In the past year, protests have rocked South Africa's university campuses, as they have in the US. The student movements known as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall are not simply or only about free education but also about freedom of education and have included repeated calls for the ‘decolonization' of the University and its curricula. These movements thus, among other things, confront the legacy of racism in society and its institutions and knowledge systems, and follow a long history of anti-racism and struggle. In this they resonate strongly with #BlackLivesMatter and its organization, movement, and rallying cry for racial justice in the US.
But this is not just about a hashtag …
In this course we look to the past and to History for explanations for the persistence of racial injustice in the present. The course takes as its point of departure the idea that a new global world order emerged with the age of European expansion, exploration, and conquest. It is a global world order in which - via slavery and colonialism - race becomes one of the foundational categories upon which modernity is built and in which the histories of those conquered and enslaved are threatened with extinction and erasure.
In the attempt to undo this legacy of destruction, the course therefore offers a general, introductory survey of African history from earliest times. It begins with a critical examination of how we view Africa and its past, and the ways in which European, American, and African scholars have debated the very meaning of ‘Africa.' It also challenges Western depictions of Africa as the ‘dark continent' by showing that African peoples had vibrant cultures and sophisticated technologies, participated in far-reaching commercial and political networks, and maintained dynamic (and internally differentiated) social systems for centuries before the arrival of Europeans on African shores. We will explore Africa's enormously rich and diverse pre-colonial past, paying particular attention to material and social change and the ways in which both ruling elites and ‘ordinary' women and men - farmers, herders, traders, slaves - helped to shape their worlds.
The course also introduces the trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves, how it developed hand in hand with (indeed, depended on) negative and inaccurate images of Africa, many of which persist to this day in our understanding of race and which often find expression in racism. We will also address the question of reparations, and the difficult question of African involvement in the slave trade, in the context of local and global processes of economic and political change and the efforts of African elites (old and new) to control their destinies in a transformed world system.
Students are encouraged to consider how colonial bias and racism among other things have shaped and politicized knowledge production about and in Africa; and how the dearth of traditional archival sources (particularly in non-literate societies or communities) have forced historians of Africa to look to the work, methods, insights and contributions of other disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology. Students will be introduced to examples of work from these fields and asked to explore their methodologies, evidence and arguments.
You need have no prior knowledge of the subject, just interest and enthusiasm. A full syllabus describing lectures, discussions, readings and films will be available at the beginning of the semester.