Events Calendar

9th African History Workshop: Greater NY Area

Friday, March 27, 2015, 08:15am - 05:00pm

 


 

Programme

Friday, March 27, 2015

Alexander Library – Teleconference Lecture Hall, 4th Floor

169 College Avenue

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

The Rutgers University History Department, Center for African Studies, and the

Center for Middle Eastern Studies

pdf [FLYER] (399 KB)

 

8:15-9:00             Light Breakfast

9:00                       Welcome

 

9:00 – 10:15 Panel I : Youth and Seniority: Historical and Contemporary Expressions

  • Louis Gosselin (Rutgers University)Young Catholic Students in Burkina Faso: From Elite Certainties to Uncertain Futures (1948-2015)
  • Laura Phillips (New York University) Principals, Chiefs and School Committees: The Localisation of Rural School Administration in Lebowa, South Africa, 1972 – 1990
  • Morgan Robinson (Princeton University) Msimulizi: 'The Narrator' and the Students of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, 1864-1900
  • Cati Coe (Rutgers University) Old Age Care in Southern Ghana in the 1860s

 

10-15-10:45 Coffee Break

 

10:45-12:00 Panel II Nationalism – Constituting the ‘Nation’  

  • Bedward, Moyagaye (Rutgers) A History of Absence: On Former slaves communities in the Struggle for Moroccan Nationalism and State Formation
  • Matt Swagler (Columbia) Decolonization’s Discontents: The African Independence Party and the Origins of Post-colonial Opposition in Senegal.
  • Keren Weitzber ( University of Pennsylvania) Self-Determination or Separatism?: Internationalizing the Struggle for Pan-Somali Nationalism in Northern Kenya (1960-63)
  • Jeremy Aaron Dell (University of Pennsylvania) The Eternal Agitator”: Cheikh Anta Mbacké’s Exile to Segu and the Early Years of the Post-Bamba Muridiyya

 

12:00-1:45 Lunch

 

1:45-3:00 Panel III Popular Struggles Within and Against the Post Colonial State

  • Daly, Samuel Fury Childs (Columbia University) Fraud and Forgery Cases from the Special Tribunal of Biafra
  • Rachael Kantrowitz, (New York University) Between Church, State and the Post colony: Catholic Education in Senegal and Benin  
  • Geoffrey Traugh, (New York University) - Incentivizing Peasants: Planners, Farmers, and Markets in Postcolonial Malawi

 

3:00-3: 30 Coffee Break

 

3:30-4:45 Panel IV: Reflections on Violence and Dispossession: Identity, Gender and Sexuality

  • Efeoghene J. Igor (Yale ) - Rethinking the Egalitarian Potential of Post-Apartheid South Africa: Zanele Muholi’s Intervention
  • Meredeth Turshen, Marc D. Weiner and Orin T. Puniello (E.J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University) Fertility under Assault: Natality in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in a Time of Conflict
  • Twagira, Benjamin (Boston University) - Women Protecting Urban Homes: Gender and Militarization in the City of Kampala, ca. 1966-1986
  • Sarah Lorya (The New School)- Examining South Sudanese Identity in America

 

PARTICIPANTS' ABSTRACTS

 

Name: Moya Bedward

Affiliation: Rutgers University

Title: A History of Absence: On Former slaves communities in the Struggle for Moroccan Nationalism and State Formation

Abstract: The history of Moroccan nationalism and Moroccan identity is conspicuously silent on the contributions of former slaves, namely the Haratins and other sub-Saharan African communities to the formation of the national civic community. Despite the long residential tenure of these two groups in Morocco as slaves, their acceptance as indigenous citizens of Morocco does not extend beyond the social and cultural spheres. This omission occurred in part because of the ways the anti-colonial and liberation movements came to define themselves: firstly Arab and Islamic, secondly Berber, and to a lesser extent Jewish. This definition relegates all other groups and their contributions to the social, political, cultural and economic development of the country to positions of obscurity and liminality. The analysis and definition of these groups solely in relation to slavery has circumscribed their agency as shapers of history in their own right. The Haratin as well as sub-Saharan Africans did not simply occupy spaces of marginality as domestics, concubines or agricultural laborers – the primary roles of slaves in Morocco – but they also occupied positions of power. One of the most obvious positions of power was as members of the Sultan’s guard, the Abid Bukhari, a group whose influence last for at least two centuries, declining only in the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite being subjects of a long, albeit not well-developed body of research, scholars’ consideration of Haratins and sub-Saharan Africans exclusively in relation to slavery has consequently shaped their marginality, and by implication their racialization, as resulting exclusively from the experience of slavery. The focus on slavery as the main mode through which these groups are constructed as racial “others” obscures the variety of ways in which this racial marginalization occurred at different historical periods. One of the most important is the nationalist period. This paper seeks to correct this omission by exploring one aspect of Haratins’ participation nationalist period by examining their role in a 1952 national labor riot in Casablanca.

Name: Cati Coe

Affiliation: Rutgers University

Title: Old Age Care in Southern Ghana in the 1860s

Abstract: In contemporary Ghana, old age seems to be in crisis. Ghanaians are concerned that familial practices of caring for the elderly are under strain, leading to the abandonment or neglect of aged relatives. This paper explores what can be gleaned about old age care in southern Ghana in the 1860s from the reports of European missionaries and African Christians affiliated with the Basel Mission, which suggest a different set of dilemmas around old age care. In particular, I draw on a description of a man, a slave, from Akyem in 1866 who wanted to convert to Christianity. However, he delayed doing so because he could not imagine who would care for him in his old age if he gave up his own slaves, a requirement of his conversion. Finally, he hit upon a solution: to marry! This description raises questions about who is obligated to provide care; how more marginal elderly, like slaves, obtained care; and how men strategized about the provision of their care, including through kinship obligations, domestic servitude, and marriage. I contextualize this incident through other Basel Mission documents and reports to argue that although daughters were important in old age care, as they are today, other categories of persons, such as spouses and slaves, have also provided elder care in southern Ghana. I propose the terms care-work, care-scripts, and care-conscription to include the ways in which non-kin or those “like” kin become involved in the work of making sustaining individuals across the life course.

Name: Samuel Fury Childs Daly

Affiliation: Columbia University

Title: Fraud and Forgery Cases from the Special Tribunal of Biafra

Abstract: In this presentation, I will use a neglected and endangered body of legal records from the former Republic of Biafra (1967-1970) to investigate the relationship between law, citizenship, and the emergence of particular types of crime in independent Nigeria. These documents vividly show how Biafra’s legal system operated, and how the conduct of the war influenced both the incidence of crime, and the ways in which crime was defined in Biafra. Beginning in the 1970s, Nigeria became known for fraud and armed violent crime, and historians and anthropologists have struggled to account for that apparent surge in criminality. Using records from Biafra’s common law courts and military tribunals, I argue that the fraud, forgery, and armed violence which became endemic in Nigeria in this period are linked to the circumstances of the civil war. Biafra had declared independence in the name of preserving order and creating a citizenry of and before the law, but the result of the war and particularly the Nigerian blockade was to create the conditions where various forms of illegality and what was often classed as “disorder”– forgery, armed robbery, and the category of fraudulent acts collectively known as “419” – could flourish. Not coincidentally, these were the same kinds of misconduct that would become major features of everyday life in postwar Nigeria.

Name: Jeremy Dell

Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania

Title: ‘The Eternal Agitator': Cheikh Anta Mbacké's Exile to Segu and the Early Years of the Post-Bamba Muridiyya

Abstract:Amadu Bamba is without a doubt Senegal's most famous exile. His successive deportations to Gabon and Mauritania, followed by a final period of house arrest in the colonial entrepôt of Diourbel, have offered historians a prism through which to view shifts in the French Empire's policy vis-à-vis its Muslim subjects (not to mention the trajectory of one of West Africa's major Sufi groups, the Muridiyya). But Bamba was not the last Murid exile. Though his return to Senegal is often viewed by scholars as evidence of a rapprochement between the colonial administration and its Murid subjects, it was only three years after Bamba's death, in 1930, that his younger brother, Mame Cheikh Anta Mbacké, was deported to the city of Segu in what was then French Soudan (today's Republic of Mali). This paper provides an account of the circumstances of this exile. But it also seeks to do more. Colonial officials viewed Mbacké as a source of dissension within the Muridiyya at a moment when they worried the order would break apart into rival factions. Contemporary Murid accounts, starting with the "Elegy of Mukhtar Mbacké" written by the poet Moussa Ka in 1943, have emphasized the steadfastness of the Murid community in the face of continued repression from the colonial administration. Accordingly, this paper demonstrates that exile is a generative phenomenon, forcing communities to reconstitute themselves while also laying bare the way specific narratives emerge at particular moments, only to be later overtaken by others.

Name: Louis Gosselin

Affiliation: Rutgers University

Title: Young Catholic Students in Burkina Faso: From Elite Certainties to Uncertain Futures (1948-2015)

Abstract: This presentation, which is part of a larger ongoing postdoctoral project on religious intellectuals, will analyze the evolution of the Young Catholic Students (Jeunesse étudiante catholique, JEC) in Burkina Faso from its first installment by missionaries in 1948 to 2015. This analysis is based on oral histories made with current and former JEC members, and on archival material. The JEC was set up as a tool to keep the church's influence over the new rising elite that was being formed in the rapidly growing school system in the 40s and 50s. In the late colonial and early postcolonial era, the JEC effectively served as a springboard for the rising Catholic elite, and the organization's influence was pretty much unrivaled among young intellectuals. However, from the late 60s to the 80s, younger generations of Catholic activists faced new challenges as perspectives for upward mobility became thinner for students and discontent grew. This led to the rise of rival organizations among students, mostly from left-wing political organizations. During that period, the JEC was split between two trends: one that tried to articulate the Catholic social doctrine with leftist principles, and the other that stressed, on the contrary, the spiritual message of the Church and a more conservative social position, under the pressure of the Catholic hierarchy. From 1990 onwards, the JEC became more and more marginalized, a trend that mirrored the increasing hardship faced by students in the face of shrinking employment opportunities and a general discredit of the white collar figure. In that context, the Church diversified its action towards youth and increasingly targeted older generations of intellectuals. Moreover, Muslim and Evangelical students organizations became more and more active and influential, thus breaking the Catholic monopoly on elite formation. This led to the JEC becoming one of many organizations that competed for students activism.

Name: Efeoghene Igor

Affiliation: Yale University

Title: Rethinking the Egalitarian Potential of Post-Apartheid South Africa: Zanele Muholi’s Intervention

Abstract: Despite the   racial   egalitarian promise of   post-apartheid South   Africa, persistent heterosexist and masculinist nationalisms characterize the period. Zanele Muholi’s photographic series (2006-2014), Faces and Phases, helps audiences question the patriarchal logic that limits social and political progress in contemporary South Africa. Muholi’s project—to create an archive of black lesbians—breaches zones of confinement that relegate black lesbians to the   infertile margins of South   African society. This paper situates Muholi’s series   as a vernacular response to the persistent heterosexist and masculinist nationalisms that characterized anti-apartheid activism. By locating Muholi’s work within previous conversations about anti-racism and citizenship, I will reframe Muholi’s work as a critique   of mainstream antiapartheid discourse in the late 1960s and 1970s. By looking at how female sexual passivity articulates Afrikaner, antiapartheid, and post-apartheid nationalisms Muholi’s series Faces and Phases provides an entry point to examine the failure of the mainstream liberation movement to deliver equality for all. This paper will argue that Muholi's work foregrounds women’s sexual nonconformity in order to indict the Constitution’s failure to protect black lesbians from brutal patriarchal and homophobic violence.

My   research examines   how   Muholi’s   work   illuminates   the   central   paradox of antiapartheid activism in the 1960s and 1970s—racially emancipatory movements arrested by heteronormative ideologies. My analysis suggests that liberation actually   perpetuated the subordination of black lesbians, ascribing it to their lack of visibility in the national imagination. By making black lesbians visible, Muholi’s series,   Faces and Phases, inaugurates the social mobility of queer, racialized women in mainstream political discourse. My work focuses on how Muholi operationalizes the shift from nominal visibility to material visibility. By examining the photographs in the   series, interviews   conducted with Muholi, and   secondary sources, my research sheds light on the ways in which history, environment, and law collude to create a particular vision of nation.

Name: Rachel Kantrowitz

Affiliation: New York University

Title: Between Church, State, and the Postcolony: Catholic Education in Senegal and Benin

Abstract: This paper discusses Catholic schools in Senegal and Benin after independence. After the Second World War, the French created a development program called FIDES, and began investing heavily in West African Catholic schools. This practice continued after decolonization, when FIDES’ name was changed to Cooperation. I argue that while under the colonial period French officials saw schools as a primary way to impart French culture and language, after independence they saw schools as one of the only politically viable ways to continue to influence their former colonies, and maintain good Franco-African relations. France also moved away from the colonial-era idea of its ability to help develop West Africa and placed the onus of development on West African countries. I look at what this meant to a range of French and African actors: clergy, lay teachers, educational experts, international Catholic organizations, and the children who attended these schools. I consider the role of coopérants, those who came to West Africa from France to work for Cooperation. While under the colonial era education comprised a relatively small portion of France’s overall development budget, after independence they dedicated more and more resources to education, and a majority of the coopérants who came to West Africa worked in schools. I consider the tensions that arose between local teachers and coopérants. I conclude by a consideration of what this does for our understanding of postcolonial West Africa, and how this helps explain why these schools still operate today.

Name: Sarah Lorya

Affiliation: The New School

Title: Examining South Sudanese Identity in America

Abstract:This research will explore identity formation among South Sudanese migrants in the United States, specifically looking at the layers of identities that they construct and maintain. The impact of factors such as background, values, religion, and culture will be explored. The research will also further examine how South Sudanese in the Diaspora are able to form political identities, as well as look at how they are able to combine their “old” identity with new descriptions in order to construct a new identity as hyphenated Americans (SSA or South Sudanese-Americans). This study will also consider factors such as age of arrival, length of stay in the United States, and status of citizenship. I will argue that these factors can have a significant effect on self-perceptions on what it means to be South Sudanese.

            Exploring the dynamics of the South Sudanese-American identity is relevant for various reasons. The overwhelming vote of 98.6% from South Sudanese globally to declare South Sudan as a new state indicates the significance of this succession. The majority of Sudanese from the south have always believed that they have a separate culture, beliefs, and traditions that differ significantly from those in the north. Prior to the succession, it was very common for many Sudanese to identify as South Sudanese as opposed to Sudanese. Historically, the tension has created long civil wars and massive violence that has plagued the country for decades. The creation of South Sudan has had a tremendous effect on how these individuals view themselves; for the first time, individuals can officially refer to themselves as Southern Sudanese, as opposed to Sudanese from the south, and have a country that they can truly call their own.

Name: Laura Phillips

Affiliation: New York University

Title: Principals, Chiefs and School Committees: The Localisation of Rural School Administration in Lebowa, South Africa, 1972 - 1990

Abstract: This presentation will examine the processes driving the making of local school administrations in the Mapulaneng District in the former Lebowa Bantustan. It examines the development of the school as a key site of power struggles, by considering the changing relationship between chiefs, principals and school committee members. I make my argument in three steps: firstly I show how the both chieftainship and the rural school became responsive to the South African state, and later, the Bantustan administration. I then discuss what this meant for the governance of education in the early Lebowa period from 1972 to 1980. Finally, I conclude with an examination of how the political environment and practices of power produced new forms of governance by the 1980s. By positioning the rural Bantustan school in the changing political and moral economies of the era, I show how Bantustan schools became ‘localised’ with significant effect for a later period of education.

Name: Morgan Robinson

Affiliation: Princeton University

Title: Msimulizi: 'The Narrator' and the Students of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, 1864-1900

Abstract: When the British members of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa arrived on Zanzibar in 1864, they were under no illusions that they would succeed in converting the islands' Muslim population. Indeed, for the first several decades of the UMCA's existence, the majority of the mission's converts and the bulk of its students were people who had been captured by slave traders in central and eastern Africa and subsequently 'rescued' by Royal Navy patrols along the coast. But over the course of the next several decades, the UMCA would open several stations on the mainland, from Magila in what is today north-east Tanzania, to Likoma Island on Lake Nyasa (Malawi) on the border between modern-day Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique. Despite their wide dispersal, however, UMCA adherents actively participated in creating and maintaining a close sense of community, a worldview which spanned these distances. One source through which we can clearly see this happening is the student-run newsletter Msimulizi ('The Narrator') which was printed on Zanzibar but contributed to by students from all of the mission's stations. Through a careful study of this mission-student publication, I will demonstrate how the very non-sacred, often mundane stories which were included in the newsletter created a distinct worldview and sense of sacred space among UMCA adherents.

Name: Matt Swagler

Affiliation: Columbia University

Title: Decolonization’s Discontents: The African Independence Party and the Origins of Post- colonial Opposition in Senegal

Abstract:In this paper, I argue that the Parti Africain de l’Indépendance (PAI) played a crucial role in post-­‐colonial opposition politics in Senegal, despite being outlawed in 1960, after less than three years of existence. The PAI was founded in Senegal in 1957 to advocate for the immediate independence of French colonies in Sub-­‐Saharan Africa.   But just ten days after Senegal became an independent state, the government of Mamadou Dia and Léopold Sedar Senghor banned the Senegalese branch of the PAI, and the party was forced underground, until it regained legal status in 1976.

Using archival research and interviews conducted in Senegal and France, I address two main issues in the history of the PAI. First, I show that PAI leaders were integrally connected to trade union and student militants in Senegal in the late 1950s whose vision of independence stemmed from principles of Marxism and Third World solidarity. These organizations challenged Senghor and Dia from the outset, and the government responded with a systematic campaign of repression. Second, I look at how PAI leaders used the connections they had established before being banned to maintain a secret organization in illegality, and train a new circle of student radicals in Dakar. Though the PAI was no longer a public organization, these militants helped form new student organizations at the University of Dakar, and initiated a student strike in 1968 that transformed into an urban rebellion, nearly toppling Senghor’s government. By looking at the history of the PAI during its period of illegality, we can trace the continuity between radical anti-­‐colonial organizations and post-­‐colonial opposition in Senegal.

Name: Geoffrey Traugh

Affiliation: New York University

Title: Incentivizing Peasants: Planners, Farmers, and Markets in Postcolonial Malawi

Abstract: Between 1968 and 1981, the World Bank’s Lilongwe Land Development Program was the centerpiece of Malawi’s agriculture-driven national development strategy. Starting with Lilongwe, the program aimed to rapidly modernize the rural economy by introducing land titles, improved seed and fertilizer, easy credit, and ready markets. The program’s design was informed by development economists’ recent embrace of the theory of the “rational peasant,” whose agricultural strategies were calculating rather than conservative. Planners believed that an integrated package of inputs, services, and infrastructure would incentivize farmers to shift from subsistence to commercial agricultural production. As this paper shows, program resources did indeed reshape agricultural production in Lilongwe, but often did so in ways that defied official expectations of agrarian change. Farmers worked new resources into established practices— improved seeds, fertilizers, and biocides issued on credit were all subjects of a thriving informal trade—that undermined projections of technology uptake, yield increases, and marketing returns. Taking official handwringing over “misused” credit packages as an entry point, this paper explores the tensions between planners’ notion of the “rational peasant” and farmers’ agricultural strategies under the Lilongwe Program. It argues that, in displacing history with a reductive typology, planners obscured the social dynamics of resource access to land, labor, and inputs. Working with program archives and oral histories, the paper looks specifically at how gendered conflicts over crop acreage, fertilizer, labor time, and money thwarted a decade-long campaign to incentivize commercial groundnut production.

Name: Meredeth Turshen, Marc D. Weiner and Orin T. Puniello,

Affiliation: E.J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University

Title: Fertility under Assault: Natality in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in a Time of Conflict

Abstract: Fertility rates have dropped in most countries but the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains an exception with a woman having on average 6.3 children during her lifetime. In this paper we ask how, in the eastern provinces of the Congo where armed conflict has affected people’s lives for more than two decades, fertility rates even higher than the national average can be explained. We examine the data from the most recent UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster survey, which included no questions about life in combat zones, and compare the findings with evidence of factors that depress fertility rates: ongoing warfare, repeated population displacement, infrastructure destruction, high rates of rape, extreme poverty, chronic poor nutrition, poor health and health care, the prevalence of HIV, and high abortion rates. Crisis-led fertility transition would lead us to expect falling fertility rates, but the UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster data leaves us with an unresolved paradox.

Name: Benjamin Twagira

Affiliation: Boston University

Title: Women Protecting Urban Homes: Gender and Militarization in the City of Kampala,1966-1986

Abstract: I propose to explores how women used gender to protect their families in wartime and militarized Kampala between 1966 and 1986. During this period the city became a space of war, and men were particularly vulnerable. Women's actions defy their popular portrayal as vulnerable individuals and men as protectors. Using oral testimonies I collected between 2013 and 2014, I will show how women indeed ensured the safety of all men in Kampala, not just their relatives. Women turned their homes into drinking spaces when bars became unsafe for men; wives took over duties that were traditionally men's; they cooked food and delivered it to men in their hiding places; importantly, women also devised ingenious ways of hiding men while avoiding the suspicion from military officials.

Beginning in 1966 militarization of Kampala neighborhoods caused insecurity for everyone living in the city. However, men's security particularly became precarious. In 1966 government soldiers attacked the palace of the Buganda Kingdom, which was located in the city of Kampala. The government formally abolished traditional kingdoms, sending Buganda's king into exile. Then government soldiers took over three enormous spaces that previously belonged to the kingdom and turned them into military establishments, a barracks, army headquarters, and an army shop. With this takeover, as many as 5,000 soldiers were living in a radius of three miles among an urban population. The army patrolled the streets, arresting men suspected of being Buganda Kingdom loyalists. These neighborhoods continued to be highly militarized through the infamous Idi Amin regime (1971-1979) until 1986 when the current government came to power. The militarization of these neighborhoods made them prime targets of rebel groups at different times, since the nearby military installations were the main defenses guarding the instruments of power in the city. Soldiers throughout this period responded to rebel activity anywhere by raiding these neighborhoods and rounding up men as alleged collaborators. Many women successfully ensured that their husbands, brothers, and sons were not swept up in one of these raids.

Name:Keren Weitzberg, PhD

Affiliation:University of Pennsylvania

Title: Self-Determination or Separatism?: Internationalizing the Struggle for Pan-Somali Nationalism in Northern Kenya (1960-63)

Abstract: In the early 1960s, as Kenyan nationalist leaders and colonial officials negotiated the terms of British withdrawal from the country, representatives from the Northern Frontier District (NFD) demanded to secede and unify with neighboring Somalia. When British support for secession waned, leaders from the NFD attempted to bring their demands before the United Nations and petitioned the Organization of African Unity through representatives in Somalia. They also appealed to a wider audience in the UK, Somalia, and the Arab world and fought attempts by British officials to divorce the NFD question from the international arena. Whereas the Colonial Office tried to treat the NFD issue as an “internal,” bilateral affair between Somalia and Kenya, northern leaders framed their struggle as a matter of imperial responsibility and self-determination. This paper will examine how NFD leaders internationalized their struggle for independence in the 1960s. Like other separatist movements of the late colonial era, NFD representatives ran up against African leaders who sought to protect the sanctity of colonial boundaries. Unable to gain traction on the national level, they instead mobilized on the regional and international level. While African nationalism was often strengthened by transnational linkages, attempts by marginalized groups to internationalize their claims also held the potential to threaten the legitimacy of nascent African nationalist movements.

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