At Critical African Studies, we often publish special issues that bring together a collection of papers examining a cutting edge topic in African Studies or examining in new perspective a long-standing area of theory and inquiry. This issue is different; it brings together some of the many individual articles submitted independently to the journal. It captures the ethos and vibrancy of Critical African Studies and of the broader multidisciplinary landscape of African studies as a whole.
Some of this vibrancy was reflected at a flagship roundtable organized by Critical African Studies in June at the 2019 AEGIS European Conference on African Studies, hosted by the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh. We convened a conversation with leading voices in discourse and activism to Decolonize African Studies, part of a longer term, multifaceted initiative that the journal has been undertaking for several years. Attended by almost a hundred conference participants, the symposium asked the crucial question, ‘If everyone is decolonizing, why does so little seem to change?’ The roundtable, moderated by Zoe Marks (Critical African Studies co-chair) included Simukai Chigudu, Marie Deridder, Elieth Eyebiyi, Simeon Koromo, Duduzile Ndlovu, and Njoki Wamai. This brought together decolonizing-themed panel convenors from across the ECAS programme, as well as contributors from a special issue of Critical African Studies to discuss tensions, setbacks, and progress toward equity and radical inclusivity in African Studies. The speakers represented some of the continent’s geographic breadth and spoke to experiences of both francophone and anglophone colonialities.
Each speaker opened with a discussion of their perspectives on and experience of decolonial praxis. From a range of disciplinary backgrounds, different nationalities and institutions, and at different career stages, they spoke about how their experiences, values, interests, and positionality shape their views. Elieth Eyebiyi gave compelling remarks in both French and English about linguistic imperialism and anglophone supremacy in African Studies. His comments were echoed by Marie Deridder, who spoke about the relative lack of decolonizing discourse in non-English-speaking African Studies circles and the challenges for building a multilingual open access knowledge economy. Duduzile Ndlovu described how her incorporation of poetry and creative methodologies had opened new avenues for scholar-activism, solidarity with the communities in which she conducts research, and most importantly, finding her own academic voice. Simukai Chigudu reflected on being at the frontlines of protest in Oxford’s #RhodesMustFall movement, and how the struggle continues for him now within the system, where he contends still with issues of power and inequality. The conversation examined how research and practice interface in Simeon Koroma’s comments, which brought out the challenges of doing North-South research partnerships, where power and material resources are often held by those with less long-term investment in and commitment to the communities where African partners are based. Njoki Wamai articulated how these inequalities pertain to African academic institutions, as well, providing a feminist, intersectional lens for understanding the challenges of navigating transcontinental academic worlds, where power if unevenly distributed in Europe and within African countries. Questions from the audience animated the roundtable session and the energy and conversation spilled out into the afternoon and other conference sessions.
The panel’s diversity and the issues they discussed contrasted plainly with who holds the most power in African Studies today. This was evidenced starkly by the series of ECAS editors’ panels on how to publish and work with journals in African Studies. As we will discuss at length in a forthcoming special issue dedicated to different topics in decolonizing, African Studies, with its roots in colonial anthropology, is perhaps one of the academic fields most urgently in need of decolonization. The inequity of the academic publishing world and its gatekeeping role – who decides what gets published, who gets to publish where, and who has access to academic publications – no doubt perpetuates the Eurocentrism of academia and in some ways delays and hampers the decolonizing efforts underway in universities worldwide. It is therefore the responsibility of journal editors, particularly within the field of African Studies, to work earnestly and urgently towards the decolonization of academic publishing. These issues are racial, regional, linguistic, gendered, and classed. As two white women co-chairing the editorial board of Critical African Studies, we have become intimately familiar with both the challenges of decolonizing academic publishing, as well as some practical solutions for increasing inclusivity, redistributing power, and improving equity.
In light of the ECAS panel we convened and in celebration of the diverse range of papers, methods, and decolonized approaches presented in this issue, we want to share some of the concrete steps we have taken at the journal to make decolonizing praxis meaningful and sustainable. These discussions have been ongoing for many years and, notwithstanding the nurturing and supportive home that the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh has been providing for the journal since its inception in 2009, we have become acutely aware of the need to strengthen and enhance the journal’s links with the African continent. At ECAS, we announced a new joint-editorial model for Critical African Studies, which will be hosted administratively at Edinburgh and have dual editorial leadership at Edinburgh and the University of Cape Town.
We are thrilled to announce that Drs Hazel Gray (Edinburgh) and Shari Daya (Cape Town) will be taking over as co-chairs in 2020, bringing with them a multidisciplinary team of editors from both institutions: Ruchi Chaturvedi, Sarah-Jane Cooper-Knock, Akin Iwilade, Shannon Morreira, and Rike Sitas will join existing board members. From January, the majority of editorial board members will be based in Africa. Having bi-continental editorial leadership strengthens and diversifies the journal’s networks so that we can better serve African academic and policy readership audiences, as well as attract and publish a wider network of scholars from the continent. This continues a broader policy we implemented to actively recruit editors from Africa through open calls and direct outreach. (Special recognition goes to our editorial board colleague Gerald Mazarire (Midlands State University), who has navigated the challenges of electricity and internet service cuts, which interfere with the daily business of editorial work and our ability to hold long-distance virtual meetings.) With Drs. Gray and Daya at the helm, we will continue to lead the field in having feminist, female leadership of the gender-inclusive editorial board for the second term in a row.
The structural and material barriers to decolonizing African Studies publishing are real and significant, but social and procedural steps have gone a long way towards strengthening the journal’s reputation as a top destination for scholarship for innovative and critical scholarship from the continent and from new authors. In our tenure, we have made a number of changes to the special issue process that are designed to strengthen the inclusivity and rigor of journal special issues as an academic practice and community-creating mechanism. First, we standardized the proposal process to ensure fairness in assessing the content and potential of every special issue and minimize the inequitable effects of relying on reputation or personal networks to assess academic value. We also added a requirement that all special issues must include one or more contributions from authors based on the continent, and ask editors to discuss how they have considered gender, race, and geographic inclusivity in curating papers. This creates incentives for all of us to expand and diversify our intellectual communities, learn from scholars based in different parts of our academic ecosystem, and as a result, strengthen our collective access to knowledge and critique.
Complementing our efforts to decolonize special issues and authorship, we have also taken strides to diversify our peer reviewer pool. Every article is sent to at least one reviewer based in the country or region the article is about. Although we cannot always secure from a given context the free editorial labour that peer reviews require, we have seen the benefit of ensuring broader African representation in reviewer circles. Feedback for authors is more incisive and insightful, often drawing attention to issues that are obvious, as well as those overlooked, in domestic academic discourses. This strengthens the quality of the submission as well as the intellectual exchange the peer review system provides for mutual benefit. By expanding the inclusivity of peer review pools, all African Studies journals can help ensure that academic debates remain relevant and intellectually accountable to the countries to which our wide-ranging research pertains. Moreover, such outreach efforts also help broaden publishing networks, building links for reviewers to become future authors, and also for them to share the articles they reviewed more widely once they are published.
We have amplified these process and network-based approaches to decolonizing the journal by sharing them with Taylor & Francis (T&F), our publisher, and through various forums for editorial best practice. As editors and through T&F, we have disseminated these strategies and learned from others to broaden access to knowledge and make knowledge production a more equitable and inclusive endeavour. In terms of journal content, as editors, we have sought through special issues to decolonize the conversations that are included in African Studies. Critical African Studies convenes and promotes conversations that allow the multi- and inter-disciplinary nature of the field to shine, while also providing a platform for understudied and emergent issues to be given a broader discursive platform.
Over the past decade, Critical African Studies has developed a reputation for publishing across a broad remit of rigorous scholarship, not limited by discipline or geographical area, but characterized by nuance and depth. From our founding manifesto, our aim has always been to ‘return Africanist scholarship to the heart of theoretical innovation’ (Nugent 2009). During our editorial tenure, we have published cutting edge work that maps the full landscape of African studies, from Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, History, Law, Economics, Cultural Studies, and more. In undertaking this ambitious mandate, we have strengthened the journal’s theoretic and discursive contribution to the discipline by developing a niche for publishing thematic special issues. Our special issues are often guest edited by leaders in the field, but also by emerging leaders, and over the years have included such themes as: cartoons and political satire (featuring Daniel Hammett’s ‘Political Cartoons, Post-Colonialism and Critical African Studies’ in Volume 2.4, 2010, still our most-read article); mineral extraction; borderlands; sport; labour; fate and fortune; animals; the politics of homosexuality; digital arts; political subjectivities; and dance.
These have all been timely and agenda-setting topics making pan-African contributions. However, this issue, consisting of a diverse array of individual submissions rather than a unifying topic, is indicative of the wide range of scholarship ongoing in African Studies. In particular, the numerous essays from scholars based in Africa showcase the theoretical and empirical excellence and innovation that motivates demands for inclusive, decolonized, transnational academic communities. The essays in this issue cover topics including colonial histories, conflict resolution and post-conflict reconciliation, civil society, and social, cultural, and leisure movements as they intersect with politics on the continent. Many of these articles are grounded in deeply local narratives and knowledge systems, yet in doing so, shine a light on broader issues and phenomena. Other essays use the general and comparative lens to push academic scholarship to pay closer attention to nuance and inconsistencies arising in social science research related to Africa.
Nathaniel Chimhete’s compelling analysis of guerrilla-civilian relations in Zimbabwe’s liberation war – ‘Pasi nemakomoredzi-ii! (Down with comrades!)’ sings with narratives and perspectives accessible only to an insider-academic. Chimhete builds on the seminal work of Norma Kriger, Terence Ranger, and others and brings to life an oversight affecting civil war and conflict studies more widely: ‘scholars’ failure to consider discursive forms of engagement’ among civilians who may support the cause, but not the actions of so-called freedom fighters. He deftly presents and unpacks the meaning behind villagers’ original stories, jokes, and songs, which he describes as crucial forms of negotiation at the local level. The analysis is made all the more compelling by Chimhete’s matter-of-fact reflexivity, woven throughout the essay from footnotes (e.g. fn 13. ‘I am describing events that I witnessed as a young boy and still remember’) to discussions of the interplay between research and memory: ‘For them, as it was for me, this exercise was part of “community” remembrance’. This essay will be a powerful source of inspiration for scholars wishing to do locally grounded social science that draws together ethnography, interview, auto-ethnography, and participant observation. And it offers important lessons for civil war scholars, those interested in violence, memory, and civilian resistance, and of course Zimbabwe scholars of all stripes.
Also grappling with local political practices in Zimbabwe, Norman Chivasa’s essay on ‘Kuripa ngozi’ examines traditional beliefs and customs as potential sites of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Chivasa offers an interpretive analysis of kuripa ngozi – ‘the customary practice of compensatory payment in inter-family disputes, as well as in the appeasement of avenging deceased spirits’ – to understand the phenomenon from within an indigenous Shona knowledge system. By synthesizing different approaches to the study of ngozi, Chivasa makes a convincing case for not only taking indigenous knowledge systems seriously, but also taking seriously their implications, such as the role of spirits in conflict resolution. The essay identifies fundamental tensions in how kuripa ngozi is practiced, often violating girls’ rights in arranged marriages, but also indicating potential avenues for inter-family dialogue and negotiation. Chivasa takes seriously the trade-offs of a fear-based indigenous belief system, and the potential it holds for centreing love as a resource for Shona conflict-resolution. His work offers a model for future research into how careful examination of tools, beliefs, and practices in one context can shine a light on broader trends and tensions in peace and conflict, particularly at the community level.
Africa has long offered scholars a rich array of associations and social institutions through which to understand the full spectrum of human social-political life. Antje Daniel and Dieter Neubert’s essay on ‘Social society and social movements’ continues in the tradition of scholars such as J. Clyde Mitchell, Kenneth Little, and Peter Ekeh by synthesizing more recent work on civil society in Africa. They examine the concept of ‘civil society’ in contradistinction to ‘social movement’ and call on scholars to refine the boundaries of each concept, rather than fitting all forms of collective action into these categories. Epistemic analysis reveals the normative foundations of ‘civil society’, leading them to argue: ‘we must conclude that civil society is a special arena of self-organization linked to a normative concept of liberal freedom and democracy’. Their synthetic review also highlights ‘the ambivalence of professionalized NGOs that act as consulting firms and implement development projects on behalf of donors’. They argue provocatively – and consistently within their broader framework – that ‘these NGOs do not represent civil society but are part of the development industry’. Such nuggets pose important challenges to the prevailing discourse on civil society, highlighting important normative assumptions that have perhaps always been embedded in the concept and signalling the need for new, potentially narrower concepts to capture African social-political life in its full diversity.
Jo Gronlund’s article on grassroots football in South African townships offers a compelling analysis of how young footballers use the sport in search for identity and authority, navigating life in often precarious and uncertain conditions. While scholarship on football often focuses on big league events and fandom, Gronlund’s ethnographic, and at times auto-ethnographic, framework of analysis focuses on the smaller, more informal games that are often neglected in scholarly analysis, but yet are so prevalent across Africa. Crucially, Gronlund acknowledges and reflects on his positionality as a white European anthropologist researching in a post-colonial and post-apartheid South African setting, stating that ‘[i]magining equality between the informant and anthropologist in this setting would simultaneously imply ignoring the realities of the historic and socio-political processes that underpin the entire context.’ From an awareness of the skewed power relationship that potentially enables access to the field while also creating an unintended distance in positionality, the author is, through empirical research, able to decipher how local football structures coordinates social control and creates meaningful social mechanisms between coach and footballers in the form of a hierarchical, authoritative relationship. With this relationship often expressed through the use of father-child metaphors, the authors shows how the role of grassroots football in South African townships extends well beyond that of a physical activity to become a social mechanism intended to raise young footballers to become responsible adults.
Almusharaf’s article on the Bakht er Ruda educational institute of colonial Anglo-Egyptian Sudan offers another incisive analysis of social structures of education and control, arguing for the significance of liberal technologies as methods of exercising power and securing colonial rule over colonial subjects. This extensive, in-depth article effectively utilizes close readings of colonial era documents to examine how school societies such as Bakht er Ruda became a means of creating a cohesive Sudanese society through the use of liberalist, psychological principles aimed at constructing self-regulated and responsible political subjects. The philosophical and institutional framework applied in the Sudanese case, the author argues, was intended to instil internalized civility and self-discipline. The case of Bakht er Ruda is ‘curious’ exactly because postcolonial criticism would view liberalism as a political ideal irreconcilable with the colonial project, while the institute’s methodology was marked by an aversion to sovereign force and sought initiative, engagement and a free and responsible autonomy in the Sudan, for individuals, groups and society. As a case study then, Bakth er Ruda undermines the predominant approach to understanding colonial rule as a mode of government reliant entirely or sovereign and disciplinary mechanisms intended to produce docility in ‘an Other too backward to be governed through liberal means’. However, the author cautions, the case study actually demonstrates that colonial administrators did not adopt methods of liberal governance out of a native idealism or as an embodiment of enlightened liberal ideals, but as strategies of governance and rule.
Shepherd Mpofu’s article provokingly analyses several examples of near-pornographic satirical humour in South African visual art. His examples include controversial paintings depicting political leaders in compromising nude postures, with satire used by the artists to challenge and contest power. These include Brett Murray’s infamous painting The Spear, which depicts Jacob Zuma; Ayanda Mabulu’s two pieces The pornography of power and State Capture; and Iven Amali’s Modern Slavery. The author utilizes critical discourse analysis of the public discussions around the art, including social media commentary and news media reports, in order to offer readings of these examples of what her terms ‘genital art’ in the broader context of South African identity politics. Since the paintings are mostly discussed within the parameters of race, Mpofu argues that this at times prevents them from being viewed as humorous, because of South Africa’s deeply troubled racialised past. Because of their shocking and deliberately provocative nature, the author suggests that artists need to look at the possibility of representing political excesses ‘without the aesthetics of the message inviting debate more than the objectives’.
Thank you for the opportunity to serve the African Studies community through our editorial leadership. We look forward to joining and convening many more discussions in years to come.