world, it resisted certain “petty apartheid” rules. For example, the washrooms and lunchrooms in its plants were open to all ethnic groups, unlike the “whites only” facilities established under apartheid. A turning point came in the 1980s when, in tandem with <a href="https://blackamericaweb.com/2014/08/10/little-known-black-history-fact-operation-push-boycotts/">activism in the US</a> calling on the company to redress racial imbalances in America, the company was forced to reexamine its racial politics in South Africa as well.</p>
<p>What followed was perhaps the most interesting chapter in the story of Coca-Cola in Africa. Breaking with established precedent, the company took a stance against the apartheid state. Coca-Cola executive Carl Ware led the way here. Under his <a href="https://www.carlwareauthor.com/">direction</a>, the company crafted a unique form of <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-09-18-mn-11241-story.html">disinvestment</a> that enabled it to do what no other company managed: keep the products in the country while depriving the apartheid state of tax revenue. To do this, the company <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/09/18/coke-to-sell-all-holdings-in-s-africa/495f0069-2682-4d67-8769-506f4fbd2d83/">sold all its holdings</a> to a separate business that continued to sell Cokes. It then moved its concentrate plant to neighbouring Eswatini, leaving Coca-Cola with no assets or employees in South Africa.</p>
<p>In part, this was possible because the company aligned itself with the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/06/17/mandelas-stops-during-us-tour-reflect-anc-political-concerns/f41a84a3-4aa5-462f-abc3-fc2a9213bb58/">African National Congress (ANC)</a>, making a host of moves to help to end apartheid. These included meeting in secret with ANC leadership, funding clandestine meetings between the ANC and businesspeople, and setting up <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/24/us/coca-cola-giving-10-million-to-help-south-africa-blacks.html">a charitable fund</a> headed by <a href="https://saportareport.com/atlanta-leaders-to-pay-special-tribute-to-desmond-tutu-sept-28/sections/reports/maria_saporta/">Archbishop Desmond Tutu</a> to support Black educational empowerment. In the book, I document these activities for the first time with extensive interviews and archival material.</p>
<p>It was during this era of disinvestment that Coca-Cola exploded within densely populated and remote parts of the country, providing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/26/business/putting-africa-coke-s-map-pushing-soft-drinks-continent-that-has-seen-hard-hard.html">on-ramps to economic participation</a> for scores of South Africans that were later replicated with its global <a href="https://www.coca-cola.com/pk/en/about-us/faq/what-is-5by20-0">5x20 project</a> to empower women in business. </p>
<p>This spread in turn drove the consumption of liquid sugar to new heights, causing a host of other problems such as <a href="https://qz.com/africa/1573448/sugar-tax-pits-jobs-versus-health-diabetes-in-south-africa">diabetes and dental cavities</a>, which both the company and my book tackle too. </p>
<p>What I demonstrate in the book is that Coca-Cola’s shrewd positioning at the end of apartheid allowed it to emerge, in the post-apartheid landscape, ready not only to renew business in South Africa, but also to reinvigorate its presence on the continent at large. The question is how to weigh this spread (and its attendant benefits) against the costs.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215923/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sara Byala does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Coca-Cola has often been entangled with key political moments in Africa since its arrival in the early 1900s.Sara Byala, Senior Lecturer in Critical Writing, University of PennsylvaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2162812023-12-27T11:11:04Z2023-12-27T11:11:04ZAn African history of cannabis offers fascinating and heartbreaking insights – an expert explains<p>When I tell people that I research cannabis, I sometimes receive a furtive gesture that implies and presumes: “We’re both stoners!”, as if two members of a secret society have met. </p>
<p>Other times, I receive looks of concern. “You don’t want to be known as the guy who studies marijuana,” a professional colleague once counselled. Lastly, some respond with blank stares: “Why do academics spend time on such frivolous topics?” </p>
<p>I’ve learned that all these attitudes reflect ignorance about the plant, which few people have learned about except through popular media or their own experiences with it.</p>
<p>I <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-0394-6_601.pdf">study cannabis</a>, but I’m more broadly interested in how people and plants interact. I’ve studied plants from perspectives ranging between ecology and cultural history, including <a href="https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=192935">obscure plants</a> and more widely known ones, such as the <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2007.01751.x">African baobab</a>. </p>
<p>Cannabis is in another category, being one of the world’s most famous and widespread plants. Yet it’s the one for which people most commonly question my research motivations.</p>
<p>Cannabis has a truly global history associated with a wide range of uses and meanings. The plant evolved in central Asia millions of years ago. Across Eurasia, humans began using cannabis seeds and fibre more than 12,000 years ago, and by 5,000 years ago, people in south Asia had learned to use cannabis as an edible drug. It arrived in east Africa over 1,000 years ago. </p>
<p>Cannabis has been under global prohibition for most of the last century, which has stunted understanding of the people-plant relationship. Africa, Africans and people of the African diaspora have had crucial roles in the plant’s history that are mostly forgotten. </p>
<p>I want people to learn about cannabis history for four reasons. First, understanding its historical uses can help identify potential new uses. Second, understanding why people have valued cannabis can improve how current societies manage it. Third, understanding how people have used cannabis illuminates African influences on global culture. Finally, understanding how people are profiting from cannabis exposes inequities within the global economy.</p>
<h2>Medicinal potential</h2>
<p>The African history of cannabis highlights its medicinal potential, a <a href="https://theconversation.com/cannabis-policy-changes-in-africa-are-welcome-but-small-producers-are-the-losers-179681">topic of growing interest</a>. </p>
<p>Advocates of medical cannabis often justify their interest by telling tales of the plant’s past. Yet the tales they tell – notably in medical journals – have been problematic. They are only about social <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1606635031000135604">elites</a> and are mostly untrue. </p>
<p>The African past is absent from this medical literature, even though historical observers reported how Africans used cannabis in contexts that justify current interest in its medicinal potential. </p>
<p>For instance, in the 1840s, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=oYUVAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA437&dq=great+promoter+of+exhilaration+of+spirits,+and+a+sovereign+remedy+against+all+complaints&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi65on7l4WCAxX0KFkFHbwjBb4Q6AF6BAgGEAI#v=onepage&q=exhilaration%20of%20spirits&f=false">a British physician reported</a> that central African people liberated from slave ships considered the plant drug </p>
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<p>a great promoter of exhilaration of spirits, and a sovereign remedy against all complaints. </p>
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<p>These were emaciated, traumatised survivors. Their experience justifies <a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/can.2020.0056">exploring cannabis as a potential treatment</a> for post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and other conditions.</p>
<h2>Exploitative labour</h2>
<p>We need to understand why people value cannabis to identify and address <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955395902000828">social processes that may produce drug use</a>. </p>
<p>Africans have <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-16-8822-5_10">valued cannabis</a> for centuries, though it’s difficult to know all the uses it had, because most weren’t documented. Despite its limits, the historical record clearly shows that people used cannabis as a stimulant and painkiller in association with hard labour. </p>
<p>Many European travellers observed their porters smoking cannabis before setting off each day. A <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=IMwNAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA257&dq=affirm+that+it+wakes+them+up+and+warms+their+bodies,+so+that+they+are+ready+to+start+up+with+alacrity&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjlre3am4WCAxWVEGIAHfJZAmQQ6AF6BAgQEAI#v=onepage&q=alacrity&f=false">Portuguese in Angola stated</a> that the porters: </p>
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<p>affirm that it wakes them up and warms their bodies, so that they are ready to start up with alacrity.</p>
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<p>Because labourers valued cannabis, many overseers did too. </p>
<p>Cannabis drug use remains associated with social marginalisation in contexts from <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15332640.2017.1300972">Morocco</a> to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955395918300124">Nigeria</a>. </p>
<p>The pan-African experience suggests using it is not a moral failing of users but is – at least in part – symptomatic of exploitation and <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9566.13244">inequity</a>. </p>
<h2>Africa’s place in global culture</h2>
<p>I also study cannabis to understand how African knowledge has shaped global culture. Cannabis travelled as an <a href="https://www.proquest.com/docview/2568024731?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true">element of exploitative labour relationships</a> that carried people around the world, including chattel slavery, indentured service and wage slavery. There is strong evidence that <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-african-roots-of-marijuana">psychoactive cannabis crossed the Atlantic with Africans</a>. </p>
<p>Oral histories from Brazil, Jamaica, Liberia and Sierra Leone tell that enslaved central Africans carried cannabis. In 1840s Gabon, a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ewUBImRf6IMC&pg=PA420&dq=%22intending+to+plant+them+in+the+country+to+which+he+should+be+sold%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjbzsOhn4WCAxW5F1kFHZw1Bv0Q6AF6BAgLEAI#v=onepage&q=%22intending%20to%20plant%20them%20in%20the%20country%20to%20which%20he%20should%20be%20sold%22&f=false">French-American traveller observed</a> a man </p>
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<p>carefully preserving (seeds), intending to plant them in the country to which he should be sold. </p>
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<p>The people who transported seeds shaped our modern language. Around the Atlantic, many terms for cannabis trace to central Africa, including the global word marijuana, derived from Kimbundu <em>mariamba</em>. </p>
<p>Further, the most common modern use of cannabis – as a smoked drug – was an African innovation. Prehistoric people in eastern Africa <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/719224">invented smoking pipes</a>. After the plant arrived from south Asia, eastern Africans discovered that smoking was a more efficient way to consume cannabis compared with edible forms of the drug. Notably, all water pipes – hookahs, bongs, shishas and so on – trace ultimately to African precedents. </p>
<h2>Drug policy reforms</h2>
<p>Finally, understanding the plant’s African past illuminates inequities within the global economy. </p>
<p>Drug policy reforms worldwide have opened lucrative, legal markets for cannabis. Businesses are feverishly competing for wealth, and governments are eagerly seeking new revenue sources. The rush to profit has enabled businesses from wealthy countries <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/17599">to gain power in poorer countries</a>. </p>
<p>Most African countries that have enacted drug-policy reforms – notable exceptions being South Africa and Morocco – did so only after foreign businesses paid for cannabis farming licences. These had always been possible under existing laws, though the governments had never made them available. </p>
<p>These drug-policy reforms don’t meaningfully extend to citizens of African countries. Licensing fees are either unknown or unaffordable for most citizens of the countries that have allowed commercial farming, including Zimbabwe, Uganda, Lesotho, Malawi, Eswatini and the Democratic Republic of Congo. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cannabis-policy-changes-in-africa-are-welcome-but-small-producers-are-the-losers-179681">Cannabis policy changes in Africa are welcome. But small producers are the losers</a>
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<p>The countries that have allowed licensed production <a href="https://www.newsday.co.zw/southerneye/2014/03/30/binga-villagers-want-freedom-use-mbanje">still prohibit</a> traditional cannabis uses. Even as export markets grow, African citizens <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-46288374">face criminal consequences</a> for domestic production. </p>
<p>Cannabis-policy reforms in Africa have mostly benefited investors and consumers in wealthy countries, not Africans, a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/48519445">textbook example of neocolonialism</a>. Further, profitable industries in Europe and North America <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562576.2016.1138674">rely on seed taken from Africa</a>, where cannabis genetic diversity is high thanks to farmers’ plant-breeding skills. </p>
<p>Cannabis is the centre of industries that generate billions of dollars annually. Increasingly, this income is legal. History shows that African countries have competitive advantages for cannabis farming. Reforms should <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-16-8778-5_10">enable Africans to enjoy these advantages</a>.</p>
<h2>Way forward</h2>
<p>Globally, many societies are recognising that criminalising cannabis <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687637.2021.1972936">has produced problems and has not eliminated drug use</a>. Some African countries are <a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/can.2021.0110">developing cannabis-policy reforms</a> that include decriminalisation and degrees of legalisation. African (and non-African) societies must address <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ediomo-Ubong-Nelson/publication/355507767_Between_Prohibition_and_Regulation_Narrative_Analysis_of_Cannabis_Policy_Debate_in_Africa/links/61767ccb0be8ec17a92a1ab6/Between-Prohibition-and-Regulation-Narrative-Analysis-of-Cannabis-Policy-Debate-in-Africa.pdf">complex questions in evaluating cannabis policies</a>. </p>
<p>In any case, the plant’s African past provides insight into both long-term and emerging issues in humanity’s interactions with cannabis. This is why I study African cannabis.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216281/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris S. Duvall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The plant’s African past provides insight into emerging issues in humanity’s interactions with cannabis.Chris S. Duvall, Professor of Geography, University of New MexicoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2024902023-04-14T12:31:04Z2023-04-14T12:31:04ZDNA study opens a window into African civilisations that left a lasting legacy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519034/original/file-20230403-14-m699gl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C0%2C6473%2C4325&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Stone obelisks stand tall in Aksum, Ethiopia. This city was once the capital of a kingdom spanning northeast Africa and the Arabian peninsula.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/ancient-monolith-stone-obelisk-symbol-old-1831447870">Shutterstock / Artist</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Pre-colonial African history is alive with tales of civilisations rising and falling and of different cultures intermingling across the continent. We have now shed more light on some of these societies using the science of genetics. </p>
<p>In a study <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq2616">published in Science Advances</a>, my co-authors and I used DNA information from people from the present-day continent to shed light on important civilisations that existed before colonialism. Genetic information from cheek swabs was extracted by machines. Once the sequence of “letters” in the DNA code had been read, or sequenced, we could use computers to compare genetic differences and similarities between the populations in the study.</p>
<p>One striking result concerned two ethnic groups in the north of present-day Cameroon, in west-central Africa, the Kanuri and Kotoko peoples. We found that these two groups were descended from three ancestral populations. </p>
<p>These ancestral groups most resembled people now living in coastal regions of west Africa as well as in parts of east Africa such as Ethiopia and populations living today in north Africa and the Levant. The populations intermixed – had children together – roughly 600 years ago. But what caused them to migrate thousands of kilometres across a desert into northern Cameroon? </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Map of the Kanem-Bornu empire" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519336/original/file-20230404-28-zarx0t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519336/original/file-20230404-28-zarx0t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519336/original/file-20230404-28-zarx0t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519336/original/file-20230404-28-zarx0t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519336/original/file-20230404-28-zarx0t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=773&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519336/original/file-20230404-28-zarx0t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=773&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519336/original/file-20230404-28-zarx0t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=773&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Kanem-Bornu empire at its greatest extent.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Afrika-Kanem-Bornu.png">Tourbillon / Wikipedia Project</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We think the answer is the <a href="https://www.vincenthiribarren.com/pdf/Hiribarren_-_2016_-_Kanem-Bornu.pdf">Kanem-Bornu empire</a>, a civilisation that existed for over 1,000 years – beginning around 700 AD. At its height, the empire spanned what is now northern Cameroon, northern Nigeria, Chad, Niger and southern Libya. It operated vast trade networks across the Sahara and attracted populations from every direction.</p>
<p>This example highlights how our genomes hold information about major events of the past. Merchants travelling along trade routes or the formation of empires from smaller political units can leave footprints in our DNA. <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1243518">Previous work</a> <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1001373">shows</a> that <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay6826">the Roman empire</a>, the <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2021.735786/full">Mongol empire</a>, and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4267745/">Silk Road trade</a> probably all left lasting legacies in the genomes of modern-day people across Eurasia.</p>
<h2>Hidden in the genome</h2>
<p>We analysed 1,300 newly collected genomes of people from across Africa. They came from 150 ethnic groups within five countries. We collaborated with anthropologists, archaeologists and linguists from Africa and elsewhere. They helped us understand the historical context of these events.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Mandara mountains" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519315/original/file-20230404-982-x059iv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519315/original/file-20230404-982-x059iv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519315/original/file-20230404-982-x059iv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519315/original/file-20230404-982-x059iv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519315/original/file-20230404-982-x059iv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519315/original/file-20230404-982-x059iv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519315/original/file-20230404-982-x059iv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Kotoko and Kanuri people live in northern Cameroon and Nigeria. The photo shows a landscape in the Mandara mountains, near the border of the two countries.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Scott MacEachern</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>African genome data <a href="https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-biodatasci-102920-%20112550?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed">is underrepresented</a> compared with that from other world regions. This means that lots of genetic diversity – or variety – in the DNA of populations is probably being missed by scientists. </p>
<p>Studying genetic diversity has many potential uses – such as understanding risks to health and developing new treatments for disease. Our group was concerned with genetic diversity as a window into the past.</p>
<h2>Dating events</h2>
<p>We modelled a person’s genome as a mixture of segments of DNA inherited from their ancestors. If a person had DNA segments closely matching two groups of people – for example, Europeans and west Africans – it suggested that this person descended from mixing between those two groups. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Great Zimbabwe" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519299/original/file-20230404-20-1aikqn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519299/original/file-20230404-20-1aikqn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519299/original/file-20230404-20-1aikqn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519299/original/file-20230404-20-1aikqn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519299/original/file-20230404-20-1aikqn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519299/original/file-20230404-20-1aikqn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519299/original/file-20230404-20-1aikqn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mysteries remain about other civilisations not studied in the latest work. These are buildings from Great Zimbabwe, a medieval city in Southern Africa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/great-zimbabwe-medieval-city-southeastern-hills-1048631507">evenfh / Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Present-day human groups that were formed from a recent mixture of Europeans and west Africans should have long sections of DNA from both populations. Those ancestral DNA segments get shorter as the genetic material of their descendants is shuffled with each new generation. </p>
<p>This provides a way of dating when mixture events took place. The longer the DNA segments matching, for example, west Africans or Europeans, the more recent the mixture event was.</p>
<h2>Peace treaty</h2>
<p>Another historical event we found evidence for was the Arab expansion in Africa. This began in the seventh century, when separate Arab armies travelling south along the Levantine coast and north from Medina in today’s Saudi Arabia crossed the Sinai desert and conquered Egypt.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="The kingdom of Makuria at its peak around 960 AD." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519342/original/file-20230404-20-2sx8ay.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519342/original/file-20230404-20-2sx8ay.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1255&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519342/original/file-20230404-20-2sx8ay.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1255&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519342/original/file-20230404-20-2sx8ay.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1255&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519342/original/file-20230404-20-2sx8ay.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1577&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519342/original/file-20230404-20-2sx8ay.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1577&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519342/original/file-20230404-20-2sx8ay.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1577&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The kingdom of Makuria at its peak around 960 AD.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Kingdom_of_Makuria_at_its_peak.jpg">Le Gabrie</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Sudan at this time, the Kingdom of Makuria <a href="http://nubianmonasteries.uw.edu.pl/about/">ruled along the Nile river</a>. Makuria signed a peace treaty with the Egyptian Arabs in the <a href="https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2003/2003.01.16/">middle of the seventh century</a> that lasted almost 700 years.</p>
<p>The majority of mixing between these two ancestral groups, one closely related to Arabs and the other to Sudanese, dates to after the peace treaty began breaking down. This in turn coincided with the decline and eventual collapse of Makuria itself, which would have allowed Arab groups to continue down the Nile into Sudan. </p>
<p>But we also found evidence of earlier migrations into Africa from the Arabian peninsula, which occurred by sea. This intermixing coincided in time with the <a href="https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/kingdom-aksum/">Kingdom of Aksum</a>, located in northeast Africa and southern Arabia, during the first millennium AD.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="The throne hall of Old Dongola in Sudan, capital of the Makuria kingdom" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519067/original/file-20230403-20-eo26qk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519067/original/file-20230403-20-eo26qk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519067/original/file-20230403-20-eo26qk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519067/original/file-20230403-20-eo26qk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519067/original/file-20230403-20-eo26qk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519067/original/file-20230403-20-eo26qk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519067/original/file-20230403-20-eo26qk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The throne hall of Old Dongola in Sudan, capital of the Makuria kingdom.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/throne-hall-building-old-dongola-deserted-2118567158">Matyas Rehak / Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Aksum was once considered <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-137-11786-%201_2#:%7E:text=The%20Persian%20prophet%20Mani%2C%20who,the%20kingdom%20of%20the%20Chi%20nese.">one of the world’s four great powers</a>, alongside contemporary empires in China, Persia and Rome.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Map of the Kingdom of Aksum." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519565/original/file-20230405-26-hndwxk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519565/original/file-20230405-26-hndwxk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519565/original/file-20230405-26-hndwxk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519565/original/file-20230405-26-hndwxk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519565/original/file-20230405-26-hndwxk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=679&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519565/original/file-20230405-26-hndwxk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=679&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519565/original/file-20230405-26-hndwxk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=679&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Map of the Kingdom of Aksum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kingdom_of_Aksum_Map.png">Newslea Staff / Wikipedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples</h2>
<p>Genetic studies have also found evidence of a continent-wide migration known as the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples. “Bantu” is a language group, now spoken by around <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Bantu-languages">one-quarter of Africans</a>.</p>
<p>There has been debate about whether the Bantu languages spread largely as a transmission of culture, or whether large-scale migration was involved. The latest research shows that the latter explanation is the likeliest. This migration started in a small area of western Cameroon roughly 4,000 years ago, before rapidly spreading south and east. It covered more than 4,000 kilometres in less than 2,000 years. </p>
<p>Bantu speakers mixed with local groups, <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aal1988">changing patterns of genetic diversity in Africa</a> forever. We showed that migrations not only occurred to the south and east of Cameroon, but also to the west. Why so much movement took place at this time is unknown, but climate change may have played a role.</p>
<p>It’s vital that scientists analyse more DNA from genomes of African people. As we do so, it will undoubtedly reveal an intricate picture of the continent’s rich past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202490/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nancy Bird receives funding from NERC. </span></em></p>DNA analysis sheds light on important societies within Africa that existed before colonialism.Nancy Bird, Postdoctoral research associate, UCLLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2027742023-04-03T13:58:22Z2023-04-03T13:58:22ZArchaeology shows how hunter-gatherers fitted into southern Africa’s first city, 800 years ago<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517897/original/file-20230328-18-wuvyra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Archaeologists excavate inside and outside Little Muck Shelter, in the Mapungubwe National Park, South Africa. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Tim Forssman</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Where the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers meet, forming the modern border between Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, lies a hill that hardly stands out from the rest. One could easily pass it without realising its <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/Mapungubwe/">historical significance</a>. It was on and around this hill that what appears to be southern Africa’s <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416508000585?casa_token=P89TPB8OTZQAAAAA:z6ePLUM4rXsAeoe1cIT8Rlak97kN_WKb6U6WDUj3-CdoENgY51DhYgQjwZWa607Bt8zUqcM-xh0">earliest</a> state-level society and urban city, <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1099/#:%7E:text=Mapungubwe%20is%20set%20hard%20against,abandoned%20in%20the%2014th%20century.">Mapungubwe</a>, appeared around 800 years ago.</p>
<p>After nearly a century of <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416508000585?casa_token=P89TPB8OTZQAAAAA:z6ePLUM4rXsAeoe1cIT8Rlak97kN_WKb6U6WDUj3-CdoENgY51DhYgQjwZWa607Bt8zUqcM-xh0">research</a>, we’ve learnt quite a lot about this ancient kingdom and how it arose among early farmer society and its involvement in global trade networks. However, before farmers settled the region, this terrain was the home of hunter-gatherer groups, who have hardly been acknowledged despite, as it seems, their involvement in the rise of Mapungubwe.</p>
<p>My <a href="http://harproject.co.za/">team</a> and I have been working in northern South Africa at sites that we believe will help us recognise the roles played by hunter-gatherers during the development of the Mapungubwe state in a bid to generate a more <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0067270X.2023.2182572">inclusive representation of the region’s past</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-pXqChyJK_s?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>Our primary study site is called <a href="https://youtu.be/-pXqChyJK_s">Little Muck Shelter</a>. It is in the <a href="https://www.sanparks.org/parks/mapungubwe/">Mapungubwe National Park</a> and about 4km south of the Limpopo River. The shelter is fairly large with a protected area under a high ceiling and a large open space in front. It also has many paintings on its walls, including elephants, kudu, felines, people, and a stunning set of giraffes. This art was produced by hunter-gatherers and it is generally considered to refer to the spirit-world and the activities of shamans therein.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=243&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=243&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=243&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Two beautifully painted giraffe are at the centre of the site in orange and red. These have been traced using digital software to limit contact with the art which may lead to damage.</span>
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</figure>
<p>The results from our research shows two things. First, hunter-gatherers lived in the area while the Mapungubwe Kingdom arose. Second, during this time they were part of the economy that assisted with the appearance of elite groups in society, and they had access to this wealth. When combined this tells us that we cannot think about Mapungubwe’s history without including hunter-gatherer societies. They were present and a part of these significant developments.</p>
<p>Why is this important? One of the foundational developments that took place that led to the rise of the Mapungubwe Kingdom was the accumulation of wealth. It drove the appearance of hierarchies in society and marked prestige. These trade goods were valuable items usually possessed by elite groups. And yet, hunter-gatherers, through exploiting their own skills, were able to obtain related goods at a time when these items were contributing to significant transformations in society. That they had access to wealth during this period likely shows us that their role in local society was valued and they were entrenched in the local economy in a way that we’ve not previous recognised.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rock-art-as-african-history-what-religious-images-say-about-identity-survival-and-change-198812">Rock art as African history: what religious images say about identity, survival and change</a>
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<h2>Unearthing evidence of trade</h2>
<p>We were attracted to Little Muck Shelter because of previous work at the site in the late 1990s that showed intense trade between hunter-gatherers and farmers took place from the shelter. To understand this better, we needed a larger archaeological assemblage to verify, or refine, what we thought might be taking place. </p>
<p>We also wanted to more closely examine the depths that dated between AD 900 and 1300, during which the processes leading to Mapungubwe began and ultimately concluded, in order to clearly show a hunter-gatherer presence during this period as well as their participation in local economic networks.</p>
<p>To do this, we needed to dig. Archaeological excavations are a slow and meticulous process that involve the careful removal of layers of artefact-bearing deposits with a very strict control of depth and location within an excavation trench.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Field team member Siphesihle Kuhlase shows a broken bangle while others remove deposit in search of artefacts.</span>
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</figure>
<p>Following this is a lengthy period of analysis that adheres to rigorous protocols to ensure consistency in identifying artefact types, their production techniques or methods, how they were used, and what they were made from.</p>
<p>We then piece all this evidence together in our attempt to understand past ways of living. From our results, we were able to trace a hunter-gatherer history that intertwined with the rise of Mapungubwe. </p>
<p>Our first and important task was to show that hunter-gatherers were still around when Mapungubwe appeared. To date, we’ve examined about 15,000 stone tools from a sample of our excavations and identified a set of finished tools that are the same as those produced by hunter-gatherers for millennia before farmer groups appeared. We believe that this consistency in cultural material over such a long span of time clearly shows that hunter-gatherers were living in the shelter when farmers were in the area.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Stone tools, glass and shell beads, bone points, pieces of copper jewellery and pottery" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1124&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1124&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1124&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A range of artefact types found at hunter-gatherer sites like Little Muck Shelter. Stone scrapers (A) and backed tools (B), which were used for producing goods and hunting, respectively, glass beads (C), traded into central Africa from the east African coastline, and larger ostrich eggshell beads (D), bone points or needles (E), broken pieces of copper jewellery (F) and pottery (G), and a grooved stone used to either sharpen metal tools, round ostrich eggshell beads, or finish and polish bone tools (H).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tim Forssman</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>We then wanted to look more closely at the trading economy. From the moment farmer groups appeared in the region, during the early first millennium AD, hunter-gatherers shifted their <a href="https://harproject.co.za/?p=203">craft activities</a>. Rather than mostly producing goods made from hide, wood and shell, they began making mostly bone implements and did so until the end of the Mapungubwe Kingdom at AD 1300. This suggests that the interactions hunter-gatherers had with farmers from when they first arrived stimulated change in their crafted wares.</p>
<p>Why did they change their crafting activities? At the same time that these shifts took place, we recorded the appearance of trade wealth in the form of ceramics and glass beads, initially, and then metal. These goods were never made by hunter-gatherers and are common at farmer settlements, indicating exchange between these two communities. It indicates that hunter-gatherers responded to new market opportunities through emphasising their own skill sets.</p>
<p>Our work to identify more evidence that shows a hunter-gatherer involvement in these processes continues. We are trying to find out in what other ways they were involved and whether they themselves developed a more complex society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202774/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span><a href="mailto:tim.forssman@ump.ac.za">tim.forssman@ump.ac.za</a> receives funding from the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Palaeontological Scientific Trust. </span></em></p>Hunter-gatherers were an important part of the development of the Mapungubwe Kingdom in southern Africa – a fact that history has tended to neglect.Tim Forssman, Senior Lecturer, University of MpumalangaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2008512023-03-15T13:37:56Z2023-03-15T13:37:56ZToyin Falola: 3 recent books that explain the work of Nigeria’s famous decolonial scholar<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514433/original/file-20230309-28-bgy994.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Toyin Falola has turned 70.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy Olusegun Olopade</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://notevenpast.org/professor-toyin-falola-living-and-globalizing-the-humanities/">Toyin Falola</a>, distinguished <a href="https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/falolaoo">professor of history</a>, is one of Africa’s most accomplished intellectuals. Born Oloruntoyin Falola in 1953 in the Nigerian city of Ibadan, he grew up in a sprawling, polygamous household that practised Islam, Christianity and ancient Yoruba spirituality. </p>
<p>This confluence of multiple worldviews and religions reflects in his thinking and in his massive academic output. Falola has produced something like 200 books in all areas of the human and social sciences, and travels widely to deliver lectures at conferences and public events.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/nigerian-historian-and-thinker-toyin-falola-on-decolonising-the-academy-in-africa-184188">Nigerian historian and thinker Toyin Falola on decolonising the academy in Africa</a>
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<p>Africa and its diasporas (including Africans in the US, Brazil, Cuba and the Caribbean) are his overriding concern and sites of study. In Falola’s handling, Africa is endlessly fascinating and resourceful, both culturally and intellectually. </p>
<p>Since he is so productive, it’s difficult to offer a cohesive account of his multifaceted work. In the process of working on a book about Falola, I think perhaps the best way to understand his impact is to identify his core values and philosophies and how they recur across his recent output.</p>
<p>His 70th birthday has been celebrated with a renewed flurry of books. I’ll focus on just three of them here.</p>
<h2>1. African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems</h2>
<p>Published in 2022, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/african-spirituality-politics-and-knowledge-systems-9781350271944/">African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems</a>: Sacred Words and Holy Realms was in part inspired by Falola’s interactions with a Nigerian political scientist, <a href="https://carleton.ca/africanstudies/people/samuel-ojo-oloruntoba/">Samuel Oloruntoba</a>. Falola used Oloruntoba, who engages in intense late night prayer sessions, as a sounding board in writing the book.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514471/original/file-20230309-26-id7yv9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover in black, brown and yellow with an image of an African statue of a head." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514471/original/file-20230309-26-id7yv9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514471/original/file-20230309-26-id7yv9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514471/original/file-20230309-26-id7yv9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514471/original/file-20230309-26-id7yv9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514471/original/file-20230309-26-id7yv9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514471/original/file-20230309-26-id7yv9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514471/original/file-20230309-26-id7yv9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bloomsbury</span></span>
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<p>Here, Falola is interested in the spiritual power of the spoken word, a concept not only familiar to Christianity and other religions, but also to Nigeria’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yoruba">Yoruba</a> <a href="https://web.ccsu.edu/afstudy/supdt99.htm">spirituality</a> – in this case ogede, a ritual form of incantation. The spoken word is seen as being imbued with life and power and therefore has the ability to transform lives.</p>
<p>While Falola explores African spiritual formations, in the book he also seeks links to global cultural practices. In the process he affirms our common humanity and the continuities across cultures. He draws links between Christian worship and Orisa spirituality, a religion that is polytheistic (worshipping many gods) and is practised in south-west Nigeria, parts of Benin and Togo. It was also spread across the world through the transatlantic slave trade.</p>
<p>In this book, Falola is refocusing our attention on the primal power of the spoken word as an agent of consciousness and transformation.</p>
<h2>2. Decolonizing African Studies</h2>
<p>Also in 2022, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/decolonizing-african-knowledge/1296996BE948B52843872FAA948447BE">Decolonizing African Studies</a> was released. This book is particularly relevant for the South African context. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/feesmustfall-the-poster-child-for-new-forms-of-struggle-in-south-africa-68773">#FeesMustFall</a> student protest movement that grew out of the University of Cape Town as part of an attack on the legacy of the arch-colonialist <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/cecil-john-rhodes">Cecil John Rhodes</a> became a nation-wide campaign. It sparked fervent debates on <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-decolonisation-131455">decolonisation</a> and the institutional legacies of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid’s</a> white minority rule.</p>
<p>European colonialism had a <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/how-africas-colonial-history-affects-its-development/">devastating impact</a> on the African continent. Slavery, colonial rule and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/neocolonialism">neocolonialism</a>, which is a covert and often non-violent form of ongoing colonialism, had a similar impact on all African communities.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514474/original/file-20230309-20-bnvma.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover with an illustration of a human profile made up of symbols and squiggles." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514474/original/file-20230309-20-bnvma.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514474/original/file-20230309-20-bnvma.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514474/original/file-20230309-20-bnvma.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514474/original/file-20230309-20-bnvma.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514474/original/file-20230309-20-bnvma.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514474/original/file-20230309-20-bnvma.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514474/original/file-20230309-20-bnvma.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Boydell & Brewer</span></span>
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<p>Indeed what these harmful encounters did to the African self was to effect a schism or disconnect within it, which has resulted in many forms of identity crisis – what the US sociologist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-E-B-Du-Bois">W.E.B. Dubois</a> called “<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-consciousness/">double consciousness</a>” and other thinkers have called a form of alienation. Simply put, colonial belief systems, morals and culture were imposed on traditional African belief systems, causing this tension. </p>
<p>In this book, Falola attempts to heal the broken African self by bypassing colonial archival sources. Instead, he undertakes a form of intellectual therapy by engaging with “alternative archives created by memory, spoken words, images and photographs”, as the blurb of the British edition puts it. A key component is the use of autoethnography (ethnographic research drawing on the researcher’s own life story) for recovering traces of African memory lost in the colonial haze. In this book, oral narratives and personal viewpoints merge in creating an authentic African knowledge system.</p>
<h2>3. African Memoirs and Cultural Representations</h2>
<p>The most recent major book by Falola is <a href="https://anthempress.com/african-memoirs-and-cultural-representations-hb">African Memoirs and Cultural Representations</a>, released in 2023. In this work, Falola analyses the memoirs of grossly under-studied west African writers who worked largely in the traditional vein – that is, within the perspectives of precolonial west African thinking. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514476/original/file-20230309-20-k4b0hf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover showing a photograph of a man in traditional African attire sitting and reading into a microphone from a large book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514476/original/file-20230309-20-k4b0hf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514476/original/file-20230309-20-k4b0hf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514476/original/file-20230309-20-k4b0hf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514476/original/file-20230309-20-k4b0hf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514476/original/file-20230309-20-k4b0hf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514476/original/file-20230309-20-k4b0hf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514476/original/file-20230309-20-k4b0hf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anthem Press</span></span>
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<p>In this manner, African perspectives, beliefs and norms are recuperated as a way of furthering a decolonial project. In addition, the book highlights the nature and purity of the African voice beyond the colonial framework. In other words, what it means to hear African voices outside the strictures or filters of colonial thought systems.</p>
<p>What these three books do is to outline Falola’s positions on a global decolonial project. He has also recently co-edited the <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-45759-4">Palgrave Handbook on Islam in Africa</a> and a multi-volume <a href="https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-030-28099-4">book project</a> on women’s studies and female agency in Africa. Such is the scope of this African scholar.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-decolonisation-131455">Explainer: what is decolonisation?</a>
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<p>Falola’s copious research outputs debunk the fallacy that Africa was without history, consciousness or mind. Such myths were promoted in the grand narratives of colonialism and the European imperial project. And more importantly, Falola’s work serves as a powerful antidote to the constant onslaughts of <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/afropessimism">afropessimism</a> and probably by extension, <a href="https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/what-is-afropessimism-politics-society-and-anti-blackness/">anti-blackness</a> in the contemporary age.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200851/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sanya Osha receives funding from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation but writes in his personal capacity.</span></em></p>With over 200 publications to his name, his three most recent books give a sense of why he is so famous as a historian.Sanya Osha, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1988122023-02-22T15:32:01Z2023-02-22T15:32:01ZRock art as African history: what religious images say about identity, survival and change<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510268/original/file-20230215-15-yt0qm3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">After colonial contact, indigenous Africans acquired horses and guns, and raided settlers as a means of resistance.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy Sam Challis</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>To “read” the history of times before writing, scholars have traditionally used excavated evidence. Remains like dwellings, burials and pots can reveal a lot about how people lived long ago. In southern Africa, there is another archive to “read” too: rock art. Rock art is primarily a record of spiritual beliefs – but also reflects the events that these beliefs made sense of.</p>
<p>Hunter-gatherers in the region, ancestors of today’s San or BaTwa, made rock art for thousands of years before African herders and farmers arrived from the north 2,000 years ago and European colonists followed by sea 350 years ago.</p>
<p>As a result of these contacts between groups of people, ethnic and economic boundaries became increasingly blurred. Rock art changed too, in technique and subject matter.</p>
<p>Rock art tells a tale of people meeting, negotiating, fighting, trading with and marrying one another. The tale is told not in simple narrative, but in spiritual beliefs. Our recent <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722260">paper in Current Anthropology</a> outlines the nature, scale and effects of contact between people in southern Africa, and the ways in which indigenous people produced images that engaged with change. It shows that contact and colonisation, in time, created a “disconnect” with the past that can be understood by looking at changes in rock art. </p>
<p>The disconnect apparent in the rock art reflects the disconnect in indigenous society more generally. It reveals the mixing and changing – and survival – of different people’s beliefs about the universe. It charts southern African history and, although it is “written” in terms of spiritual beliefs, it is the only record that shows what happened from the San perspective.</p>
<p>It often shows the struggle to resist subjugation, and it depicts beliefs about the forces that could be summoned to resist.</p>
<h2>Shifts in rock art</h2>
<p>What the San painted or engraved on rock was their vision of what happened in a trance state. The artists entered this trance state in order to establish <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/12/1099">connections with animals and spirits in the landscape</a>, to influence their movements, and to derive the power to make rain and heal the sick. </p>
<p>Rock art was never unchanging, but new traditions and styles appeared when African farmers arrived in southern Africa from about 2,000 years ago, and when pastoralism was later introduced. Further changes came with the <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134215">arrival of Khoe-speakers about 1,000 years ago</a>. These Khoe-speaking herders were themselves descended from earlier mixing between hunter-gatherers and east African pastoralists.</p>
<p>Changes appeared in the rock art’s content – for example the animals and materials portrayed – and in the artistic techniques used.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two images of antelope painted on rock surface" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=180&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=180&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=180&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=226&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=226&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=226&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Eland antelope, painted (probably) before and after contact between San and other groups.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Sam Challis</span></span>
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<p>Eland antelope (the one with the most spiritual power for the San) were once lovingly drafted and shaded. Later they appeared in bright, chalky and vivid colours, rendered in a posterlike and blocky fashion. The drop in pigment quality was likely due to the breakdown of trade networks brought about by marginalisation, then <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262547793_The_forgotten_killing_fields_San_genocide_and_Louis_Anthing's_mission_to_Bushmanland_1862-1863">slaughter</a>, of indigenous people, but still they called on the power of the eland to help them. </p>
<p>We see pictures of cattle and sheep appearing in rock art, and finger-painted and engraved patterns associated with girls’ initiation, common to pastoralist and hunter-gatherer societies. The images show that people’s identity (ethnicity) and the way they survived (economy) weren’t divided into clear groups. Hunters were not necessarily all San, and all San were not necessarily hunters. The blurring of boundaries between groups increased with time. </p>
<p>As time went on, all these people became subject to extermination policy, slavery and marginalisation. But rather than being passive receptors of change, they used their religion, comprising multicultural beliefs, to survive. This can be seen in the rock art they created.</p>
<h2>Spiritual concepts of water</h2>
<p>Conceptions of the rain, in the form of images of water bulls and water snakes, are particularly useful for examining cross-cultural influences. </p>
<p>For African farmers, snakes were associated with water. Hunter-gatherers and herders with whom they came into contact acknowledged this because they, too, already had beliefs about water and the animal entities embodied by it. </p>
<p>People from different language groups may have gathered together for girls’ initiation ceremonies at sites where the great water snake emerged. At these locations, this spiritual creature’s body, the <a href="http://www.driekopseiland.itgo.com/">undulating rock</a>, is covered with markings to appeal to it – the markings that also appear on the initiates’ tattoos, face paint, clothing and bags. </p>
<p>The control of water, to make rain for pasture and crops, was traded (bartered for cattle) between groups, very likely for centuries. Rock art images of water snakes, water bulls and domestic cattle intertwine and superimpose one another; sometimes water snakes have cattle horns. Often, water bulls or water snakes were depicted being killed to make their blood – the rain – fall. </p>
<p>Water was also extremely important to those wishing to combat the encroaching colonists. By this time the people of southern Africa, regardless of background, held many <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280623580_Binding_beliefs_the_creolisation_process_in_a_%27Bushman%27_raider_group_in_nineteenth-century_southern_Africa">beliefs in common</a>. The people or entities that lived underwater could be called upon to influence situations: torrential rain to wash away the tracks of stolen animals, for example. </p>
<h2>Raiding and escape</h2>
<p>By the time colonists arrived, hunter-gatherers had sheep, and <a href="https://dsae.co.za/entry/sintu/e06478">isiNtu-speakers</a> (African farmers) had adopted aspects of hunter-gatherer beliefs, and vice versa. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Painted image of human with some animal features" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Xhosa warrior painted in the Windvogelberg mountains of the Eastern Cape, possibly as a ‘commission’ including war medicine obtained from the San.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Brent Sinclair-Thomson</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>San were increasingly marginalised from well-watered pasture suitable for domestic herds of African herders and farmers. Some became herders themselves, some mixed with farmers and some became raiders. Then, with the expansion of settler farms in the 18th century (which they also raided) they were <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-bandit-slaves-and-the-rock-art-of-resistance-165107">decimated, hunted and enslaved</a>.</p>
<p>In the rock art, baboons became a symbol of protective power to enable raiders to escape unharmed. The root of a powerful medicine, <em>so-|oa</em> or <em>mabophe</em> – closely associated with baboons – enabled stock thieves to pass unnoticed, and “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15740773.2017.1487122">turned bullets to water</a>”. We see this in the paintings of people taking on the power and features of baboons, appearing alongside horses and cattle.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-bandit-slaves-and-the-rock-art-of-resistance-165107">South Africa's bandit slaves and the rock art of resistance</a>
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<p>Horses, the magical vehicles of violence, passage and escape, were kept and cared for by their new owners – the raider groups. They painted themselves in scenes before, during and after raids, not as a diary entry but as part of the [<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam-Challis/publication/280623828_Re-tribe_and_resist_the_ethnogenesis_of_a_creolised_raiding_band_in_response_to_colonisation/links/5efb0cf6299bf18816f37af0/Re-tribe-and-resist-the-ethnogenesis-of-a-creolised-raiding-band-in-response-to-colonisation.pdf">ritual</a>] of ensuring the outcome was favourable and the memory made positive. </p>
<p>We can now see changes in rock art, from “traditional” animals like rhebok and eland, to those showing rain bulls being killed, rain snakes captured, people with shields and spears, or riding horses alongside baboons, <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722260">in a new light</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198812/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam Challis receives funding from the South African NRF African Origins Platform and is a member of the Bradshaw Foundation Rock Art Network</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brent Sinclair-Thomson received funding for this research from the South African National Research Foundation African Origins Platform. </span></em></p>Changes in southern African rock art reflect the mixing of groups of people after they came into contact with each other.Sam Challis, Senior Researcher, University of the WitwatersrandBrent Sinclair-Thomson, Support staff, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1942762022-11-15T13:28:34Z2022-11-15T13:28:34ZWoman King is set in Benin but filmed in South Africa - in the process it erases real people’s struggles<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495062/original/file-20221114-13-qvejj0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures Entertainment</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The latest film by director <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0697656/">Gina Prince-Bythewood</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-woman-king-is-more-than-an-action-movie-it-shines-a-light-on-the-women-warriors-of-benin-190466">The Woman King</a>, is about a legendary all-woman African army in the 1800s, the <a href="https://thisisafrica.me/politics-and-society/benins-30m-amazon-statue-honours-the-women-warriors-of-dahomey/">Amazons</a> of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Dahomey-historical-kingdom-Africa">Dahomey</a>. It takes place in what is today the Republic of Benin in west Africa. It wasn’t filmed in Benin, but in South Africa, in the KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape provinces using locations that look like west Africa.</p>
<p>The film has had an overwhelmingly <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/the-woman-king-review-b2194801.html">positive</a> <a href="https://www.essence.com/entertainment/the-woman-king-opening-weekend/">reception</a>, but some <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/20/what-woman-king-gets-wrong-right-about-dahomeys-warriors/">critics</a> have <a href="https://theconversation.com/woman-king-is-worth-watching-but-be-aware-that-its-take-on-history-is-problematic-191865">cautioned</a> against ignoring history in favour of crowd-pleasing storytelling. I would like to draw attention to the film’s use of the African landscape, as Hollywood tells new stories while ignoring the struggles of the present.</p>
<p>I am a curator of African art in Kingston, Ontario. I arrived in Canada from Cape Town around the time The Woman King was being filmed in the coastal town of <a href="https://southafrica.co.za/history-kleinmond.html?gclid=CjwKCAiA68ebBhB-EiwALVC-Nl6e0BM8x1tEdji_4bBuskGYsljgwthlHZEs7QOn7LoGqDSKG4hrWxoCAusQAvD_BwE">Kleinmond</a> in the Overstrand, where I’d lived with my family. I was struck by how the town was depicted.</p>
<p>The film uses Kleinmond as the site of great battles that glorify Africa’s history. But the town’s actual history is one of struggle and the oppression of black people that lives on to this day. The Woman King shows a pristine version of Kleinmond, digitally altering the landscape to erase black lives and settlements.</p>
<p>Cheating one film location for another is common practice. Film infrastructure exists in the Western Cape and there are financial incentives that attract international film makers. Not only is the natural diversity of South Africa appealing, it’s also marketable. </p>
<p>But film locations in Africa are often used as a generic Hollywood backdrop or African cities are easily traded. For example, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450259/">Blood Diamond</a> is set in Sierra Leone and was filmed in Cape Town. More recently <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395427/">Avengers: Age of Ultron</a>’s battle scenes <a href="https://brandsouthafrica.com/4221/see-joburg-on-the-big-screen-in-the-new-avengers-movie/">played out</a> in downtown Johannesburg.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/woman-king-is-worth-watching-but-be-aware-that-its-take-on-history-is-problematic-191865">Woman King is worth watching: but be aware that its take on history is problematic</a>
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<p>These distortions are part of the global film industry, but they can also lead to a distortion of a continent and its history. The Woman King’s use of Kleinmond’s setting may seem like just a technical gimmick, but it points to a bigger issue: even when telling African stories, Hollywood reimagines the true history and geography of the continent to serve western audiences.</p>
<h2>Kleinmond</h2>
<p>Kleinmond bears witness to <a href="http://thehda.co.za/index.php/multimedia/single-media-statement/apartheid-spatial-planning">apartheid town planning</a>. During <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a>, white minority rulers implemented a policy of separate development, and allocated racial groups to different living areas.</p>
<p>The original town was settled from the 1850s by fisher families who made their living from the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1950s, when it became part of a “<a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/group-areas-act-1950">white group area</a>”, Kleinmond was bulldozed by the apartheid government, its people forcibly removed to Protea Dorp on the mountainside near the town dump. A letter by a local fisher, <a href="https://www.pjfca.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Fredericks-family-fish-history.pdf">Petrus Johannes Fredericks</a>, attests to growing up in Kleinmond harbour and to his family’s forced removal. He writes about the ongoing struggles to secure scarce government fishing quotas.</p>
<h2>Retelling Africa and cinematic erasure</h2>
<p>It’s ironic that Kleinmond was the backdrop for The Woman King’s battle scenes, and appropriated into a story of a glorious, fictitious African past. Frequent <a href="https://ewn.co.za/topic/kleinmond-protest">violent protests</a> in the area show that the real life struggle for the ocean and the land is still underway. During recent protests for better housing, burning tyres were positioned around an area called Perdekop and it became a true battleground for its inhabitants.</p>
<p>In a similar way, Kleinmond’s complexities and its embattled people are erased for the purposes of tourism. According to <a href="https://kleinmondtourism.co.za">local authorities</a>, the natural beauty and biodiversity are the “finest example of mountain fynbos in the Western Cape and (the Kleinmond biosphere is) a world-renowned World Heritage Site”. But this heritage has yet to yield enough sustainable jobs, and for many Kleinmond men, the illegal trade in endangered <a href="https://www.aquarium.co.za/species/entry/abalone">abalone</a> is one of only a <a href="https://www.groundup.org.za/article/poaching-abalone-matter-survival-says-kleinmond-community/">few forms of employment</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495063/original/file-20221114-22-sxseen.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A moody still of an old port with ships approaching in a rough sea and the sun breaking through the clouds." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495063/original/file-20221114-22-sxseen.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495063/original/file-20221114-22-sxseen.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=248&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495063/original/file-20221114-22-sxseen.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=248&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495063/original/file-20221114-22-sxseen.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=248&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495063/original/file-20221114-22-sxseen.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=312&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495063/original/file-20221114-22-sxseen.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=312&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495063/original/file-20221114-22-sxseen.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=312&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The port of Ouidah in Benin was filmed in South Africa’s Western Cape.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures Entertainment</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The white South African art world also has countless examples of black erasure and distorted storytelling. The apartheid state’s favoured painter <a href="https://www.everard-read.co.za/artist/J.H._PIERNEEF/biography/">JH Pierneef</a> painted empty, detailed landscapes of South Africa that were hung in government buildings across the country. He never showed the conflicted human life inhabiting those landscapes, erasing black people, the original inhabitants. <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/irma-stern">Irma Stern</a>, favoured by white liberals, preferred painting scenes in the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/homelands">Bantustans</a> or black reserves of South Africa to show an “authentic” African life. She ignored the everyday trauma of living under apartheid to capture what she considered the African ideal. </p>
<h2>Pristine Africa</h2>
<p>The Woman King continues this elided narrative by presenting Africa as largely uninhabited and pristine. But what does it mean when the real, battle-worn Perdekop is not acknowledged and becomes part of an elaborate computer graphic of a white settlement instead? Or a graphic of fictional houses is overlaid on the Overhills settlement? </p>
<p>As a curator, I think about which stories we tell in the present, which stories will endure, but most importantly what shape our collective responsibility takes. Kleinmond is close to my heart, which is perhaps why I’m especially troubled by this new kind of historical erasure, as the African landscape is digitally emptied and its people ignored so that its image can be used as the canvas for a redemptive story.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-woman-king-is-more-than-an-action-movie-it-shines-a-light-on-the-women-warriors-of-benin-190466">The Woman King is more than an action movie – it shines a light on the women warriors of Benin</a>
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<p>All this is not to say that The Woman King does not carefully counter harmful African stereotypes; it does. It presents African women as strong, healthy and independent, Africans as the inheritors of a rich cultural tradition and Africans as majestic purveyors of lost ideals. But at what cost does this fictional black redemption come? </p>
<p>In erasing the past, the film undermines Africa’s struggles, creating a false impression of the continent to please western viewers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194276/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Qanita Lilla does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Hollywood undermines Africa’s struggles, creating a false impression of the continent to please western viewers.Qanita Lilla, Associate Curator Arts of Africa, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen's University, OntarioLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1943262022-11-15T13:21:01Z2022-11-15T13:21:01ZNorth Africans’ experiences of World War II often go unheard<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495150/original/file-20221114-21-pmhw1p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C3%2C1020%2C726&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">German troops marching through Tunis in 1943.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/tunisia-german-troop-marching-through-tunis-in-north-africa-news-photo/107427560?phrase=tunisia%20german&adppopup=true">Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In November 1942, the Nazis occupied Tunisia. For the next six months, Tunisian Jews and Muslims were subjected to <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29530">the Third Reich’s reign of terror</a>, as well as its antisemitic and racist legislation. Residents lived in fear – “under the Nazi boot,” as Tunisian Jewish lawyer Paul Ghez wrote in his diary during the occupation.</p>
<p>One of us is <a href="https://sarahastein.com/">a historian</a>; one of us is <a href="https://anthro.ucla.edu/person/aomar-boum/">an anthropologist</a>. Together, we have spent a decade <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32119">gathering the voices</a> of the diverse peoples who endured World War II in North Africa, <a href="https://www.worldreligionnews.com/issues/the-triangular-affair-between-muslims-france-and-jews-interview-with-ethan-b-katz/">across lines of</a> race, class, language and region. Their letters, diaries, memoirs, poetry and oral histories are both defiant and broken. They express both faith and despair. All in all, they understood themselves to be trapped in a monstrous machine of fascism, occupation, violence and racism. </p>
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<p>When most Americans think of the nightmares of the war or the Holocaust, they think strictly of Europe. Hate has a shifting color wheel, however – and we learn something new when we watch its spin in wartime North Africa.</p>
<h2>Crossing the sea</h2>
<p>The history of Jews settling in North Africa begins as early as the sixth century B.C., after the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. Another significant wave of immigrants followed the Spanish Inquisition. At the start of World War II, <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jews-of-the-maghreb-on-the-eve-of-world-war-ii">a diverse North African Jewish population</a> of roughly 500,000 coexisted with Muslim neighbors.</p>
<p>North Africa’s Jews spoke many languages, reflecting their many different cultures and ethnicities: Arabic, French, Tamazight – a Berber language – and Haketia, a form of Judeo-Spanish spoken in northern Morocco. While a large number of North African Jews, particularly in Algeria, enjoyed the privileges of French and other Western citizenship, the majority remained subjects of local leaders. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An old, black and white postcard shows a group of girls standing outside a doorway in skirts and kerchiefs." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A group of Jewish girls in Debdou, Morocco, around 1915.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Debdou_Fillettes_Juvies.jpg">D Millet E/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>During the Second World War, however, those who held French citizenship had it stripped away. Three European powers ruled North Africa during the war, all brutally.</p>
<p>Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia were, for most of the conflict, in the hands <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/france">of Vichy France</a>. This authoritarian government, which collaborated with Nazi Germany, was formed in July 1940 by armistice, after Germany’s successful invasion of France. It was ruled by Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, a French hero of the First World War, out of the southern city of Vichy.</p>
<p>All <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewish-legislation-in-north-africa?parent=en%2F54497">antisemitic and racist laws and policies</a> the Vichy regime imposed upon continental France were extended to its colonies in North and West Africa, pushing Jews out of professional sectors, stripping them of citizenship – if they had it to begin with – and seizing Jewish property, businesses and assets. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows a man and woman standing while another woman sits between them. They all wear long robes or skirts and have their heads covered." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=690&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=690&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=690&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A Jewish family in Tangier, Morocco, in 1885.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/jewish-family-tangier-by-1885-news-photo/55757507?phrase=jewish%20morocco&adppopup=true">LL/Roger Viollet via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>The Vichy regime also continued racist policies begun by France’s Third Republic, which pushed young Black men from the empire into forced military service – and the most dangerous wartime posts. These forced recruits included soldiers <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-time-has-come-for-france-to-own-up-to-the-massacre-of-its-own-troops-in-senegal-35131">from Senegal</a>, French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Niger and Mauritania; French territories in present-day Benin, Gambia and Burkina Faso; and Muslim men from Morocco and Algeria.</p>
<p>In these ways, the French carried on a wartime campaign of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, pairing these forms of racialized hatred from the colonial era with antisemitism. Antisemitism had deep roots in French and colonial history, but it <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2022-06-27/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/how-north-african-jews-have-been-erased-from-holocaust-history/00000181-a4fe-dcbe-a19b-a5ff8fc40000">found new force</a> in the era of fascism.</p>
<p>Antisemitic and anti-Black policy was also a bedrock of Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italian government, which ruled over Libya during the war. Italy first tested its <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/08/25/in-plain-sight-black-lives-matter-and-italys-colonial-past/">racist policies</a> in its colony of Italian East Africa, segregating local Black populations from Italian settlers. Mussolini’s regime then reshaped these policies of racialized hatred for Libya, where it pushed Jews out of the professions and the economy, seized property from thousands and <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-10-31/ty-article/.highlight/a-childhood-in-benghazi-a-bar-mitzvah-in-bergen-belsen/0000017f-f0ea-df98-a5ff-f3ef381e0000">deported them to labor and internment camps</a>. Jewish children, women and men died from starvation, disease, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/famine-wartime-north-africa-ukraine/">hunger</a> and forced labor. </p>
<h2>Camps on African soil</h2>
<p>Nazi Germany occupied Tunisia from November 1942 to May 1943. <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32119">During this period</a>, the SS – the elite guard of the Nazi regime – imprisoned some 5,000 Jewish men in roughly 40 forced labor and detention camps on the front lines and in cities like Tunis. German troops also terrorized Muslim and Jewish girls and women who remained behind.</p>
<p>The Third Reich did not set out to deport Jews from North Africa to its death camps in Eastern Europe, but hundreds of Jews of North African heritage and some Muslims who were living in France <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2022-06-27/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/how-north-african-jews-have-been-erased-from-holocaust-history/00000181-a4fe-dcbe-a19b-a5ff8fc40000">did meet this fate</a>. They were deported first to the <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/december/1942.html">internment camp of Drancy</a>, on the outskirts of Paris, and sent from there to concentration and death camps. Many died in Auschwitz.</p>
<p>There were <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/labor-and-internment-camps-in-north-africa">camps in North Africa and West Africa, too</a>. In addition to those the Italian fascists built in Libya, Vichy France and Nazi Germany ran penal camps, detention camps and labor camps. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows a shirtless man in shorts pushing a heavy metal cart over a track." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C3%2C1020%2C695&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rosenthal, a German Jewish prisoner, pushes a cart in the stone quarry of the Im Fout labor camp in Morocco.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1172894">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Vichy regime alone built nearly 70 such camps in the Sahara, <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1941/03/30/85472142.html?pageNumber=107">breathing new life</a> into a colonial ambition of building a trans-Saharan railway to connect the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. The Vichy regime saw it as a conduit for supplying the front lines with forcibly recruited, Black Senegalese soldiers.</p>
<p>In these camps, as in the Nazi camps of Eastern Europe, the complex racist logic of Nazism and fascism took vivid form. Muslims arrested for anti-colonial activities were pressed into back-breaking labor alongside Jews and Christians who had fled war-torn Europe, only to find themselves arrested in North Africa.</p>
<p>These men broke bread with other forced workers from around the world, including <a href="https://spanishcivilwarmuseum.com/the-virtual-spanish-civil-war-museum/an-international-war/international-brigades/">fighters who had volunteered for Spain’s Republican Army</a> during its civil war. These Ukrainians, Americans, Germans, Russian Jews and others had been arrested, deported and imprisoned by the Vichy regime after fleeing Franco’s Spain. There were political enemies of the Vichy and Nazi regimes, too, including socialists, communists, union members and North African nationalists. Children and women were imprisoned as well. </p>
<p>Among this hodgepodge of prisoners, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SvM32zM7-g">many were refugees who fled Europe</a>, whether because of their Jewishness or because they were political enemies of the Third Reich. Inmates were overseen by French Vichy soldiers as well as <a href="https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20200707-french-mayors-urged-to-acknowledge-outstanding-contribution-of-african-soldiers-during-wwii">forcibly recruited indigenous Moroccan and Black Senegalese men</a>, who were often <a href="https://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/en/colonised-soldiers-french-empire">little more than prisoners</a> themselves. Sometimes the camp prisoners interacted with local populations: Saharan Muslims and Jews who provided them medical care, burial grounds, and food and sex for money. </p>
<p>Nazism in Europe was underlaid by an intricate matrix of racist, eugenicist and nationalist ideas. But the war – and the Holocaust – appears even more complex if historians take into account the racist and violent color wheel that spun in North Africa.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194326/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>People across much of North Africa were subject to racist laws and suffering at the hands of European powers during the Second World War.Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Professor of History, University of California, Los AngelesAomar Boum, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1913862022-10-13T14:21:11Z2022-10-13T14:21:11Z‘Restitution’ of looted African art just continues colonial policies - much more is at stake<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488751/original/file-20221007-22-wnmp36.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An artefact is returned to the king of Benin in Nigeria.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kola Sulaimon/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe id="noa-web-audio-player" style="border: none" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=x84olp&id=https://theconversation.com/restitution-of-looted-african-art-just-continues-colonial-policies-much-more-is-at-stake-191386&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=D8352A&playColor=D8352A" width="100%" height="110px"></iframe>
<p>The violence of the past is far from over. But it is disguised in many ways, made invisible and normalised. What started with the Spanish, Portuguese or the Ottoman empires continued with the British, French and Russian empires, and now the United States. Imperial political violence continues today in Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, to name but a few. </p>
<p>One of the disguises is “restitution”. </p>
<p>I’m a scholar of what I understand as <a href="https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9584750">catastrophic art</a> – artworks which were made in worlds that empires destroyed, and were then taken to the imperial centres, or metropoles.</p>
<p>When talking about <a href="https://theconversation.com/benin-bronzes-what-is-the-significance-of-their-repatriation-to-nigeria-171444">returning</a> these artworks, the former imperial states speak of “restitution”. Restitution is taken to mean the return of “objects” to their homes or places of origin. It is confined to individual works of art, and human remains, that were brutally deported and displayed in museums or subjected to laboratory research. It includes animals too. These were hunted and taken to satisfy the interest of imperial science, museums and zoos. </p>
<p>But the language of restitution fails to take into account historical responsibilities. </p>
<p>As I discuss in a recent paper on <a href="https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9584750">catastrophic art</a>, restitution fails to note that taking “objects” from Africa went hand-in-hand with the murder or destruction of knowledges in the continent. It thus eliminated the possibility for future knowledge practice and circulation. </p>
<p>Restitution ignores the annihilation of life forms – of social, political, ecological and epistemological organisation – that was perpetrated in Africa by the empires. </p>
<h2>‘Civilising mission’</h2>
<p>I have been working on understanding the British colonial destruction of the <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/benin/">Kingdom of Benin</a> in 1897. The destruction was an imperial response to Oba (king) <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ovonramwen">Ovonramwen Nogbaisi</a>’s refusal to submit to control by imperial legislation. The kingdom was first made to disappear in a great fire and then turned into a British colony with a “native council”. </p>
<p>The British empire had already destroyed the <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/ashanti-empire-asante-kingdom-18th-late-19th-century/">Ashanti Kingdom</a> (in 1874) in what is today Ghana and the German empire had destroyed <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Cameroon">Cameroon</a> in West Africa (in 1884). At the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Berlin-West-Africa-Conference">Berlin Conference</a> of 1884–85, representatives of predatory empires met and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Western-colonialism/Partition-of-Africa">divided the continent</a> of Africa between them into areas over which they would have sole rights. </p>
<p>The French destruction of the <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/mirambo-ca-1840-1884/">Kingdom of Dahomey</a> in 1892–94 followed. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/germany-is-returning-nigerias-looted-benin-bronzes-why-its-not-nearly-enough-165349">Germany is returning Nigeria's looted Benin Bronzes: why it's not nearly enough</a>
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<p>The political violence of these empires was driven by what they termed a “civilising mission”. This meant conquest of land. And that meant the annihilation of life forms. It destroyed different knowledges and was followed by the extraction of artworks and human remains. Colonial ethnologists and ethnographers had the power to treat destroyed knowledges as “objects” or “artefacts”. </p>
<h2>The murder of knowledges</h2>
<p>As imperialists, they could create theories to prove that plundered knowledges were nothing more than objects. They stripped from these knowledge systems their ability to transmit knowledge. </p>
<p>In the Kingdom of Benin, art was never seen as art alone, but a system of knowledge that shaped life. The critical thinker, poet and Senegal’s first president, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leopold-Senghor">Léopold Sédar Senghor</a>, <a href="https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/1675/Leopold_Senghor__The_Spirit_of_Civilisation.pdf">wrote</a> of African art as “social life, goodness, beauty, happiness, and the ‘knowledge of the world’”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488770/original/file-20221007-16-g739gl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A statue of a head behind a glass display case, in the background a man and woman gaze at it." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488770/original/file-20221007-16-g739gl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488770/original/file-20221007-16-g739gl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488770/original/file-20221007-16-g739gl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488770/original/file-20221007-16-g739gl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488770/original/file-20221007-16-g739gl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488770/original/file-20221007-16-g739gl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488770/original/file-20221007-16-g739gl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Benin Bronze artwork on display in the Humboldt Forum, Germany.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wolfgang Kumm/picture alliance via Getty Images</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>By denying that the artworks carried knowledge they brought with them, the colonial ethnologist or anthropologist could make scientific knowledge claims about these “objects”. </p>
<p>But the colonialist system of classification, categorisation and hierarchy denied the fact that the artworks carried knowledge they brought with them. This process destroyed the ability and right of an artwork to speak of life forms.</p>
<p>The “objects” were then put on display and turned into spectacles to entertain the masses, or “sleeping beauties”, as the philosopher <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frantz-Fanon">Frantz Fanon</a> put it in <a href="https://theconversation.com/quotes-from-frantz-fanons-wretched-of-the-earth-that-resonate-60-years-later-173108">The Wretched of the Earth</a>. </p>
<p>The empires used spectacle to institute imperial citizenship and to justify violence and destruction in the colonies. </p>
<p>To this day, the <a href="https://www.louvre.fr/en">Louvre</a> in Paris, the <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org">British Museum</a> in London and the <a href="https://www.humboldtforum.org/en/">Humboldt Forum</a> in Berlin continue to lay legal claim to, and to display, “objects” from Benin, Dahomey and Cameroon. The undisturbed display prevents any thinking of the “objects” as the colonial murder of knowledges.</p>
<h2>A call for historical responsibility</h2>
<p>States and museums see themselves under no historical, political or ethical obligation even to inquire into their colonial histories of murdering knowledge. </p>
<p>Quite the opposite. The language of restitution and provenance is a “new” spectacle, a way of remembering colonialism and writing colonial history. Restitution is declared and controlled in the metropoles and governed by museums, provenance researchers, archives and curators there.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/returning-looted-artefacts-will-finally-restore-heritage-to-the-brilliant-cultures-that-made-them-107479">Returning looted artefacts will finally restore heritage to the brilliant cultures that made them</a>
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<p>In fact, the rhetoric of restitution celebrates colonialism and imperial relations of power.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron/2017/11/28/emmanuel-macrons-speech-at-the-university-of-ouagadougou">speech</a> at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso on 28 November 2017, <a href="https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron">President Emmanuel Macron</a> of France declared that “African heritage must be showcased in Paris but also in Dakar, Lagos and Cotonou; this will be one of my priorities. Within five years I want the conditions to exist for temporary or permanent returns of African heritage to Africa.” </p>
<p>A similar approach was taken in a <a href="http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf">presidential report</a> on restitution that Macron commissioned. </p>
<p>The rhetoric of restitution also unfolded in Germany and Britain, demonstrating that the imperial <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/159783/orientalism-by-edward-w-said/">will to know is the will to dominate</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191386/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fazil Moradi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Art stolen from African kingdoms is a knowledge system plundered by colonialists, who must take historical responsibility.Fazil Moradi, Associate Professor, Faculty of Humanities, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1890922022-10-06T13:44:24Z2022-10-06T13:44:24ZUganda: an ancient circumcision ritual is key to imparting communal knowledge<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482802/original/file-20220905-18-etse8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Amirr (centre) parades though his village ahead of the imbalu circumcision ritual. Imbalu begins with dance and music, as initiates visit relatives and friends to receive gifts.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Luke Drey/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Music, dance, drama and poetry are important elements of ritual in African societies. Imbalu, the centuries-old circumcision ritual of Uganda’s <a href="https://www.insidemountelgonnationalpark.com/bagishu-bamasaba-people-culture.html">Bagisu people</a>, is no different. When Bagisu boys between the ages of 16 and 22 undergo this initiation into manhood, they learn the ancient meaning of the practice through music and dance.</p>
<p>Imbalu takes place every even year in August in the remote districts of eastern Uganda close to the border with Kenya. Imbalu ceremonies are not only staged in homes, but also in public spaces. Here, a broader audience witnesses the special dance and music performances.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.101lasttribes.com/tribes/Bagisu.pdf">previous</a> <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?hl=en&lr=&id=MZJMlaisYmwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA71&dq=Dominic+Makwa&ots=optoAgyHI6&sig=XPwA4-uosT3jegD6CRqAhA3xFTc&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Dominic%20Makwa&f=false">studies</a>, I have examined these performances. Music and dance are integral from the moment a boy declares he is ready to be initiated until he performs inemba, a final dance marking his return to society.</p>
<p>My most recent <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/yearbook-for-traditional-music/article/abs/musicking-and-dancing-imbalu-at-namasho-enacting-indigenous-education-among-the-bagisu-uganda/47BBFBE5A253EC18B97BA2EA0113B864">study</a> looks at how imbalu music and dance performances act as platforms where boys are tutored about their society’s gender ideology, history and ritual practise. The public performance of these rituals at a sacred place called the Namasho Cultural Site is like a communal classroom where community members attending also share what they know of their history, identity and values.</p>
<p>But imbalu, like other cultural performances among the Bagisu, has been affected by fewer and fewer boys undergoing initiation. Hospital circumcision has become more common, and Christianity, Islam and western education have negatively impacted uptake. Many Bagisu who have adopted western religious practices look at imbalu performances as something of a cult and consider these rituals to be “backward” and “primitive”. </p>
<p>As a result, there is a risk that the music and dance created, performed and transmitted through cultural sites like Namasho at ceremonies like those staged for imbalu will be lost to future generations. However, they are valuable to the community since they transmit social histories, help form identity and teach social values. They should be documented and archived without delay to preserve traditional knowledge for use by future generations.</p>
<h2>Imbalu at Namasho</h2>
<p>The initiate and his family and community members all take on different roles during imbalu performances at Namasho.</p>
<p>The site, in Bududa District, stretches from the local school to the confluence of the Manafwa and Uha rivers. It is known as a place where wars were fought, and where fetishes of medicine men and women were dumped during the precolonial period. (Fetishes, in the form of calabashes or gourds, are objects kept by diviners or traditional healers to give them supernatural power. When they didn’t have successors, such objects were disposed of.) These histories are part of what is taught in the rituals performed at this sacred site.</p>
<p>Different forms of music are played during imbalu. Khukhubulula is one form. The boy, surrounded by friends and relatives, sings songs praising himself, his family and his clan. These are usually composed by him some months earlier. Some songs will praise his girlfriends, as marriage is the phase that follows imbalu among traditional Bagisu.</p>
<p>Then there are bibiwoyo, coaxing songs usually led by men. They use titles like umwami (chief), umukoosi (the one with respect) or umusani (man) to encourage the boy to go through with the circumcision. The community demonstrates to the boy that he will become a “powerful” person in society if he gets circumcised.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483203/original/file-20220907-12-ap277n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Four people against a backdrop of dark pink sheet. They are colourfully dressed in traditional attire, a man holding a guitar." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483203/original/file-20220907-12-ap277n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483203/original/file-20220907-12-ap277n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483203/original/file-20220907-12-ap277n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483203/original/file-20220907-12-ap277n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483203/original/file-20220907-12-ap277n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483203/original/file-20220907-12-ap277n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483203/original/file-20220907-12-ap277n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Members of Yoyo Toto Wambale music group pose for a photo before performing at an imbalu ceremony.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Badru Katumba/AFP via Getty Images</span></span>
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<p>Then there is kadodi music and dance. Accompanied by five drums, kadodi is performed to accompany initiates as they visit cultural sites and relatives. At Namasho, it entertains initiates and visitors besides also enabling some initiates to meet and interact with girls who may be future marriage partners. Kadodi is so popular at Namasho that bands come to play just to advertise themselves. Moreover, although the isonja dance is displayed earlier in the year, it is sometimes brought to this sacred site to give expert singers an opportunity to advertise themselves to future candidates who hire them to learn how to compose and sing songs. </p>
<p>Lastly, groups congregating at Namasho play prerecorded imbalu songs, produced in a studio or recorded live at the event in previous years. This is meant to entertain candidates but also remind circumcised men about the vows about manhood they made during their own ceremonies, including the need to defend and provide for themselves, their families and the broader community.</p>
<h2>Communal classroom</h2>
<p>Music and dance turn Namasho into a communal classroom for imparting indigenous knowledge and history. Some performances, for example, tell the story of <a href="https://thisisafrica.me/lifestyle/nabarwa-marking-200-years-circumcision-uganda/">Nabarwa and Masaaba</a>, the woman and man who are believed to have introduced imbalu among the Bagisu. Mythical narrative has it that Masaaba, who met Nabarwa and asked for her hand in marriage, was asked by her to be circumcised before they could marry since she came from a circumcising community. When the Bagisu refer to themselves as Bamasaaba, they explicitly mean that they are children of Masaaba. The relationship between Nabarwa and Masaaba is used as testimony that women and men in this community should play complementary roles.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-sacred-sites-act-as-living-archives-in-a-ugandan-community-140571">How sacred sites act as living archives in a Ugandan community</a>
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<p>Another song is about Lutseshe, a famous forefather. In singing this song, the community reminds the initiates about the need to produce children to fill Lutseshe’s land. As boys sing, some spectators will advise them to be assertive and objective if they are to manage their households well. </p>
<p>Through the interaction between women and men as they perform these rituals, their mutual roles in society are underscored. For example, as an initiate sings, his sisters and other female relatives are at the centre of responding to the songs, symbolising the need for women and men to work together on daily activities.</p>
<p>Acts like being smeared with clay from the sacred swamp are a reminder of the history of those who came before. </p>
<h2>Preserving cultural identity</h2>
<p>In the face of the threats to traditions like imbalu from social change, it is crucial that this knowledge be preserved for use by future generations. </p>
<p>Stakeholders like the Uganda Tourism Board, Bududa District local government and academic archives, like Makerere University’s <a href="http://musicarchive.mak.ac.ug">Klaus Wachsmann Audio-visual Archive</a>, need to work together to record and preserve these musical and dance materials. </p>
<p>Imbalu will then continue to offer its lessons to the Bagisu and help maintain their rich cultural identity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189092/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dominic D.B. Makwa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The ritual site becomes a communal classroom where songs and dances teach history, impart values and preserve cultural identity.Dominic D.B. Makwa, Lecturer, Makerere UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1906022022-10-06T13:43:48Z2022-10-06T13:43:48ZZulu monarchy: how royal women have asserted their agency and power throughout history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484899/original/file-20220915-37506-jywf4t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Phill Magakoe/AFP Pool</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The passing away of South Africa’s Zulu king <a href="https://www.citizen.co.za/witness/news/eidos-news/obituary-zulu-king-goodwill-zwelithini-72-died-on-friday-20210312/">Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu</a> in March 2021 refocused attention on the role of royal women in Zulu leadership. After the official mourning period, and to the surprise of many observers, the late king’s will <a href="https://www.citizen.co.za/witness/news/kzn/update-queen-mantfombi-madlamini-zulu-to-reign-as-regent-until-installation-of-next-king-20210322/">appointed</a> his senior wife Queen Mantfombi Dlamini Zulu to hold the throne for his successor. </p>
<p>Queen Mantfombi <a href="https://www.citizen.co.za/witness/news/kzn/queen-mantfombi-dlamini-zulus-obituary-20210430/?fbclid=IwAR10PkNlTJf5_L6e37tk2NM8BNwk0tD3dRS2HsnwsHWT6iezFvpHK7cpFpI">died</a> six weeks later. Her will named her son <a href="https://www.citizen.co.za/witness/news/kzn/new-zulu-king-aims-to-unite-the-royal-family-20210603/">Misuzulu kaZwelithini</a> as the heir.</p>
<p>In response, Zwelithini’s first wife Queen Sibongile Dlamini Zulu and her daughters, Ntombizosuthu kaZwelithini and Ntandokayise kaZwelithini, <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-01-13-legal-tussle-over-zulu-royal-family-succession-could-take-years-to-resolve/">challenged the late king’s will in court</a>. They tried to prevent Misuzulu’s installation.</p>
<p>These contestations are only the latest episodes in a long history of royal women’s agency in the affairs of the Zulu kingdom. </p>
<p>Since 2010, the South African government has formally recognised seven kingdoms in the country. Of these, the Zulu royal house is the best financially supported. As a result of secret <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2019-08-07-secret-details-of-the-land-deal-that-brought-the-ifp-into-the-94-poll/">negotiations</a> in the last days of apartheid, the Zulu king is the largest landowner in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. He is the sole trustee of nearly 30% of KwaZulu-Natal’s land. South African taxpayers <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2021/04/the-king-is-dead">support the royal family</a> to the tune of R75 million (over US$4 million) each year.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-the-zulu-kingship-judgment-tells-us-about-the-future-of-south-african-customary-law-178786">What the Zulu kingship judgment tells us about the future of South African customary law</a>
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<p>As scholars of traditional authority in the region that is now KwaZulu-Natal, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02582473.2021.1937300?scroll=top&needAccess=true">we convened</a> a roundtable after Zwelithini’s passing with historian Jabulani Sithole to reflect on how historians have written about the king. As we noted in the roundtable, this necessary attention to Zwelithini and his forefathers has obscured the agency exerted by royal Zulu women in state-building. Historians still have much to explore on this topic. The isiZulu language, <em>izibongo</em> (praises) and place names are among the sources still to be mined in depth. But Zwelithini’s passing provides a starting point for reflection on the role of senior royal women in Zulu history.</p>
<h2>Gender, status and access to power</h2>
<p>In the historical polities of southeastern Africa, gender and generation shaped a person’s status and access to power. Respect for elders was encouraged. Women carried many responsibilities in showing respect for men. Men, too, were required to show deference for senior women – including mothers, mothers-in-law and royal women.</p>
<p>As the historian <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sifiso-Ndlovu">Sifiso Ndlovu</a> has argued, among royals,</p>
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<p>the primary principles of social organisation were seniority, defined by lineage and relative age.</p>
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<p>This does not mean gender did not come into play. As Ndlovu points out, some of the praises of royal women masculinise them. The <em>izibongo</em> of Queen okaMsweli, who was the mother of King <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/king-dinuzulu">Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo</a>, describe her as “uSomakoyisa”. This praise positions her as “the tough and uncompromising one”. The prefix “so” depicts a male figure (versus “no” to refer to a female). </p>
<h2>Reinforcing customs, fighting succession battles</h2>
<p>Perhaps most famous of the powerful Zulu women are Regent Queen Mkabayi kaJama, regent for Senzangakhona kaJama, and the Queen Mother Nandi. </p>
<p>Regent Queen Mkabayi operated as a senior member of the Zulu kingdom during its height in the early 19th century. She was responsible for enforcing custom and advising kings <a href="https://sahistory.org.za/people/shaka-zulu">Shaka kaSenzangakhona</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/king-dingane-ka-senzangakhona">Dingane kaSenzangakhona</a> as part of a military council. The <em>izibongo</em> of Queen Nandi present her as a strong-willed and protective mother who advocated for her son Shaka’s ascendancy.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-has-a-new-traditional-courts-bill-but-it-doesnt-protect-indigenous-practices-190938">South Africa has a new traditional courts bill. But it doesn't protect indigenous practices</a>
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<p>Royal women defended the Zulu monarchy during times of assault and civil war. For example, Novimbi okaMsweli advised her son Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo in the wake of the Zulu civil war that followed the British annexation of Zululand. While he was exiled to Saint Helena, she kept him updated and cooperated with the prime minister of the Zulu, Mankulumana kaSophunga.</p>
<p>Royal women also defended King Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo during his trial after <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/bambatha-rebellion-1906"><em>impi yamakhanda</em></a> (the war of the heads, or Bambatha’s Rebellion) in 1906, collaborating with Anglican missionary <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/harriette-emily-colenso">Harriette Colenso</a> to position the leader as protecting Zulu autonomy. </p>
<p>These royal women played important roles in succession disputes. <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Zulu_Woman.html?id=5ZTelqdJKgQC&redir_esc=y">Christina Sibiya</a>, the wife of King Solomon kaDinuzulu, provided her son <a href="https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/23611">Cyprian Nyangayezinzwe Bhekuzulu kaSolomon</a> with the impetus to claim the throne. She also testified in 1945 to the government commission that found her son to be the rightful heir.</p>
<p>In 1969, King Cyprian’s widows and Princess Greta <a href="https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/44558d306?locale=en">manoeuvred</a> to have Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu installed. Princess Nonhlanhla shaped the official account of Zwelithini’s ascendancy and rule through her contribution to his <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/King_of_Goodwill.html?id=ufAwAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">authorised biography</a>.</p>
<p>During King Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu’s long reign, royal women played key roles in sustaining and reestablishing cultural inheritances. The late king’s fourth wife, Queen Buhle kaMathe, revitalised uMkhosi woMhlanga (the <a href="https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/sights-and-sounds-from-umkhosi-womhlanga-2022/">Reed Dance</a>), a long-standing ceremony to celebrate Zulu womanhood, and held major cultural events at her palace.</p>
<p>Princess Ntandoyenkosi was granted the title of “head of the maidens” in 2005. Mukelile kaThandekile Jane Ndlovu Zulu and Nqobangothando kaNophumelelo MaMchiza Zulu promoted <em>izintombi zomhlanga</em> (virginity testing) revivals and a controversial <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-06-16-virginity-testing-gender-equality-commission-bans-maiden-bursaries/">bursary for “maidens”</a> proposed in 2016.</p>
<p>The claim by Queen Sibongile that she is entitled to half of the <a href="https://www.citizen.co.za/witness/news/kzn/zulu-royals-standoff-not-about-throne-but-about-who-gets-what-in-the-will-20210624/">royal estate</a> as Zwelithini’s only legal wife shows new forms of agency for the women of the royal family. It remains to be seen what role King Misuzulu’s new wife, Queen <a href="https://www.citizen.co.za/witness/news/kzn/meet-zulu-kings-wife-to-be-ntokozo-mayisela-20210515/">Ntokozo Mayisela</a>, will take in the public sphere.</p>
<h2>Sustaining chiefdoms</h2>
<p>Beyond the inner circle of the Zulu kingdom, there are instances of women sustaining chiefdoms in the early decades of colonial rule in Natal. The scholar Felix Jackson <a href="https://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10413/12460/Jackson_Eva_Aletta_2014.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">shows women members of chiefly elites</a> attempting to reestablish polities in these difficult years.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-goodwill-zwelithini-the-zulu-king-without-a-kingdom-156965">South Africa's Goodwill Zwelithini: the Zulu king without a kingdom</a>
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<p>Zulu women don’t have a single, homogeneous status. Not all women enjoyed access to political power. But there were those who actively engaged in politics and governance. Their influence is yet to get full attention and understanding.</p>
<p>The intrigues of the succession dispute remind us that much more historical research is needed on women’s access to power.</p>
<p><em>Jabulani Sithole, a commissioner in the KwaZulu-Natal Commission for Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims, contributed to the research.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/190602/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jill E. Kelly's research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and Fulbright.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liz Timbs has received funding from Fulbright </span></em></p>Royal women play important roles in succession disputes, such as the naming of King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu’s heir.Jill E. Kelly, Associate Professor of History, Southern Methodist UniversityLiz Timbs, Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina WilmingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1918652022-10-05T13:46:58Z2022-10-05T13:46:58ZWoman King is worth watching: but be aware that its take on history is problematic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488093/original/file-20221004-18-v5q4hn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures Entertainment/Tiff</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Hollywood movie <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8093700/">The Woman King</a>, released in mid-September, became an immediate <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/movies/the-woman-king-box-office.html">box-office success</a>. The triumphs of the <a href="https://travelnoire.com/agoodjie-warriors-protected-benin">Agoodjies</a>, the women warriors of the ancient <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Dahomey-historical-kingdom-Africa">Kingdom of Dahomey</a> in today’s Benin, west Africa, are as magnificent as <a href="https://collider.com/the-woman-king-premiere-toronto-international-film-festival-viola-davis-john-boyega/">the public had anticipated</a>. In this epic historical drama, African women take centre stage.</p>
<p>Abomey (the kingdom’s capital) and Ouidah (the main port under its control) are shown from the perspective of Nawi, a novice in the all-female regiment. She opposes the enduring injustice of gender expectations, espouses the camaraderie of her sisters in arms and faces the brutality of slave traders. The humanity of the Dahomey women is superbly portrayed. </p>
<p>But the film has drawn controversy from many angles. </p>
<p>The US far right has condemned it for depicting black women <a href="https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2022/7/ofraiklyc6adn2d5uwakk0gzaksuwu">murdering white men</a>. The <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23BoycottWomanKing&src=typed_query&f=top">hashtag</a> <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/why-is-boycottwomanking-trending-viola-davis/">#BoycottWomanKing</a> has also trended on social media among black users. </p>
<p>The film in fact attracted racist rhetoric even before it was released. Online <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHolOo8td4I">commentators</a> condemned the perceived savagery of the Dahomey kingdom. In those reports, particular attention was given to the <a href="https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/3183">“annual customs”</a> in Dahomey, the palace rituals that sometimes included massive human sacrifices. </p>
<p>Criticism has also been levelled at the film from people presenting themselves as “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/us/slavery-black-immigrants-ados.html">ADOS</a>” (American descendants of slavery). They have called for it to be boycotted because it glorifies an African kingdom that brutalised their ancestors.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-woman-king-is-more-than-an-action-movie-it-shines-a-light-on-the-women-warriors-of-benin-190466">The Woman King is more than an action movie – it shines a light on the women warriors of Benin</a>
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<p>Disapproving notes have also come from specialists of 19th-century Dahomey history who have publicly shared their <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/20/what-woman-king-gets-wrong-right-about-dahomeys-warriors/">concerns</a> about the misrepresentation of the slave trade in the film.</p>
<p>Finally, a recurring argument is that the Kingdom of Dahomey, with its many flaws and crimes, was not worthy of representation. Some social media users, calling for more representations of positive black stories, have also questioned the choice of Dahomey. One <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/xnebrs/why_the_hell_would_you_make_a_movie_about_dahomey/">Reddit user</a> asked a question that has echoed online in various forms: “Why the hell would you make a movie about Dahomey when you have Toussaint?”. </p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=SCAI6lgHuMgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Toussaint+louverture&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Toussaint%20louverture&f=false">Toussaint Louverture</a> is the hero of the Haitian revolution – and, coincidentally, the son of a woman enslaved during wars waged by the Kingdom of Dahomey. </p>
<h2>African histories matter</h2>
<p>As an anthropologist who has studied the legacies of slavery in Africa and who grew up in Benin, I argue that our approaches to internal slaveries or African participation in the slave trades must not be minimised. Their existence should also not serve the dehumanisation of Africans or justify the erasures of their complex histories.</p>
<p>My criticism of the movie is related to the misuse of fiction. Film making often involves the liberal creation of plot points and characters arcs. But is there a limit to our our right to alter history?</p>
<p>African histories are not inconsequential; they don’t deserve simple reinventions. Africans have a right to demand fair and layered representations.</p>
<h2>Distortions</h2>
<p>The film resorts to considerable distortions. The trajectory of King Guézo (1818-1859) of Dahomey seems particularly contentious. Historian Ana Lucia Araujo <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2022/09/woman-king-movie-true-story-dahomey-amazons-slave-trade.html">alerts us to his role</a> in continuing his engagement with the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade">transatlantic slave trade</a> – abolished in 1807 by the British but eradicated only decades later. <a href="https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates?selected_tab=timeline">The last documented</a> transatlantic slave voyage occurred in 1866. </p>
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<p>By contrast, King Guézo in the film (handsomely interpreted by John Boyega) affirms his commitment to ending the slave trade despite the greed of Brazilian merchants and the rival <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Oyo-empire">Oyo kingdom</a> (an important neighbouring kingdom and a leading participant in the slave trade in the Bight of Benin). </p>
<p>The film seems to rely on a central dichotomy to lay out moral and political ambiguities: it pits the “evil” Oyo kingdom against the “innocent” Dahomey kingdom.</p>
<p>In the US, implicating African kingdoms such as Dahomey in the context of the proliferation of revisionist curriculums – for instance, that propose to teach the slave trade as a <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/30/texas-slavery-involuntary-relocation/">simple relocation of people</a> – can be daunting. </p>
<p>Far too often, the recognition of the role of African political entities in the transatlantic slave trade (the women warriors of Dahomey were tasked with capturing fellow Africans to be sold into slavery) is interpreted as a permission to absolve Euro-Americans of their responsibilities as enslavers of Africans. </p>
<h2>The price of entertainment</h2>
<p>Asked to react to the controversies around the film, US actress Viola Davis, who stars in the movie, <a href="https://variety.com/2022/awards/awards/viola-davis-julius-tennon-the-woman-king-historical-facts-box-office-1235377450/">explains</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We entered the story where the kingdom was in flux, at a crossroads. They were looking for a way to keep their civilization and kingdom alive. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that they were decimated. Most of the story is fictionalised. It has to be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Julius Tennon, a producer on the movie and Davis’ husband, adds in the same interview: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s history, but we have to take license. We have to entertain people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The film could be praised as an alternate history, belonging to a genre of fiction where actual historical events receive different endings. Popular movies, series, and novels have used this type of narration. The resolution can provide consolation, a sense of hypothetical retaliation, or conversely cause utmost terror. </p>
<p>For example, in Tarantino’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361748/">Inglourious Basterds</a>, Hitler and Goebbels are shot by a Jewish-American commando. In the TV show <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409459/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Watchmen</a>, Charles Lindbergh, the real-life aviation pioneer, becomes the US president and implements fascist and antisemitic policies. </p>
<p>Whether dystopian or utopian, alternate histories can work when they transform notorious events and disrupt known historical orders – narratives so familiar that they surprise, but without instilling any doubt in the minds of their audience. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/james-hutton-brew-gold-coast-abolitionist-who-exposed-britains-anti-slavery-hypocrisy-187385">James Hutton Brew: Gold Coast abolitionist who exposed Britain's anti-slavery hypocrisy</a>
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</em>
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<p>With this genre, fiction reveals itself as fiction because of the magnitude of the changes it imposes. </p>
<p>In the case of The Woman King, however, it is fair to assume that the history of Dahomey is relatively unknown to a large part of its global audience. </p>
<p>Anthropologist Nigel Eltringham, in the book <a href="https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/EltringhamFraming">Framing Africa</a>, reminds us of the distinction between “true inventions” of fiction – those which may remain intentionally truthful – and the falsifications that distort histories beyond repair and recognition when they, for instance, remove the blame for actual crimes committed by historical figures.</p>
<p>Falsifications may undoubtedly undermine our sense of justice and trust in history. A group of US-based historians, Ana Lucia Araujo, Vanessa Holden, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Alex Gil, have assembled an extensive and impressive online document, <a href="https://womankingsyllabus.github.io/?fbclid=IwAR16h_EBNmwPnv1an0dBEjC9k5sZtIdTaXD2z0rStGEFQp104pA9hvMlr6U">The Woman King Syllabus</a>, for viewers interested in “the history beyond the fiction”. </p>
<h2>Should one watch it?</h2>
<p>The Woman King should be seen. For its spectacular celebration of the Agoodjies’ strength and its invitation to explore their meaningful, public and intimate lives. And also for – rather than despite – the political and ethical conundrums it occasions. </p>
<p>It is, however, best viewed with an awareness of its extensive alterations.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191865/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This publication was made possible partly by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.</span></em></p>This movie is absolutely worth seeing. But it’s best viewed with the awareness of its significant alterations of history.Dominique Somda, Junior research fellow, Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1879262022-08-07T08:03:28Z2022-08-07T08:03:28ZNew book on Mapungubwe Archive contests history of South African world heritage site<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477610/original/file-20220804-14-n38306.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The new home of the Mapungubwe Archive.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Pretoria Museums/Mapungubwe Archive</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em><a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/mapungubwe">Mapungubwe</a> is a <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1099/">world heritage site</a> and <a href="https://www.sanparks.org/parks/mapungubwe/">national park</a> located on the border between South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana. From about 1000 AD the settlement there developed into a major African state before being abandoned by the 1300s. Mapungubwe has been the subject of diverse scientific enquiry and archaeological research since the early 1930s. As a heritage site, however, it challenges colonial, nationalist and apartheid views of prehistory. The vast global trade that’s evidenced by masses of trade glass beads and local artisanship of metals at Mapungubwe shows that Africa was not a ‘dark continent’, devoid of technology and innovation. Mapungubwe’s prehistory was excluded during apartheid to support more Eurocentric views of South Africa’s past. Now a new book, <a href="https://www.barpublishing.com/past-imperfect.html">Past Imperfect</a>, offers a study of this archive of research and reveals gaps, silences and missing voices, some deliberately erased. The author, a curatorial specialist, historian and archaeologist, Sian Tiley-Nel, discusses her findings.</em></p>
<h2>What is the Mapungubwe Archive?</h2>
<p>For more than two decades the <a href="https://www.up.ac.za/museums-collections/gallery/view-2345176-mapungubwe">Mapungubwe Collection</a> has been on public display at the University of Pretoria. The world-class collection, including a famous gold rhino and other significant materials, is a critical research collection for the precolonial era. It has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people since being made more accessible after 1999 at the University of Pretoria.</p>
<p>The same cannot be said for the associated Mapungubwe Archive, which for decades lay in departmental storerooms at the university in boxes, as old papers and ageing photographs. </p>
<p>As an academic, historian and conservator, I was responsible for the archive, which was often unfunded and unvalued as a research asset. It was only in 2018, when I submitted a grant application to the <a href="https://www.up.ac.za/news/post_2735669-ups-mapungubwe-archive-receives-r800-000-cultural-preservation-grant-">US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation Grant via the US Embassy in Pretoria</a>, that greater traction could be gained to fund the physical preservation of the archive. In the end, the Mapungubwe Archive was established as a formal repository and research site at the University of Pretoria.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477427/original/file-20220803-11163-c4yh6h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover in red with the title Past Imperfect and a black and white photo of a grand old university building." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477427/original/file-20220803-11163-c4yh6h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477427/original/file-20220803-11163-c4yh6h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477427/original/file-20220803-11163-c4yh6h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477427/original/file-20220803-11163-c4yh6h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477427/original/file-20220803-11163-c4yh6h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477427/original/file-20220803-11163-c4yh6h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477427/original/file-20220803-11163-c4yh6h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BAR Publishing</span></span>
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<p>It was early in my career, in 1999 that I began to realise the full extent of negligence and disregard for original archival sources. There were many antiquated views from scholars which excluded many hidden histories and suggested that other cultures or “non-Africans” were responsible for building the Mapungubwe site. So some Mapungubwe academics often came with racist theories and partial hypotheses based on circumstantial evidence, and ignored histories of oral records. Most disconcerting was the lack of proper care, conservation, preservation, access and active research. Mass excavation was more important than preserving the material and associated records derived from the Mapungubwe Collection.</p>
<h2>What was neglected and what would the missing voices tell us?</h2>
<p>The gaps, silences and missing voices in the Mapungubwe Archive usually indicate highly selected material that was deliberately not kept and is most probably in private possession or was simply destroyed. There were missing letters, photographs and other content. There were gaps in the archive chronology, no field reports and the like.</p>
<p>Some of the Mapungubwe Archive material is related to when the site was used as a military terrain on the farm Greefswald. Many military records are tied up in the Department of Defence and some still have an embargo. </p>
<p>Other forms of missing narratives outlined in the book refer to the neglect of oral history and indigenous knowledge of Mapungubwe Hill as a sacred site by local communities. Fortunately the recognition of community voices has increased over the decades.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-continued-threat-of-coal-mining-at-the-mapungubwe-world-heritage-site-138153">The continued threat of coal mining at the Mapungubwe world heritage site</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<p>In 1969, archaeology become a fully fledged discipline at the University of Pretoria, with a focus on stratigraphy (the layering of archaeological deposits). Research reinforced what I call “pots over people”. There was a lack of consultation with local commmunities in and around the Mapungubwe region. This included a lack of acknowledgement that prior to 1933, Mapungubwe held a deep precolonial history – although not physically evidenced or written. </p>
<p>There are also intentional gaps and silences in the archive during the height of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a> (white minority rule in South Africa) mainly from the 1970s until the late 1980s. But even after democracy in 1994 this was happening in archives, and in many other universities as well. It was largely as a result of departmental agendas, academic power struggles and internal institutional politics or just a lack of rigour to preserve archival material.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477459/original/file-20220803-11-vpuj3d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two women, one seated, examine a clay pot on a table in front of them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477459/original/file-20220803-11-vpuj3d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477459/original/file-20220803-11-vpuj3d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477459/original/file-20220803-11-vpuj3d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477459/original/file-20220803-11-vpuj3d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477459/original/file-20220803-11-vpuj3d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477459/original/file-20220803-11-vpuj3d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477459/original/file-20220803-11-vpuj3d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The author (right) with Helma Steenkamp in 2015, former assistant conservator now the Mapungubwe archivist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stefan Heunis/AFP via Getty Images</span></span>
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<p>The understanding of Mapungubwe’s early contested history can be shaped by the archive and can reveal why some records were kept and others not. And, more importantly, what can be further extracted and learned from the many omissions, silences and absences.</p>
<h2>Is this the case in many archives in South Africa?</h2>
<p>Sadly, the destruction, reckless handling and poor conservation efforts of historical records is notable and widespread even today, globally. The book acknowledges upfront the loss of countless important South African archives over years, not just by research institutions, but by government, private and public institutions as well.</p>
<p>Yet the fact remains that the Mapungubwe Archive does exist. Even if with gaps and omissions, it remains one South Africa’s greatest heritage archives for the continent. </p>
<h2>Why does this matter?</h2>
<p>Archives matter as history matters. Lessons can be learnt from past mistakes and archives serve as human testimony and knowledge that would not have been known if they weren’t preserved. The damage by omissions in the archive from a research point of view demonstrates that the archive is not a repository of historical material only. Archives are shaped in the present and have the potential to shape the future. Much of what is known about Mapungubwe in the 21st century stems from the contents of the archive. <em>Past Imperfect</em> provides many fascinating details of this research.</p>
<p>The recentering of the Mapungubwe Archive shows that while archival material has enduring historical value it also forms part of the university’s shaped culture, trajectory of research and institutional memory. The book is not about making history but instead how history is used. </p>
<p>The Mapungubwe Archive at the University of Pretoria has evolved into not just a repository or depository, but a site of contestation, a space and place of memory.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187926/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sian Tiley-Nel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Mapungubwe site offers evidence of precolonial innovation and technology.Sian Tiley-Nel, Head of Museums, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1841882022-06-23T14:27:56Z2022-06-23T14:27:56ZNigerian historian and thinker Toyin Falola on decolonising the academy in Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467935/original/file-20220609-14-6t06uu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Toyin Falola </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy Boydell & Brewer</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Nigerian intellectual and historian Toyin Falola’s latest book is called <a href="https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781648250279/decolonizing-african-studies/">Decolonizing African Studies</a>: Knowledge Production, Agency, and Voice. It sets out to respond to the urgent need to eliminate the vestiges of colonialism (the domination of foreign powers) in the academy and in research methodologies where African perspectives continue to be marginalised or excluded, creating the problem of misrepresentation of the continent. The book also critiques the limitations to and failures of decoloniality so far. It closes with a discussion of African futurism. In this interview Falola talks about some key battlegrounds for the decolonisation of knowledge production.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> How do you or other African intellectuals hope to replace the hegemony of Western knowledge systems imposed on Africa in a one-sided world?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> I think we can both agree that the side of the narrative preferred by the western world is not that which entirely favours the best interest of Africa. Though the colonial masters have been gone for decades, they left behind intellectual legacies that are not so obvious to many of us in Africa. Such legacies include those that reflect in knowledge and how we acquire it, legacies that permeate the operations of our institutions and have an effect on the means of development of our continent. These are the legacies we are making positive efforts to remove through decolonisation. </p>
<p>My book is one of the materials that help set things straight about decolonisation. I know there are many materials out there, and there are many more that will come from scholars across Africa who understand the patriotic assignment of decolonising knowledge production. But this does not stop here. There is also sensitisation going on across Africa. Seminars and think tank assemblies are being held to develop strategies for fastening the grip on decolonisation in Africa. </p>
<p>An important mission is to integrate indigenous systems into the formal western-education style. What is ours? Our languages, ideas, crafts, stories, including festivals, ceremonies, useful knowledge from elders, and many more. And we must put what we have learned into practice as we play, interact with one another, and build purposeful communities.</p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> How do you redress the problem of the misrepresentation of how the history of the continent has been told?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> If you tell a story or the history of a people from a wrong perspective for too long, people will come to accept it, regardless of how untrue it is, while disregarding the other perspective or even believing that there cannot be any other perspective than the one they have been told. </p>
<p>For a long time, there has been a lot of westernisation of African history, and in return, African perspectives have been neglected or deemed nonexistent. It was not until after the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II">second world war</a> that African writers began to decolonise African history. So, yes, if you say there has been a misrepresentation of the continent, I wouldn’t deny it, but at the same time, we are already creating new narratives. We now have people strongly and tirelessly correcting this misinformation and replacing them with our truth. </p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> What do you mean by “African futurism”? (<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-afrofuturism-an-english-professor-explains-183707">Afrofuturism</a> is a movement in art, literature, etcetera featuring futuristic or science fiction themes that incorporate elements of black history and culture.)</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> African futurism is the latest stage of decolonisation. It is a movement of the creative world that emphasises the relevance of Blackness, one that displays the energies of our youth to merge technology with performance, to <a href="https://theconversation.com/hip-hop-and-pan-africanism-from-blitz-the-ambassador-to-beyonce-151680">re-imagine Pan Africanism</a> in their own way. It borrows and integrates ideas and practices from various parts of the world and is receptive and adaptive to changes, innovations, enlightenment, reasoning, and many other legacies and concepts in Africa’s best interest. </p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> In the book you have a chapter on empowering marginal voices, this includes LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) Africans, who many believe are ‘unAfrican’ in nature?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> We must accept the reality of change, respect boundaries, embrace other identities, and accept that a new generation will replace the old. LGBTQ people should be considered a sexual orientation and human rights issue, and we need to acknowledge that they are Africans like you and me. We must treat all Africans with respect.</p>
<p>I believe that the obstacle is that the tool needed to advance Africa into a pro-LGBTQ continent is still within the control of the older generation. But I believe that change is constant and that when this change happens, and a new generation of Africans emerges to take positions of power, the animosity towards LGBTQ will be reduced, and there will be tolerance and the political will to implement a pro-LGBTQ agenda in Africa. </p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> You write about using language as a form of decolonisation as well as decolonising African literature?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> I have always believed that beyond being an art, language is also a science. It is a tool of transformation, and as far as decolonisation is concerned, language is a necessary tool. I do not think literature is worth anything without language, and the language in which it is told goes a long way to convey different things that can alter the perspective of a people or transform it. Of course, African literature needs to be decolonised.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/drama-that-shaped-ngugis-writing-and-activism-comes-home-to-kenya-184353">Drama that shaped Ngũgĩ’s writing and activism comes home to Kenya</a>
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<p>Many aspects of African literature cannot be adequately conveyed if you take it away from the African context. Meanwhile, leaving it in the African context means using the African language to properly communicate it. So, yes, language has a huge place in African literature, and we need to do a better job of harnessing it. Language is more than literature; it is an entry to socialisation and education, to people’s well-being, and to the advancement of cultures and civilisations. African languages are an integral part of our march of progress.</p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> What is the relevance of African history to the world or vice versa?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> We need to understand that the history of any people, no matter how small a group, is relevant to them and the world, even at a time of globalisation. Every one of us must be able to distinctly identify ourselves and our histories while being active partakers of the global village. African history is highly important to the world, and not just the history as told from outsiders’ perspective, but as told by Africans. Africans have made significant contributions to the growth of civilisation, from the very early humans to the advancement in technologies and the development of capitalism.</p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> Although it has been reintroduced, history was phased out of Nigeria’s school curriculum or relegated at some point, what does this portend?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> It is a bad idea to ignore the teaching of history because a river that forgets its source will surely dry up. History is crucial for the growth of any nation, and any nation that decides to forget it or undervalues its relevance in the educational system will suffer the consequences. There are no two ways to it. If you desire a better future for yourself or your country, you must consider where you are today, as well as where you have been coming from. The interrelation of these things will birth an encompassing understanding of what to do to reach where you need to be.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184188/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Olayinka Oyegbile does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Indigenous knowledge, African languages, queer rights and Afrofuturism are some of the issues discussed in the new book.Olayinka Oyegbile, Communications scholar, Trinity University, LagosLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1798292022-03-29T16:12:12Z2022-03-29T16:12:12ZEthiopia’s war in Tigray risks wiping out centuries of the world’s history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453819/original/file-20220323-27-1xt3zno.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tigray's al-Nejashi Mosque, one of Africa's oldest Islamic sites, was damaged in December 2020. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe id="noa-web-audio-player" style="border: none" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=x84olp&id=https://theconversation.com/ethiopias-war-in-tigray-risks-wiping-out-centuries-of-the-worlds-history-179829&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=D8352A&playColor=D8352A" width="100%" height="110px"></iframe>
<p>The human carnage and heritage destruction in Ethiopia’s Tigray region that began in November 2020 has been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/02/ethiopia-1900-people-killed-in-massacres-in-tigray-identified">devastating</a>. Thousands have been killed, millions displaced and several historical monuments damaged by invading forces in the East African country’s north.</p>
<p>Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-54964378">military campaign</a> against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on 4 November 2020. As troops from the Ethiopian military and Eritrea, as well as Amhara militia groups, brutally attack civilians, they have also destroyed religious, historical and cultural sites of immense value. Some of the damage to these sites has been documented through calls made by Tigrayans using satellite phones.</p>
<p>The region’s heritage sites have been <a href="https://africanarguments.org/2021/03/tigray-why-are-soldiers-attacking-religious-heritage-sites/">deliberately</a> targeted. To appreciate the weight of these attacks, the role and influence of <a href="https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/28644/1/10672804.pdf">the church in Ethiopia</a> needs to be understood. </p>
<p>The church underpins historical and modern claims of political and military authority in Ethiopia. It has shaped community identity and informed cultural narratives. </p>
<p>Therefore, the <a href="https://eritreahub.org/the-destruction-of-tigrays-world-important-cultural-heritage">bombing and destruction</a> of churches, as well as other religious sites, strikes at traditional power structures. These sites are <a href="https://africanarguments.org/2021/03/tigray-why-are-soldiers-attacking-religious-heritage-sites/">cherished</a>, multi-functional gathering places and sacred spaces. Looting and attacking them is a grave dishonouring of cultural values.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1499010183778361&set=pcb.1499010343778345">report</a> from the Tigray Orthodox Church Diocese three months into the war in February 2021 found 326 members of the priesthood had been killed. There is no clear data on how many members of the clergy have been killed since then. While at least 40 churches and monasteries have had a general assessment of damages, <a href="https://eritreahub.org/tigray-war-regional-implications-volume-2">my analysis</a> finds hundreds of such sites have been affected by the war.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/religion-was-once-ethiopias-saviour-what-it-can-do-to-pull-the-nation-from-the-brink-171763">Religion was once Ethiopia's saviour. What it can do to pull the nation from the brink</a>
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<p>I have received <a href="https://eritreahub.org/first-comprehensive-analysis-of-the-looting-of-tigrays-heritage-as-ebay-halts-sale-of-ethiopian-treasures">confidential local reports</a> from those with satellite phones on the scale of devastation. This is a result of the network I have established over the past decade during <a href="https://martinplaut.com/2022/03/22/the-tigray-crises-and-the-monastery-of-waldba/">visits</a> to several historical sites in Tigray to carry out manuscript assessments and digitisation. </p>
<h2>Monuments of civilisation</h2>
<p>Ethiopia is the <a href="https://allafrica.com/stories/201506191183.html#:%7E:text=It%20is%20being%20regarded%20as,the%20land%20of%20religion%20tolerance.">source</a> of various civilisations in sub-Saharan Africa. It is believed to have more than 3,000 years of history. Most of the historical artefacts the country is famous for are originally from today’s Tigray. </p>
<p>For example, the <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/kingdom-aksum/">Aksumite civilisation</a>, one of the four known civilisations established in the first century CE (in addition to Rome, Persia and China), was in today’s central Tigray. </p>
<p>In the Bible, Qurʿan and inscriptions in South Arabia, terms like “Ethiopia” and “HBST” (Abyssinia) exist. Almost all the city-states and centres of civilisations prior to 13CE were found in today’s Tigray, Eritrea, and Agaw (a highland in today’s northern Ethiopia). </p>
<p>The <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/15/#:%7E:text=The%20ruins%20of%20the%20ancient%20Aksumite%20Civilization%20covered%20a%20wide,3rd%20and%204th%20centuries%20AD.">Aksumite Monuments</a> and <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/18/">Lalibela rock-hewn churches</a>, both UNESCO-registered heritage sites, are among the treasures of East African civilisation. </p>
<p>The alpha-syllabic Aksumite writing system, Gǝʿǝz/Fidäl, is the only ancient writing system still functional in modern Africa. Gǝʿǝz script is still used in Ethiopia, illustrating that Africa is not only the cradle of people and culture, but also of literacy. </p>
<p>Tigray is the foundation for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, and hundreds of inscriptions written in Gǝʿǝz. The world’s oldest existent Christian manuscript (from 6CE) – The Gospel of Gärima – is preserved in central Tigray. </p>
<p>Abrahamic religions were introduced in the early ages – Christianity before the 4th century and Islam in the first half of the 7th century – in Africa through Tigray. </p>
<p>Its early introduction to these monotheistic religions and its writing system saw Tigray preserve a huge amount of religious and cultural artefacts. This heritage documents the history of the Ethiopian state and its religious institutions. </p>
<h2>Complex political culture</h2>
<p>Ethiopia is a country of rich anthropological value and complex political culture. It is also known for wars with foreign invaders, as well as civil conflict. In these clashes, countless cultural heritage items have been destroyed. </p>
<p>In the current war, many of Tigray’s heritage sites have been targeted by invading troops. The region has thousands of churches, monasteries, mosques and symbolic Islamic settlements, archaeological sites, museums and ritual centres. These spaces are popular with tourists from around the world and pilgrims from across the country.</p>
<p>Hundreds of these heritage sites have been <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-in-tigrays-war-ancient-christian-and-muslim-houses-of-worship-risk/">destroyed</a> in the ongoing war. For instance, the Church of Aksum Tsion is the head of Ethiopian churches and monasteries. It is symbolised as the dwelling place of the Ark of the Covenant. It was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/24/fabled-ark-could-be-among-ancient-treasures-in-danger-in-ethiopias-deadly-war">vandalised</a> after hundreds of civilians were <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr25/3730/2021/en/">massacred</a> around its yard by Eritrean soldiers in November 2020. </p>
<p>The al-Nejashi Mosque, a symbol for the first introduction of Islam in Africa, was <a href="https://eritreahub.org/historic-al-nejashi-mosque-in-tigray-badly-damaged-and-looted">bombed</a> in December 2020. </p>
<p>Precious medieval manuscripts have been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B591G8u42pw">burned and vandalised</a>. Thousands of artefacts have been looted and smuggled for an <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/civil-war-to-blame-for-surge-in-online-sales-of-ethiopian-artifacts/a-61069797">international market</a>. </p>
<h2>The impact</h2>
<p>Heritage artefacts offer historical evidence and are a means of tourism development. But more than that, they are a social ingredient, upgrading human existence and giving it more meaning. People are emotionally connected to their heritage, beliefs, language and identity. </p>
<p>Religious objects and ecclesiastical materials are transcendent, emotive instruments between believers and their God/creator. They are also a display of genetic memory between descendants and their ancestors. </p>
<p>In this conflict, the people of Tigray have been denied their natural and human rights. They have had both their existence and meaningful life challenged. </p>
<p>The global community needs to step in to address the continuing loss of human lives and salvage Tigray’s cultural heritage. The destruction of the region’s tangible heritage and vandalising of its monuments of intangible value may lead to irreversible cultural shocks and social collapse. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-the-african-unions-mediation-effort-in-tigray-is-a-non-starter-169293">Why the African Union's mediation effort in Tigray is a non-starter</a>
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<p>While <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-59227672">many</a> international agencies have expressed their concern about the situation in Ethiopia, there hasn’t been practical action taken to save the lives of Tigrayans or their inheritance.</p>
<p>The African Union put up its headquarters in Addis Ababa in <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/organisation-african-unity-oau">a nod</a> to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-battle-of-adwa-an-ethiopian-victory-that-ran-against-the-current-of-colonialism-132360">Battle of Adwa</a> (in Tigray), which was against colonialism. Yet, in a stroke of historical irony, the union has been slow to condemn the brutal killing of Tigrayans and the destruction of historical artefacts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/179829/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hagos Abrha Abay receives funding from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under German’s Excellence Strategy, project no. 390893796. He/she is affiliated with Center for the Study of Manuscript Culture (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg. </span></em></p>Many of the artefacts Ethiopia is famous for are found in Tigray. Their continued destruction could lead to irreversible culture shock and social collapse.Hagos Abrha Abay, Postdoctoral researcher, University of HamburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1772592022-02-20T05:50:45Z2022-02-20T05:50:45ZThe story of how Swahili became Africa’s most spoken language<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447271/original/file-20220218-37276-ov27yd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere, a Swahili advocate.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Keystone/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognised language. It is peer to the few languages of the world that boast over 200 million users. </p>
<p>Over the two millennia of Swahili’s growth and adaptation, the moulders of this story – immigrants from inland Africa, traders from Asia, Arab and European occupiers, European and Indian settlers, colonial rulers, and individuals from various postcolonial nations – have used Swahili and adapted it to their own purposes. They have taken it wherever they have gone to the west. </p>
<p>Africa’s Swahili-speaking zone now extends across a full third of the continent from south to north and touches on the opposite coast, encompassing the heart of Africa.</p>
<h2>The origins</h2>
<p>The historical lands of the Swahili are on East Africa’s Indian Ocean littoral. A 2,500-kilometer chain of coastal towns from Mogadishu, Somalia to Sofala, Mozambique as well as offshore islands as far away as the Comoros and Seychelles. </p>
<p>This coastal region has long served as an international crossroads of trade and human movement. People from all walks of life and from regions as scattered as Indonesia, Persia, the African Great Lakes, the United States and Europe all encountered one another. Hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and farmers mingled with traders and city-dwellers. </p>
<p>Africans devoted to ancestors and the spirits of their lands met Muslims, Hindus, Portuguese Catholics and British Anglicans. Workers (among them slaves, porters and labourers), soldiers, rulers and diplomats were mixed together from ancient days. Anyone who went to the East African littoral could choose to become Swahili, and many did.</p>
<h2>African unity</h2>
<p>The roll of Swahili enthusiasts and advocates includes notable intellectuals, freedom fighters, civil rights activists, political leaders, scholarly professional societies, entertainers and health workers. Not to mention the usual professional writers, poets, and artists. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hip-hop-and-pan-africanism-from-blitz-the-ambassador-to-beyonce-151680">Hip hop and Pan Africanism: from Blitz the Ambassador to Beyoncé</a>
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<p>Foremost has been Nobel Laureate <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/biographical/">Wole Soyinka</a>. The Nigerian writer, poet and playwright has since the 1960s repeatedly called for use of Swahili as the transcontinental language for Africa. The <a href="https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/african-union-adopts-swahili-as-official-working-language/2498467">African Union</a> (AU), the “united states of Africa” nurtured the same sentiment of continental unity in July 2004 and adopted Swahili as its official language. As <a href="https://www.kofiannanfoundation.org/member/joaquim-chissano/">Joaquim Chissano</a> (then the president of Mozambique) put this motion on the table, he addressed the AU in the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3871315.stm">flawless Swahili</a> he had learned in Tanzania, where he was educated while in exile from the Portuguese colony.</p>
<p>The African Union did not <a href="https://allafrica.com/stories/200407060715.html">adopt</a> Swahili as Africa’s international language by happenstance. Swahili has a much longer history of building bridges among peoples across the continent of Africa and into the diaspora.</p>
<p>The feeling of unity, the insistence that all of Africa is one, just will not disappear. Languages are <a href="https://qz.com/africa/996013/african-languages-should-be-at-the-center-of-educational-and-cultural-achievement/">elemental</a> to everyone’s sense of belonging, of expressing what’s in one’s heart. The AU’s decision was particularly striking given that the populations of its member states speak an estimated <a href="https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/5769808/mod_resource/content/1/MAKONI%20and%20PENNYCOOK%20Disinventig.pdf">two thousand languages</a> (roughly one-third of all human languages), several dozen of them with more than a million speakers.</p>
<p>How did Swahili come to hold so prominent a position among so many groups with their own diverse linguistic histories and traditions? </p>
<h2>A liberation language</h2>
<p>During the decades leading up to the independence of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the early 1960s, Swahili functioned as an international means of political collaboration. It enabled freedom fighters throughout the region to communicate their common aspirations even though their native languages varied widely. </p>
<p>The rise of Swahili, for some Africans, was a mark of true cultural and personal independence from the colonising Europeans and their languages of control and command. Uniquely among Africa’s independent nations, Tanzania’s government uses Swahili for all official business and, most impressively, in basic education. Indeed, the Swahili word uhuru (freedom), which emerged from this independence struggle, became part of the <a href="https://inpdum.org">global lexicon</a> of political empowerment.</p>
<p>The highest political offices in East Africa began using and promoting Swahili soon after independence. Presidents <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Nyerere">Julius Nyerere</a> of Tanzania (1962–85) and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jomo-Kenyatta">Jomo Kenyatta</a> of Kenya (1964–78) promoted Swahili as integral to the region’s political and economic interests, security and liberation. The political power of language was demonstrated, less happily, by Ugandan dictator <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Idi-Amin">Idi Amin</a> (1971–79), who used Swahili for his army and secret police operations during his reign of terror.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-kiswahili-science-fiction-award-charts-a-path-for-african-languages-163876">New Kiswahili science fiction award charts a path for African languages</a>
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<p>Under Nyerere, Tanzania became one of only two African nations ever to declare a native African language as the country’s official mode of communication (the other is Ethiopia, with Amharic). Nyerere <a href="https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/shakespeare-goes-to-east-africa">personally translated</a> two of William Shakespeare’s plays into Swahili to demonstrate the capacity of Swahili to bear the expressive weight of great literary works. </p>
<h2>Socialist overtones</h2>
<p>Nyerere even made the term Swahili a referent to Tanzanian citizenship. Later, this label acquired socialist overtones in praising the common men and women of the nation. It stood in stark contrast to Europeans and Western-oriented elite Africans with quickly – and by implication dubiously – amassed wealth.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the term grew even further to encompass the poor of all races, of both African and non-African descent. In my own experience as a lecturer at Stanford University in the 1990s, for instance, several of the students from Kenya and Tanzania referred to the poor white neighbourhood of East Palo Alto, California, as Uswahilini, “Swahili land”. As opposed to Uzunguni, “land of the mzungu (white person)”. </p>
<p>Nyerere considered it prestigious to be called Swahili. With his influence, the term became imbued with sociopolitical connotations of the poor but worthy and even noble. This in turn helped construct a Pan African popular identity independent of the elite-dominated national governments of Africa’s fifty-some nation-states. </p>
<p>Little did I realise then that the Swahili label had been used as a conceptual rallying point for solidarity across the lines of community, competitive towns, and residents of many backgrounds for over a millennium.</p>
<h2>Kwanzaa and ujamaa</h2>
<p>In 1966, (activist and author) <a href="https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/maulana-karenga-39">Maulana Ron Karenga</a> associated the black freedom movement with Swahili, choosing Swahili as its official language and creating the Kwanzaa celebration. The term <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-kwanzaa-means-for-black-americans-88220">Kwanzaa</a> is derived from the Swahili word ku-anza, meaning “to begin” or “first”. The holiday was intended to celebrate the matunda ya kwanza, “first fruits”. According to Karenga, Kwanzaa symbolises the festivities of ancient African harvests.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman sings and dances, dressed in traditional East African fabric with headpiece and holding a wooden bowl, the sides strung with cowrie shells." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A Kwanzaa celebration in Denver, US.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images</span></span>
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<p>Celebrants were encouraged to adopt Swahili names and to address one another by Swahili titles of respect. Based on Nyerere’s principle of <a href="https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-172">ujamaa</a> (unity in mutual contributions), Kwanzaa celebrates seven principles or pillars. Unity (umoja), self-determination (kujichagulia), collective work and responsibility (ujima), cooperative economics (ujamaa), shared purpose (nia), individual creativity (kuumba) and faith (imani). </p>
<p>Nyerere also became the icon of “community brotherhood and sisterhood” under the slogan of the Swahili word ujamaa. That word has gained such strong appeal that it has been used as far afield as among Australian Aborigines and African Americans and <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Swahili_State_and_Society.html?id=-9MwAAByvf0C&redir_esc=y">across the globe</a> from London to Papua New Guinea. Not to mention its ongoing celebration on many US college campuses in the form of dormitories named ujamaa houses.</p>
<h2>Today</h2>
<p>Today, Swahili is the African language most widely recognised outside the continent. The global presence of Swahili in radio broadcasting and on the internet has no equal among sub-Saharan African languages. </p>
<p>Swahili is broadcast regularly in Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland and Tanzania. On the international scene, no other African language can be heard from world news stations as often or as extensively.</p>
<p>At least as far back as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022495/">Trader Horn</a> (1931), Swahili words and speech have been heard in hundreds of movies and television series, such as <a href="https://intl.startrek.com/database_article/uhura">Star Trek</a>, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089755/">Out of Africa</a>, Disney’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110357/">The Lion King</a>, and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146316/">Lara Croft: Tomb Raider</a>. The Lion King featured several Swahili words, the most familiar being the names of characters, including Simba (lion), Rafiki (friend) and Pumbaa (be dazed). Swahili phrases included asante sana (thank you very much) and, of course, that no-problem philosophy known as hakuna matata repeated throughout the movie. </p>
<p>Swahili lacks the numbers of speakers, the wealth, and the political power associated with global languages such as Mandarin, English or Spanish. But Swahili appears to be the only language boasting more than 200 million speakers that has more second-language speakers than native ones.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-kwanzaa-means-for-black-americans-88220">What Kwanzaa means for Black Americans</a>
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<p>By immersing themselves in the affairs of a maritime culture at a key commercial gateway, the people who were eventually designated Waswahili (Swahili people) created a niche for themselves. They were important enough in the trade that newcomers had little choice but to speak Swahili as the language of trade and diplomacy. And the Swahili population became more entrenched as successive generations of second-language speakers of Swahili lost their ancestral languages and became bona fide Swahili.</p>
<p>The key to understanding this story is to look deeply at the Swahili people’s response to challenges. At the ways in which they made their fortunes and dealt with misfortunes. And, most important, at how they honed their skills in balancing confrontation and resistance with adaptation and innovation as they interacted with arrivals from other language backgrounds. </p>
<p><em>This is an edited extract of the <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780896804890_chapter_01_and_toc.pdf">first chapter</a> of <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/The+Story+of+Swahili">The Story of Swahili</a> from Ohio University Press</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177259/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John M. Mugane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Over two millennia, Swahili has built bridges among people across Africa and into the diaspora.John M. Mugane, Professor, Harvard UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1756562022-01-27T15:13:29Z2022-01-27T15:13:29ZBook review: how Africa was central to the making of the modern world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/442723/original/file-20220126-21-hadgbf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, approached by a Berber on camelback, from The Catalan Atlas, 1375</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Attributed to Abraham Cresques/Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Journalist, photographer, author and professor Howard W. French’s <em><a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631495823">Born in Blackness</a>: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War</em>, is the most recent in a long career of thoughtful and significant literary and journalistic interventions. It demands an account of modernity that reckons with Africa as central to the making of the modern world.</p>
<p>The book’s main aim, French explains early on, is to restore those key chapters which articulate Africa’s significance to our common narrative of modernity to their proper place of prominence. </p>
<p>French intricately traces, from the early 15th century through the Second World War, the encounters between African and European civilisations. These, he argues, were motivated by Europe’s desire to trade with West Africa’s rich, Black <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/medieval-africa-lost-kingdoms/">civilisations</a>. These included the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Ghana-historical-West-African-empire">Ghanaian</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/empire-mali-1230-1600">Malian</a> empires. The ancient West African region was perceived as an <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/africa_caribbean/west_africa.htm">abundant source</a> of both gold and slaves. French argues that it is the “intertwined background of gold and slavery” which would eventually birth the transatlantic slave trade of the early 16th century. </p>
<h2>A 600 year journey</h2>
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<p><em>Born in Blackness</em> sprawls approximately 600 years. It traverses geographies from the edge of Europe, across Africa and the Americas. It follows the long history of the age of European “discovery” beginning with <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/africa-portugal">Portugal’s early ventures</a> into Africa and Asia in the late 1400s and early 1500s, through the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade">Atlantic slave trade</a>’s “modest” start in Barbados in the 1630s to the <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/haitian-revolution-1791-1804/">Haitian Revolution</a>. </p>
<p>Then it moves to London’s <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/tradeindustry/slavetrade/overview/parliament-abolishes-the-slave-trade/">abolishment</a> of the transatlantic trafficking of humans in 1807 and the introduction of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/cotton-harvester">mechanical cotton picker</a>. This invention “could do the work of fifty sharecropping Blacks, a fact not lost on the white planters of the (Mississippi Delta)”. French’s historical tracing of the crafting of the modern world through the oppression and subjugation of Black persons continues on through the Second World War and beyond.</p>
<p>Citing Simeon Booker, a noteworthy African-American journalist whose work concerned the American <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/American-civil-rights-movement">civil rights movement</a> and the murder of <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/articles-and-essays/murder-of-emmett-till/">Emmett Till</a>, an African-American teenager accused of offending a white woman, French notes that in the early 1960s, “Mississipi could easily rank with South Africa, Angola or Nazi Germany for brutality and hatred”. </p>
<p>His careful weaving together of how gold and slavery became intertwined over centuries and continents makes one thing abundantly clear. Without the trade of persons belonging to African civilisations across the globe, but particularly the Atlantic, the modern world would not have been made.</p>
<h2>A reckoning with slavery</h2>
<p>As the author explains, the boom of the cotton, sugar and tobacco industries of the colonial US simply would not have happened without the trade of slaves from Africa. Without this “capitalist jolt” as French puts it, what we know now as the United States of America would have remained relatively obscure. It would not likely have become the superpower state it is today.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-but-slavery-isnt-our-only-narrative-137016">Black Lives Matter but slavery isn't our only narrative</a>
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<p>In this way <em>Born in Blackness</em> challenges emphatically the deliberate forgetting of European contests over control of African resources. This process of erasure, French explains, began with Europe’s “Age of Discovery” (1400s-1600s). The improperly explained rationale for this era was that European civilisations wanted to form trading ties with Asia. To do so, they reached across continents, including Africa, for territory – and, later, subjects. </p>
<p>But French insists that the real rationale was Europe’s earnest desire to establish economic ties with Africa, and in particular West Africa with its resource-rich civilisations and resource-based economies. </p>
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<span class="caption">Howard W. French.</span>
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<p>The intervention of <em>Born in Blackness</em>, then, is to insist on reckoning with the role played by the brutal bond between Europe and Africa. This was forged through slavery. It is what drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy; it hastened the processes of industrialisation and revolutionised the world’s diets by facilitating the globalisation of the consumption of sugar. </p>
<p>It is also important to mark, as French does, that the centrality of enslaved Africans’ labour extends beyond the mining of plantation crops to the very creation of the plantations themselves. It was the slaves who prepared the land for planting: they removed plants and rocks, but most importantly displaced indigenous peoples from their territories. </p>
<h2>A world born in Blackness</h2>
<p>In marking this, <em>Born in Blackness</em> demonstrates how the displacement to which African persons taken as slaves is mirrored in the making of modern-day America and echoed in the displacement of first nations or indigenous Americans.</p>
<p>What is at stake in the intervention of the book is precisely what is gestured toward by its title: that modernity and the modern world was indeed born in Blackness. The civilisational transformations the author traces – economic, spatial and most importantly cultural in their texture – are a product of Blackness.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/175656/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lauren van der Rede receives funding from the Early Career Academic Development programme of the Division of Research Development, Stellenbosch University.</span></em></p>Born in Blackness by Howard W. French is a towering work. It argues that, because of gold and slavery, Africa is central to creating the modern world.Lauren van der Rede, Lecturer, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1705832021-10-28T16:40:34Z2021-10-28T16:40:34ZDune – a prophetic tale about the environmental destruction wrought by the colonisation of Africa<p>Director Denis Villeneuve’s most recent sci-fi epic is the latest attempt to tell the story of Frank Herbert’s acclaimed 1965 novel, Dune. The film is set millennia in the future when the galaxy is ruled by a class of family Houses. Each house battles for control over the most valuable resource in the galaxy, “spice” – a powerful hallucinogen that also happens to power interstellar travel.</p>
<p>Spice is mined on only one inhospitable desert planet – Arrakis, also known as Dune. Arrakis is populated by the Fremen, a group of warriors and desert dwellers who have to fight against a series of imperial colonisers, each one using different methods of control to mine and sell spice. </p>
<p>Dune offers a useful allegorical narrative of the “<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Scramble_For_Africa/KwRMCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">scramble for Africa</a>”, which saw European empires carve up the continent into colonised powers based purely in the pursuit of trade advantages.</p>
<h2>Violent extraction of resources</h2>
<p>The “scramble” officially began in 1884 with the Berlin Conference. Here major European and other imperial powers – Germany, Britain, Belgium, Austria-Hungary, France, Spain, the US, the Ottoman Empire and others – colluded in violently delineating the continent’s varied tribal geographies into colonial nation states. </p>
<p>The colonial and aristocratic European motifs in Villeneuve’s Dune are not hard to spot: sealing decrees with signet rings on wax, overtly westernised regal dress and military uniforms.</p>
<p>Based on specific trade specialities and existing knowledge of resources, by 1914, Africa was a colonised continent. Like Arrakis, its valuable natural resources (both human and nonhuman) were being mined to service western colonial markets.</p>
<p>In Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium undertook one of the most notorious <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.14361/9783839454985-002/html">resource plunders</a> in the Congo, which is known for its abundance of rubber. Leopold was far more brutal in his land grab than other colonisers, <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315829173/european-atrocity-african-catastrophe-martin-ewans">committing mass genocide</a> in the process. </p>
<p>Seeing the Congolese people as inferior, Leopold forced them to labour for the valued resources and murdered those who refused. The exact figures are hard to discern, but it is thought that his armies murdered over half of the population. </p>
<p>In the film, audiences are introduced to Vladimir, leader of House Harkonnen, which has enacted a brutal and violent colonisation of Arrakis for years. His corpulence, greed and brutality bear a striking resemblance to the actions of Leopold. There is even a scene where he bathes in molten rubber.</p>
<h2>The lasting impact of colonisation</h2>
<p>As Villeneuve himself has <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/dune-director-denis-villeneuves-climate-change-warning-future-generations-will-judge-us?ref=scroll">pointed out</a>, the themes of his version of Dune speak to how fragile a planet’s ecosystem can be. It also highlights how we must change our dependence on extracting resources to start a planetary healing process. </p>
<p>As climate catastrophe continues to unfold around the world, many commentators (<a href="https://tacity.co.uk/books/seven-ethics-against-capitalism/">myself included</a>) point to the extractive nature of fossil fuel companies, deforestation practices and ocean-polluting industries as the <a href="https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/01/31/richard-smith-must-capitalism-end-to-avoid-climate-collapse/">prime culprits</a>. These practices have a legacy in the colonial plunder of Africa, with several <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/chartered-companies-africa">chartered companies</a> set up to marshal the global trade of the resources gained from colonial invasions. </p>
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<p>For example, Cecil Rhodes, who is known widely for the decolonisation campaign <a href="https://harvardpolitics.com/rhodes-must-fall/">#RhodesMustFall</a>, made his fortune mining diamonds in South Africa. This industry
produces a lot of <a href="http://www.imperial-consultants.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Final-report-Environmental-Impacts-of-Mined-Diamonds.pdf">local pollution and is also highly energy intensive</a>. </p>
<p>Many modern-day mining and oil companies have their <a href="https://theconversation.com/earth-day-colonialisms-role-in-the-overexploitation-of-natural-resources-113995">roots</a> in the colonial invasion of Africa, with damaging environmental costs both locally in African countries, but also globally as they belch carbon into the air.</p>
<p>Dune shines a harsh light on these processes. </p>
<p>We see how technologically superior invading “houses” are harvesting the raw materials, enslaving the population and using precious resources (such as water) to feed sacred trees rather than quench the thirst of indigenous workers. But these powers are ultimately humbled by Arrakis’ indigenous population who use spice as part of their sustainable relationship with the harsh environment of the planet – not for intergalactic trade or to generate vast profits. </p>
<p>In this, Dune critically explores the geopolitics behind resource extraction. It highlights the limitations of and the inevitable <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/mining-in-south-africa-radical-resistance/">resistance</a> to the powers that attempt to wield natural resources for domination. It also predicted that the colonisation of the past would lead to much of the destruction we are now seeing.</p>
<p>The next decade has to be the one in which we, as a planet, begin to work towards reducing the impact of climate catastrophe. Part of that process will involve understanding the past transgressions of European power on the Global South. Stories that have a message behind them, like Dune, show us how.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/170583/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Oli Mould does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Africa was divided by European imperialists depending on what each desired in natural resourcesOli Mould, Reader in Human Geography, Royal Holloway University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1464082021-06-17T15:10:07Z2021-06-17T15:10:07ZKenneth Kaunda: the last giant of African nationalism and benign autocrat left a mixed legacy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358636/original/file-20200917-24-1xzswgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda at the inauguration of former South African president Thabo Mbeki in 2004.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/dr-kenneth-kaunda-former-president-zambia-born">Kenneth Kaunda</a>, the former president of Zambia, who has <a href="https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/former-president-kenneth-kaunda-passes-away-aged-97/">died in hospital in the capital, Lusaka</a>, at the age of 97, was the last of the giants of 20th century African nationalism. He was also one of the few to depart with his reputation still intact. But perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, the standing of the man who ruled over Zambia for 27 years is clouded with ambiguity.</p>
<p>The charismatic president who won accolades for bowing out peacefully after losing an election was also the authoritarian who introduced a one-party state. The pioneer of “African socialism” was the man who cut a supply-side deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The nationalist leader known for personal probity planned to give huge tracts of farmland to an Indian guru. The revolutionary who gave sanctuary to liberation movements was also a friend of US presidents.</p>
<p>I met him in 1989 when I helped organise a delegation of 120 white South African notables for a conference with the then-banned and exiled <a href="https://www.anc1912.org.za/brief-history-anc">African National Congress</a>, which was fighting for the liberation of black South Africans, in Lusaka. “KK”, as he was known, shed tears as he welcomed guests, who included the <a href="https://hsf.org.za/about/about-the-helen-suzman-foundation">liberal MP Helen Suzman</a>, known for her defiant opposition to the apartheid government.</p>
<p>By then, he’d been president for a quarter of a century and seemed a permanent fixture at the apex of southern African politics. And yet, as it turned out, he was on his final lap.</p>
<p>He exuded an image of the benign monarch, a much-loved father to his people, known for his endearing quirks – safari suits, waving white handkerchiefs, ballroom dancing, singing his own songs while cycling, and crying in public. And yet there was also a hard edge to the politics and persona of the man, whose powerful personality helped make Zambia a major player in Africa and the world for three decades.</p>
<h2>The early years</h2>
<p>Kenneth David Kaunda was born in Chinsali, Northern Zambia, on October 24 1924. Like so many of his generation of African liberation leaders, he came from a family of the mission-educated middle class. He was the baby among eight children. His father was a Presbyterian missionary-teacher and his mother was the first qualified African woman teacher in the country.</p>
<p>He followed his parents’ profession, first in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), where he became a head teacher before his 21st birthday. He also taught in then Tanganyika (Tanzania), where he became a lifelong admirer of future president Julius Nyerere, whose “Ujamaa” brand of African socialism he tried to follow.</p>
<p>After returning home, Kaunda campaigned against the British plan for a <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230270916_12">federation</a> of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which would increase the powers of white settlers. He took up politics full-time, learning the ropes through working for the liberal Legislative Council member <a href="https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-33474">Sir Stewart Gore-Browne</a>. Soon after, as secretary general of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress, he was jailed for two months with hard labour for distributing <a href="https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/zambians-campaign-independence-1944-1964">“subversive literature”</a>.</p>
<p>After his release he clashed with his organisation’s president, Harry Nkumbula, who took a more conciliatory approach to colonial rule. Kaunda led the breakaway Zambian African National Congress, which was promptly banned. He was <a href="https://biography.yourdictionary.com/kenneth-david-kaunda">jailed for nine months</a>, further boosting his status.</p>
<p>A new movement, the United National Independence Party <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3172067">(UNIP)</a>), chose Kaunda as its leader after his release. He travelled to America and <a href="https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/kenneth-kaunda-the-united-states-and-southern-africa/introduction-kenneth-kaunda-and-zambia-united-states-relations-before-1975">met Martin Luther King</a>. Inspired by King and Mahatma Gandhi, he launched the <a href="https://cdn.website-editor.net/74225855d7734800bb2b5c38f2c1cf16/files/uploaded/chachacha.pdf">“Cha-cha-cha” civil disobedience campaign</a>.</p>
<p>In 1962, encouraged by Kaunda’s moves to pacify the white settlers, the British acceded to self-rule, followed by full independence two years later. He emerged as the first Zambian president after <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/25/newsid_2658000/2658325.stm">UNIP won the election</a>.</p>
<h2>The challenges of independence</h2>
<p>One challenge for the newly independent Zambia related to the colonial education system. There were no universities and fewer than half a percent of pupils had completed primary school. Kaunda introduced a policy of free books and low fees. In 1966 he became the first chancellor of the new <a href="https://www.unza.zm/international/?p=history">University of Zambia</a>. Several other universities and tertiary education facilities followed.</p>
<p>Long after he was ousted as president, Kaunda continued to be warmly received in African capitals because of his role in allowing liberation movements to have bases in Lusaka. This came at considerable economic cost to his country, which also endured military raids from the South Africans and Rhodesians.</p>
<p>At the same time, he joined apartheid South Africa’s hard-line prime minister <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/balthazar-johannes-vorster">BJ Vorster</a> in mediating a failed bid for an internal settlement in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1975. He attempted the same in South West Africa (Namibia), which was then administered by South Africa. But <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/pieter-willem-botha">President PW Botha</a>, who succeeded Vorster after his death, showed no interest.</p>
<p>Kaunda helped lead the <a href="https://www.nti.org/learn/treaties-and-regimes/non-aligned-movement-nam/">Non-Aligned Movement</a>, which brought together states that did not align with either the Soviets or the Americans during the Cold War. He broke bread with anyone who showed an interest in Zambia, including Romania’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicolae-Ceausescu">Nicolai Ceausescu</a> and Iraq’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/saddam-hussein-how-a-deadly-purge-of-opponents-set-up-his-ruthless-dictatorship-120748">Saddam Hussein</a>, while also cultivating successive American presidents (having more success with <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/james-carter/">Jimmy Carter</a> than <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/ronald-reagan/">Ronald Reagan</a>). He invited China to help build the <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0330/033064.html">Tazara Railway</a> and bought 16 MIG-21 fighter jets from the Soviet Union <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/0205/020532.html">in 1980</a>.</p>
<h2>African humanism</h2>
<p>Kaunda’s economic policy was framed by his belief in what he called “African humanism” but also by necessity. He inherited an economy under foreign control and moved to remedy this. For example, the mines owned by the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/British-South-Africa-Company">British South African Company</a> (founded by <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/cecil-john-rhodes">Cecil John Rhodes</a>) were acquired as a result of colonial conquest in 1890. Kaunda’s threats to nationalise without compensation prompted major concessions from BSAC.</p>
<p>He promoted a planned economy, leading to “development plans” that involved the state’s Industrial Development Corporation acquiring 51% equity in major foreign-owned companies. The policy was undermined by the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/mar/03/1970s-oil-price-shock">1973 spike in the oil price</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1973/02/04/archives/as-copper-goes-so-goes-zambia.html">fall in the price of copper</a>, which made up 95% of Zambia’s exports.</p>
<p>The consequent balance of payments crisis led to Zambia having the world’s second highest debt relative to GDP, <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11985187.pdf">prompting IMF intervention</a>. Kaunda at first resisted but by 1989 was forced to bow to its demands. Parastatals were partially privatised, spending was slashed, food subsidies ended, prices rocketed and Kaunda’s support plummeted. </p>
<p>Like many anti-colonial leaders, he’d come to view multi-party democracy as a western concept that fomented conflict and tribalism. This view was encouraged by the 1964 uprising of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1964/08/13/archives/rhodesia-holds-leader-of-cult-kaunda-says-alice-lenshina-calls-for.html">Lumpa religious sect</a>. He banned all parties other than UNIP in 1968 and Zambia officially became a one-party state four years later.</p>
<p>His government became increasingly autocratic and intolerant of dissent, centred on his personality cult. But Kaunda will go down in history as a relatively benign autocrat who avoided the levels of repression and corruption of so many other one-party rulers.</p>
<p>Julius Nyerere, who retired in 1985, tried to persuade his friend to follow suit, but Kaunda pressed on. After surviving a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/01/world/failed-zambia-coup-weakens-leader.html">coup attempt in 1990</a> and following food riots, he reluctantly acceded to the demand for a multi-party election in 1991. </p>
<p>His popularity could not survive the chaos prompted by price rises and was not helped by the revelation that he’d planned to grant <a href="http://www.minet.org/TM-EX/Fall-91">more than a quarter of Zambia’s land</a> to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (who promised to create a “heaven on earth”). The trade union leader Frederick Chiluba won in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/02/world/zambian-voters-defeat-kaunda-sole-leader-since-independence.html">landslide victory in 1991</a>.</p>
<h2>The last years</h2>
<p>Kaunda <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4283286.stm">won kudos abroad</a> for what was considered to be his gracious response to electoral defeat, but the new government was less magnanimous. It placed him under house arrest after alleging a coup attempt; then <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/01/world/founder-of-zambia-is-declared-stateless-in-high-court-ruling.html">declared him stateless</a> when he planned to run in the 1996 election (on the grounds that his father was born in Malawi), which he successfully challenged in court. He survived an <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/shot-kaunda-claims-attempt-on-life-1.99800">assassination attempt in 1997</a>, getting grazed by a bullet. One of his sons, Wezi, was shot dead outside their home in 1999.</p>
<p>The 1986 AIDS death of another son, Masuzgo, inspired him to campaign around HIV issues far earlier than most, and he stepped this up over the next two decades. After Chiluba’s departure, he returned to favour and became a <a href="https://thenews-chronicle.com/a-life-that-defies-expectations-a-tribute-to-kenneth-kaunda-at-96/">roving ambassador for Zambia</a>. He reduced his public role following the <a href="https://www.lusakatimes.com/2012/09/19/mama-betty-kaunda-dies/">2012 death</a> of his wife of 66 years, Betty.</p>
<p>Kaunda will be remembered as a giant of 20th century African nationalism – a leader who, at great cost, gave refuge to revolutionary movements, a relatively benign autocrat who reluctantly introduced democracy to his country and an international diplomat who punched well above his weight in world affairs.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146408/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gavin Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Kaunda will be remembered as a giant of 20th century African nationalism – a leader who gave refuge to revolutionary movements, a relatively benign autocrat and an international diplomat.Gavin Evans, Lecturer, Culture and Media department, Birkbeck, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1407472020-06-22T14:32:50Z2020-06-22T14:32:50ZLesotho can’t afford incremental changes to its constitution: it needs a complete overhaul<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342974/original/file-20200619-43214-hhxia0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Moeketsi Majoro, Lesotho's new Prime Minister. A minor constitutional amendment enabled his ascension to power. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">GCIS/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ever since Lesotho, the mountainous southern African constitutional kingdom of about 2.2 million, attained independence from Britain in 1966, its development has been punctuated by all manner of constitutional breakdowns. These have ranged from coups, dictatorships and military rule. </p>
<p>Among the long list of factors that account for the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10246029.1995.9627804?journalCode=rasr20">long-running political instability</a> in the country, the flawed <a href="https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Lesotho_2011.pdf?lang=en">constitution</a> ranks high.</p>
<p>It is now a matter of common course that successive interventions by the Southern African Development Community, in a bid to bring peace to Lesotho, <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-efforts-to-stabilise-lesotho-have-failed-less-intervention-may-be-more-effective-137499">have failed</a>. One of the main reasons is that the solutions often provided are palliative; they ignore the need for fundamental constitutional reform. </p>
<p>The organisation of Lesotho’s state institutions is fundamentally flawed. Almost every institution is an appendage of the executive: oversight institutions, security agencies, parliament, and the judiciary. There is a very weak balance between key state institutions. </p>
<p>Despite the fact that it was adopted only as recently as 1993, Lesotho’s constitution is fairly outmoded. The country had a chance to adopt a new constitution when it emerged from dictatorship under <a href="https://uca.edu/politicalscience/dadm-project/sub-saharan-africa-region/lesotho-1966-present/">Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan</a> and <a href="https://journals.co.za/content/afrins/20/4/AJA02562804_1157">rule by a military junta</a>, both of which lasted for about twenty years. Instead, what followed was a mere rehash of the 1966 constitution. </p>
<p>As such, the current constitution is cast in the <a href="http://www.cplo.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/BP-380-South-Africas-Parliamentary-System-May-2015.pdf">classical Westminster conceptions</a> that countries in Africa and elsewhere have long jettisoned. The fundamental structure of the constitution is bad and unsuited for modern-day constitutionalism.</p>
<h2>Different approaches</h2>
<p>While there is some consensus about the need for constitutional changes, there is considerable disagreement in the country about the kind of constitutional changes that are needed, and how extensive they should be. </p>
<p>There are those who say that the changes must be <a href="https://www.gov.ls/documents/expert-report-of-constitutional-reforms/">incremental and phased</a>. The justification for this approach is that there are minor and urgent changes that can be effected with relative ease. These can be carried out within a short space of time, and without a need for huge resources. This include, for example, reducing the powers of the Prime Minister in relation to other branches of government.</p>
<p>This justification is largely based on expediency. The proponents of this approach use the recently adopted <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lesotho-politics/lesothos-king-assents-to-bill-limiting-pm-thabanes-powers-idUSKBN22J2UD">Ninth Amendment to the constitution</a>
as an example of the success of the incremental approach. The amendment, in the main, prevents a Prime Minister who has lost a vote of no confidence in parliament from calling an early election. It leaves him or her with just one option; to resign. The amendment had an <a href="https://theconversation.com/lesothos-new-leader-faces-enormous-hurdles-ensuring-peace-and-political-stability-139320">immediate application</a> in May 2020 after then Prime Minister Tom Thabane lost the confidence of the National Assembly.</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are those who believe that this success is shorlived; that the country should seize this opportune moment to change the entire constitution. I belong to this group. Lesotho needs a new constitution altogether, and as a matter of urgency. A new constitution is needed that will design new institutions that work in a balanced manner and contribute to the <a href="https://journals.co.za/content/ju_slr/22/1/EJC54773">transformation of the country</a> from its historic <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10246029.1996.9627810?journalCode=rasr20">shackles of instability</a>, poverty and abuse of fundamental rights.</p>
<h2>What’s wrong</h2>
<p>The fundamental principles on which the current constitution is based are outmoded. It is based, among other things, on a very weak model of separation of powers and <a href="https://brill.com/view/journals/ajls/6/1/article-p49_3.xml">checks and balances</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342972/original/file-20200619-43229-64gt5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342972/original/file-20200619-43229-64gt5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342972/original/file-20200619-43229-64gt5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342972/original/file-20200619-43229-64gt5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342972/original/file-20200619-43229-64gt5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342972/original/file-20200619-43229-64gt5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342972/original/file-20200619-43229-64gt5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">PM Tom Thabane recently stepped down as Lesotho’s PM.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA/MIchael Reynolds</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The executive is virtually untrammelled. It appoints and dismisses, almost single-handedly, the heads of security agencies, heads of oversight institutions, and the heads of the superior courts. It even appoints all chief accounting officers in the civil service. </p>
<p>This kind of institutional design is typical of classical <a href="https://parliament.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/379278/The-Westminster-System.pdf">Westminster constitutions</a>. Most of them are cast on monarchical prerogative. Thus, when political power in Lesotho shifted from the palace to cabinet with the 1993 constitution, <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2225-71602020000100011&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en">all the prerogatives of the monarch shifted to the Prime Minister</a>. The Prime Minister, therefore, virtually exercises all the erstwhile prerogative powers of the King.</p>
<p>When power is so concentrated in the hands of one person, abuse is inevitable. Indeed, the office of the Prime Minister has been the fulcrum of instability in Lesotho. The successive incumbents have used other state institutions to suppress dissent and perpetuate administrative malfeasance. The army, the parliament, and the judiciary have been the major instruments in this onslaught.</p>
<p>Another fundamental problem with the constitution is that the country has a bad <a href="https://journals.co.za/content/lesotho/23/1/EJC185615">Bill of Rights</a>. All the rights in it are fraught with claw-back clauses, to the extent that the “fundamental rights” it supposedly enshrines are reduced to an empty list of promises.</p>
<p>For instance, section 18 provides for the freedom from discrimination. But it then provides for a long list of limitations to the right. It even outrageously includes one that says freedom from discrimination does not apply to members of the “disciplined forces” such as members of the army, police and correctional services. It also says that the right does not apply when the basis for the violation is customary law. </p>
<p>Effectively, women whose rights are often <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1727-37812019000100027">suppressed through the use of customary law in Lesotho</a>, can hardly expect meaningful protection of their rights from the Bill of Rights. Most importantly, it excludes social and economic rights. This is despite the fact that Lesotho is trapped in the <a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/dpad/least-developed-country-category-lesotho.html">least developed countries category</a>.</p>
<p>The importance of having <a href="http://www.saflii.org/za/journals/LDD/1998/9.pdf">enforceable economic rights</a> is that it changes the constitutional orientation of the country entirely, from a liberal constitution to a post-liberal one. A <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/tlj54&div=4&id=&page=">post-liberal </a> constitution - such as neighbouring South Africa’s - embodies the positive obligations of the state to remedy historical realities. It’s imperative for Lesotho to move in this direction. </p>
<h2>Time for boldness</h2>
<p>There is no amount of gradual change that can remedy these fundamental deficiencies. It’s time for an overhaul of the entire constitution. Its deficiencies are both structural and fundamental. </p>
<p>Lesotho would do well to follow the example set by the likes of <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/constitution/SAConstitution-web-eng.pdf">South Africa</a> and <a href="http://kenyalaw.org/kl/index.php?id=398">Kenya</a>, whose constitutional projects became a success. Instead of just tinkering, they bravely adopted completely new constitutions that marked a clear break with the past. </p>
<p>This is the path that Lesotho needs to take. The incremental approach only adds to the already existing confusion about relations between state institutions in the country. That will only amount to an unsustainable patchwork.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140747/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hoolo 'Nyane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The fundamental structure of the current constitution, which is cast in classical Westminster conceptions, is unsuited for modern-day constitutionalism.Hoolo 'Nyane, Head of Department, Public and Environmental Law Department, University of LimpopoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1391542020-05-24T07:51:23Z2020-05-24T07:51:23ZNigeria was once an indisputable leader in Africa: what happened?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337012/original/file-20200522-124826-17t8ngr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/nigeria-flag-painted-on-clenched-fist-696718654">Ink Drop/Shutterstock </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The traditional leadership and redeemer posture of Nigeria in Africa has, in recent years, been put into question. </p>
<p>Issues like <a href="https://www.pwc.com/ng/en/press-room/impact-of-corruption-on-nigeria-s-economy.html">corruption</a> and <a href="https://www.sunnewsonline.com/how-corruption-caused-infrastructure-decay-in-nigeria-magu/">infrastructural decay</a> have held the country down from playing a leadership role in Africa. As have transitions <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Challenge-of-Leadership-and-Governance-in-Ogunmilade-Nwoko/15847a6e0ec50ce505176e8f681c37a6ccc9bc09">from one poor leadership to another</a>. A visionary leadership is lacking while public institutions are weak, inept and compromised. Decades of political patronage and nepotism have seen a corrosion of <a href="https://www.dpublication.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/3-7013-.pdf">quality and performance in the public service</a>. </p>
<p>In addition, the intractable problem of Boko Haram and Islamic State, coupled with kidnappings, have created a security crisis. All continue to shatter the myth of military invincibility and the might of the Nigerian state. </p>
<p>In the beginning, it was not so. From independence in 1960, Nigeria took upon itself the role of uniting Africa against western recolonisation. The continent, from then on in, became the centre-piece of its foreign policy. The fact that nations were living under foreign rule made it possible to galvanise them around a common cause. This led to the creation of the <a href="https://au.int/en/overview">Organisation of African Unity </a> – now the African Union – in 1963 and <a href="https://www.ecowas.int/">Economic Community of West African States</a> in 1975. </p>
<p>Nigeria assumed a leading role in these events as it forged <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24328637?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A96897dea276c534b718f126a1a286764&seq=1">a foreign policy with a strong Afrocentric posture</a>. In fact, so frenetic was its involvement in this role that it sometimes paid little attention to the home front. </p>
<p>Nigeria’s leadership role on the continent was a product of the vision, dreams and, sometimes, whims of the founding fathers. They were nevertheless premised on real national capacity. Jaja Wachukwu, Nigeria’s first external affairs minister <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/160798?read-now=1&seq=1">noted </a> in 1960 that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our country is the largest single unit in Africa… we are not going to abdicate the position in which God Almighty has placed us. The whole black continent is looking up to this country to liberate it from thraldom. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This defined the country’s behaviour and continental outlook and has continued to influence successive administrations – weak or effective. </p>
<h2>Assuming a leadership role</h2>
<p>The sheer size of Nigeria’s population – the largest on the continent which rose from 48.3 million in 1963 to <a href="https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/nigeria-population/">over 200 million in 2020</a> — gave the country the idea that Africa was its natural preoccupation.</p>
<p>In addition, its colonial experience and the abundance of its oil resources and wealth have empowered Nigeria economically. This made it possible for the country to pursue an ambitious foreign policy. It also permitted Nigeria to <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-history/article/oil-british-interests-and-the-nigerian-civil-war/8EA7F57669A2115B4DC421ABD3CCD028">finance its Civil War</a>, strengthening its international independence. And oil <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1148538?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3Aac914b8ca4f94c1094bf41fd4ba4d724&seq=1">made possible</a> an unparalleled post-war recovery.</p>
<p>Nigeria has used its influence to good effect and to good ends. For example, <a href="https://www.ecowas.int/about-ecowas/history/">it worked with other countries</a> in the West African sub-region to establish the Economic Community of West African States in 1975. It went on to push for the <a href="https://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/liberia/#2">prevention and resolution</a> of devastating conflicts that engulfed Liberia in 1992. The conflict spilled over into <a href="http://www.redcross.int/EN/mag/magazine2003_2/4-9.html">Sierra Leone </a>and other countries in the region. Nigeria spearheaded the cessation of hostilities and created the cease-fire monitoring group to bring a total end to the civil strife and restore democracy in both countries. </p>
<p>Many observers <a href="https://www.academia.edu/33587349/Nigeria_Participation_in_Peacekeeping_Operations">agree</a> that the sterling performance of the monitoring group is unparalleled in the history of regional organisations the world over. It has now become a model to emulate for its operational efficiency and for giving regional actors pride of place in the resolution of regional conflicts. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337014/original/file-20200522-124822-1vnoe4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337014/original/file-20200522-124822-1vnoe4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337014/original/file-20200522-124822-1vnoe4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337014/original/file-20200522-124822-1vnoe4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337014/original/file-20200522-124822-1vnoe4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337014/original/file-20200522-124822-1vnoe4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337014/original/file-20200522-124822-1vnoe4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Nigeria <a href="http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1657-89532011000200005">exerted similar efforts</a> to ensure that democratic governments were restored to <a href="https://www.lindenwood.edu/files/resources/56-76-re-engineering-nigerias-foreign-policy.pdf">Guinea-Bissau</a>, <a href="https://www.lindenwood.edu/files/resources/56-76-re-engineering-nigerias-foreign-policy.pdf">Cote d’Ivoire</a> and <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9780230115453_6">Sao Tome et Principe</a>, after military take-overs in those countries.</p>
<p>It spent <a href="http://www.providingforpeacekeeping.org/2015/04/24/peacekeeping-contributor-profile-nigeria/">over US$10 billion</a> in these peace campaigns and also lost soldiers in the process.</p>
<p>Nigeria has not limited its peacekeeping role to West Africa. It has also been engaged in Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia-Eritrea. </p>
<p>The country also <a href="https://www.academia.edu/6432757/Visibility_and_Relevance_in_International_Politics_National_Role_Conceptions_and_Nigerias_Foreign_Policy_in_Africa">played the most important role </a> in fighting apartheid in Southern Africa and supporting liberation movements on the continent. </p>
<h2>Disappointments</h2>
<p>But Nigeria has not been immune to challenges facing countries on the continent. Corruption, misappropriation of public funds, electoral malpractices, insurgency and terrorism have devastated its capacity and weakened its moral fortitude to lead the continent. </p>
<p>Amidst enormous wealth, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/26/africa/nigeria-overtakes-india-extreme-poverty-intl/index.html">poverty in Nigeria is endemic </a>. It could even become the <a href="https://www.worldpoverty.io/map">poverty capital</a> of the world, according to The World Poverty Clock. Nigerians have been reduced to the behest of the politicians that tie them to gridlock of <a href="https://www.intechopen.com/books/elections-a-global-perspective/electoral-behavior-and-politics-of-stomach-infrastructure-in-ekiti-state-nigeria-">“stomach infrastructure”</a>. This is a new trend which reflects institutionalised and structural poverty. Deprivation puts people in a vulnerable and compromised position where the desperation for survival makes them sell their votes and conscience.</p>
<p>The slow movement of the current administration is also killing the Nigerian spirit and leadership posture. <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/south-africa-announces-26bn-covid-19-rescue-package-200422073711103.html">South Africa</a>, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/ghana-homecoming-african-americans-190820061314002.html">Ghana</a> and even <a href="https://www.africanews.com/2020/05/14/madagascar-s-covid-organics-testimonies-and-medical-caution//">Madagascar</a> have acted faster in continental and global politics, including during times of emergency such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. But Nigeria seems content with a spectator position. </p>
<h2>What next?</h2>
<p>Nigeria has been relegated to the background of international affairs. To turn this around requires a revisit to the roots – and mowing the lawns afterwards. Nigeria must take stock of its <a href="https://www.academia.edu/8939875/Nigeria_and_Africa_in_the_21st_Century?auto=download">own performance and capacities and re-position itself</a> – first from within. </p>
<p>If Nigerian leaders are increasingly determined to proffer African solutions to their problems, then political structures and institutions must be reformed to reflect conditions suitable for sustainable development. Without a formidable political base, the economy will remain weak and fragile. The political base is crucial, because, the state is the repository of all ramifications and dimensions of power – political, economic, technological and military. And the purpose of the state is to authoritatively allocate these resources.</p>
<p>There is also a need to empower people to mobilise their local resources and to use them for development. And, of course, public funds should not be concentrated in the hands of few individuals, who may be tempted to steal them. An accountable system is one in which money management has several checks. </p>
<p>Oil wealth has been the country’s nemesis, a curse that has promoted corruption and blatant bleeding of the economy. But it is <a href="https://www.africaportal.org/features/paradox-nigerias-oil-dependency/">declining in value</a> and as source of national revenue. Now is the time for Nigeria to make good its repeated and well-advertised intentions to <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2019/01/25/reviving-nigerias-economy-through-economic-diversification/">diversify the economy</a>. </p>
<p>A de-emphasis on oil would open the door to smarter ideas about how to create wealth. It would also herald in getting rid of a great deal of the phlegm of corruption which has played such a central role in Nigeria’s infrastructural decay, eroded its influence and given it such a negative image. </p>
<p>Added to this is the succession of weak rulers since 2007.</p>
<p>African leaders do not look towards Nigeria anymore for counsel, inspiration and help. They think Nigeria has a lot on its plate already and needs help. The potential is still there for Nigeria to return to power; but it takes leadership to (re)build the auspicious atmosphere and to activate the country’s potential – the two steps required to regain that enviable frontliner spot on the continent.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139154/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sheriff Folarin receives funding from organisation. Institute of International Education. Carnegie Corporation. </span></em></p>Nigeria’s pre-eminent position in Africa, lost to corruption and political patronage over the years, can be regained by putting its house in order.Sheriff Folarin, Professor of International Relations, Covenant UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.