I think I’ve hit on a catchy structure for a modest reshuffling of my Honors seminar in Colonial Africa. Much of my reading list will remain the same, but this restructuring is designed to make the way I look at the historiography much more concrete and transparent to the students. Basically, I want to organize the syllabus in terms of what strike me as the Big Questions that sustain historical and anthropological study of the colonial and postcolonial periods. I’m not sure that for each week there’s a single major book or article that will frame an answer to the question: these questions operate at different scales and with different degrees of historiographical density.
I’m curious to hear whether there are other questions you’d add to the list, or variant formulations of them that you prefer.
Keep in mind that one thing I really want to explore in my seminar is the metaquestion of whether colonialism per se was important or powerful in shaping 20th Century Africa. I want to stay open to the school of thought that suggests that there are other transformative influences that have been far more powerful (capitalism, “modernity”), to the school of thought that suggests that it’s actually the prior integration of African societies into global structures between 1450 and 1850 that’s more powerful, and to the school of thought that suggests that deep indigenous structures (political, environmental, social, cultural) remain more determinative of daily life and social outcomes in contemporary African societies than influences from the past century.
A lot of these questions can be answered well with skeptical reformulations. E.g., you could say in response to the question, “Why were European societies able to subject African societies to formal colonial rule with such rapidity?” that they weren’t able to do so, that the colonial state had little real authority outside of administrative centers for twenty or thirty years after lines were drawn on the map in Berlin, save for occasional displays of spectacular violence.
The more I think about it, the more I think that this list would also make a great premise for a catchy short book of essays. I’m feeling kind of pulled by the idea. This is kind of my worst habit, thinking of ideas for books rather than finishing almost-done ones, but I can’t really help myself.
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What was the state of African societies in 1860? Are there any useful generalizations to be made in response to that question? What was the relationship between African societies and larger global economic and political systems in 1860?
Why did the “Scramble for Africa” happen? Why were European societies able to subject African societies to formal colonial rule with such rapidity?
Did the activities and character of global capitalism within Africa change markedly after the Scramble for Africa, and was that a consequence of colonialism if so?
Did colonial authorities exercise meaningful political and social control over African societies after 1880, and if so, what kind of control? How did colonial administration actually work, and to what ends did it work? Did the purpose or function of colonial rule change over time?
How did the social structure of African societies change during the colonial era? How much of that change was directly attributable to colonialism itself?
How comparable were the experiences of different African societies during the colonial era? Did the nationality of the colonizer make a significant difference? Did the nature of colonial authority vary for other reasons? Did African societies become more alike or similar in the first half of the 20th Century?
Does the nature of colonial rule in Africa pose special historiographical or methodological problems for historical study?
How did the content and character of cultural practice and everyday life change during the colonial era, and how much was colonialism responsible for that change?
How did Africans think about or understand colonialism? How important was it to them? What social and political developments in African societies were primarily a response to or critique of colonial authority?
What are the social and political origins of African nationalism? How did it relate to other social and political movements in Africa during the “high imperial” era from 1919-1945?
Why did formal colonial rule in Africa come to an end after World War II?
What primarily shaped the evolution of the postcolonial state and postcolonial African societies in the first two decades of independence? (1960-1980)? Did the relationship between African societies and the global system change significantly during that period?
Why has much of postcolonial Africa suffered a series of recurrent political, economic and social catastrophes since 1980? Are all of those problems and failures in fact linked or connected?
Are colonial and postcolonial useful or meaningful periodizations of African history?
Perhaps it is not relevant to your course or you have other reasons for not mentioning it explicitly, but one topic that is highly relevant to your high-level questions is the role of religious missionary ractivities. In many African nations today, the only non-state actors with national presence and with an educated cadre are religious organizations. (In the last years of Mobutu’s rule in Zaire, for example, the Jesuits were running the civil service.)
Some lower-level questions would be (I am sure you can think of many more):
– How has missionary religion impacted life before, during and after colonial rule?
– How did western mission activities interact with traditional culture and religion?
– Were there differences between countries missioned mostly by Protestants versus those where Catholics dominated? I witnessed the ill-feeling and rivalry between Catholics and Protestants that still existed in Lesotho in the 1980s, almost a century after the first missionaries arrived.
– Why did some regions see the rise of traditional-Christian hybrid churches, such as the African Zionist churches of southern Africa.
Another topic of relevance is the relationship between colonial rule in Africa and rule by the same powers elsewhere, leading, for example, to the movement of Indians, Malays and Chinese people from British colonies in Asia to British colonies in East and Southern Africa. This topic is also relevant to the resistance to colonial rule, most famously in the case of Gandhi, who became political active in South Africa.
I was thinking of fitting missionaries in under several of these questions. But if I were to drill down a bit, there’s a set of slightly more specific questions that have a huge historiography built up around them. At the top of the list is, “Why did Africans convert to Christianity in such numbers?” and “How should we think about missionaries in the wider context of colonial society?”
The comparative question is a huge, important one but I think it requires a separate seminar of its own to be serviced well.
The big picture is depressingly simple.
European interaction with Africa falls into two paradigms: colonial (explorers, soldiers, merchants, settlers) and missionary. Before 1850, the pattern is almost exclusively colonial. Between 1850 and 1950, missionaries and colonialists contended. After 1950, the pattern is almost exclusively missionary.
Postcolonial Africa is simply the triumph of the missionary paradigm – in its secular, American Unitarian-Quaker form. Your so-called development expert is a (Protestant) missionary in disguise. Hello, Mrs. Jellyby.
The easiest way to see this is to read the colonialists, specifically their comments on the missionary paradigm. Many colonialists explained that, if you gave Africa over to the missionary, exactly what has happened would happen. See, for example, Burton’s discussion of Sierra Leone in Wanderings in West Africa. If there’s any 19th-century country that resembled what Africa has become in the caring hands of you humanitarian gentlemen, it is Sierra Leone.
And I hope you won’t forget the tremendous human diversity of sub-Saharan Africa – certainly our most diverse continent, at least from a biological perspective.
Wicherts et al in Intelligence have just published a tremendous meta-analysis of studies on the cognitive dexterity of this diverse population. Worth a look.
The previous figure, due to Lynn – who is, let’s face it, a racist – is 70 or under. Heroic statistical efforts on the part of Wicherts et al, who are (so far as I can tell – but surely the point could stand more investigation) not racists, bring it up to 82.
It is certainly possible to write the history of Africa assuming that Africans are in fact Koreans. Little new can be done in this department, however. The scholars of the 20th century have already explored it to perfection. As for the actual history of Africa, so far as I can tell it is largely unknown.
(Anyone here read much Stuart Cloete? Stuart Cloete simply rocks.)
A good critical thread on the Wicherts paper is at Gene Expression.
(Note that Harvard has just created a new Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. In case you’re not quite sure what “human evolutionary biology” is, it’s pretty much the same thing you used to call “scientific racism.” A good primer is the new Cochran-Harpending book, The 10,000-Year Explosion. Note that during the aforementioned 10,000 years, Homo sapiens was not exactly a single homogeneous gene pool.)
Here is a good exercise for you, Professor Burke: how would a colonialist answer these questions – all of which are excellent and to the point?
Surely, as a historian of Africa, you study colonialism. In that case, you must want to know what colonialists were thinking. Since you are not a colonialist, you must have different answers to these questions. Perhaps you could ask a progressive development expert to answer them, then ask a colonialist to answer them, then compare the answers.
Don’t you think this would be a fun exercise? Unfortunately, all the colonialists are dead – you seem to have killed them. Or defeated them, anyway. What a bother! Oh, well, we can always deconstruct them.
However, I’ve been reading the colonialists, although hardly with any depth, and I can answer all these questions if you want. I’m afraid most of my answers are quite short, however. And predictable. You may find it a more useful exercise to just imagine them.
The questions are great–and the book may have already been written by someone else. Check out Adu Boahen’s classic collection of talks, _African Perspectives on Colonialism_ (1987).
There’s been plenty of research since then, but Boahen’s core of synthetic analysis stands up well, and remains an excellent point of departure for my students. The book’s also highly readable, which is a big advantage.
It isn’t perfect–there’s an explicit whiggish pan-Africanism. I’ve yet to find its equal as a primer, though.
The Boahen book is a very good example of these questions as a book, yeah. I think if I were going to tackle something like this, it would be a) from a perspective other than Boahen’s; b) with a mind to the historiography since 1987.
Sounds good, but raises another question worth thinking about: Boahen came from a straightforward and explicit perspective, and it’s easy (and productive) for students to identify and critique. And he handled these subtle questions with the sorts of waves of detail and fact that impress students about how Africa really has a history. Real people lived there. They were creative, made choices, and acted as people, not just heros or victims. Much of the scholarship since 1987, though, consists of an awful lot of historians saying “it’s more complicated even than that” and other things that are well documented, but point toward the sort of ambiguity that in the classroom often leads students (especially less prepared ones) to conclude that historians know nothing, and that everything’s just a matter of opinion. And this isn’t exactly what most of us are about with these non-wikipediaable questions as issues of meaning and value rather than detail and evidence.
One of the questions I struggle over every time I put together a syllabus is how to balance out the need for students to understand that history includes facts and realities that they need to learn, as well as ambiguity, changing interpretations, and historical argumentation.
Obviously, students need both.
Perhaps the most constructive project would be to have students work out a research agenda: what would they need to know in order to come up with meaningful insights into your starting questions?
More constructively, I’d suggest you consider ending the semester with a couple weeks that suggested students test their interpretations of whether colonialism mattered by following along a couple of really big themes such as violence and gender. In other words, think about whether the insights developed help us understand change/continuity in the work done by gender, or the place of various sorts of violence in shaping power and experience.