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'Connections and transformations in Africa' | |
| A workshop at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands, Tuesday 21 November, 2006 |
return to: Index page 'Connections and transformations in Africa'
Knowledge is evidently a constituent
element of all the four dimensions of our Programme ‘Connections
and transformations in Africa’: material technologies;
technologies of space; technologies of time; and technologies of
management. Knowledge therefore constitutes an immense field of
study, and only with the greatest selectivity can we make the
best of our very limited institutional resources for this
sub-programme.
While we will consider some definitional problems surrounding
knowledge, our central theme will be that knowledge constitutes a
technology of (dis-)connection and transformation in its own
right.
This is particularly clear when we consider collective
representations (such as belief systems, myths, ideologies,
implicit major orientations of a culture) as forms of
collectively managed knowledge:
·
On the one hand, collective representations connect those who
share them, create a self-evident, transparent world for them,
and thus enable sociality –
·
but at the same time they disconnect those not sharing these
collective representations,
o
because they locally represent (as excluded outsiders, or eminent
insiders in other words as knowledge specialists) minority
options in the socio-cultural situation at hand,
o
or because they belong to different societies and cultures.
Africanist research usually involves
the production of knowledge across socio-cultural boundaries;
from the mid-20th century, the perspective of cultural relativism
has helped to negotiate the dilemmas of connection and
disconnection when African knowledges were introduced and
evaluated in a global environment. Even so, there is unmistakable
disconnection in the sense that African knowledge is often –
with the full force of northern hegemonic arrogance –
disqualified in the global context:
·
either because (as traditional local knowledge) it is deemed
incompatible with globally circulating forms of knowledge (modern
science, world religions, models of democracy and human rights);
·
or because (as African contributions to global knowledge
production, e.g. in science) it is considered derivative, and
lacking in resources.
The development of a
counter-hegemonic perspective on African knowledge therefore will
be a major theme in this sub-programme. Here we will derive
inspiration from the work of Valentin Mudimbe and Sandra Harding,
and engage in discussion with Afrocentricity as another, radical
counter-hegemonic perspective (Cheikh Anta Diop, Molefi Kete
Asante, Martin Bernal).
Concretely, and with a view on technologies of connection, we
will concentrate on the question as to how state-of-the-art
technologies of information and communication are
transforming the reality of African knowledge production and
knowledge management in African universities, and integrate it
progressively in global processes; one specific research project
will address this set of questions. This leads to projects 1 and
2 as specified below.
But to balance this emphasis on scholarly knowledge production,
we shall extensively look at local knowledge systems in Africa,
especially myths. Here we pose two leading questions:
·
How are myths (especially when considered in Michael Witzel’s
long-range perspective, across millennia, and across continents)
examples of connections, disconnections and transformations in
the field of knowledge?
·
How are these traditional knowledge systems affected by the
introduction of state-of-the-art technologies of information and
communication: are they eradicated by the latter, or do these
afford them a new lease of life, under a different format?
This leads to project 3 as specified
below.
The current South-North
collaboration in the production of Africanist knowledge
is an intercontinental project of connectedness, both in the use
of social and technical technologies (disciplinary organisation,
technologies of research, data processing and publication), and
in the critical construction of a shared knowledge domain that --
considering increasing North-South contradictions in the world
today -- may well be considered a unique achievement.
Work on this topic makes us aware of the epistemological and
knowledge-political presuppositions of Africanist research in the
past (e.g. the alleged geopolitical and cultural distinctness of
Africa and of Africans; and of the alleged superiority of North
Atlantic theories and methods).
The hierarchical dimension to be considered in this connection is
that of (real and imagined) North Atlantic hegemony –
increasingly challenged not only by Islamism but also by
Afrocentrism.
It forces us to reconsider the place of Africa as massively
connected with other continents in an increasingly connected
global world.
The forms of hegemonic exclusion and rejection, the disdain
(often also among African elites) vis-ŕ-vis African forms of
knowledge and their rationality, makes us select the production
of African/Africanist scholarship by Africanist a particularly
strategic point to concentrate our research on
This is a form of action research, in which the possibilities for
South-North co-operation in scholarship are explicitly considered
and pursued,
·
Not only out of loyalty with the South and of awareness of the
historical shortcomings of an Africanist production dominated
(numerically and in terms of means of production) by northerners
·
But also because such collaboration constitutes a concrete
setting in which the contradictions of African knowledge
production today can be experienced and negotiated
The project will be executed by Wim
van Binsbergen in conjunction with the other members of the
editorial team (Editorial Board and Advisory Editorial Board) of Quest:
An African Journal of Philosophy. Its
proposed products are
·
the continued publication of the journal Quest
·
a series of articles (including editorials) in which the research
topic is explored
·
An international conference – preferably in West Africa
– on the research topic, and the publication on an edited
collection based on that conference
·
Initiation of a series on African philosophy and society with a
reputable publishing house, in association with Quest
This project proposal springs
directly from Julie Ndaya’s complex background and
intellectual experience. She was born in Congo and experienced
Mobutu’s policy of ‘authenticité’ in early
childhood. Coming from the typical family of traditional
knowledge specialists having turned modern teachers, she was
educated in Congo where she read Humanities at the University of
Lubumbashi, one of her lecturers being the great Congolese
writer, philologist and philosopher Valentin Mudimbe.
Subsequently she received an MA in ethnic studies from the
Université Libre, Brussels, Belgium. She established and
directed for many years a NGO in the field of development in
Congo. She married a Dutch ICT specialist and moved to the
Netherlands, where she now about to complete a PhD on women’s
prayer groups in Congo and in the West European diaspora.
Ever since her childhood meetings with North Atlantic researchers
who frequented her father’s house but never, to her
knowledge, left any written result of their research work
available locally, she has struggled with one central question:
how North Atlantic (or, giving the dominance of North Atlantic
models of knowledge production, global)
academic knowledge on Africa could be made available,
comprehensible and importantly relevant for the Africans who were
the central subjects in such knowledge. This problematic is
complementary to Mudimbe’s, especially in his path-breaking
book The invention of Africa, in
which, among other themes, he develops the critical notion of the
Colonial Library as the North Atlantic hegemonic appropriation of
knowledge on Africa; but the present problematic also implies a
critique of Mudimbe approach and its critical universalism which
no longer seeks to be directly relevant to specific day-to-day
problems in a specific African environment, sc. Congo.
Since the onset of colonial rule, the societies of Congo have
undergone rapid and violent social change. In more recent
decades, a sizeable diasporic population of Congolese, often
fairly highly educated, has settled in Western Europe. The point
is no longer merely to study these people and their enduring
social patterns, explaining these to a non-Congolese academic
audience. The point is also, and primarily, how to cater for the
practical and existential needs of Congolese people today, on the
basis of specialist academic knowledge produced with
state-of-the-art global methodologies and in the light of
state-of-the-art global intellectual debates. How to understand
chaos, conflict and reconstruction in Congo today? How to
interpret the dilemmas of the 2006 elections? Is a widespread,
upper middle-class spiritual movement such as Le
Combat Spiritual a road of liberation, or a
trap of mystifying false consciousness? Is there anything of
value and practical applicability still to be derived from
historic, precolonial Congolese cultural notions and practices;
why do modern spiritual movements formally reject tradition while
selectively bringing it in through the backdoor? How to respond
to the challenges of socio-political responsibility and
socio-cultural restructuration? These are some of the questions
modern Congolese are profoundly struggling with, and they are
also questions addressed by global scholarly research. Can we
mobilise the latter, to assist the former?
So what is being proposed is some kind of action research, in
which the researcher is largely guided by the perceptions,
motivations and declared needs and predicaments of the target
group, and conducts her research and her publications with the
close critical participation of that target group. The following
themes are particularly singled out:
·
advantages and disadvantages of the African, even Congolese
researcher in the present context
·
dilemmas of writing and publishing a PhD thesis that is to serve
an African readership even though satisfying primarily a North
Atlantic academic jury
·
enhancing institutional collaboration between the North Atlantic
region (especially the Netherlands) and Congo in the field of the
production of Africanist academic knowledge
·
towards an academic sound board and forum for the Congolese
diaspora in Western Europe
This project will be executed by
Julie Ndaya. The envisaged results are a number of articles;
tangible and viable networks between Northern and Congolese
academic institutions; and a scholarly forum for diasporic
Congolese.
New, electronic and digital
technologies of connectedness, however exciting and important,
only exist in continuity with older technologies of connectedness
through knowledge. In the latter, ethnic and religious myths of
identity, difference, and fundamental meaning (in other words,
everything that is constitutive of society) have always played a
major role.
These forms of connecting knowledge, highly constitutive of local
life worlds and sociality, have been conveyed through older
formats of communication such as story-telling and initiation
rites.
·
Do modern communication technologies destroy these older formats?
·
Or may they also lead (in a way parallel to the near-ubiquity of
global science, which to Harding is a major factor in the latter’s
claims to universality) to the articulation, circulation and (re-)invention
of ancient myths – and if so, why and under what conditions?
·
Is it even possible that ancient myths gain a new lease of life
through these new technological means? Wide supralocal
connectedness now becomes an everyday experience through modern
technology; but is that experience perhaps already implied in the
deep structure and the (often very wide and persistent)
distribution of ancient myths? Is this a context in which (as
recent long-range approaches to the study of myth are advocating)
even the sacrosanct distinction between Africa and the other
continents begins to dissolve?
In general, in this sub programme we
seek to explore the boundary conditions under which new
technologies of connectedness are both reshaping and preserving
Africa.
This project will be executed by Wim
van Binsbergen (ASC), Daniela Merolla (Leiden University), and
Eric Venbrux (Radboud University Nijmegen), in association with
the Harvard Round Table on Comparative Mythology, and the
International Association for Comparative Mythology. Its
envisaged products are
·
Several articles
·
An international conference 2008 on Connections in global
mythology (provisional title), to be convened by Wim van
Binsbergen, Eric Venbrux and possibly Daniela Merolla on behalf
of the International Association for Comparative Mythology
·
An edited collection based on that conference
·
A book on comparative world mythology from an African long-range
perspective.
return to: Index page 'Connections and transformations in Africa'
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