By Sarah Aduke Ohiomah / August 15, 2020
“How do we study contemporary Africa from a global Black Studies framework?”
Hello Everyone! My name is Sarah Aduke Ohiomah, and I am here to discuss a topic that is often overlooked or hidden in academia and other discourses. When you think of African history, what are some prominent words that come to mind? Colonization? Imperialism? Slavery? If these are some of the words that popped into your head, I am not that surprised. Why is our primary knowledge about African history centered around the subjugation and degradation of its people? Why is it that Black/African Studies centralizes the voices/views of Europeans or white scholars? Why is it that we can never hear about African natives’ achievements without holding white people responsible for their success? These are all critical questions that have been asked often within the African diaspora. Although it is rarely discussed, there are many layers—that have lasted several centuries—that are incorporated into our current mindset about African history, culture, tradition, language, politics, etc. The truth is that the introduction of European imperialism caused a drastic shift in our views about the world and how we talk about them in academia in particular; So the question is: “How do we study contemporary Africa from a global Black Studies framework?”
Today, I will strictly focus on the need for change from Eurocentric knowledge production and vernacular in global Black Studies.
To do this, it takes a lot of work. We must acknowledge and comprehend the impact of all the oppressive systems (i.e. gender, class, race, religion) that have been brutally enforced since the colonial era by the Western world. We must ensure that African natives are in control of knowledge production within the field of Black Studies. We must alter our vernacular when writing and speaking about Africa because we should never give power to Africa’s colonial perspective. We must educate ourselves about pre-colonial Africa in order to critically analyze the changes that were made as a result of European rule. Once we acknowledge all these corrupt systems and mechanisms derived from the West, we can better understand the continent and steer away from the harmful, inaccurate stereotypes that control Africa’s narrative today. Today, I will strictly focus on the need for change from Eurocentric knowledge production and vernacular in global Black Studies.
African history is essential for understanding the countries across the globe that have grown around it. For centuries, African voices have been absent due to colonization, which involved the historical erasure of archives and the instillment of fear that prevented them from sharing their stories. Colonists erased the stories of their victims and contrived to create stories that denied their guilt. According to Bade Onimode, colonial rule was based on establishing dominance in these societies. He states that “the expansion of capital, inequality, domination, and exploitation are the fundamental variables of imperialism” (Onimode Chapter 1, 3). With that being said, eliminating the voices of the oppressed allowed for an increased sense of superiority/dominance from these imperialists (Onimode Chapter 1, 3). From the perspective of the oppressor, African history makes it immensely difficult to fully grasp the reality of the events that occurred because it glorifies the actions of the colonists and invalidates the natives’ struggles. It is crucial for the inclusion of African voices, and that an essential part of studying African history.
We must look at how knowledge is produced, and vernacular is used to talk about Africa. I will start by saying that…it is all highly racialized. Jemima Pierre’s The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race explain all of the African Studies Traditions. But I would mainly like to focus on the Africanist perspective. According to Pierre, the Africanist tradition “has held near-hegemonic study over the study of Africa since the last half of the twentieth century” (Pierre Chapter 7, 188). The Africanist perspective was “built upon ‘intellectual, material, and racial pillars’ of U.S. national politics” (Pierre Chapter 7, 188). It meant that the West actively controlled much of the literature that was written about Africa and control how knowledge was being distributed. Pierre argues that the Africanist tradition began a “purposeful displacement of a competing and older tradition of black scholarship,” and due to this, there was a significant divide between “the study of Africa and the diaspora” (Pierre Chapter 7, 188). This quote exemplifies how the individuals who were in charge of spreading the history of Africa—and essentially controlling the narrative around the continent—were completely different from those who were experiencing it firsthand.
It is clear to see the fallacies within African studies by reading the literature and noticing the language. One of the most prominent examples of this is the term “tribalism.” We have all heard the word “tribe” at least once in our lives, and I am sure we have used it (or have heard someone use it) to describe a community of African natives. The term “tribe” is a colonial invention created to emphasize a false narrative of primitivity and underdevelopment within African societies (Ngugi, 20). By creating the term, this was the imperialist method of “othering” African communities and continuing to make them feel different from the rest of the world. The word tribes made it easier to differentiate the ethnic group from each other. Ngugi explains how “the history and usage of this one English word, tribe, have had negative effects on the evaluation and self-evaluation of African intellectuals that have internalized this divisive inheritance of colonialism” (Ngugi, 22). This quote demonstrates how treacherous and risky Western language is to the fate of global Black studies due to its effect on the mindset of the inhabitants of the land and how they perceive themselves compared to the rest of the world.
Pierre makes a similar argument by stating how racial vernacular strengthened the belief of inferiority. Pierre says how the “‘co-naturalization of language and race’ (623) that constructs Africans as peculiar types of beings is evident through such terms as ‘capacity building,’ ‘corruption,’ ‘resource curse,’ and ‘(bad) governance,”’ and continues by explaining that these “terms reinforce patterns of racial (dis)advantage, global inequality, and relations structured in dominance” (Pierre, 2). Pierre is emphasizing that the way we talk about Africa strengthens the false narrative of its secondary status on a global scale. She points out the typical pattern that when individuals describe the governance in Africa, they often use the words above to summarize their thoughts. The issue is that people don’t seem to talk about Western countries that function just as horribly or how some sources of authorities in Africa only became that way as a result of European imperialism.
The Western world often uses their own biases about their lifestyles to negatively point out how non-Western groups steer away from “norm,” making every difference about them “a genetic predisposition” (Oyewumi Chapter 1, 5). Africa is an anomaly, a place with no way of proving itself otherwise unless the Western world terminates its authority and dominance over the continent—especially in terms of global Black studies that have a responsibility to educate the masses. The African history that is prominently studied and it is built on the subjectivities of the oppressor; it is almost assumed that “Africans did not have a history before the white man came,” which is nonsensical (Oyewumi Chapter 3, 80). Therefore, the familiar tropes about Africa in literature includes its “underdevelopment;” however, “African and Asian societies were developing independently until they were taken over directly or indirectly by the capitalist power” (Rodney, 20). This quote demonstrates how the imperial rule was a significant turning point that contributed to the invalidation of African voices in their own history and the fate of their land. With that being said, we must dismantle the stance that the Western world has on hijacking the oppressed narrative.
Although the erasure of African voices and the centralization of the European perspective began centuries before our time, this pattern ensued and entered its way through contemporary media, literature, film, music, and so much more. It perpetuates the strong sense of ignorance/oblivion about Africa from all communities, including other black communities across the world (Murunga, 40). Godwin Rapando Murunga believes that “we live in a world where black people exist in mutual ‘ignorance’ of one another, of their collective experience before and after the raptures of slavery, of their changing cultures, values, and lifestyles in different regions of the globe” and I couldn’t agree more (Murunga, 42). By making a Western point of view—which views black people as inferior—more critical, you are not only decreasing the sense of pride in your black race, but you are also diminishing the solidarity and creating a divide between black communities everywhere. Chelsey Carter writes about his challenges as an African American student in the country of Niger; he states that “being both Black and American in Niger is not common and I often get the impression that people are surprised at that revelation” (Hagan, 2). He continues by saying that Africans never saw him as a part of their community because of his American status. The focus on a Western perspective weakens the significance of black voices in global Black studies; this is why we must decentralize the West from this field of research and increase the solidarity within the African diaspora.
So how do we study contemporary Africa from a global Black Studies framework, you ask? We should practice consciousness and skepticism while reading African literature. I hope that the next time you read a piece of work regarding Africa, you ask yourself many questions. For example, who wrote this? What is the origin of the author? Is this written from a Western perspective and if so, how? What type of language is being used to describe the countries within the continent? Does it suggest primitivity, underdevelopment, unawareness, savagery etc? Eurocentric knowledge and vernacular within global Black studies still dominate the conversation by perpetuating the belief that African voices are inherently less than those of the Western world. Questioning the validity of these Western sources written about Africa is the first step to giving the power back to Africans and enabling their control over what is said about the land and the people. I MUST emphasize how crucial it is to be cognizant of all this; coming from the American education system, I never understood the danger of Eurocentric knowledge and vernacular until I reached university (an American university that has the CHOICE to provide this information to me). We do have the power to alter the way global Black studies is operated.
Thank You.
Bibliography
- Hagan, Ampson. “Footnotes: Multimodal Anticolonial Iconoclastic.” Footnotes: Multimodal Anticolonial Iconoclastic, Chelsey Carter, 19 Apr. 2019
- Murunga, Godwin Rapando. “Thoughts on Intellectual and Institutional Links Between African and Black Studies.” Africa Development, vol. 33, no. 1, 2010, doi:10.4314/ad.v33i1.57249.
- Onimode, Bade. Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria: the Dialectics of Mass Poverty. Macmillan, 1985.
- Oyewumi, Oyeronke. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
- Pierre, Jemima. “Chapter 7: Race across the Atlantic…and Back: Theorizing Africa and/in the Diaspora.” The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race, by Jemima Pierre, The University of Chicago Press, 2013, pp. 185–216.
- Rodney, Walter, et al. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso, 1973.