by Akosua Adomako Ampofo
This past year I have been a Visiting Scholar at Concordia University (CUI) in Irvine, California. CUI is a Lutheran school and generally provided me with a warm and welcoming environment. While many of my students had never taken a class that focused on African or African-American studies, most were open to learning and indeed expressed appreciation for the paths we traveled in class. One morning on my way to class I found myself behind a young man (not my student) wearing a T-shirt that read, “All lives matter”. I was unprepared for the wave of sadness, frustration, anger and even despair that came over me. How do people not get that saying “all lives matter” in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US in 2016 shows, at best, deep ignorance, and at worst, a total lack of concern for those at the receiving end of institutional racism?
As we know all too well, not all voices have the same power—where we speak, how loud our voices are, the authority we convey, and the reach of our words vary depending on who we are, and where we are located. Some voices are marginalized by the way knowledge is produced and disseminated in different places around the globe. American and European journals are prized, African scholars both on the continent and in the Diaspora seek to publish in these “high impact” journals to gain tenure, then we have to legitimize our own knowledge by referencing European and American authors. And as African and other Black scholars chase these journals the continental and other purportedly less prestigious Black ones don’t receive the submissions that will promote them, scholars on the continent are deprived of the research, the journals stagnate, the African experience and perspective is deprioritized and the cycle continues. I would like to thank Gretchen Bauer for bringing to my attention the Twitter #WherearetheAfricans? which reflects the silencing of Black voices in knowledge production. Njoki Damai’s upcoming piece that will be posted on this blog early next week provides another case in point. Enter the RMF and BLM protests that spread across University campuses in South Africa and the US in 2015. Both movements illustrate how far today’s Black students (and some non-Black students) are willing to push to see their universities become decolonized spaces.
The cyber world is replete with accounts of both movements. Most recently Nyamnjoh’s (2016) book #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa provides an important chronology and analysis of the complexities of the South African movement. Both movements have been criticized by some as showcasing the tantrums of privileged middle class Black youth. My own limited experience with activists on two campuses—the University of Cape Town and Yale University—suggests that although there may certainly have been middle-class youth involved in the protests, the calls for “transformation” were both genuine and broad-based. In any case this is true for most protests and should not devalue the content of the calls. From August to September 2014 I was a Mellon Fellow at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town and witnessed the beginnings of the fusing of anger and frustration into action. In diverse student meetings and informal gatherings I attended Black students expressed frustration with the content of their education, from texts to methodologies. One student of commerce complained that what he learned in class from his economics lecturer was far removed from his own reality and that he could teach his lecturer a thing or two about how people living in poor Black communities survived economically. Another, a graduate student, narrated his struggle to get his lecturer to allow him to write his honors thesis on an African playwright rather than one of the European authors provided. His lecturer’s initial response was that no literature existed on the selected African playwright. Others voiced anger at the structure of the university system that was not designed, they felt, to take account of the cultural diversity of students, specifically the experiences of Black students. And many expressed frustration, pain and anger that the statue of Cecil Rhodes still greeted them at the pinnacle of the university despite multiple requests since 1994 for its removal. At the time of my visit there was a sign beneath the statue acknowledging the requests for its removal but noting that the University felt it was a historical feature that needed to be retained. Cecil John Rhodes was a British businessman, mining magnate and South African politician who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. Born in England on July 5th, 1853 he moved to South Africa when he was only 17. He was a committed British imperialist and his views on race have led contemporary critics to label him as an “architect of apartheid” (Rothberg:1988) and a white supremacist.
[ii]
The actual date of the genesis of the RMF movement is generally noted as March 9th, 2015, and on April 9th, 2015, following a UCT Council vote the previous night, the statue was removed. Although originally directed at the removal of Rhodes’ statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) the campaign led to a wider movement to decolonize and transform education across South Africa including demands that more African faculty be hired, the curriculum be “Africanized”, and that access for African students be increased. Campaigns and protests followed at the universities of the North-West, the Free State, Witwatersrand, Pretoria, KwaZulu-Natal, Stellenbosch, Rhodes, and Pretoria. During my fellowship at UCT in 2014 I workshopped a University-wide Introductory course on African Studies taught at the University of Ghana. In response to the protests, in April 2015 UCT announced that it would be introducing Black Studies as part of its transformation project. Leigh-Ann Naidoo’s PhD work (at the University of Witwatersrand) focuses on the RMF movement. She considers the spread of the movement across South Africa as the “emergence of a new black intellectual life”. This new Africa-centred student recognizes that the educational landscape continues to inflict epistemological violence on black students.[iii] This resonates with the movements that spread across over 100 US campuses in 2015 (See http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/04/campus-protest-roundup/417570/ for a cheat sheet of some of the major campus protests.).
The issues raised on US campuses ranged from demands that hostile environments and racist treatment of Black and other students of color be addressed, to calls that curricular be decolonized, and that links to slavery be acknowledged and corrected. For example, the Black Justice League at Princeton was particularly vocal in their demand for the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public-policy school. Wilson, a one-time president of Princeton and later the US, is known to have opposed admitting Black students to Princeton in 1902, and was sympathetic or even had links to the Klu Klux clan. Woodrow Wilson’s links to the clan have recently received new attention as the extremely racist film, Birth of a Nation, (originally called the Clansmen) by D W Griffith, that he hailed, has also received renewed attention, following the release Nate Parker’s 2016 film by the same name. Parker’s film reclaims the title and is about a slave who becomes a leader. The 10-member special committee set up at Princeton to consider the demand, however, voted to retain Wilson’s name. Students at Georgetown University had greater success. Two buildings named after University presidents who sold Jesuit-owned slaves to save the University from bankruptcy are to be renamed Freedom and Remembrance hall respectively until further notice.
Most prominent among the stories are events that took place at the University of Missouri (Mizzou), a public institution, and Yale University, a private one. At Mizzou students had long been unhappy about the administration’s failure to respond to their concerns. A student, Jonathan Butler, went on a hunger strike to protest a series of racist incidents, including reports that feces were smeared in the form of a swastika in a dorm restroom. Butler was himself a veteran of protests in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer. Demonstrations and a faculty walk out followed; students then demanded the resignation of Mizzou president Tim Wolfe. When the school’s football team boycotted games that would cost the University millions in liability, it seemed to be the final blow and president Wolfe resigned. A series of new initiatives to address racial tensions on campus were subsequently instituted, including hiring a diversity, inclusion and equity officer for the entire University of Missouri system.
There were student protests at Ivy league schools Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown and Yale, with the latter garnering the most attention. A series of events in late 2015 came to a head just before Thanksgiving. First some women students alleged that they were barred from attending a fraternity party which was admitting “White girls only”. Then swastikas were drawn across campus.[iv] Finally, a letter from one administrator urging students to avoid insensitive costumes including those that feature blackface, turbans and mock Native American headdresses, and to be “thoughtful” on Halloween, was met with a response from another administrator, Dr Erika Christakis. Christakis suggested that the email exhorting students to be sensitive pandered to the culture of “coddling” young people and curtailed free speech. “Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious … a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” Dr Erika Christakis, a Deputy Master of a residential college, and wife of Dr Nicholas Christakis, the master of the residential college responded in her email. The timing of her email is curious given that it was made the week before Greg Lukianoff—author of “The Coddling of the American Mind”—was due to speak at Yale (http://www.ukren.org/uploads/Black%20Europeans%20Briefing%20Paper%20Summer%202012.pdf). Students at Yale held a “March of Resilience” that garnered more than 1,000 supporters, and sent a detailed list of requests to President Peter Salovey, who acknowledged in a closed-doors meeting that the university had “failed” its minority students and that the students had made very mature and practical suggestions for the way forward.[v] Among other things students insisted that Yale actively seek to increase the number of Black faculty, address its ties to slavery, ensure the campus is a safe space for minority students, and enrich its curriculum offerings by making them more diverse. A few weeks later, just before president Salovey, delivered on his promise to provide a concrete action plan that included a “strengthening of the academic enterprise” via a greater focus on “particularly intense study of Race, ethnicity, and other aspects of social identity”. Yale would also provide new faculty positions and launch a five-year series of conferences on issues of race, gender, inequality, and inclusion.
The Future of Afro-Knowledge
The real drive forward into the future is the story that is heard, known, held, and believed corporately. It is what many are looking for in the idea of the African Renaissance… It begins with vision and hope… We have embalmed the story and have turned art into craft. The result is nostalgia— preservations of themes and enactments, connected by familiarity to a simplified history and function. .. We almost forget that early storytellers responded dynamically to the needs of their communities, to create vision along with the processes to grow sustainable societies… We need to understand the timelines of our being, seek the root and stem of our aspirations for our elders and children, the girls, the boys, the women, the men, and society at large. We need to talk about our attitudes, relationships, traditional cultures and also popular culture. We need to think of ourselves within our cultures and also against other cultures. We need to recreate the past, such that we can collectively experience it, while we discuss the present as observers and investigators of society. We must journey through history and what is currently news, and by our explorations, create futures as we see it arise from the story. Then we must send the story into the future as a prophecy by the development of identifiable characters and the unmasking of our hopes. (Adowa Badoe 2012).
This generation of young scholars, whether born and raised on the continent, whether descendants of those carried forcibly to North America and the Caribbean on boats, whether the first, 1.5 or 2nd generation children of immigrant parents, do not necessarily draw clear lines between the African experience on the continent or in the Diaspora. They recognize that our story needs to be told and heard and transmitted into the future.
What futures will we create from our stories? Which hopes will we unmask? What stories
will we tell? The student movements show us clearly the historical ties to slavery, colonialism and racism that embody the everyday lives of Black people, and the cultures of the academy and knowledge production. We need to blur the lines between African, African American and Black Studies. We need to join hands in ensuring that the African-centred story, the story that recognizes the diverse experiences of African people while also recognizing our shared geo-political history and contemporary realities, is kept alive. It would also emphasize the relationships among our realties—so the erasure of Black lives by police shootings of Black people in the US would be read as related to the erasure of African lives crossing the dessert to Europe, will be read as related to the beating of one of Africa’s leading writer’s Binyavanga Wainaina in Berlin last month, will be read as related to the absence of a single African author in several texts on Africa. (For example the 2013 Oxford Handbook of Modern African History does does not have a single African author among the 26. Some of the authors are colleagues I highly respect, however, the editors John Parker and Richard Reid need to be called out for this).
An African-centred knowledge agenda will develop tools and methodologies that are relevant to our context and that will enable “truer” pictures of our reality.
Akosua Adomako Ampofo is a Professor of African and Gender Studies at the University of Ghana (UG), and was until 2015 its Director. She considers herself an activist scholar, and was also the founding Director of the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy, CEGENSA, at UG and is currently a Visiting Senior Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Concordia University, Irvine. Adomako Ampofo’s teaching, research and advocacy address issues of African Knowledge systems; Higher education; Identity Politics; Gender-based Violence; Women’s work; Masculinities; and Gender Representations in Popular Culture.
Dr. Adomako Ampofo is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of CODESRIA, the (US) African Studies Association, Co-President of the Research Committee on Women and Society of the International Sociological Association, http://www.isa-sociology.org/rc32.htm; Founding Vice-president of the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), http://www.as-aa.org; Co-Editor, Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa blog, www.cihablog.com; and an honourary member of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. In 2010 Adomako Ampofo was awarded the Feminist Activism Award by Sociologists for Women and Society, SWS; in 2014 she was a Mellon Fellow at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town and in 2015 she delivered the African Studies Review Distinguished lecture at the African Studies Association meetings held in San Diego.
References
Badoe, Adwoa. 2012. “Unleashing the Story.” Legon International Scholar Series (LISS) Speaker, November 12, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.
Magubane, Bernard M. 1996. The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and the
Union of South Africa, 1875–1910. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2016. #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in
South Africa, Mankon: Langa Research and Publishing.
[i] Parts of this article were culled from the ASR Distinguished Lecture presented at the 58th annual meeting of the African Studies Association, November 2015, San Diego, California. The full version is forthcoming in the African Studies Review, 2016.
[ii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/11/25/woodrow-wilson-and-cecil-rhodes-must-fall/ accessed May 10, 2016. For more on Rhodes see Magubane 1996.
[iii] http://mg.co.za/multimedia/2015-08-06-decolonising-institutions-leigh-ann-naidoo accessed May 10, 2016
[iv] http://time.com/4106265/yale-students-protest/. The fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, had been banned from activities on campus and this party was held off campus. It had come under pressure in recent times at the University of Alabama for their chant, “You can hang from a tree, but will never sign with me, there will never be a nigger at SAE”.
[v] The timing of her email is curious given that it was made the week before Greg Lukianoff—author of “The Coddling of the American Mind”—was due to speak at Yale.