Of Origins and Colonial Order: Southern Nigerian Historians and the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ c. 1870–1970

1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip S. Zachernuk
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
West African ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Racial History ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
Hamitic Hypothesis ◽  
New Treatments

The professional Nigerian nationalist historiography which emerged in reaction against the imperialist Hamitic Hypothesis – the assertion that Africa's history had been made only by foreigners – is rooted in a complex West African tradition of critical dialogue with European ideas. From the mid-nineteenth century, western-educated Africans have re-worked European ideas into distinctive Hamitic Hypotheses suited to their colonial location. This account developed within the constraints set by changing European and African-American ideas about West African origins and the evolving character of the Nigerian intelligentsia. West Africans first identified themselves not as victims of Hamitic invasion but as the degenerate heirs of classical civilizations, to establish their potential to create a modern, Christian society. At the turn of the century various authors argued for past development within West Africa rather than mere degeneration. Edward Blyden appropriated African-American thought to posit a distinct racial history. Samuel Johnson elaborated on Yoruba traditions of a golden age. Inter-war writers such as J. O. Lucas and Ladipo Solanke built on both arguments, but as race science declined they again invoked universal historical patterns. Facing the arrival of Nigeria as a nation-state, later writers such as S. O. Biobaku developed these ideas to argue that Hamitic invasions had created Nigeria's proto-national culture. In the heightened identity politics of the 1950s, local historians adopted Hamites to compete for historical primacy among Nigerian communities. The Hamitic Hypothesis declined in post-colonial conditions, in part because the concern to define ultimate identities along a colonial axis was displaced by the need to understand identity politics within the Nigerian sphere. The Nigerian Hamitic Hypothesis had a complex career, promoting élite ambitions, Christian identities, Nigerian nationalism and communal rivalries. New treatments of African colonial historiography – and intellectual history – must incorporate the complexities illus-trated here.

scholarly journals Hamlet (RSC, 2016) and representations of diasporic blackness

2019 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-160
Author(s):  
Sujata Iyengar ◽  
Lesley Feracho
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
South African ◽  
African State ◽  
West African ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Royal Shakespeare Company ◽  
African Caribbean

In 2016 Paapa Essiedu, a British actor of Ghanaian ancestry, starred as Hamlet in Simon Godwin’s lauded Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, set in a post-colonial African state whose non-specificity nonetheless irritated some reviewers. We contend, however, that the production mixed multiple referents of blackness (Eastern African, West African, Caribbean, South African, 1970s African American) in order deliberately to create an imaginary post-colonial domain where these different kinds of diasporic blackness engaged with each other through the figure of Hamlet and his art. We therefore examine how the concept of race changes with the transatlantic or transnational movement among spaces in this production.

Entangled political histories of twentieth-century West Africa: The case of Guinean exile networks

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
John Straussberger
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
West Africa ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Home Country ◽  
West African ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Order

Abstract Following independence in 1958, hundreds of Guinean soldiers, students, and politicians fled their home country in order to build an opposition to President Sékou Touré in exile. This article examines how these exiles built regional and global networks in order to effect political change. In turn, West African states sought to manage exiles in order to apply political pressure on regional rivals. Despite their liminality in a region increasingly dominated by national politics and international organizations, exiles were at the centre of political contestations surrounding citizenship, sovereignty, and human rights that emerged in the three decades following decolonization. Their history underscores the importance of regional frameworks in shaping the post-colonial order in West Africa.

How Not to Introduce Blues Prosody:

Poetics Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-681
Author(s):  
Michael Skansgaard
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
West African ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
Sterling Brown ◽  
Response Patterning ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Iambic Pentameter

This article delivers a two-pronged intervention into blues prosody. First, it argues that scholars have repeatedly misidentified the metrical organization of blues poems by Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. The dominant approach to these poems has sought to explain their rhythms with models of alternating stress, including both classical foot prosody and the beat prosody of Derek Attridge. The article shows that the systematic organization of blues structures originates in West African call-and-response patterning (not alternating stress), and is better explained by models of syntax and musical phrasing. Second, it argues that these misclassifications — far from being esoteric matters of taxonomy — lie at the heart of African American aesthetics and identity politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas literary blues verse has long been oversimplified with conventional metrics like “free verse,” “accentual verse,” and “iambic pentameter,” the article suggests that its rhythms arise instead from a rich and complex vernacular style that cannot be explained by the constraints of Anglo-American versification.

African American Journalists in World War II West Africa: The NNPA Commission Tour of 1944–1945

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110549
Author(s):  
Oliver Coates
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
West Africa ◽  
American West ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic

The National Negro Publishers Association (NNPA) Commission to West Africa in 1944–1945 represents a major episode in the history of World War II Africa, as well as in American–West Africa relations. Three African American reporters toured the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and the Congo between November 1944 and February 1945, before returning to Washington, DC to report to President Roosevelt. They documented their tour in the pages of the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Their Americans’ visit had a significant impact in wartime West Africa and was widely documented in the African press. This article examines the NNPA tour geographically, before analyzing American reporters’ interactions with West Africans, and assessing African responses to the tour. Drawing on both African American and West African newspapers, it situates the NNPA tour within the history of World War II West Africa, and in terms of African print culture. It argues that the NNPA tour became the focus of West African hopes for future political, economic, and intellectual relations with African Americans, while revealing how the NNPA reporters engaged African audiences during their tour.

scholarly journals Liturgy and non-colonial thinking: Speaking to and about God beyond ideology, religion and identity politics – Towards non-religion and a unbearable freedom in Christ

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann-Albrecht Meylahn
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Specific Group ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Face ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Voice

It has been argued that most countries that had been exposed to European colonialism have inherited a Western Christianity thanks to the mission societies from Europe and North America. In such colonial and post-colonial (countries where the political administration is no longer in European hands, but the effects of colonialism are still in place) contexts, together with Western contexts facing the ever-growing impact of migrants coming from the previous colonies, there is a need to reflect on the possibility of what a non-colonial liturgy, rather than a decolonial or postcolonial liturgy, would look like. For many, postcolonial or decolonial liturgies are those that specifically create spaces for the voice of a particular identified other. The other is identified and categorised as a particular voice from the margins, or a specific voice from the borders, or the voices of particular identified previously silenced voices from, for example, the indigenous backyards. A question that this context raises is as follows: Is consciously creating such social justice spaces – that is determined spaces by identifying particular voices that someone or a specific group decides to need to be heard and even making these particular voiceless (previously voiceless) voices central to any worship experience – really that different to the colonial liturgies of the past? To give voice to another voice, is maybe only a change of voice, which certainly has tremendous historical value, but is it truly a transformation? Such a determined ethical space is certainly a step towards greater multiculturalism and can therefore be interpreted as a celebration of greater diversity and inclusivity in the dominant ontology. Yet, this ontology remains policed, either by the state-maintaining police or by the moral (social justice) police.Contribution: In this article, a non-colonial liturgy will be sought that goes beyond the binary of the dominant voice and the voice of the other, as the voice of the other too often becomes the voice of a particular identified and thus determined victim – in other words, beyond the binary of master and slave, perpetrator and victim, good and evil, and justice and injustice, as these binaries hardly ever bring about transformation, but only a change in the face of master and the face of the slave, yet remaining in the same policed ontology.

Groove Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Social Perspectives ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual History

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Out of Empire into Socialist Modernity

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-70
Author(s):  
Steffi Marung
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.

Race Doesn’t Matter

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey D. Fields
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Abstract Notion

This chapter focuses on African American Republicans who can be labeled as “color-blind” because their strategy for linking black identity to Republican politics involves de-emphasizing the role of race in black people's lives. These African American Republicans see themselves as linked to a broader black community, but they reject identity politics as the pathway to racial uplift. They endorse Republican social policy as part of a commitment to an abstract notion of conservative politics, not because the policies are good for black people. Indeed, for race-blind African American Republicans, the best thing for blacks is to abandon race-based identity politics.

From the Bamboula to the Baby Dolls

Walking Raddy ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Jennifer Atkins
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
West African ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
West African Dance ◽  
Baby Doll

Baby Dolls embodied the rambunctious, ambulatory dance practices of New Orleans' African-American community, playing with ragtime dancing, a style in conversation with early twentieth century music. Baby Doll dancing referenced their contemporary situation, empowering them through ribald street jaunts full of dynamism, while also relating to other cultural practices like jazz funerals and connecting them to a historical legacy that traced back to Congo Square (and earlier). Essential to Congo Square, where the Bamboula dance featured prominently, was that West African dance aesthetics persevered but also blended with sociocultural ideas influenced by its New Orleans context. Improvisation was key. Dancing, whether in Congo Square or ragtime style, highlighted spontaneity and a spirited—even competitive—style that cultivated agency while acknowledging a communal presence. These moments (and movement) were vibrant, illuminating Baby Dolls as innovators within a rich, cultural tradition that left troubles behind as liveliness surged through their dancing processions.

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