The Africa Seminar: A Digital Conversation

10:00 – 10:15 am – Welcome remarks

10:15 – 10:45 am – Florence Mugambi, African Studies Librarian

Presentation of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University

10:45 am – BREAK

11:05-11:25 am – Natalia Molebatsi (Northwestern University)

Performance The Woman Is Her Own Home

11:30-11:50 am – Shanille Allo (Northwestern University)

Performance Made in Cameroon

11:55-12:15 pm – Stephen J. Chandler lll (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

How (white) Students Understand and Conceptualize Black Music’s Role in Black Lives Matter?: A (racial) Comparison of Students’ Understanding of the Impact of Black Music

12:15-12:45 pm – Q&A: Natalia Molebatsi, Shanille Allo, Stephen J. Chandler III

12:45 – 1:00 pm – BREAK

1:05 – 1:25 pm – Colleen Foran (Boston University)

White Masks, Black Resistance: Hearing the Subaltern in Colonial Côte d’Ivoire

1:30 – 1:50 pm – Kenyi Betuel B Marle (Ohio University)

How Twitter influences information sharing among South Sudanese

1:55 – 2:15 pm – Kelvin Acheampong (Bayreuth University) with Gideon Asante Yeboah (Centre for African and International Studies, University of Cape Coast, Ghana) and Prince Henry Ebbey (School of Management Jiangsu University of China)

Sino-Africa Relations: Implications for Neo-Colonialism and Sustainable Development Goals: A Case of China’s Involvement in Ghana’s Textiles and Mining Industries

2:15-2:45 pm – Q&A: Anuli Akanegbu, Kenyi Betuel B Marle, Kelvin Acheampong, Gideon Asante Yeboah, Prince Henry Ebbey 

2:45 – 3:00 pm – Closing remarks

 

10:00 – 10:15 am – Welcome remarks

10:20 – 10:50 am – Keynote presentation: Dr. Frank Mugisha, Executive Director, Sexual Minorities Uganda

11:00 – 11:30 am – Keynote presentation: Dr. Kwame Otu, Assistant Professor of African-American and African Studies (University of Virginia)

“The Radically Afriqueer, Feminist Agitations of Patricia McFadden”

11:30 – 12:00 pm – Q&A: Dr. Frank Mugisha and Dr. Kwame Otu

12:00 – 12:15 pm – BREAK

12:20 – 12:40 – Anuli Akanegbu (New York University)

“I am BLK IRL (Pronounced: Black in Real Life)”

12:45 – 1:05 pm – Emmanuella Amoh (Purdue University)

“The Campaign for Africa: Horace Mann Bond’s Anti-Colonial Politics in the Age of Cold War”

1:10 – 1:30 pm – Sanyu Mulira (New York University & California State University)

“”Awa,” A journal of Post-Colonial Womanhood”

1:30 – 2:00 pm – Q&A: Colleen Foran, Emmanuella Amoh, Sanyu Mulira

2:00 – 2:10 pm – BREAK

2:15 – 2:35 – Kimberly Rooney (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

“Traces of the School in Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir and Mongo Beti’s Mission Terminée”

2:40 – 3:00 pm – Elizabeth (Beth) Woods (Boston University)

“A Colonial Haunting: The Morphology of Violence through Mysticism and Female Narratives in Senegalese Cinema”

3:00 – 3:20 pm – Q&A: Kimberly Rooney, Elizabeth (Beth) Woods

3:20 – 3:30 pm – Closing remarks

Natalia Molebatsi (Performance Studies, Northwestern University)

Performance The Woman Is Her Own Home

What do you call a woman who carries the entire world on her head? What does it mean for Black womxn to want to live exist create art freely? “The woman is her own home” is a poetic/visual performance which revolves around writing back Black womxn into the fabric of my society. In this world, womxn who know are too much are revered, but never in public. They transgress the rules of hetero-normative patriarchy and whiteness and as a result are punished and/or erased. I wanted to centre our lives worlds in different ways, as we always navigate for survival. My main argument(s) point of departure in this work is that:

– Women//Womxm/Womyn save the world.

– Black queer feminist women save free everyone.

– Memory is the keeper of our their stories. 

My ultimate goal is to use queer feminist poetry as a performance strategy to explore issues of African history, identity/disidentification, colonization, as well as anti-colonization and anti-homophobia interventions of worldmaking.

 

Shanille Allo (Global Health Studies, Northwestern University)

Performance Made in Cameroon

This piece highlights the crimes against Southern Cameroon (the anglophones), the colonial impacts, and the struggle to find hope and forgiveness amidst a civil war. It references a few of the atrocities committed at the beginning of the war in 2016. The crimes, I believe, are not are bad as what it once was, but there is still no resolution and we are yet to see even a shift in power structures. The accompanying music is a South African song of praise and thanks to God, but with a sober, thoughtful tune, which, foreshadows the hope sought for by Southern Cameroonians towards the end of the poem.

 

Stephen J. Chandler lll (Educational Policy & African American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

How (white) Students Understand and Conceptualize Black Music’s Role in Black Lives Matter?: A (racial) Comparison of Students’ Understanding of the Impact of Black Music

This paper seeks to acknowledge how students enrolled in a college course on Black Music and American Cultural History understand and conceptualize Black music’s role in Black Lives Matter. My research is an ethnographic content analysis of former students enrolled in a college course which uses hip-hop pedagogy as its primary method of teaching. Moved by Gloria Ladson-Billings concept of “culturally relevant teaching,” which utilizes students’ culture to encourage them to think critically about the sociopolitical issues that affect their daily lives, I looked to students to grasp how using hip-hop pedagogy in the classroom fosters their understanding of Black music’s role in Black Lives Matter. Special consideration was designated to how Black music is perceived and understood as maintained by educators’ knowledge and use of hip-hop pedagogy. The conceptual frame of this analysis included Altheide’s ethnographic content analysis and hip-hop pedagogy, an extension of Gloria Ladson-Billings’s culturally relevant teaching. This case study employed a sociopolitical methodology to demonstrate the ways students understand the cultural, historical, and social positioning of Black music in the United States. Significance in this work lies in its aim to address how students’ learning in the course connects to their sense of self and understanding of race in the United States. My proposed research offers suggestions for the use of hip-hop pedagogy in the development of students’ critical consciousness.

 

Anuli Akanegbu (Anthropology, New York University)

I am BLK IRL (Pronounced: Black in Real Life)

BLK IRL™ is an unapologetically Black multimedia research project that aims to showcase the expansiveness of Black identity in today’s Internet culture. The mission of BLK IRL™ is to produce work that bridges online content with offline contexts to achieve a more holistic understanding of how Black people navigate multiple worlds synchronously on a daily basis. The first offering from BLK IRL™ is an audio docuseries that explores the business of “influencing” and the power dynamics at play in the act of cultural exchange. Each episode dissects themes related to race in the influencer economy through research and conversational interviews with predominantly Black content creators, scholars, entrepreneurs, activists, marketing experts, and cultural critics. Listen to Season 1 at www.blkirl.com.

 

Kenyi Betuel B Marle (Mass Communication/Media Arts Studies, Ohio University)

How Twitter influences information sharing among South Sudanese

Since the independence of South Sudan on July 9th, 2011, the country has continued to experience conflicts, and the conflicts are characterized by hate speech and misinformation on social media. This study aims to understand how South Sudanese use Twitter to interact and share information because some studies found out that social media users can engage in conversation that can facilitate open discussion on issues that can bring about peace and development. The study performed a content and textual analysis of Twitter data from 8,292 tweets generated in the month of (November 2020). The study also employed Voyant to transform large quantities of textual and online tweets into concise visual representations. Content analysis identified that males were active on Twitter compared to Females and others (unspecified gender). The study also found out that South Sudanese on Twitter mostly use mobile phones to interact compared to those who use the web and other unspecified devices. While 34% tweeted within South Sudan, 38% of South Sudanese were from the diaspora, and 28% of South Sudanese were interacting from an unspecified location. The overall data set (38%) of the sample of tweets mentioned peace in South Sudan while 62% of individual tweets contained interaction about other development issues about South Sudan. Keywords: word; conflict, war, peace, displacement, interaction, social media, Twitter.

 

Kelvin Acheampong (African Studies, Bayreuth University)

Gideon Asante Yeboah (Centre for African and International Studies, University of Cape Coast, Ghana) 

Prince Henry Ebbey (Public Administration, School of Management Jiangsu University of China)

Sino-Africa Relations: Implications for Neo-Colonialism and Sustainable Development Goals: A Case of China’s Involvement in Ghana’s Textiles and Mining Industries

China’s progressive assumption as a major actor on the African scene needs critical academic examination. China has refused to paint a benefactor-beneficiary relationship (as is often the case with Africa’s relations with the West), and has consistently stressed a win-win relationship based on mutual cooperation. Besides, aid from China seems more efficient, as it often appears to have no strings attached and Chinese projects are usually executed within a shorter time. However, there are also concerns about whether China’s win-win rhetoric is sincere or just an empty propaganda. This paper contributes to the debate by examining the relationship between China and Africa through the lens of Kwame Nkrumah’s neo-colonialism. In this regard, the paper examines China’s involvement in the textiles and mining industries of Ghana as a case study to argue whether the partnership between China and Africa is one that actually promotes development or engenders a new trend of neo-colonialism. This research intersects four of the SDGs (i.e. clean water and sanitation; sustainable cities and communities; life below water; and partnership for the goals). The paper is structured into four sections: The first is an overview of China’s relations with Africa, and specifically Ghana. The second section presents the theoretical framework and the third is an evaluation of China’s involvement in the textiles and mining industries of Ghana. The last part attempts to specifically answer whether or not China is a neo-colonizer.

 

Dr. Frank Mugisha (Executive Director, Sexual Minorities Uganda, Robert Kennedy Human Rights Awardee, Thorolf Rafto Memorial Prize Awardee, Finalist Nobel Peace Prize)

 

Dr. Kwame Otu (Assistant Professor of African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia)

“The Radically Afriqueer, Feminist Agitations of Patricia McFadden”

 

Colleen Foran (History of Art and Architecture, Boston University)

“White Masks, Black Resistance: Hearing the Subaltern in Colonial Côte d’Ivoire”

Starting from close examination of a mid-twentieth-century Wè mask in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art’s collection, this paper argues that this object actively resisted French colonial oppression. The materials used (recycled gun casings), their intentional arrangement (echoing European cannons used to terrorize West Africa’s coastline), and the mask’s facial characteristics (including a distinctly European handlebar moustache), were intended to talk back to violent white invaders in a language they would understand.This mask was danced in the early to mid-twentieth century to maintain the balance between civilization and wilderness. Wè masks made for this purpose grew and changed over time with the continual addition of materials, wisdom, and power, becoming a physical record of its community. During this mask’s lifetime, French military forces invaded Wè territory to create and then “pacify” colonial Côte d’Ivoire. Thousands of shotgun casings were left behind, as well as French settlers intent on taking away Wè land for agricultural use, thus threatening the Wè community’s way of life. Postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously declared that the subaltern could not speak. This idea was later tempered by Spivak and others to reflect that the subaltern has of course always been speaking—a more relevant question is, can it be heard? This Wè mask loudly communicated through the auditory sounds it made in motion and through its evocative materials and their intimations of violence. By employing repurposed Western technology and caricatured European facial features, this Wè mask confronted its colonizers literally and metaphorically.

 

Emmanuella Amoh (History, Purdue University)

The Campaign for Africa: Horace Mann Bond’s Anti-Colonial Politics in the Age of Cold War

In 1957, shortly after returning from the celebration of Ghana’s independence, Horace Mann Bond, the African American educator and first Black President of Lincoln University, was asked to tender in his resignation letter. Scholars and journalists speculated that one of the reasons cited for Bond’s forced resignation was his frequent travels to Africa, concentration on African students and African affairs. Using correspondences between Bond and African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe, in addition to memoirs and articles, I argue that Bond’s campaign for Africa, which included frequent travel to the continent and focus on African students were part of a broader goal of using education to support decolonization and to bridge the gap between continental and diaspora Africans. This study adds to—and expands Pan-African narratives beyond the political progressions which follow the Pan-African Congresses to the formation of the African Union. Bond’s campaign for Africa urges scholars to look at other phases of anti-colonial struggles beyond demonstrations and foreign policies. Focusing on the period between 1949-1972, Bond’s support of Nkrumah’s ‘rapid Africanization’ will be analyzed. I will also highlight organizations like the Africa-America Institute, which Bond founded with William Leo Hansberry to rally intellectual, financial, and political support for Africa. Education as an anti-colonial and nation-building tool, for Bond, Nkrumah, and Azikiwe, was a revolutionary and liberatory praxis.

 

Sanyu Mulira (History (NYU); Lecturer of Ethnic Studies (California State University))

“Awa,” A journal of Post-Colonial Womanhood

Three years after Senegalese independence from France, journalist and educator Annette Mbaye d’Erneville founded the first francophone black women’s magazine in Africa, “Awa: La Review de la Femme Noire.” As a historical figure, d’Erneville has lived a rich life as a trailblazer with a captivating career dedicated to female empowerment. “Awa” was the first public enterprise of d’Erneville’s career that helped build the image of the new, modern, and African woman in the era of African Independence. “Awa,” published from 1963 to 1873, was a glossy magazine that chronicled the position and potential of African women in a bourgeoning new world. The magazine focus on women living not between past and present, traditional and modern—but advocated for women to allow their lives to be a perfect métissage of African tradition and modernity. The notion that African women could craft their own post-colonial futures as a tapestry of the traditional and modern was radical, innovative, and empowering. This paper presentation will critically examine the “Awa” journal to investigate how this women’s magazine encouraged African women to insert themselves into contemporary history and mold their own place in society.” Awa” served as a women’s only space where they could explore the potentially of feminist future in an independent Africa, create new roles for women to occupy, and disrupt gender boundaries of the past.

 

Kimberly Rooney (French, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Traces of the School in Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir and Mongo Beti’s Mission Terminée

Questions of education permeate many early francophone novels from sub-Saharan Africa, and these literary narratives provide important insights into the wider effects of a foreign, colonial instruction. My paper examines depictions of the School as a colonizing agent in L’Enfant noir (1953) by Camara Laye and Mission terminée (1957) by Mongo Beti. While these works have been studied extensively for their treatment of education more broadly, my paper contributes to this discussion important critical perspectives on this Western institution in particular. By zooming in on the works’ portrayals of the school that have thus far been understudied, I explore how the schooling experience plays a role in the subject formation of the student characters as well as in the formation of the narratives themselves. In On Decoloniality, Walter Mignolo writes that the coloniality of knowledge exists not only on the level of content, but in “the principles and assumptions of knowledge creation, transformation and dissemination” (2018, 145). Accordingly, in this paper I argue that beyond the content learned, the school’s pedagogy, classroom space, and power dynamics bear powerful and persistent colonial epistemologies. However, by interrogating the school in these classic Francophone works, we can shed light on its traces and unsettle the persistent coloniality of knowledge. School is not a given, “universal” experience, but a place and a process that merit more scrutiny and whose portrayals reveal important truths about the coloniality of certain educations and the colonial matrix of power.

 

Elizabeth (Beth) Woods (Department of Romance Studies, Boston University)

A Colonial Haunting: The Morphology of Violence through Mysticism and Female Narratives in Senegalese Cinema

Nigerian author and spokeswoman Chimamanda Adichie has both written and spoken about the dangers of “single story” narratives surrounding the continent of Africa. These narratives are often defined by a single word: postcolonial. Like many of its fellow African nations, the modern nation-state of Senegal has been subject to this arguably violent narrative despite its complex cultural identity. As the capital of the French African Empire, Senegal’s colonial oppression catalyzed this identity suppression before gaining independence in 1960. In this paper, I chart the mutations of the delicate dance of the morphology of Senegalese identity from the independence era to the present day through an examination of two Senegalese films centered on female protagonists: the classic 1966 film La Noire De… by Ousmane Sambene and the 2019 award-winning film Atlantique by Mati Diop. Using a comparative lens, this paper will analyze how colonial violence has morphed and been rebranded for a postcolonial age and the complications this violence imposes on Senegal’s identity as a peaceful and independent nation state. Building on the works of Adichie and other theorists such as Chandra Mohanty, Pierre Bourdieu and Léopold Sédar Senghor, this paper will pay particular attention to the liaisons between female narratives and national identity in both films. Furthermore, I will use the simulated and confrontational characteristics of the cinematic medium to explore how each film agitates and deconstructs these liaisons through the exposure of a violent identity restriction that such “single stories” of postcolonial nation-states sustain.