Race and African Studies

The birth of African studies in the West is an exploration of Africa, a racialized continent and subject that was explored, othered, and exploited. Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal divided Africa, lumped together people who had no business being together and attempted to destroy their culture and replace them with theirs. The divide-and-rule and restructuring were done to gain control and it would not end there. Race was created to justify the colonialist’s inhumane enterprise. The enterprise would have been disrupted if area studies like the African Studies had not been created to continue to allow them to describe Africa as they would in the face of changing realities -The realities were the world wars and the fight for independence in Africa.  Africa was described as inferior through the erasure of its voice and studies were carried out to exercise a different form of power where history is recorded by the powerful as though Africa did not exist before their arrival.

Mbembe (2017) stated that race as a term was created and used to describe a group that is seen as a danger that one must avoid or subdue. While ‘black’ is used to transform Africa and Africans into objects and sites of extraction, ‘white’ is used to represent purity and knowledge. Africans in the diaspora were exploited for free labor to build resources they had no claim to and Africans on the continent were research subjects. African Studies was a discipline to better understand and categorize Africa, and race and its different forms continue to be a major theme in African studies even after many decades.  The reasons for this are: on one hand the effects of racism as postcolonial studies have shown and the persistence of racism and neocolonialism. Racial issues are therefore a significant aspect that intersects themes in African Studies. For example, popular arts, economy, social stratification in terms of politics, economy, gender, and gender role, literature can be examined through the racial lens.

            Race remains an object of control in African Studies as reflected in the creation and continued privileging of white scholarship in the African Studies Association. Amory (1997) and Alleman (2019) reported the white Africanist enterprise of the African Studies Association that excluded blacks and African people with the claim that they cannot be objective. Herkovist’s blatant racism was rooted in and supported by the institutionalized power to control the narratives about Africa. This imperial belief led to severing the connection between African Studies and Afro-American Studies- another employment of the divide-and-rule tactic.  This speaks to their fundamental notion that Africans are intellectually inferior, a claim with which they have placed themselves at the top of the chain. Colonialists thrive by spreading their beliefs and enforcing them through religion culture politics, and economy, even within the African continent. The American-style recolonization of underrepresenting knowledge production shapes the thinking of students who are in the discipline.

            Africans and people of African descent have pushed against the one-man story and continue to re-invent narratives around Africa. An earlier movement is the negritude which brought to the fore black excellence. There are Africanists like Ngugi wa Thiongo who took a more radical stance by rejecting the colonial language and there are those who study Africa through a neutral lens like Olaniyan or Gilroy. While the past cannot be forgotten, one must not be blind to the changing terrain- the blurred lines between geographies, languages, cultures, and ideologies.

 

References

Amory, Deborah (1997) “African Studies as an American Institution,” in Anthropological Locations: boundaries and grounds of a field science, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., University of California Press, 102-116.

Allman, Jean (2019) “#Herskovits Must Fall? A Meditation on Whiteness, African Studies, and the Unfinished Business of 1968,” African Studies Review 62 (3): 6-39

Mbembe, Achille (2017) Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press: Durham