20th Annual Meeting of MAAAS University of Kansas

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 03

1:20 to 3:00: Decolonizing Archives (Commons, Spooner Hall)

Bridging Continents: Africanist Librarianship in the 21st Century; Brian D. Moss, University of Kansas

This presentation will examine the state of information exchange between the U.S. and Africa, focusing primarily on the evolving role of Africanist librarianship in the U.S. What types of materials do academic libraries in the U.S. provide to their users, both in terms of creative literature and in terms of scholarly output from and about Africa? Just as importantly, what sorts of glaring gaps exist in those collections? How are those collections formed, how are they shared within and among universities, and what is the outlook for improved access in the future? Attendees will be encouraged to share stories of success and failure from their own institutions’ libraries in an effort to help further this important dialog regarding how academic libraries in the U.S. can better support Africanist scholarship in the 21st century.

Disseminating Public Health and Development Knowledge through the Community Tool Box; Ithar Hassaballa, University of Kansas; Stephen Fawcett, University of Kansas; Davison Munodawafa, World Health Organization; Peter Phori, World Health Organization; Christina Holt, University of Kansas

The Community Tool Box (CTB) is a free, online resource that provides people with tools for planning public health and development efforts. It is used globally, with 60% of its 4.5 million unique visitors from outside the U.S. A particular challenge for international NGOs is securing resources for capacity building, particularly in Africa. Culturally-sensitive tools for addressing public health and development are needed by global health partners.

The World Health Organization in the African Region (WHO-AFRO) has adopted the CTB as one of four key Health Promotion Strategies. As a WHO Collaborating Center, the University of Kansas team identified global health tools for planning public health and development efforts and provided Africa-based examples of efforts in the region. Using WHO-AFRO’s Framework—these tools are then utilized by African practitioners to address public health and development concerns. Through the CTB, public health practitioners are provided with free access to culturally-relevant and problem-specific guides for taking action. Qualitative data of the CTB online traffic—using Google Analytics—will provide an indicator of success in dissemination.

Preliminary data suggests there are differences in accessing the tools among countries based on their language, geographic location, and other country-specific factors. There is a significant increase in utilization of CTB tools in English-speaking countries, but far less use in French-speaking countries. Due to the recent Arabic translation, the CTB has seen an increase in Arabic-speaking North Africa. This results suggests that easy access to culturally-specific capacity-building online tools catalyze the planning of public health and development efforts. Practitioners in Africa are also invited to share their own frameworks and tools within the CTB in order to create a culture of free, available information to be used within and outside the continent.

Decolonizing Biodiversity Knowledge: Digital Enabling of Botanical Data for West Africa; A. Townsend Peterson, University of Kansas; A. Asase, University of Ghana; Jean Ganglo University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin; Pierre Radji, University of Lomé, Togo; Omokafe Ugbogu, Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria; Sainge Nsanyi Moses, Tropical Plant Exploration Group, Cameroon

Biodiversity data are notoriously imbalanced in their distribution: countries rich in biodiversity tend to be quite poor in biodiversity information, and biodiversity-poor countries tend to be the repositories of the bulk of biodiversity data for the rest of the world. These imbalances hark back to the colonial history of tropical portions of the world. Africa is an important case in point in this regard: the great bulk of African biodiversity information is held in biocollections institutions in Europe and North America. What is more, those repository institutions have tended to be rather slow in digitizing their biodiversity data, and rather reticent to share openly what data they do have in digital formats. The West African Plants Initiative represents an effort led by West African botanists to digitize, enrich, share, and use data on West African plants that will involve capture of plant data at 5 West African institutions and 6 European and North American institutions. The effort will, in effect, ‘decolonize’ one portion of biodiversity knowledge for West Africa, and will provide a template or prototype for parallel efforts for other regions and other taxa.

Decolonizing Understandings of Rhetoric and Nation Building in the Work of Kenya’s Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission; Lindsay Harroff, University of Kansas

On December 30, 2007, moments after Kenya’s electoral commission announced incumbent President Mwai Kibaki won the presidential election, violence erupted across Kenya. Although immediately sparked by the contested election results, the violence resulted from and revealed longstanding social divisions and political injustices. In an address to the National Assembly, newly elected president Mwai Kibaki identified the crisis as a “turning point” and called for the construction of a “new Kenya.” As part of this effort, the National Assembly established the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) in October 2008. In this paper, I analyze the TJRC’s final report to better understand the challenges to constructing a “new Kenya,” as well as rhetoric’s potential contribution. Numerous scholars study rhetoric’s role in defining national identity and constituting a community (Beasley 2004, Charland 1987, McGee 1975, Mercieca 2010, Taylor 2004). However, much of the rhetorical scholarship focuses on relatively stable Western societies and a correspondingly narrow perception of national unity and the rhetoric that constitutes it. Understanding rhetoric’s potential contribution to nation building after Kenya’s post-election crisis disrupts the traditional binary between ethnic and civic nationalism and reliance on a rational attachment to a set of political practices, institutions, and values as the foundation of community. In particular, the construction of a “new Kenya” must account for the irreducibility of ethnic identity in politics and recognize a violent and divisive past. I argue the TJRC operates through the rhetorical performance of “truth telling,” which promotes national unity by fostering identification among individuals.

3:20 to 5:00: Decolonizing the Past (Commons, Spooner Hall)

Religious Practice and Decolonial Imaginaries in Equatorial Africa; John Cinnamon, Miami University

This paper looks historically and methodologically at equatorial African religious imaginaries and practices as forms of knowledge. I begin with a broad question: how have religious practices, particularly in northern Gabon, sought both to engage and decolonize “externally imposed” forms of knowledge? In what ways are colonial and postcolonial religious movements grounded in African ways of knowing and imagining the world while at the same time bearing the indelible imprint of colonial knowledge production? To frame this paper, I draw on Vansina’s longue-durée “equatorial African tradition,” Guyer’s “traditions of invention,” MacGaffey’s “conceptual challenge of the particular,” Bayart’s “extraversion” (both pre-colonial and colonial), Balandier’s “colonial situation,” as well as Tonda’s insights into divine healing and “the modern sovereign.” All of these approaches provide important insights into equatorial Africa systems of knowledge and power. More concretely, I outline shifting northern Gabonese religious practices up to the mid-twentieth century late colonial moment. These included ancestor “cults” and initiation societies increasingly under duress, composed power objects, sorcery and anti-sorcery, missionary Christianity, and Bwiti and Mimbiri that had been borrowed and adapted from southern Gabonese peoples. This complex, competitive, and shifting religious landscape in turn provided the context for the late colonial Mademoiselle movement that swept across northern Gabon in the 1950s. But as Peel (2000) has argued, the effort to reconstruct African religious knowledge and practice is hampered by our sources—written accounts almost always filtered through colonial prerogatives or more recent African accounts (and ethnography) that necessarily internalize colonial and postcolonial knowledge.

Conflict versus Cohabitation: Uncovering the African-Indigenous World of Sixteenth Century Mexico; Robert C. Schwaller, University of Kansas

From the earliest years of conquest and colonization, Spanish authorities viewed their African slaves and servants as natural antagonists to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Early legislation prohibited intermarriage between Africans and Native Americans and even barred Africans and their descendants from living within indigenous communities. The view that Africans were detrimental to indigenous groups has been preserved and perpetuated thanks to the voluminous documentation produced by conflicts between these two subaltern groups. However, underneath the history of conflict lies another history, one that exists in contrast to the colonial ideal of separation. Using a close reading of various Spanish colonial sources, this paper argues that the longstanding colonial perception that Africans and Native Americans lived in a constant state of conflict reflects the perpetuation of Spanish prejudice and overlooks the strong ties that could be forged between these two diverse people groups.

In fact, from the outset of Spanish colonial rule shared occupations and residence helped forge ties that eventually facilitated African-indigenous families. Overtime, these families served as cultural crucibles that helped produce afro-indigenous individuals capable of navigating across the diverse social and cultural spaces of early colonial society. Overall, this paper deconstructs the persistent prejudices produced by Spanish colonialism to help recover the history and experiences of Africans and their descendants in the earliest colonies of the Americas.

“Archdemon” Walter E. Owen and Edith B. Downer: Rewriting Missionary Experience in Colonial Kenya; Hannington Ochwada, University of Kansas

This paper attempts to interrogate the contributions of Walter Edwin Owen, archdeacon of Kavirondo (hereafter Abaluyia and Joluo communities) and the lady missionary named Edith B. Downer’s experiences in western Kenya. Owen arrived in East Africa as a missionary in 1904, serving in Bunyoro, Kyagwe, Ankole, Toro, and Budu in the Uganda Protectorate before being moved to work among Abaluyia and Joluo in present-day Kenya. On the other hand, Downer arrived in Lagos, West Africa in 1907 where she severed her first missionary assignment on the continent before being moved to Uganda in 1914. Downer was transferred to work among Abaluyia and Joluo in the early 1920s. Owen was an energetic and intellectually perceptive missionary whose tenure with the Anglican Church was shrouded in a myriad controversy. On the other hand, Downer was that enigmatic women who performed tasks that straddled the gender divide with amazing easiness that defied the ubiquitous Victorian perceptions of domesticity. Suffice to mention that Owen was a forceful but tactful cleric whom the British administration and the CMS diocese within the region found difficult to contain and use himto turn Christianity to the service of the colonial state. On her part as a female educator in western Kenya Downer was involved in vocational training and activities such as carpentry and animal husbandry that defied not only the Victorian perceptions of domesticity but also conflicted with the indigenous African gender relations during that period. While Owen persistently pointed out the misdeeds of the white settler administration and the CMS studious silence over real and imagined colonial injustices, he also criticized Africans for holding rather tightly onto their indigenous customs he considered incompatible with Anglicanism and the whole mission of European civilization. In her missionary work, Downer made gigantic steps in introducing new skills that would transform the lives of both men and women in western Kenya. Using archival materials from the Church Missionary Society Archives at the University of Birmingham in the UK and other secondary materials I will analyze how cultural and social differences existing between the British missionaries, the colonial state and Africans in western Kenya were negotiated.

Ade-Ajayi and the Study of African History; Bukola Oyeniyi, Missouri State University

This paper spotlights the contributions of Jacob Festus Adeniyi Ajayi to the study of African history. Ade-Ajayi, as he is popularly known, was a pioneer academic historian who, in league with Kenneth Dike and others, championed the struggle to confront the Eurocentric denial of African historicity. As a representative of a generation, Ade-Ajayi’s scholarship focused on the use of oral traditions as credible sources in documenting African history. His scholarship traversed key areas in African history; contributing to our understanding of missions and missionaries, the formation of a new Western educated elite and the transformations that took place in the long and eventful nineteenth century. He was adept at locating the internal forces that drive changes, an orientation that can be described as the “African perspective” of writing, as opposed to the Eurocentric.

The demography of Ade-Ajayi’s scholarship revealed the complexities of institutions, practices, and beliefs that emerged in the processes of European encounters, seen either through the lenses of imposition or African agencies. He engaged in the analysis of the colonial era, which he declared as a mere episode. Where others saw a break in the past, he saw continuity. In this regard, he synchronized the histories of Western and African institutions, without sacrificing African cultures. While maintaining a view of the past, Ade-Ajayi advocated a forward thrust for African study, calling on historians to adopt new tools, new methodologies, and new skills in order to reach the rich ores of African history, which, as he asserted, still remained under the crust of the African earth. He declared that first generation historians merely scratched the surface of African history and that the task of bringing forth the rich ore should be the engagement of modern Africanists.

SATURDAY, 04 OCTOBER

9:00 to 10:40 Ken Lohrentz Graduate Paper Award Presentations (Malott Room, Kansas Union)

Progress Towards Sustainable and Equitable Waste Management at the University of Ghana, Legon; Matt DeCapo, Kansas State University

Waste management at the University of Ghana could benefit significantly from waste separation, composting, and organized recycling systems.  There are no hazardous waste disposal sites, and much of the waste generated on campus ends up getting dumped in the bushes or burned.  Batteries and compact fluorescent bulbs litter the environment and allow the spread of toxic chemicals.  Students studying agriculture are taught about composting, but there has not been a place on campus where they can see these ideas put into practice.  We started a composting operation nearby a market on campus and trained the staff to separate food waste from other waste.  We would pick up these bins and transport them to our compost site.  Many people were educated about how to compost.  We gave presentations at conferences to spread awareness about potential solutions to the waste issues in Accra, Ghana.  We documented the people scavenging through the dumps.  The place where the waste from campus is taken, Abokobi dump site, was photographed and documented.  There are large human rights abuses in the waste management infrastructure of Accra.  The increasing consumption of plastic that is encouraged by large corporations is resulting in larger volumes of plastic being burned every day, releasing toxic chemicals.  People’s attitudes about waste management were documented.  A garden was installed near the market to spread awareness.  We have found that community based solutions that teach people how to compost, how to organize recycling systems, and why burning waste is so dangerous are the most effective.

Traveling to Nontraditional Destinations: 5 Things Americans Should Know Before Studying Abroad to "Africa"; Ifeyinwa Onyenekwu, University of Illinois

As a response to federal mandates and university education missions, study abroad professionals are being encouraged to increase the number of college students traveling abroad for academic credit (Redden, 2014; Stroud, 2010). However, despite the fact that Africa has 6 of the 10 fastest growing world economies, which exemplifies great potential for investment and professional opportunity; most colleges continue to send most of their students to traditional locations in Europe and Asia such as UK, Italy, China, and Japan (International Institute of Education, 2013). Consequently, few studies examine and evaluate study abroad programs traveling to nontraditional destinations. Due to the paucity of research and assessment in this area, this paper outlines strategies and approaches for American faculty and students studying in continental Africa. Specifically, this paper offers five things Americans should know and do before studying abroad in Africa: 1) know Africa is a not a country but a continent; 2) do you research; 3) know Africans are capable; 4) examine your privilege; and 5) choose quality over quantity (as it pertains to experience).

Confronting the Elephant in the Room: Race in South Africa Twenty Years after Democracy; Elene Cloete, University of Kansas

Coinciding with the twentieth annual meeting of the Mid American Alliance for African Studies, this paper reflects on the realities South Africa faces twenty years after its first democratic elections. Most obvious of these concerns are the country’s alarming poverty, unemployment, and social inequality figures. Needless to say these socio-economic realities contradict the almost euphoric promise of redistribution, empowerment, and social development accompanying the end of apartheid. But in addition to these pressing realities we cannot ignore a greater underlying issue: Race. Undeniably race and its Pandora-like box of related concerns persistently pull at the rather delicate fabric of South African society. Most poignant in this regard, is the ideologically, if not complete ignorance, interpretations amongst white South Africans of the country’s racially defined socio-economic dynamics. This is especially evident in light of the government’s most recent Land Restitution Amendment Bill, allowing people to claim land lost during the colonial and apartheid period. Instead of confronting and recognizing the historic impact of apartheid and its persistence in a so-called post-apartheid period, there exist amongst many white South Africans a conflict between romanticized ideas of a ‘rainbow nation’ and manifestations of Afrikaner nationalism. The purpose of this paper is therefore to engage with issues concerning race in contemporary South Africa using both scholarly and ethnographic material. This engagement also addresses the challenges facing a white South African scholar when dealing with racially sensitive issues.

 Links between Women’s Empowerment and Fourth Wave Democratization in Predominantly-Muslim States; Ginger Feather, University of Kansas

            This project questions the causal logic that democracy is necessarily good for women in predominantly-Muslim countries and reverses the paradigm to assert that women’s empowerment is a necessary but not sufficient precursor for fourth wave predominantly-Muslim democratic transition.  Predominantly-Muslim former Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan experienced exceptionally high levels of top-down empowerment and opportunity for women through universal education and employment and high levels of women’s political inclusion as compared to the other five regions of the world with Muslim majority states.   This project divides the 49 predominantly-Muslim countries into six regional groupings to compare their relative women’s personal, socioeconomic, and political empowerment to ascertain if there is an obvious correlation between the status of women and the level of democratic development.  Initial results are somewhat surprising indicating that women’s empowerment may be a necessary but insufficient precursor to democratic transition in predominantly-Muslim states and pointing to the necessity of strong women’s organization outside the masculine state apparatus to act as a secondary factor facilitating bottom-up democratic transitions.

9:00 to 10:40 Decolonial Encounters (Commons, Spooner Hall)

Service and Study Abroad: A Challenge to Global Citizenship Education; Katie Gauthier Donnelly, Saint Louis University

The rise in popularity of service and volunteer programs throughout Africa present a familiar challenge; a paradoxical global citizenry that continues to frame North American student as benevolent volunteers and Africans as recipients of aid and charity. While this paradigm is both challenged and changing, educators and scholars working in Africa today play a critical role in shaping global citizenship education. Furthermore, the last decade has seen a considerable shift in study abroad programming, this shift is characterized by a move away from traditional semester and academic year programs grounded in place and in language study, to short term faculty-directed programs. Chronicling this shift and trends in study abroad and voluntourism, this presentation draws on an inventory and case study of programs in East Africa, suggesting important tools for reorienting study abroad for educators and scholars working not only in Africa but throughout the developing world.

The Lie of the Lion: Racialization of Nature in the Safari; Cassie M. Hays, Gettysburg College

The narrative of the Maasai lion hunt, invoked to sell souvenirs in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area, establishes a vision of nature that is intertwined with racial otherness; on safari, nature is racialized, and this racialized nature is exemplified by the souvenir. The Maasai souvenir represents wild, external nature because it includes ‘natural products’ and it mimics the trophy. It symbolizes wild, internal, human nature by invoking the mythos of the lion hunt. It also solidifies time by recalling the colonial past and tying it to the tourist present. Building on ethnographic field work, interviews, and archival research conducted over the past decade, I have found that nature is racialized on safari. To go to or know of Tanzania, and perhaps Africa more generally, is to see nature through the lens of racial difference. This racialization of nature therefore has much wider implications for perceptions of the African landscape and people.

Sacred Grove Dynamics in the Republic of Benin; Erika Kraus, Michigan State University

Vodoun in the Beninese natural landscape are tied to families and communities, preserving the ancestral link to the physical area and instilling a sense of place. They inhabit natural resources such as trees and water. At sacred groves, vodoun direct people through rituals how to use certain trees and plants for certain illnesses; many of these species are indigenous and found on the site, and are rare outside of sacred groves. Growing human populations increase pressure on land and natural resources, jeopardizing the quality of the trees and sanctity of the sites. Enough pressure can reduce the grove to a sacred place with only a tree, at which point the trees used in healing are off-site in uncertain conditions. When directed by the divinities, vodoun practitioners can plant any kind of vegetation to provide shade and calm for the divinities, but indigenous species are preferred because they can once again be grown in careful conditions that improve efficacy of treatments. The fluctuating vegetation cover and types of trees present at a sacred vodoun site depend on population pressure, governance, natural ability of the woods to reproduce, and the general care provided by the population/religious leaders. These factors interact, and demonstrate that the same population that depends on the groves for spiritual and ecological benefits is also the population that destroys the vegetation. Identifying the most influential factors acting on sacred groves will facilitate preserving these sites, which is necessary for the sake of the culture as well as the environment.

An Instance of African Modernity:  Manjako Age Sets Make History; Margaret Buckner, Missouri State University  

In Theory from the South, the Comaroffs state that, like Europe, African modernity entailed a rupture with a flattened, detemporalized, congealed past (p. 8). This paper will show an instance of such a rupture in Guinea Bissau.  In one region of Manjakoland, during the colonial upheaval of the early 1900s, the traditional age grades turned into historical age sets.  In the old system, the names of the age grades remained the same (i.e., “novice”, “initiate”, “senior”) and people moved through them. But in the new system, every four years a new age set received a unique name the members kept their entire lives. Thus, age set names came to mark historical time. Moreover, Jack Goody has made the case that the concept of history (vs. myth) appears as a consequence of written records; in this case, however, historical reckoning came about in a purely oral fashion.

11:00 to 12:40: PANEL DISCUSSION*The Role of Extended Family in Raising Children with Special Needs: Implications for Community-Based Rehabilitation in Africa (Malott Room, Kansas Union) Victoria Chikodi Onu, University of Nigeria Wilfred Chukwudi Onu, Director & Co-owner, Shalom Academy, Nsukka, Nigeria Nkemjika Helen Asadu, Principal Geoffrey Ndubisi Asadu, Barrister and Social Welfare Officer, Nsukka Local Government Nnenna Liziana Onuigbo, University of Nigeria; Ngozi Obiyo, University of Nigeria Augustina Nwamaka Ugwu, Head Mistress, Center for Academic and Vocational Training

for Special Needs Children Nsukka (CAVTSN), Nsukka, Nigeria Dorothy Ukamaka Abugu, , Assistant Head Mistress, Center for Academic and Vocational

Training for Special Needs Children Nsukka (CAVTSN), Nsukka, Nigeria

The role of extended family in raising children with special needs has important implications for community based rehabilitation In Africa and specifically Nigeria. The village or community, characterized by an extended family network of people, who whether legally related or not, act as “aunts” and “uncles” is said to be held responsible for raising children. Hence the neighborliness and peaceful coexistence that makes the child with special needs feel loved and accepted by all is developed through this extended family network. Though this way of life, where many neighbors are as much a part of the family as legal family members, is gradually being replaced by the modern fast paced nuclear family system, wherever the relics remains, the children and the entire community are the benefactors

* This presentation is part of the Nigeria Public Affairs Program, Missouri State University sponsored by the U.S. Embassy, Public Affairs Division, Abuja, Nigeria and Provost Office, Missouri State University. Program Coordinator: Dr. Jamaine Abidogun, Missouri State University (417) 836-5916; jamaineabidogun@missouristate.edu

11:00 to 12:40 Decolonizing Representations (Commons, Spooner Hall)

Africans Read Shakespeare; Leonard Gadzekpo, Southern Illinois University - Carbondale

Slavery in much of the U. S. and in the Caribbean and British colonization in Africa introduced English as an official language to Africans and their descendants in those territories; and as they became proficient in the language, many were exposed to English literature. This dynamic also introduced Africans to England. Africans shaped by enslavement and colonization often became audiences to and actors in Shakespearean drama performances. If Shakespeare’s plays have been the most popular English dramatic works since the sixteenth century, how does the portrayal of blacks in some of them, especially in Titus Andronicus, and Othello, capture attitudes towards blacks?  How do audiences through the centuries relate and interpret the depiction of blacks in these plays in the context of contemporaneous societal norms?  How do Africans read and react to these plays taking into account the problematic relationship people of African descent have with Europeans and their descendants around the world, indeed with Western culture, concerning race? The paper examines how Blacks, especially Africans, question European internal and external colonization and the notion of canon by interpreting Shakespearean drama within African indigenous cultural matrix.  It extends the discussion through Othello in The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice, and through “AARON the Moor,” in Titus Andronicus, to Arabo-Islamic religious and cultural colonization and how Africans negotiate cultural impositions and decolonize knowledge.

“Anansi Meets Peter Parker”: Uses of the SpiderMan in African Diaspora Literature; Giselle Anatol, University of Kansas

In his remarkably brief but incredibly rich short story, “Anansi Meets Peter Parker at the Taco Bell on Lexington,” Douglas Kearney highlights the fact that mainstream U.S. culture not only controls and distorts our awareness of what constitutes relevant history and “High Art,” but also which figures inhabit popular culture. Very few—if any—readers need the footnote that identifies Peter Parker as the alter ego of the superhero Spiderman, but many more require the one that reveals Anansi to be a spider/man trickster figure from the Akan and Ashanti cultures of West Africa. In this paper, I will explore a variety of techniques that African diasporic authors use  when employing the Anansi figure to “decolonize knowledge” in their work:

(1)   to preserve folklore and the African/Caribbean oral tradition, as in Philip Sherlock’s Anansi, the Spider Man; Jamaican Folk Tales (1956) and Gerald McDermott’s Anansi the Spider: A Tale from the Ashanti (1972);

(2)   to privilege African values over Western ones, such as communal efforts triumphing over individualism, and brains and wit trumping physical size and strength, as in Anancy and the Haunted House (2002), an original Anansi tale by Richardo Keens-Douglas;

(3)   to challenge the monocultural focus of Western education, as well as the economic exploitation of the Global South and cultural appropriation of underrepresented communities, as seen in Kearney’s “Anansi Meets Peter Parker.”

Decolonizing Images…From Thiaroye to Katanga; Andre Siamundele, Wells College

I will examine two different events as portrayed on big screen by two renowned filmmakers: Ousmane Sembene (Thiaroye massacre) and Raoul Peck (Lumumba assassination). By exploring the concept of representation as a way of dissemination, my goal will be to determine the role of space in those two tragedies.

In Camp de Thiaroye (1988) by Ousmane Sembene; African soldiers, upon their return to Africa were placed in a transit camp enclosed by fences with armed guards. I will question the meaning of the transit camp and its role in the tragedy by examining the concept of isolation.

In the case of the assassination of Lumumba, my focus will be on two films: Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet (1990) and Lumumba (2000). While these films depicted the life, rising to power and death of the first Prime Minister of the Democratic of the Congo, I will analyze Lumumba’s last journey: after fleeing Kinshasa, he was arrested on his way to Kisangani and transferred to Katanga, where he was killed. Both “in transit” and “transfer” as concepts will provide ground for me to address how those two events are remembered in the post-colonial Francophone world. I will illustrate how the works of Ousmane Sembene and Raoul Peck contribute greatly to the concepts and practices of decolonization of Images.

Transformative Aesthetics: Ndebele Identity in South African Visual Culture; Adrienne Walker Hoard, University of Missouri-Kansas City

This presentation examines significant transformations in traditional artistic expressionamong the Ndzundza Ndebele women artists of South Africa since the end of the Apartheid era.It contributes to an understanding of the processes underlying transformation in aesthetic intent,media usage and creative outcomes among newly liberated indigenous artisans. Collectivelysocietal innovations and the resulting internal interpretations impact creative expression asindigenous artwork transitions across the traditional boundaries of art for ritual purpose into artwith other purposes including commodity among artists within global emerging democracies.Though not the sole ethnic model of artistic transformation, South African Ndzundza Ndebelewomen artists and their created forms are indicative of an indigenous group who can facilitatethe growth, change and survival of their society in the throes of democratization, through theritual maintenance of even a singe intrinsic symbol, tradition and/or practice, which validatestheir presence as an individual family member and as a community citizen. The continuity inNdzundza Ndebele creative expressions since the transformation of political climate fromapartheid to blossoming democracy in South Africa, must be reviewed as a seminal paradigm forexamining the expressions from other indigenous creators domiciled in similar emerging,democratic nation states who must amalgamate their personal, localized and tribal expressioninto a national expression encompassing shared images and shared belief systems within their national visual culture.

2:20 to 4:20 Revolt and Reform (Malott Room, Kansas Union)

Democracy and Corruption in Mali: The Case for Election Campaign Finance ReformStephen A. Harmon, Pittsburg State University

Mali, by early 2012, had emerged as a showcase for democracy in Africa and a darling of the donor countries due to its record of four consecutive democratic elections, a peaceful turnover of power to a new president not of the incumbent’s party, and a touted free press. But this image came crashing down in the tragic Mali War of 2012-2013, which saw the country torn in two by a nationalist insurgency that was itself pre-empted by a Islamist terrorists who seized control of the northern half of the country after a military coup against the democratically elected president. The collapse of Mali’s elected government laid bare the myth of Malian democracy. It had been a procedural democracy that was exploited and manipulated by political and business elites, and it had not sunk roots among the ordinary people. Mali’s government and military had, in fact, been hollowed out by endemic corruption. This corruption, which had grown worse under the democratic regime, was most apparent in three areas, electoral politics, the civilian administration, and the military. This paper will focus on corruption in Malian electoral politics, particularly election campaign finance, which seems to be at the root of corruption in other sectors. Drawing on the experience of campaign finance reform efforts in the United States, we will offer some recommendations for the reform of Malian election campaign financing practices, which appears to be a good place to begin a comprehensive anti-corruption reform program that will extend to other sectors of the economy and society.

The Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Myths and Realities; Angellar Manguvo, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Zimbabwe has featured prominently in news headlines around the world over the controversial Fast Track Land Redistribution Program executed more than a decade ago. In most cases, both the local and international media have presented extremely different versions of the preceding historical background, the land redistribution process, and the subsequent aftermath in relation to agricultural productivity. The land redistribution program and the subsequent different versions from the media have, resultantly, left most Zimbabweans and the world at large with extremely polarized views of the whole program. This paper attempts to iron out the myth and realities of the land reform program in Zimbabwe. The paper begins by discussing the dynamics of land ownership during the precolonial era, the racially skewed land ownership of the colonial era, as well as the post-independence land redistribution policies and attempts (1980-1998). The paper proceeds to discuss the events leading to the farm invasions of 2000-2001. Lastly, the paper evaluates the success and shortcomings of the land reform program in terms of the number of people resettled and their use of the land by comparing productivity between the pre- and the post- land reform period.

Rwanda in 2014: Policy Implementation in a Post-genocide Country; Sterling Recker, Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville

Rural public policy in post-genocide Rwanda aims to facilitate development while at the same time maintaining the dominance of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) regime. I focus on the policy of villagization that originated as a plan to bring security to the country after the genocide in 1994, and since 2000 has been justified as a necessary component of national development, to explain how public policy is implemented through a deconcentrated administrated system that ensures political acquiescence among bureaucrats and the rural poor. I frame the analysis by referring to Michel Foucaults concept of biopower. During a series of lectures beginning in the 1970s, Foucault argued the early medical and military sciences gave way to the governing of society through “the building up of profiles, statistical measures and so on, increasing knowledge through monitoring and surveillance, ‘extremely meticulous orderings of space’, and control through discipline.” The meticulous ordering of space and control through discipline are fundamental to understanding policy development and implementation in Rwanda under the ruling RPF and allows us to better understand the rationale behind resettlement and deconcentration.

Genocide as Oppressors' Revolt?  Rwanda, 1994; David N. Smith, University of Kansas

Genocide is often portrayed as the ultimate, tragic outcome of irreconcilable inter-ethnic conflict. But in reality the defining genocides of modern times have been initiated by states; they are, it can be argued, oppressors' revolts, directed against the oppressed by opppressors who fear the loss of their power.  These revolts are "realistic" when the oppressors are truly in danger of losing their grip on power.  They are, in such cases, instances of what Marx called "slaveholders' revolts," raised to exponential heights.  But there are also cases when elites revolt against subalterns whose vengefulness and menace is exaggerated to the point of paranoia.  

The genocide in Rwanda appears to have been just such an event.  The Rwandan ruling elite, unwilling to relinquish its role as oppressorr, reacted to threats from without and below by a violent parody of exploitation.  Genocide, the ultimate exploitation of the weak, was in this instance a vast, antinomian effort to eradicate subaltern enemies both real and imagined.  

We are now exactly 20 years removed from the genocide in Rwanda, which began in April 1994 and lasted three months.  Relatively little is being said about this tragedy; even our anniversary-mad society is already forgetful about its significance.  But it remains vitally important, both intrinsically and comparatively. 

Decolonizing and Deconstructing African Knowledge/Stereotypes in a Globalizing Era; Manfred O. Wogugu, University of Nebraska at Omaha

The purpose of the paper is to highlight issues of African knowledge marginalization and stereotypes which impinge on the full acceptance of African Intellectual endeavors while deconstructing the underlying notions about Africa and its peoples. Just as slavery and Jim Crow laws defined the social, economic and political boundaries of African American participation in the United States, colonialism and imperial cultural subjugation relegated Africans as cultural “inferiors” of Europe especially in the context of ideas and knowledge. This blatant marginalization of African peoples in their own homeland by invading and occupying regimes from Europe aborted the authentic growth of African religious, political and cultural development. Some colonial forms of government reflected this systematic assault on the orderly development and appreciation of what is truly African. The Belgian paternalistic colonial policy, the French direct rule and cultural assimilation policy, the Portuguese 500 years of continuous occupation of its African territories along with the recently ended South African Apartheid rule, left their Eurocentric vestiges that greatly turned the continent into a super hybrid of imported religions, cultures and education systems that are devoid of local foundations and roots.

While colonization and imperial rule distorted the true trajectory of African cultural and intellectual development by placing undue emphasis on European model education in the 19th and 20th centuries, the emergence of globalization as the “new” driving force behind Africa’s participation and integration into the global economic and social order, is unravelling its own unique social, political and cultural cleavages. There are some negative notions of Africa which have persisted over the centuries. These notions are continuing to undermine the ability of western scholarship to accept African thought processes and knowledge in conventional, traditional European standard worldview settings and epistemology. In this context, a re-examination and deconstruction of some of these notions will be undertaken.

2:20 to 3:35 Decolonizing Gender, Part 1: Nigerian Cases (Commons, Spooner Hall)

Strengthening Gender Research to Improve Girls’ and Women’s Education in NigeriaJamaine Abidogun, Missouri State University

This is a ethnographic study designed to work with university faculty, private and public education faculty and students, and community members to identify knowledge and practices that impact gender bias within education with emphasis on the role of indigenous science knowledge in formal education curriculum.  The study goals included identifying methods that engage female students in the Sciences; collection of Indigenous Science Knowledge for inclusion in the formal education; and the development of a collaborative community model to increase awareness and implementation of gender research methods in classroom action research to identify and redress education gender inequities. To this end the study was framed by the premise that African Indigenous Knowledge, in this case Igbo Indigenous Science in Nigeria, was largely absent in the current formal science secondary curriculum. Based on the historical and current formal education structures, Western science was the dominate content in the classroom presented with a male dominated bias as to who was encouraged or expected to engage in the sciences. The goal of documenting the current status of Science Secondary Education through teacher and student interviews and observations confirmed the perspective of science as a male gendered field of study and practice. Through interview of women in various Igbo traditional fields, Indigenous Science Knowledge was documented and brought forward to the Secondary Science teachers for integration within the classrooms. It was perceived as a welcome addition by the majority of teachers as it increased Indigenous Knowledge in the content and modeled female control and production of science. A future outcome of this ethnography may be the continuation of a collaborative model to integrate Igbo Indigenous Science Knowledge, highlighting female roles, within the current Secondary Science curriculum.

She Lives Dangerously: Grammatical Personhood, Intimate Ethics, and HIV/AIDS in Northern Nigeria; Kathryn A. Rhine, University of Kansas

In this paper, I will highlight the ways HIV-positive women manipulate language to express their subjectivity, while they simultaneously evade disclosing details that could jeopardize social relationships. While deeply stigmatizing public sentiments in Nigeria may discipline these women into silence about their diagnosis, I argue that they do not entirely efface their efforts to imagine a different future – one in which they can protect their dignity and fulfill crucial economic, social, and religious aspirations. I will explore here a case in which an HIV infected woman uses a shift in grammatical person over the course of an interview to transfigure a religious and popular discourse about immoral, dangerous, HIV infected women, into a moral account in which she is able to present herself as an ethical subject.

(De)Mobilizing Women: Discourses of Sex, Mobility, and National Honor in NigeriaStacey Vanderhurst, Indiana University

Over the past ten years, the Nigerian government has intercepted thousands of women as they try to migrate out of the country to enter foreign sex industries. Part of a broader campaign against human trafficking, the government defends its intervention as pre-emptive while the women themselves rarely see their experiences in this way. This paper situates women’s sensibilities about sex and migration in context where the two are so intimately tied, from linguistic metaphors for sex and sex work to the very policies designed to regulate them. It traces rhetoric of colonial and post-colonial movements against prostitution through humiliating accounts of women deported in the 1990s that directly spurred Nigeria’s own counter-trafficking movement. Then, using ethnographic data from a rehabilitation shelter for human trafficking victims in Lagos, it shows how current campaigns to stop women from migrating must be seen as an extension of  those persistent discourses that conflate women’s mobility and sexuality as a social threat—to a woman’s family, to her community, and to the reputation of the nation as a whole.

3:45 to 5:00 Decolonizing Gender, Part 2: Sex and Marriage (Commons, Spooner Hall)

Afrobeat Queens and the Decolonial Turn; Oladotun Ayobade, University of Texas

On February 18, 1978 Fela Kuti, Nigerian activist and musician, married all twenty-seven women members of his band. This move inspired a mix of outrage and admiration in the Nigerian public. With the marriage the women—or Queens as he Fela called them— became cast as key partakers in the articulation of its larger anti-colonial agenda. The Queens, many of whom performed as dancers and backup singers at Fela’s club, adorned skimpy dresses while performing, defying the codes of propriety in the Nigeria of the 1970s and 80s. In the largely Christian South where the Queens performed with Fela, their hypersexual presence coupled with their open use of marijuana upset the general moral standards. In this paper, I examine some of the ways that their dancing and singing enacted an ideological resistance to colonial imaginings of woman as a gendered subject. In their collaborations with Fela, the Queens challenged what it meant to be a woman within a colonial framework. I offer that Fela Kuti’s Queens employed dancing to rethink the Victorian idea of women that pervaded early postcolonial Southwestern Nigeria of the 1970s and 80s. I employ a close reading of Fela Kuti’s 1981 “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense” to illustrate how the Queens’ dancing offer a positional understanding of decolonial feminism.

Of Traditions, and Meaning: Gender and Marriage Institutions in West Africa; Omofolabo Ajayi-Soyinka, University of Kansas

The marriage institution, one of the structuring elements of a people’s cultural identity became a contentious factor between colonized Africans and colonial powers at the point of contact in the late 19th century. Each culture has its specific marriage practices, but the inequality of the encounter during colonialism not only magnified, but also distorted the differences especially regarding the performance, and meaning of marriage among colonized peoples. In this paper I explore the impact of these misrepresentations on contemporary marriage institutions, and the participants the construction of the meaning of ‘wife,’ ‘husband‘ and sexuality. A comparative analysis of ancient folklore, proverbs and relate My comparative analysis and examples will be drawn from mostly from West African, and British cultures, and based on various marriage practices, past and present.

Old Margins Becoming New Frontiers: The New Trend of African Traditional Weddings among Young African-American Students/Graduates in the United States; Mary Mba, University of Kansas

Recently, there is an increase in African traditional weddings among young African-Americans born in the United States. As this paper will show, the majority of these young African-Americans took classes in African Studies or participated in African Students Associations in their respective Universities either as undergraduate or as graduate students. Their African Studies scholarship helped them to better understand, accept and embrace their divers African cultures and their African roots as opposed to those who did not participate in African Studies classes, African Students Associations or African cultural events. These non-participants usually just opt for a “White” or court wedding. In addition, more and more non-Africans are participating in these African traditional weddings because of their exposure to African cultures, through African Studies scholarship. This paper will explore this new trend of traditional weddings among young Africans in the United States through pictures and other visual aids to show how African cultures are being re-enacted, relived and recreated in the United States.