A
Colloquium at UNISA 4th-5th March 2014
Call
for papers
At the time
when the 50th anniversary of attempts at African unity are being
celebrated, it is perhaps also important to reflect on the general demands and
struggle for freedom which underlay the pan-African dream and which African
independence had promised its peoples.
Rather than merely celebrating an organisation of states, it is
fundamentally important to reflect on the ideals which produced them and how
they have been experienced by people since.
After all it was as recently as the 1980s that a Nigerian peasant was
asking ‘When will independence end?’
(Raufu Mustapha, 1996)[1]. It is a sad fact that popular dissatisfaction
with the state in Africa is widespread.
The so-called
‘second liberation’ of the continent which lay stress on democracy rather than
on independence, announcing with much fanfare a Renaissance founded on a
combination of neo-liberalism and good governance, has also not been able to
produce the promised results as civil wars, xenophobic and ethnic violence and
internecine strife have affected even the most democratic of African
states. Neo-colonial interference in
African affairs has continued unabated, and not only in the economic sphere
where the myth of the lack of African integration in the world economy has been
used a pretext for even more plunder of African natural resources, although now
taking different forms from the past. In
the ex-settler colonies of Southern Africa, racism has persisted, fuelled it
seems by a neo-liberal consensus which
while creating a small but new wealthy elite from among the previously
disadvantaged, has followed the rest of Africa in promoting a form of
accumulation parasitic on the state.
Simultaneously levels of social exclusion do not seem to have decreased
post-1980 but have persisted and even, in many cases, seem to have
increased. As a result, a number of
commentators are talking of a crisis of social cohesion on the continent
despite positive predictions on the economic front due to recent mineral
discoveries.
Some argue that
the problem lies with the self-serving habits of politicians, although it is
rarely stressed that such politicians are regularly chosen by the people. Others stress the need to build lasting
institutions, while yet others insist that the problem is the fact that the
state itself has not been rooted among the people, but has simply been grafted
on a foreign system of domination - foreign not only in nationality terms but
more fundamentally in the sense of an external imposition on popular culture,
thought and society in Africa. Within
this overall context, it is important to submit many of the assumptions of the
1960s and 1980s to renewed critical scrutiny.
And in this instance, one can do worse that to refer to the critical
analysis of the post-colonial state outlined in the work of Frantz Fanon. Written in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
precisely as African independence was being achieved continent-wide, Fanon’s
mature work expanded on his youthful analysis of racial oppression in the
metropole to examine not only the character of popular nationalist
consciousness, but also the failure of post-colonial states to deliver on the
freedom which they had promised their peoples.
Not only did Fanon notice the deterioration of the party of liberation
from a popularly based organisation to one ‘lording it over the people’ but he
vehemently decried the interests of the ‘national bourgeoisie’, the repressive
nature of the new states and the tendency to xenophobic exclusion.
Since Fanon
wrote, the continuities and discontinuities between colonial/apartheid and
postcolonial/post-apartheid state forms have not always been analysed at
sufficient depth; in this African scholars can learn much from other parts of
the South. Literature from India of the
‘subaltern studies’ school in particular asked the central question as to why
nationalism in its various forms tended to simply reproduce the repressive
features of colonialism which it itself had criticised. In particular, given the fact that colonial
societies never experienced modernity as a liberating process, but as one of
exclusion and oppression, why were so many of its features simply adopted
wholesale after nationalists came to power?
Is there something about modernity itself which makes oppression along a
multitude of dimensions inevitable? Is
there something even about ‘scientificity’ itself which reproduces racism? Is capitalism the appropriate category for
understanding post-colonial Africa? And if so how is economic interest to be
understood both within and between societies and nations? To what extent is
class still a relevant concept and, if so, is it more than a simply
sociological category with no political import?
Is there something regarding human rights discourse itself which - as
Aimé Césaire noted - is simply hypocritical when connected with power and
interest in Africa? Indeed is analysing
identity politics - the politics of interest - the proper way to think about
freedom on the continent today? Is a
category of ‘social cohesion’ imported from 1950s American functionalist
sociology the most useful way to think about the problems linked with social
upheavals, or would a notion of ‘exclusion’ (and its opposite ‘inclusion’) - social or political - be of greater use?
These are some
of the issues and questions which this symposium intends to address at a high
level of theoretical and empirical sophistication, including contemporary
postcolonial perspectives. To this end
papers are requested on any topic pertinent to the general theme of the conference. It is hoped to invite plenary speakers who
have been thinking and writing about these issues for a long time and who
therefore can provide parameters for thought and raise questions for general
discussion. The number of presentations
will be limited so selection will be made on the basis of originality and
intellectual rigour.
It is intended
to hold this 2 day colloquium during the 2014 Research and Innovation week at UNISA from 4th-5th
March 2014
In the first
instance a 250-300 word abstract should be submitted to Hanli Wolhüter (wolhuhs@unisa.ac.za) by 30th October
2013. Authors of selected abstracts will
be informed soon thereafter. Full papers
will be expected no later than 31st January 2014.
[1] Mustapha, A. R. 1996, “When Will Independence end?
Democratisation and Civil Society in Rural Africa” in L. Rudebeck and O.
Tornquist (eds.) Democratisation in the
Third World: concrete cases in comparative and theoretical perspective, Uppsala
