Mbembe’s Matrix and the Matri-Archive

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Laura S. Grillo
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Postmenopausal Women ◽  
African History ◽  
Public Protest ◽  
Epistemic Violence ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Female Genital

Abstract Achille Mbembe shows how the West’s denigrating projections on Africa as a chaotic void perpetrated a founding epistemic violence. The matrix of Black Reason, Blackness, and The Black worked systematically to justify colonialism and undermine African subjectivity. By maintaining its grip over the psyche, the postcolonial commandement effortlessly and indefinitely sustained subjugation. This is its ‘little secret’. Mbembe suggests that liberation may be possible by appealing to an archive from the ‘underside’ of African history to retrieve a self that is not constituted by toxic colonial projections. Drawing on my work An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa, I argue that the traditional appeal by postmenopausal women to their ‘bottom power’ is just such a living matrix – a ‘matri-archive’. Performing this ritual in the context of public protest, the ‘Mothers’ deploy their own ‘little secret’ with the capacity to break the hold of the postcolony’s spell.

WHO BELONGS TO THE ‘STAR PEOPLE’? NEGOTIATING BEER AND GIN ADVERTISEMENTS IN WEST AFRICA, 1949–75

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
DMITRI VAN DEN BERSSELAAR
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Life Style ◽  
Market Research ◽  
African History ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Foreign Companies

ABSTRACTThis article explores the different trajectories of advertising for schnapps gin and beer in Ghana and Nigeria during the period of decolonisation and independence up to 1975. It analyses published newspaper advertisements alongside correspondence, advertising briefs, and market research reports found in business archives. Advertising that promoted a ‘modern’ life-style worked for beer, but not for gin. This study shows how advertisements became the product of negotiations between foreign companies, local businesses, and consumers. It provides insights into the development of advertising in West Africa, the differing ways in which African consumers attached meanings to specific commodities, and possibilities for the use of advertisements as sources for African history.

Constructing a Precolonial Owan Chronology and Dating Framework

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 219-249
Author(s):  
Onaiwu W. Ogbomo
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
African History ◽  
Accurate Assessment ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relative Chronology ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Genealogical Data

Oral tradition has been recognized by historians as a vital source for historical reconstruction of non-literate societies. However, one of its “deficienc[ies] is an inability to establish and maintain an accurate assessment of the duration of the past [it] seeks to reconstruct.” As a result of its time-lessness it has been declared ahistorical. In the same vein R.A. Sargent argues that [c]hronology is the framework for the reconstruction of the past, and is vital to the correlation of evidence, assessment of data, and the analysis of historical sources. Any construction of history [which] fails to consider or employ dating and the matrix of time to examine the order and nature of events in human experience can probably be labelled ahistorical.Basically, the concern of critics of oral tradition is that, while they are veritable sources of history, the researcher “must work and rework them with an increasing sophistication and critical sense.” Because dating is very pivotal to the historian's craft, different techniques have been adopted alone or in combination to create a relative chronology. In precolonial African history, the most commonly used have been genealogical data which include dynastic generations, genealogical generations (father-to-son succession) and the age-set generation. Also systematically charted comets, solar eclipses, and droughts have been employed by historians in dating historical events, or in calculating the various generational lengths.A dynastic generation is determined by “the time elapsing between the accession of the first member of a given generation to hold office and the accession of the first representative of the next.”

Postcolonial States and Societies in West Africa

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebenezer Obadare
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
African History ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Lost Decade ◽  
Independence Era ◽  
Political Landscapes ◽  
Postcolonial States ◽  
The Military

Postcolonial West African history can be understood in terms of transitions across three successive eras: a post-independence era of high nationalism; the military era, characterized by profound political and socio-economic instability; and, finally, since the early 1990s, a democratization era, marked by continued swings between fevered hopes and anguished realities. These temporalities arguably converge on a singular leitmotif, namely, the attempt by state power to preserve its privileges and the struggle by social forces to resist the state and draw effective boundaries between the private and public domains. Gloomy for most of the “lost decade” of the 1980s, the prospect for such a project appears brighter today, especially in the aftermath of pivotal shifts in the global and regional political landscapes.

Some Source Books for West African History

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. W. Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
West African ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
African History ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Varied Range

In his recent book on the Royal African Company, K. G. Davies remarked that he had found himself obliged to conduct his research as though he were working on Ancient History. I have since experienced the same feeling when dealing with a more varied range of material, and this article is a plea for subjecting the sources for African history to that kind of critical appraisal which has customarily been applied to Greek and Roman authors. In my case I was concerned only with the old European forts in West Africa, and from an antiquarian viewpoint, but the same considerations must apply more generally, and the examples that follow will, I trust, stimulate investigation of the writers where they deal with other topics.

The Import of Firearms into West Africa 1750–1807: a quantitative analysis

1977 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Inikori
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Crop Protection ◽  
Strong Preference ◽  
African History ◽  
Agricultural Commodities

A series of articles on firearms in Africa published in the Journal of African History in 1971 raised a number of questions which have not been given adequate attention since those articles appeared. In the present paper an attempt is therefore made to shed some light on some of these questions in relation to West Africa in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the basis of import figures from England total imports during this period was estimated to be between 283,000 and 394,000 guns per annum, excluding imports into the Congo–Loango area which Phyllis Martin estimated to be about 50,000 yearly at this time. These guns went largely to the major slave exporting regions of West Africa, especially the Bonny trading area. The sellers of slaves showed a very strong preference for firearms, which is an indication of a strong connexion between guns and the acquisition of slaves. This reinforces the gun-slave cycle thesis. The evidence fails to support the idea that firearms were used primarily for crop protection in West Africa in the eighteenth century. If this were so it should have been reflected in the European goods demanded by sellers of agricultural commodities. It is likely, however, that the use to which firearms were put in West Africa changed after 1900. While the quality of firearms imported into West Africa during the period of this study was generally low, it would seem that those firearms largely served the purposes for which the African buyers purchased them.

scholarly journals Did the ancient Egyptians migrate to ancient Nigeria?

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jock M. Agai
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
West African ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
African History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

Literatures concerning the history of West African peoples published from 1900 to 1970 debate�the possible migrations of the Egyptians into West Africa. Writers like Samuel Johnson and�Lucas Olumide believe that the ancient Egyptians penetrated through ancient Nigeria but Leo�Frobenius and Geoffrey Parrinder frowned at this opinion. Using the works of these early�20th century writers of West African history together with a Yoruba legend which teaches�about the origin of their earliest ancestor(s), this researcher investigates the theories that the�ancient Egyptians had contact with the ancient Nigerians and particularly with the Yorubas.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: There is an existing ideology�amongst the Yorubas and other writers of Yoruba history that the original ancestors of�the Yorubas originated in ancient Egypt hence there was migration between Egypt and�Yorubaland. This researcher contends that even if there was migration between Egypt and�Nigeria, such migration did not take place during the predynastic and dynastic period as�speculated by some scholars. The subject is open for further research.

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