As a starting point, I want to suggest that thinking Africa differently involves thinking outside of the framework of three existing discourses that currently structure the field. The first of these is colonial ethnography, in which Africa appears as the other of the Western self.
The image here is the image of the mirror: Africa functions as the mirror of Europe in its modern history. It tells us less about the purported subject of investigation than it does about the self doing the speaking, writing or imagining. Africa appears less as a solid object than it does as a sign, a site of projection or a territory of the imagination.
We see the word “Africa” in the title of a book, a movie or a research proposal and we expect a certain kind of story with a particular outcome, a particular kind of moral scripting. One of the most important works to explore and expose this form of representation was Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a work that founded a mini-industry in studies of colonialist discourse and postcolonial critique.
“Orientalism” is a relation of knowledge, but it is also a relation of power, not so much knowledge of as knowledge over. The line between knowledge of and knowledge over is a troubled and ambiguous one, particularly when the knowledge object is in a position of dependency. This is the deeper meaning of the knowledge/power “couplet”. It is not that knowledge legitimates power (although it often does) but that knowledge is power.
Knowledge over always includes forms of epistemic violence (that is, the violence of ways of knowing) — categorical exclusions and inclusions, the violent reshaping of subjectivities, refusals, marginalisations and disavowels — with dramatic consequences in the world. It is not that the world and our knowledge of it are separable entities.
Knowledge shapes or makes the world, or at least our world, the world that we know and inhabit. Put differently, when we speak of the politics of knowledge, the stakes could not be higher. By now, the outlines of approaches founded on difference as otherness and notions of the exotic have been well established. Yet they remain surprisingly present in public and popular culture, in the media, in tourist discourses on Africa and in think-tanks and policy circles.
Racism itself is one form of representation and identification founded on difference from the Western self. Here the body, rather than territory, functions as the site of difference. In a series of moves, bodies “raced” as black are assigned to a territory (Africa), invested with tropes of darkness, timelessness or mystery.
A densely overlapping set of meanings emerges that conditions everything that follows. In these terms, to write Africa differently is to write against the grain of a set of established meanings, deeply embedded metaphors and the tracks of certain familiar ideas that run in a single direction, stopping at all the familiar stations.
The second discourse that conditions contemporary approaches to Africa is an essentialising one that takes the terms and tropes of colonialist discourse and inverts them, valuing them positively. Here, a sense of community, closeness to nature, even a sense of rhythm — all features of colonialist discourses on Africa, where they denoted a lack of civilisation and the capacity for abstract thought — become positive features of lives described as African.
In these terms, Africa functions as a necessary corrective to the alienation of Western lives, a place of soul, family, nature, community and spirit. Historically speaking, the movement of ideas and writing known as Negritude was an important early formulation of this approach, founded in reaction to Western stereotypes of Africa.
At the same time, essentialist (or nativist) approaches have been a feature of the postcolonial academy, not only on the continent but also in the global North. In many cases, an Afrocentric project founded on notions of essential difference has been a starting point for a postcolonial knowledge agenda, guided and enabled through research institutes, funding initiatives and policy frameworks.
The question to ask of such approaches is how far they take us outside the framework of colonialist discourse (albeit in inverted form). Do they allow fresh thinking? Or do we find ourselves on the same tracks, running in the other direction?
If colonialist discourse continues to exist in a low-key and disreputable form, and if nativist approaches remain fairly marginal in the academy, then the third discourse conditioning approaches to Africa is by far the dominant contemporary approach to the continent and its phenomena — that is, a form of development discourse that sees Africa as a problem to be fixed. For this discourse, Africa functions as a sign of dysfunction and failure (a failure of modernisation, development and governance).
A small army of scholars, technicians, bureaucrats, managers, analysts, policy-makers, field workers and politicians works to offer solutions to these problems. Within the academy, this is expressed in the dominance of social-science approaches, based on an instrumentalist conception of knowledge.
The appeal of such approaches is the appeal of apparently manageable technical solutions to complex phenomena. It is also the appeal of knowledge, which appears as certain, fixed and definite. If the phenomena of life are often complex and unknowable, then knowledge of this kind represents itself as being incisive, able to cut through the muddle to bring clarity and solutions. Part of the contemporary ascendancy of such approaches is their claim to address African crises.
They value expert knowledge, offer tangible outcomes and lend themselves to the kinds of multidisciplinary teams now prized by grantmakers. In a recent committee meeting, a colleague of mine, a respected social scientist, declared that Africa currently exists as five essential problems. In his view, any form of enquiry that diverts attention from these five problems is a waste of time and money.
I forget exactly which problems he indicated, but HIV/Aids was one of them, as well as a crisis of governance and the need for foreign direct investment — the general drift of the argument will be familiar. Certainly this was a vision of Africa in the academy without room for the study of African literature, for example, political philosophy, archaeology or much of the rest of what falls under the heading of the humanities.
An obvious problem with such sterile approaches is a track record of disastrous failures in the name of development. We might say that Africa has been developed to death. Indeed, in one of its guises, colonialism was a form of development, characterised by the vigorous incursion of modern ideas and institutions into local contexts.
One of the ideas that confronts us is that modernity itself has been a phenomenon of two faces, that it demands a kind of double-entry bookkeeping — in the one column, racial slavery, colonialism/imperialism, genocide, mass poverty and environmental catastrophe; in the other, real advances in human health and wellbeing, undreamed-of freedoms, advances in knowledge and a set of aspirational conversations about social emancipation.
So, to return to my starting question: How do we break out of this conceptual bind, to think Africa differently? In an important essay (The Uncertainty of Africa in an Age of Certainty) the historian David William Cohen writes of the push in the United States academy post-9/11 for epistemologies of certainty — that is, simple, clear, direct and prescriptive readings of the world that can be translated into policy and action.
This is an enclosed moral universe, a world of us and them, in which you are either for us or against us (begging the question of who the us and them are in this formulation). Such developments, Cohen writes, are of particular interest to scholars of Africa, long subjected to a knowledge economy distinguished by two features — knowledge from outside and certain knowledge.
In relation to the first, Cohen writes: “The will to explain Africa from a distance is not simply a present condition but builds upon a constantly reproduced and hardly ever challenged invention of ‘Africa’ as an entity within a larger system of global fates and identities over the past 1 000 years. It is as old as travellers viewing and imagining Africa from the deck of a ship or from a well-worn path.”
On the second point, he writes: “Whatever the cause, the programme, the difficulty, or the issue at hand, the mandate for the production of knowledge has pressed for direct, simple and whole answers and accounts.
“In a consistent way, yet without formal orchestration, this mandate has been constructed by textbook publishers and curriculum committees (from the Afrocentric initiatives in the US and South Africa to Unesco and Cambridge and Oxford University Press editorial committees), by research groups seeking cases or analogies from ‘an African context’ — by international agencies and missionary organisations, by business and investment houses, promoters and advertisers, by investigative and legislative bodies — and by the information-gathering bodies on the African continent both during and after colonialism.”
The force of Cohen’s critique is contained in his argument that “the will to explain Africa from a distance — including sustaining race as a key referent — is substantially underwritten by economies of knowledge that speak closure, recognisable answers, simple conclusions, certainties.” Against this conception of certain knowledge, Cohen advocates the power of uncertainty, openness and questioning.
He writes: “Our position is that the power in events and in histories is constructed within, and often sustained, not so much through the constitution of answers or solutions, but rather in — interstitial and unfinished moments and contexts in which people and interests raise questions, and struggle over meaning — “Here uncertainty stands as an accessible and alternative political frame against the confidence underlying various development protocols, structural adjustment programmes, population-control campaigns, democratisation and civil-society initiatives, health interventions, and global campaigns against terrorism.”
The three discourses outlined above, which condition contemporary approaches to Africa, have in common the fact that they are all framed as certain knowledge (even as they take different positions around an insider/outsider dynamic).
How might we use Cohen’s provocative set of formulations to break free of their determining influence? Specifically, what would this entail for knowledge projects institutionalised in the academy under a set of disciplinary headings? Even as it points a possible way forward, Cohen’s essay trails a set of questions in its wake.
Nick Shepherd is associate professor of African Studies and Archaeology at the University of Cape Town and joint editor-in-chief of the journal Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress. He has co-authored books such as Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-Apartheid City and New South African Keywords. This article first appeared in Research Africa