Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
Abstract
- Abstract
- en This special issue “Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected” comes out of the first conference of the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple. Reconfiguring African Studies, which took place from 14th to 17th July 2021. Like the conference, the special issue is dedicated to the cluster’s annual theme and heuristic angle of modes of relating. In the overall research agenda of the Africa Multiple, the notion of relationality takes centerstage. With the focus on Africa not as a given but as a multiple constantly in the making, relations through which it is constituted and upated necessarily come to the fore. Our attention is drawn to processes, appearances and practices and hence to the variety of modes of coming into relation. Accordingly, next to medialities, spatialities, and temporalities, modalities is a heuristic angle in Africa Multiple meant to structure the study of relations we encounter in African lifeworlds, which can take a vast spectrum of forms, like e.g. exchange, acceptance, adaptation, convergence, dependence, hierarchization, conflict, struggle, resistance, and denial. Furthermore, modalities is fundamentally interlinked with the Africa Multiple Cluster’s key concept of reflexivity, which requires the researchers to reflect upon the relational modalities of their position and the very conditions of their knowledge production. This issue’s six contributions which approach modes of relations from a variety of perspectives and with a view on different African countries and their diasporic links, were written by scholars from a variety of disciplines, namely, sociology, geography, anthropology, religious and literary studies and philosophy. Furthermore, in line with critically reflecting upon the modalities of academic knowledge production, it also contains contributions by two artists, the French photographer Aurélien Gillier, who enters in a dialogue with the sociologist Joschka Philipps, and the Kenyan author Yvonne Ahdiambo Owuor, who critically reflects on creative forms of knowledge production on and in Africa.
- de Dieser Sammelband „Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected“ ist das Ergebnis der ersten Konferenz des Exzellenzclusters Africa Multiple. Reconfiguring African Studies, die vom 14. bis 17. Juli 2021 stattgefunden hat. Wie die Konferenz ist auch der Sammelband dem Jahresthema des Clusters und dem heuristischen Blickwinkel „Modes of relation“ gewidmet. In der allgemeinen Forschungsagenda des Clusters Africa Multiple steht der Begriff der Relationalität im Mittelpunkt. Da der Cluster Afrika nicht als eine gegebene Einheit, sondern als ein sich ständig entwickelndes Vielfaches perspektiviert, rücken die Beziehungen, durch sich die Afrika konstituiert und aktualisiert, notwendigerweise in den Vordergrund. Unsere vorliegendes Interesse gilt Prozessen, Emergenzen und Praktiken und damit auf der Vielfalt der Beziehungsmodi. Dementsprechend ist Modalität neben Medialität, Räumlichkeit und Zeitlichkeit ein zentraler heuristischer Blickwinkel in Afrika Multiple, der die Untersuchung von Relationen, denen wir in afrikanischen Lebenswelten begegnen, strukturieren soll. Modalitäten verweisen auf ein breites Spektrum an Formen, wie z.B. Austausch, Akzeptanz, Anpassung, Konvergenz, Abhängigkeit, Hierarchisierung, Konflikt, Kampf, Widerstand und Verweigerung. Darüber hinaus ist der Begriff der Modalitäten grundlegend mit dem Schlüsselkonzept der Reflexivität des Africa-Multiple-Clusters verknüpft, das von den Forscher*innen verlangt, die Modalitäten ihrer Position und die Bedingungen ihrer Wissensproduktion zu reflektieren. Die sechs Beiträge dieser Ausgabe, die sich aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven und mit Blick auf verschiedene afrikanische Länder und ihre diasporischen Verbindungen mit Beziehungsmodi auseinandersetzen, wurden von Wissenschaftler*innen aus verschiedenen Disziplinen verfasst, nämlich Soziologie, Geographie, Anthropologie, Religions- und Literaturwissenschaft und Philosophie. Ganz im Sinne der angestrebten kritischen Reflexion der Modalitäten akademischer Wissensproduktion enthält es darüber hinaus Beiträge zweier Künstler*innen, des französischen Fotografen Aurélien Gillier, der mit dem Soziologen Joschka Philipps in einen Dialog tritt, und der kenianischen Autorin Yvonne Ahdiambo Owuor, die kreative Formen der Wissensproduktion über und in Afrika kritisch reflektiert.
Description
- Note
- Autoren des Bandes: Akin-Otiko, Akinmayowa ; Diop, Babacar Mbaye ; Doevenspeck, Martin ; Gillier, Aurélien ; Kinyera, Paddy ; Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo ; Philipps, Joschka ; Seesemann, Rüdiger ; Simatei, Peter Tirop ; Vierke, Clarissa
- Full text
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Africa*n Relations.
Modalities Reflected
University of Bayreuth
African Studies Online
11
Clarissa Vierke and Rüdiger Seesemann, 2024
11
University of
Bayreuth African
Studies Online
Africa*n Relations
Modalities Reflected
Rüdiger Seesemann and Clarissa Vierke, 2024
CC BY 4.0
iii
Institute of African Studies (IAS)
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Online (10)
University of Bayreuth African Studies Online
Title
Editor(s)
Year of
Publication
Issue
A new Age of Extremes?
Jamile Borges da Silva,
Fa bio Baqueiro Figueiredo,
and Patricia Godinho Gomes
2023
10
Frontiers
in
African
Digital
Research. Conference Proceedings
Anja
R.
Dreiser,
Cyrus Samimi
2022
9
Gesundheitssicherung im Kontext
sozialer Differenzierung. Wer tritt
Krankenkassen im la ndlichen Mali
bei?
Alexander Schulze
2020
8
Being In-Between. Middle Income
Groups in Uganda and their Forms
(and Absences) of Political and
Social Mobilization
Anna Fichtmu ller
2019
7
Competing and Conflicting Power
Dynamics in Waqfs in Kenya, 1900-
2010
Suleiman A. Chembea
2018
6
Die
Finanzierung
von
Eigentumswohnungen
in
Addis
Abeba.
Eine
diskursanalytische
Anna herung an Wohneigentum
Nadine Wenzel
2008
5
Die Spur der Glasperlen. Akteure,
Strukturen
und
Wandel
im
europa isch-ostafrikanischen
Handel mit Glasperlen
Ulf Vierke
2004
4
Globalization in a Local Context:
Perspectives
and
Concepts
of
Action in Africa: An Introduction
Roman
Loimeier;
Dieter
Neubert
and
Cordula
Weißko ppel
2005
2
From
an
Anthropology
of
Astonishment to a Critique of
Anthropology´s Common Sense: An
Exploration of the Notion of Local
Vitality in Africa
Peter
Probst
and
Gerd
Spittler
2005
1
v
Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence
The Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence was established in January 2019 through the Excellence
Strategy of the German Federal and State Governments. Building on the well-established
programme of African Studies at the University of Bayreuth, the Cluster pursues an innovative
agenda as expressed in its subtitle – Reconfiguring African Studies. It has almost one hundred and
sixty members, from three continents, who represent a diverse range of academic disciplines and
cooperate with partner institutions in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Our understanding
of the reconfiguration of African Studies focuses on stimulating new theoretical approaches and
the creation of new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. In addition to the University of
Bayreuth, the Cluster is made up of four further African Cluster Centres (ACCs): the Universities
of Lagos (Nigeria), Joseph Ki-Zerbo (Burkina Faso), Moi (Kenya), and Rhodes (South Africa).
Our key concepts are multiplicity, relationality, and reflexivity. We employ them to capture the
dynamic interrelationship of diversity and entanglement that characterize African and African
diasporic ways of life and world-making. In the “Knowledge Lab”, we connect our theoretical,
epistemological, and methodological issues. Our “Digital Research Environment” integrates
analogue and digital data into a common, digital research platform. Through the Bayreuth
Academy of Advanced African Studies, the Cluster coordinates an international fellowship
programme for junior and senior researchers, including artists. Bayreuth International Graduate
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In addition to University of Bayreuth African Studies Online, there are the University of Bayreuth
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Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence
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Deputy Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Ute Fendler
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Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
University of Bayreuth African Studies Online (10)
About the Authors
Akinmayowa Akin-Otiko is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of African and Diaspora
Studies, University of Lagos. He is a Principal Investigator in the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced
African Studies (BA). His research interest cuts across the religio-cultural spaces of the Africans.
He engages in theory development in African Studies and traditional medicine. He has written
books on the indigenous religions of the Yoruba and their medicine. He is currently a Principal
Investigator (PI) and co-PI on different projects such as a African Multiple Cluster funded project
entitled, Ethics Dumping Across Africa, and the African Realities Project of the NAGEL Institute,
Calvin University, USA.
Babacar Mbaye Diop is Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art and Culture in the
Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Humanities at the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar
(UCAD). His research and teaching focus on French-speaking African philosophy and literature,
with particular emphasis on African art, aesthetics and cinema from a decolonial perspective and
in relation to ecological issues, concepts of identity, universality, vulnerability and cultural
diversity.
Martin Doevenspeck is Professor of Political Geography at the University of Bayreuth. His
research interests are at the intersection between migration studies and political geography, with
a focus on (im)mobilities, conflicts, and borders.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6518-1426
Aurélien Gillier is a photographer born in 1983. Primarily practicing photography between
Bordeaux, where he resides, and West Africa, where he regularly travels, he draws inspiration
from seemingly different urban spaces. Beyond a purely event-based and illustrative approach,
his reports bear witness to a particular attention to the details of everyday life, seeking traces and
clues of connections between these different territories, combining aesthetics with a broader
humanistic approach that captures the photographed subjects in all their dignity. This perspective
on social worlds and the interrelationships that occur within them is certainly influenced by his
background as a historian of the United States.
Paddy Kinyera is a postdoctoral fellow in the Research Section “Mobilities” of the Africa Multiple
Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth. His research explores the (im)mobility
dimensions of mega infrastructure projects.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a Kenyan writer. Her latest Indian Ocean novel, “The Dragonfly Sea”
(2019) fictionally explores transoceanic connections and what the return of China to Eastern
Africa might mean for intimate histories of East Africa’s maritime people. Her highly acclaimed
debut novel, Dust (2014), narrates a story of national amnesia. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s short
stories have been published in international literary magazines. Her short story, The Weight of
Whispers, earned her the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003.
Joschka Philipps is a sociologist and Junior Research Group Leader of the project “Politics of the
Unknown. Conspiracism and Conflict” at the University of Bayreuth’s Africa Multiple Cluster of
Excellence. Before turning to the political importance of conspiracy theories and rumours, he
worked on urban youth and protest movements, especially in Conakry (Republic of Guinea) and
in Kampala (Uganda). His book “Ambivalent Rage” (Harmattan, 2013) won the Junior Researcher
Award by the Association for African Studies in Germany. Joschka received his PhD in sociology
vii
from the University of Basel, Switzerland (2016) and his MA in political science from the
University of Freiburg, Germany (2011).
https://orcid.org/0009-0008-4568-5556
Rüdiger Seesemann holds the Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany,
and serves as the Dean of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, which started is operations in
2019. His research focus is on Islam in nineteenth and twentieth century-Africa, a field where he
has published widely. His publications include The Divine Flood (Oxford University Press, 2011)
and Sufism, Literary Production and Printing (Wu rzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2015; ed. with R. Chih and
C. Mayeur-Jaouen). Seesemann’s more recent work focuses on theories and practices of Islamic
knowledge and engages wider theoretical and epistemological questions in the study of Africa.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0647-3899
Peter Simatei is a Professor of Comparative Literature. He teaches African literature, African
Drama, Diaspora Studies, and African Cinema in the Department of Literature, Linguistics, Foreign
Languages, and Film Studies at Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya. He has a PhD from the University
of Bayreuth, Germany. He has been a German Research Council (DFG) Post-doctoral Fellow
(Postcolonial Studies Program) at the University of Munich and a fellow of the Five College African
Scholars program at the University of Massachusetts, USA. He is also an alumnus of Alexander von
Humboldt Stiftung, Germany. He is the author of The Novel and the Politics of Nation-Building in
East Africa (Bayreuth African Studies, 2001) and co-author of Decolonial Aesthetics II: Modes of
Relating (Stuttgart: JB Metzler, 2023). He is a member of the advisory board of Postcolonial Lives
(Brill) and the The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI).
Clarissa Vierke is Professor of Literatures in African Languages at the University of Bayreuth. She
is an expert of Swahili poetry, Islamic manuscript cultures and has been publishing on texts
travelling the Indian Ocean to East Africa – both in Anglophone Kenya and Tanzania and
Lusophone Mozambique. Her most recent publication is a poetry anthology “In this Fragile World.
Swahili Poetry of Commitment by Ustadh Mahmoud Mau” (Brill, 2023). She is principal
investigator of the Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple. Reconfiguring African Studies” and the
spokesperson of the research section Arts and Aesthetics. Together with colleagues working on
Francophone and Lusophone literature and film, she is currently running a research project on
literary entanglements in the Indian Ocean across boundaries of nations, languages and media.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4167-7451
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Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
University of Bayreuth African Studies Online (10)
Table of Content
Institute of African Studies (IAS)
iii
Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence
v
About the Authors
vi
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
Africa*n Relations: Modalities Reflected
1
Ru diger Seesemann and Clarissa Vierke
Thresholds, Ennui, Futures & Alt. Decoloniality
13
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Modalities of Theorizing: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Conspiracy Theories
27
Joschka Philipps and Aure lien Gillier
Arguing for Integrative Medicine in Diversity
51
Akinmayowa Akin-Otiko
Ways of Knowing Africa: African Literature and Shifting Imaginaries
65
Peter Simatei
Consentient Citizenship and the Making of Infrastructural Frontiers in East Africa
77
Paddy Kinyera and Martin Doevenspeck
Senghor et les expositions du Musée Dynamique de Dakar
101
Babacar Mbaye Diop
Africa*n Relations:
Modalities Reflected
Introduction
Rüdiger Seesemann and Clarissa Vierke
“Modalities seems to me a very powerful tool for studying Africa as multiple and
relational, reflexive. (…) It moves away from the binary in the history of philosophy
of substance, a singular, and modes in the plural, so that the substance presents itself
under different modes. Spinoza differentiates between the substance, which is God,
and modes like the body or the spirit. Modality deconstructs it, but puts the only
emphasis on different manners, reflections, modes which do not point to the oneness
of substance. Modalities have a mode of being on their own.”
This is the response the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne gave, when the dean
of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, Ru diger Seesemann, asked him about the analytical
value of “modalities” in the concluding session of the Cluster conference “Africa*n Relations.
Modalities Reflected”.1 Indeed, our consideration of modalities of relating in the Africa Multiple
Cluster is fundamentally connected to the triad we have advanced as the conceptual framework
for our research: Multiplicity as constituted by relationality and reflexivity. With the notion of
multiplicity, we move away from the idea of Africa as a neatly delineated and definable area, a
substance, in Diagne’s words, mostly invented by the West and fixed in time and space, which has
1 The conference took place at the University of Bayreuth from 14th to 17th July 2021. Most of the chapters published
here are the outcome of research conducted within the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of
Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany s
Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1 – 390713894.
2
Africa*n Relations: Modalities Reflected
so long troubled African studies and area studies more broadly. Instead, we propose to
conceptualize ‘Africa’ as multiple, which implies that we do not approach Africa as an isolate or
fixed unit, but as constantly and dynamically constituted and reconstituted through relations. To
quote Diagne once again:
“If we take modalities seriously, we need to consider modes of relating in themselves
without reducing them to the one – Glissant talks about the primacy of relation. The
rhizome offers another concept of tiny roots, without having a center or one root (…).
Modalities is a way of thinking about the multiple realities of Africa, an Africa in flux
with urban intensifications. (…) If you do not have an overarching vertical universal,
you have a horizontal plane of immanence. This is a way of escaping the invention of
Africa (as Mudimbe put it), by not imposing an overarching universalism, considering
Africa as a substance. There is no language which represents the logos, but there are
only different modalities – no Ursprache of which everything else is a mode. (…) There
are only modalities and the language of languages is translation.”2
Multiplicity is not a synonym of diversity, and it goes beyond underlining Africa’s (often
stereotypically evoked) plurality. From the point of view of multiplicity, there is, for instance, not
a super-category (or substance) of literature, like the novel, and many national adaptations of the
novel on the African continent just derived from it as variations. So far, however, the narrative –
which has troubled literary studies as much as many other disciplines – has largely remained a
teleological one of Western origin (or at least, standard of measure) and African variations of it,
which always come belatedly. Diagne points to the example of Islam in Africa, which is often
considered as a localized version of “Arab Islam”3. He refers to a quote attributed to Tierno Bokar
Saalif Tall, a Sufi scholar from present day Mali of the early 20th century, who compared Islam to
water, which does not have a colour of its own, but takes on the colour of the landscape through
which it is runs.4 “You do not have Islam as a substance”, Diagne concludes, “you only have
modalities of Islam”. As the anthropologist Marylin Strathern puts it in her reflections about
relations, a multiple world made up of relations cannot be dissected into “the one and the many”
(Strathern 1991)5. Seen from this perspective, the dichotomy of centre and periphery is dissolved:
what remains are only peripheries – or only modalities.
Sticking to the “plane of immanence”, relationality stays with the fuzzy and dynamic nature of
lifeworlds, embedded in multiple relations and attuned to the coming into being of, for instance,
literary works, religious practices as well as the simultaneity of many coexisting phenomena,
different ways of being in and acting in the world, and options, which might also be contradictory,
contested, and incommensurable. Since relations also feed back into the context from where they
2 Again this quote is taken from the videorecording of the same concluding session of the conference. The dictum “the
language of all languages is translation” is borrowed from Ngu gĩ wa Thiong’o (see wa Thiong’o 2023). Diagne has also
written recurrently about the question of universalism (see, for instance, Diagne 2022).
3 See also Spies and Seesemann 2016; Seesemann 2020.
4 In the words of Amadou Hampate Ba, Tierno Bokar’s most prominent student: “L’Islam n’a plus de couleur de l’eau: il
se colore aux teintes de terroirs et des pierres” (as quoted in Monteil 1964: 41).
5 See also Strathern (2018: 3): “(…) nothing is simply part of a whole insofar as another view or perspective may
redescribe it as part of something else.”
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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come, reflexivity is the second analytical tool for considering multiplicity, entailing also a critical
view on researchers’ positionalities: Researchers embedded in power structures shape their
‘object’ of research and vice versa. This also implies that this approach is susceptible of questions
of power, processes of border-drawing and exclusion, which we will come back to below.6
Conceptually, the research agenda takes inspiration from a variety of disciplines and debates, like
science and technology studies, cultural studies and theories of new materialism, which seek to
leave behind monist, reductionist entities – in Diagne’s words, the idea of a “substance” – as
elementary considerations of research, and foreground relations instead. Echoing the sociologist
Christopher Powell, whose “radical relationality” advocates giving up dichotomies of the
individual and society, structure and agency (2013: 191), we consider African lifeworlds as
configurations of relations. Whether on larger or smaller scales, relations allow us to see Africa as
globally entangled and as co-constituting a dynamic world in constant flux. The focus on relations
entails a perspective that foregrounds processes. In his book Poetics of Relations, Edouard Glissant
(1996) inflects relations not as “being in relation” or “having relations”, but essentially as a
constant process of becoming; he speaks of “coming into relation” in specific moments and
contexts as key points. Similarly, Powell also underlines, in drawing on Elias, that relations “are
only directly observable through concrete action” (2013: 194).7
While a perspective of “coming into relation”, and hence on processes, emergences and
transformation is a common denominator, views differ particularly concerning the ontological
status of relations, their conceptualization, as well as, more specifically, the human-non-human
boundaries.8 From a constructivist (relativist) point of view, it is the object under investigation
which changes depending on the observer’s standpoint as well as the conceptual lens taken: There
are many versions of, for instance, religious practice, political formations or art history (see
Philipps and Gillier in the present volume). While there is a diversity or plurality of gazes and
perspectives that question single narratives, which exclude others, it is the phenomenon under
investigation whose ontological status remains unquestioned: it “remains singular, intangible and
untouched” (Mol 1999: 76). Translating this perspective into Diagne’s terminology, one could say
that the object is a substance that appears in various modes depending on the observer. However,
as Diagne emphasises in his quote above, from an ontological perspective on multiplicity there is
no such thing as one object, but only different versions or modalities of it, which are constantly
being shaped, performed and changed (see also Akin-Otiko in the present volume).
For Annemarie Mol, the case for ontological multiplicity is supported by the fact that reality is
“historically, culturally and materially located” (Mol 1999: 75; Mol 2000, see also Haraway 2003).
Object and subject, matter and human cannot easily be differentiated as the observer and the
observed. A good example is the laboratory, Bruno Latour’s paradigmatic site for developing his
actor-network theory, which most approaches in new materialism draw on: Laboratory products,
like microchips, telephones, or vaccinations, “carry new realities with them”, which then figure as
6 On that, see also in particular the contribution by Philipps and Gillier and Kinyera and Doevenspeck in this special
issue.
7 For Massumi (2002), movement and moments of emergence are key; Mol (1999: 75) underlines performance and
intervention.
8 From this point of view, even stasis is the product of constantly renovated relations and just a special case of becoming.
4
Africa*n Relations: Modalities Reflected
“historically grounded contingencies” (Mol 1999: 75). To give another example, as highlighted by
Achille Mbembe, borders are decisively linked with the racialisation of human bodies, advanced
through biometrics, allowing some to pass and others not to pass: “The human body is seen as an
indisputable anchor to which data be safely secured” (Mbembe 2019: 5). It is a perspective of
actor-network theory and subsequent inquiries of new materialism which (analytically)
diminishes the distinction between the material and immaterial, semiotic, physical and social
forces. Rather, emphasis is put on constant interactions and interrelations, making human and
matter actants and co-equal, constantly reshaping each other.9
These considerations feed into or overlap with a variety of conceptualizations of relationality, like
networks (Latour 2005), assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 2015) or enmeshments (Mol and
Law 1994). Not only the philosopher Brian Massumi but also scholars such as Tim Ingold (2007:
80, 2011: 85) have built on but also criticized Latour’s ANT for translating life into a series of
interconnected and well-defined nodes, rather than linear trails. Massumi compares it to a flying
arrow, whose flow can only artificially and in retrospect be segmented into nodes along the flying
curve (see Massumi 2002: 6). The impossible question at which point one can grasp the arrow’s
trajectory (a point can never picture movement) reminds us of Mol’s finding that many conditions
are contingent and hence difficult to be traced and grasped in one single moment (Mol 2010).
Ingold’s concept of the meshwork (based on the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre) is “not so
much nodes in a network as knots in a tissue of knots” (Ingold 2011: 71).10 Gilles Deleuze and Fe lix
Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome is also an organic one, where relationality between humans
and matter is not tied by nodes but grows, horizontally, along tiny roots (Deleuze and Guattari
2015).
Even if one does not subscribe to a radical ontogenetic view on relations, a focus on modes and
modalities comes in as a logical consequence of putting an emphasis on multiplicity refracted
through the lens of relationality. Because relations sidestep defined terms and structure and are
tied to movement and change, they suggest an empirical approach, zeroing in on moments of
becoming – which is also the focus of the contributions to the present collection. The question is
how to analyze and, hence, also qualify modes of relations, as they emerge, stagnate, continue, or
overlap. Moving towards practices, appearances, and emergences, mostly (transitive and
inchoative) verbs rather than nouns are being used. In the context of the Africa Multiple Cluster
of Excellence, we use modalities as one of our heuristic angles, together with medialities,
spatialities, and temporalities, meant to structure the study of relations. Examining modes of
relating is first of all an empirical question with the aim to collect, systematize, and structure the
variety of empirically observed processes of relating, like exchange, acceptance, adaptation,
affiliation, inclusion, cooperation, (mutual) influence, convergence, dependence, hierarchization,
9 More recently, it is the COVID-19 pandemic but also climate change which have increasingly underpinned what
Mbembe, arguing from a political perspective, calls “planetary” view beyond human-centrism: In his lecture “Bodies as
Borders. The Right to Mobility in a Planetary Age” (2019), he is not only worried about how to “repair” the planet so
much “damaged by human activities”, but wonders how to “reassemble” the “humans and non-humans, its physical,
chemical and biological components, its oceans, atmosphere and land surface, all interlinked in a grand gesture of
mutuality”. In the present volume, Kinyera and Doevenspeck describe the “reassemblement” of communities, state and
company representatives, different notions of land and oil pipelines.
10 See Lefebvre 1991: 117.
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Online (11)
competition, conflict, struggle, rejection, resistance, opposition, and denial (see also Spies and
Seesemann 2016).
Rather than thinking of relations merely as alternative options or as successively coming into
being in a narrative of progress, multiplicity takes particular interest in their simultaneity,
interplay and historical entanglement: how do possible options enforce or exclude each other?
how do they overlap? How are they being defended, argued for, or attacked (see also Spies and
Seesemann 2016: 6)? Modalities urges us to not only reflect on the situatedness of the historical,
social and material conditions of coming into relation, but also to consider their outcomes, which
are never stable: Which multiple versions of reality constantly emerge through and in relations?
And which future versions do they make way for or hinder?
Furthermore, how can we qualify the properties of relations? Also depending on the researcher’s
perspective and conceptual take, they might appear as imagined, symbolic, conceptual, personal,
physical, embodied, material, or affective; they might also be direct, indirect, concrete, actual,
potential, historical, present or future-oriented; they might be enduring or also brief. A particular
challenge, circumscribed by the range of adjectives listed, lies in the often rather fuzzy nature of
modes of relations as such (which makes it often impossible to opt for one descriptive adjective).
Rather than thinking of modes of relations as well-circumscribed and definable, they appear
fragmented, ambiguous, partial or discontinuous: processes that clash or stagnate in one context
might produce collaborations and acceptance elsewhere, possibly producing collateral effects.
Rather than modes of relations adding up to a well-defined harmonious whole (a substance in
Diagne’s terms), “tolerating open-endedness, facing tragic dilemmas, and living-in-tension sound
more like it” (Mol 1999: 83). Mol gives the example of “side-effects” in the various ways of
diagnosing anemia, like for instance, a categorization of sexes due to statistics, which was not the
intention of the originally planned tools for diagnoses, but still has very concrete effects (see also
Mol 2010). Modes and qualities of relations are not merely alternatives to each other. There are
not only many relations, but they also interfere, overlap or include one another in complex ways.11
Emphasising processes of emerging necessitates a view on the becoming and hence the “not-yet
defined”, including tacit, potential, latent, embodied, affective and sensuous modes, which defy
easy categorization and terms: there is no name for it yet in the moment when something
happens.12 For Massumi’s approach, for instance, affect and sensation are key categories. For him,
the “becoming sensible” (Massumi 2002: 77) of change, rupture and deviation, “processes before
signification and coding” are essential, since terms of sociality, culture but also space are not fixed
terms which precede bodily and sensuous experience, but, the other way around, experiences are
only categorized in social, cultural and spatial terms in retrospect (Massumi 2002; see also Žižek
2006, Ingold 2011). Modes of experience precede language and concepts.13
11 This is exactly the reason why Mol criticizes Latour’s notion of network as well-defined nodes.
12 The sensuous perception, embodied experiences and affect have also been widely debated in cultural philosophy,
cultural studies and anthropology.
13 In this collection, the aspect of latent emergence preceding language and concepts is discussed by Philipps and Gillier,
who compare the way photography and sociology ‘know’.
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Africa*n Relations: Modalities Reflected
In a similar vein, Ute Fendler, with reference to the philosopher and artist Erin Manning,
underlines dance as a relational practice, which creates an “in-between”, an “interval”, a “third
space” that comes with new, emergent sensations, breaking with established codes and thus
bringing about a reality in the making (Fendler 2021, see Manning 2013: 2). Giving prominence
to the material world that defies a reduction into discourse and language, affective, tacit and
sensuous, aesthetic modes (which also challenge the analytical language of the scholar), have
played an important role in strands of cultural philosophy, particularly in relational approaches
to arts, which highlight their specific quality, of creating. Glissant, in his Poetics of Relations, calls
them “opaque” relations.14 Creole poetry, like the “composite culture” of the French Antilles,
drawing on a variety of cultural influences, cannot be dissected into parts, but presents a relational
“composite” full of tensions, made of a multitude of cultural layers, which both hide and reveal a
view on a totalité-monde, a totality of world (Glissant 1997: 22). Glissant celebrates the notion of
errantry, which he opposes to the arrow-like trajectory of expansion and domination. Errantry is
for him the approach to a totalité-monde, best exemplified by the culture of the French Antilles,
which resists categorizations: “In the poetics of relation, one who is errant (who is no longer
traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he
will never accomplish this – and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world
resides” (1996: 20).
Drawing on Deleuze (1983), Michaela Ott (2018) has explored the concept of dividuality to
examine composite modalities of artworks, like film but also visual art, which participate in a
globalized aesthetic sphere using an increasingly globalized but also fragmented language,
incessantly recombining as well as transforming aesthetic elements in new reconfigurations of
relations.15 Similar to Glissant’s totalité-monde, which resists generalizations and can blow off like
a bomb, awakening the dormant consciousness, these reconfigurations are not apolitical:
Questioning a didactic and representational function of the arts, acting as a sheer mirror image of
society, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) underline the way art, like, for instance, cinema, but also
painting or music, through their concrete form of images, sounds and their fictions create
“sensible intensities” (Ritzer 2018: 23), which unsettle established categories. They are political
in the sense that they make alternative existences perceptible, since as politics concerns itself with
what can be seen and what can be said (see also Rancie re 2004). So the arts render an alternative
perceptible before it can be conceptualized and categorized in words (see Fendler et al.
forthcoming).16
It lies in the nature of modes of relations that they do not imply equality or solidarity: They are
rarely egalitarian and harmonious, but always situated within and imbued with power structures
(Powell 2013). As Mbembe reminds us, global entanglement, spurred by ”technological
14 One cannot possibly summarize a poem, a painting or a dance without losing its exact quality as a poem, a painting
or a dance.
15 Gilles Deleuze (1983: 140) characterizes film and music as dividual expressions, since they are based on temporal
processes and therefore incessantly recombining and transforming their aesthetic elements while nevertheless
providing a singular expression.
16 In the present volume, the arts as modes of relations are well-represented, starting with the artist’s essay by Yvonne
Owuor, who reimagines Africa through narratives. Peter Simatei shows how literature shapes worlds, and Babacar Diop
focuses on Senghor’s vision of reinventing Africa and the world through the arts.
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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escalation”, together with an all engulfing “fast capitalism” driven mostly by private high-tech
corporates, (see also Kinyera and Doevenspeck in this volume), on the one hand, also means, on
the other hand, the drawing of increasingly rigid boundaries and borders, manifested, for instance,
in tracking devices and the enforcement of wide range of coercive modes: “The drive is
simultaneously and decisively towards contraction, towards containment, towards enclosure and
various forms of encampment, detention and incarceration” (Mbembe 2019: 4). Glissant (1996:
104) also highlights “the relationship of domination”, which he sees residing in “technological
expansion” as well as “generalizing a neutral uniformity”. It is the search for the universal – here
a universal language (see Diagne’s reference to the logos) – which comes with violent modes of
exclusion (see also Diagne 2022).17 The latter translate into technological modes of confinement,
as Mbembe put it, in which both politics, but also forms of knowledge production in science and
scholarship are complicit. To give another example, M’charek, Schramm and Skinner (2014)
interrogate race, “itself a multiple absent-present slippery ‘object’ in Europe”, which is sometimes
relegated to the past, sometimes considered a biological, sometimes a physical category, “coming
in many guises”. It is the interplay of science, technology, values as well as specifically situated
“historical and political trajectories” that turn race into an identifiable category of concern
(M’charek, Schramm and Skinner 2014: 460).
Therefore, the heuristic angle of modalities is fundamentally interlinked with the Africa Multiple
Cluster’s key concept of reflexivity, which requires the researchers to reflect upon the relational
modalities of their position and the very conditions of their knowledge production, because there
can never be the position of an external observer relationally disconnected from the world.18
Reflexivity urges us, firstly, to take the repetitive loop effects of relations into consideration,
feeding back into the discourse and context they emerge from: the ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ standpoint are
an illusion of a binary perspective. Acknowledging the situatedness of all relations also means to
examine the ways in which researchers are implicated in the shaping of relational modes.
Thinking about the interrelation of overt or tacit modes of dominance, in intersectional
approaches, developed to uncover the overlapping and simultaneous structures of oppression,
come in as a conceptual tool (Crenshaw 1991). Under these conditions, the question of how modes
of cooperation and solidarity are possible becomes the more pertinent.
As already pointed out, the contribution to this special issue approach the notion of modalities of
relations in different ways both in terms of concepts and approaches but also in terms of
disciplines.
It starts with an essay by the Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor based on her artist lecture
given during the “Africa*n Relations” conference in July 2020. She critically reflects on the nexus
of African Studies, the African continent and the modes of knowledge production about Africa in
a postpandemic and fast-changing world. In what Owuor calls the “liminal season of humanity”
where the humanity of the ‘other’ is still denied, on the one hand, but, on the other, global
interconnectedness is most evident, the question of what knowledge Africanists produce and for
whom is most pertinent. Rather than continuing to foster an existential boredom-–ennui—
17 It is the universal vision of art by Senghor discussed by Diop in this volume, which, in a very different way, comes
with an inviting gesture.
18 See the harsh criticism of knowledge production in African Studies by Yvonne Owuor in the present volume.
8
Africa*n Relations: Modalities Reflected
incapable to think a different world, she sees the present global crises as a chance for Africa to
reimagine its futures, rethink its options, taking its own responsibility as well as forging new
solidarities across the continent and the Global South. Her emphasis on thinking creatively is
reminiscent of her literary work: As a novelist, Yvonne Owuor has written alternative presents,
futures and pasts into being. She has given life to Kenya’s entangled histories of long dure e beyond
the national and the colonial period. Thus, one can read her essay alongside her literary work as
an exercise of thinking modes of relations differently. Evoking African narrative creativity, one
can read her as referring to relationality as a decolonial approach, as defined by Catherine Walsh
and Walter Mingolo (2018: 14), who consider it as referring to “ways that different local histories
and embodied conceptions and practices of decoloniality, including our own, can enter into
conversations and build understandings that both cross geopolitical locations and colonial
differences, and contest the totalizing claims and political-epistemic violence of modernity.”
In their contribution “Modalities of Theorizing”, the sociologist Joschka Philipps and the
photographer Aurélien Gillier also engage with modalities as a question of knowledge
production, including a discussion of the particular way the arts—in this case photography—
‘know’. Focusing on conspiracy theories in Guinea, they engage in a dialogue on the ‘modes of
knowing’ of the photographer in contrast to the sociologist. It is what Gillier calls the “openness”
of the photographic approach – reminiscent of the tacit, latent or sensuous modes referred to
above – that renders a complexity sensible, without translating the “opacity” of the “totality of
world” (Glissant 1996) into propositional language. The formulation of concepts, the work of the
sociologists, does not precede the photograph, which does more than illustrate a concept. It is
revelatory in opening new fields of imagination, making palpable the “not-yet” rather than giving
form to the already understood. The contingency, which we underlined before as a quality of
relations constantly in the mode of becoming, seems to be best captured by photography.
However, as Philipps and Gillier argue, concepts do not merely disambiguate and clarify, but are
relational as well, because they depend on the “modalities of researching and theorizing”, which
“are always partial”: “They structure not only what we see in the world, but also what we ignore
and what remains unknown to us”. The authors, for whom modalities emphasize the partial nature
of all epistemological approaches, contrast ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘sociological theory’, which
have been often defined in binary terms. They gradually deconstruct the opposition by referring
to the example of Guinea, where the everyday sense-making of a political arena largely defined by
parapolitical actors necessarily involves speculation. The ‘universal’ of conspiracy is hard to be
grasped empirically, in contrast to local terms and practices whose situatedness the authors
follow by pursuing a biographical approach. Echoing Diagne’s point that modes do away with
substance, Philipps and Gillier use modalities to refer to the various – always partial –perspectives
taken, depending on the medium as well as the theoretical approach, whereby the boundaries
between sociological and conspiracy theory become fuzzy.
Akinmayowa Akin-Otiko, renowned for his research on traditional African medicine, also
examines the relation between two different ‘theories’, in this case medicine based on Western
positivist notions of health and sickness and Yoruba traditional medicine, whose relation is often
constructed in terms of dichotomies. Through ethnographic fieldwork, he accompanied patients
with somatoform disorders through the process of receiving conflicting diagnoses and treatments
in hospitals and later by diviners. As it becomes clear, the reasons given for sicknesses by the
diviners consider a whole range of courses – from breaking taboos to being the victim of witchcraft
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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or a bad spirit – not considered in the context of the context of the hospital. Akin-Otiko argues for
an integrative medicine that allows for a variety of treatments based on different epistemologies
– and, as one might add, ontologies. Here, it is pertinent to note once more with reference to
Diagne that the sickness and its symptoms are not a substance. They are not a universal given with
a single firm ontological grounding, but rather emerge in a variety of etiologies and medical terms,
hence in a wide range of social and spiritual orders, and hence in different ontologies. Thus, Akin-
Otiko does not only offer a case of medical pluralism, but also an actual illustration of multiplicity.
What is at stake is not a diversity of interpretations of a single phenomenon – i.e., the sickness –
but rather a multiplicity of sicknesses, emerging in variable relations.
The literary studies scholar Peter Simatei examines literature and its modes of knowledge
creation. In his contribution “Ways of Knowing Africa. African Literature and Shifting Imaginary”,
he traces the dynamic history of postcolonial African literature and its changing modes of relating
and creating shifting worlds, focussing on the relation between literature and world. Similar to
the approach Philipps and Gillier take to photography, Simatei underlines the specific quality of
literature to not merely mirror or document “African realities” as they precede the literary mode.
Rather, through their specific voices, multifaceted narratives, the interplay of various aesthetic
traditions and the play with allusions and imagery, literary works co-constitute and imagine
worlds yet to materialize, bringing to life alternative histories for crafting new perspectives on
African modes of the self. Sketching out a historical perspective and starting with the first
generation of African writers, like Chinua Achebe, Simatei shows how literature was given a prime
role in rewriting Africa’s history. Reclaiming history was a literary intervention meant to map out
“a unique politico-cultural consciousness as part of a larger project of liberating the African person
from the debilitating conditions created by colonialism”, as he posits. The postcolonial novel is
itself a product of complex relations: It is an outcome of the colonial and later independent nation
state, on the one hand, and becomes a tool of resistance, on the other, constructing worlds in
relation, namely in dialectical opposition to the values of the colonizer and later the oppressing
ruling class. This construction, however, has neither been simply stable, nor has the constructed
world remained inert. As Simatei goes on to show, the nation and the search for roots and origins
became contested by later generations of writers, who sought to address their cosmopolitan,
transnational, and diasporic identities. In the last part of his contribution, he turns to the example
of Asian diasporic writers in East African, whose biographies and narratives often span three
continents, India, Africa, and – depending on where they migrated to – North America, the UK or
Europe, constantly negotiating flexible identities outside of the exclusionary framework of the
nation. It is their “multi-positionality”, sometimes also consciously claiming East African roots in
the context of the ‘new’ diaspora, which emphasizes the constantly flexible relational creation of
the multiple worlds in which Africa is entangled.
In their contribution “Consentient Citizenship and the making of Infrastructural Frontiers in East
Africa”, the geographers Paddy Kinyera and Martin Doevenspeck analyze dynamic multimodal
– socially, economically, politically and materially grounded – relations as they play out in the
context of the introduction of transnational mega infrastructures in East Africa. They present two
examples: first, Kenya’s Lamu-Port-South-Sudan Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET), a corridor
project that seeks to link the newly built port on the Kenyan coast with South Sudan through
railways, highways, airports for freight handling and pipelines for oil, and second, Uganda’s East
African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), which covers a distance of over 1,400 kilometers and takes
10
Africa*n Relations: Modalities Reflected
the oil to the Tanzanian port of Tanga. Both projects bring the states, cooperates, and local
communities in hitherto remote and hardly connected areas into new and dynamic modes of
relation that are characterized by tremendous power imbalances. High capitalist hopes and
narratives of an economic boost driven by oil and easier, far-distance transport clash with local
communities’ fears of being disenfranchised. Dispossession, compensation, and displacement,
which are part of the process of land acquisition required by the infrastructures, constitute an
existential threat to already marginalized local communities, whereas other local actors next to
the multinational companies and the state see them as huge opportunities. Drawing on
ethnographic fieldwork, the authors contrast these views. Notions of pushing a frontier into so far
unproductive and hence ‘empty’ areas are not easily reconcilable with local view of land, which
do not perceive the areas as ‘empty’. Notions like the communally owned land in the Turkana area,
do not match with the principles of recompensation schemes that typically consider individual
owners. Such different understandings complicate negotiations – as much as individual desires,
ignorance, lack of transparency and mistrust do. Kinyera and Doevenspeck describe the variety of
strategies used to reach consensus and allow participation, showing how cooperate citizenship is
constantly constructed in modes of dynamic power-laden relations.
The contribution by the philosopher Babacar Mbaye Diop highlights Africa not as a neatly
defined area or substance, but constantly and actively shaped by relation-making. He traces the
captivating case of Senghor’s cultural politics and his vision of shaping Africa’s new self-
understanding through the arts that found a home in the Muse e Dynamique, inaugurated in Dakar
in 1966. Starting off with the Premier festival mondial des arts nègres, which brought together
contemporary and traditional African art from 28 countries, Senghor’s vision was to create an
internationally visible platform for the arts founded on the principles of négritude. His aim was
not to reinvent Africa along the lines of Panafrican relations or within the confines of national
borders only: Senghor had a global and universal ambition seeking to create a dialogue with
modernist artists from Europe and making Dakar a center of new networks. The already famous
modernist artists, like Picasso, Chagall and Soulages, were invited to exhibit their artwork in later
solo exhibitions in Dakar, where the works of contemporary African artists were also displayed
with increasing frequency. Diop refers to Senghor’s writings to examine his arguments for a
universal notion of art founded on the principles of négritude. It is “art ne gre”, the masques in the
museums of Paris, which greatly inspired Picasso and allowed him to not only change his style,
but also his “way of seeing reality”, as Senghor observed. However, as Diop shows, making art a
prime concern of the state and tying it to the ideas of négritude was met with criticism from
Senegalese artists – such as the group Agit’Art – already in the 1970s. Nonetheless, aspects of
Senghor’s vision – particularly the translatability of African “traditional” artwork, as Diop points
out with reference to Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s– can still inspire current discussions about
restitution.
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Thresholds, Ennui, Futures & Alt.
Decoloniality
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Hello there everybody. In these odd days of shifting world spirits, I guess it is only human to ask:
Are you well? Before I begin, I want to acknowledge the tragedy of the floods here in Germany,
and will express my sympathy to those affected. Applying lessons from the pandemic; which is to
be gently aware of, and to always seek to be tender about human woundedness, and suffering. We
are as beautifully ephemeral as fireflies—aren’t we?
Back to the paper: I had sent an abstract to Professor Vierke having scratched it out on a piece of
paper, and then copied it out onto my phone while climbing one of the montane forest hills I was
on, to wait for a signal and then hit the send button. Returning from that journey weeks later, I
looked again at what I had submitted to Clarissa. The montane forests I was in are in the Loita
Hills, where pure oxygen flows. I reread everything and concluded that I had been high—no pun
is intended. I spent the next hours clutching my head as I read the abstract. In the morning of my
post-mountain descent, regret I wrote to Clarissa to tell her that I had recanted. That plea, sent
from one of the airport lounges between Nairobi and Berlin got lost. It meant that it was too late
to offload myself from what I had committed to.
Coincidentally I had also been sent off to Leukerbad in Switzerland. More high mountains, and it
is there that I prepared this ‘interpretation’, and in the process realised that this topic comes at
the right time, whether by intent or coincidence, one cannot tell. In simple words—it becomes one
of the many new forms of enquiry erupting out of our pandemic-wearied world, the questioning
of imagined realities given what we all now know, feel, sense and understand.
So much that was habit and imagined as tradition—like going to work from 9 to 5, has crumbled,
so many former employees have discovered, to their surprise, that they are human beings whose
greatest and most precious asset is time, for example, and that in a wired world they can work
from home or from the beach in Diani, South Coast.
14
Thresholds, Ennui, Futures & Alt. Decoloniality
I sense that the long season of the pandemic has driven us all to a threshold where we are
compelled to look again at human keystone questions:
◼ What does it now mean for us to be human? After the pandemic?
◼ What does the humanity of the other mean for us, now? After the common story of a global
pandemic?
So yes, this …exploration.
The gist of this presentation is offered in a few parts: Part one, the case for thresholds. Part two,
imagining futures which elides into part three(ish); Alt-Decol. Epistemological underpinnings, the
references are oblique though—but these are Mignolo, Dussel, Hinkelammert, Quijano, Sarr and
Diagne. I am with Mignolo on this one:
I prefer the action word – decoloniality – to reflect on my interrogations. Let me quote Catherine
Walsh (2018: 17) from the important book on decoloniality which she wrote the Walter Mingolo:
“Decoloniality denotes ways of thinking, knowing, being, and doing that began with,
but also precede, the colonial enterprise and invasions. […] Moreover, it is indicative
of the ongoing nature of struggles, constructions, and creations that continue to work
within coloniality’s margins and fissures to affirm that which coloniality has
attempted to negate.”
Thus, for her, “decoloniality, in this sense, is not a static condition. “ Rather, it is an attitude and
practice. In the matter of aesthesis, for this presentation is—ennui. Stories, you understand, need
to have turning points that lead to transformation, not stasis, and it is the stasis in its different
manifestations that I prod at, and judge. How much longer are we going to have these same, same
kind of diagnostic conversations abstracting the very visceral and tangible human conditions and
generating ever-new concepts that serve no other purpose other than generating more… concepts
that move the human being further and further away from grasping that which should be tangible?
Aren’t you bored already?
The paper’s flourishes are directed at the state of the scholarly quests and structures of the African
Studies' nodes and hubs and their crisis of meaning in this new word to which you allude. The
paper is infused, informed by, permeated by insights delivered by the crucible that is the present
zeitgeist. What a threshold experience for humanity! We are reluctantly bundled into this one
story, and learning, very quickly, the limits of the imagination of our solidarity, of our interest in
the thriving and survival of others, of our previously sacrosanct institutions that in the face of a
collective existential threat, simply crumbled. The pandemic, I think, has muted our grand
posturings. Our self-soothing propaganda is consumed by our closet preoccupation with the
primordial basics: life or death, and how humanity uses the forces of its experiencing and
experimentation to support or sustain either life or death.
At the heart of our present restlessness is the consciousness of a generational as well as a global
pivot mediated by all forms of unravelling of assumptions; the argument and conviction is an
ancient one: old wine skins cannot contain new wine. That we are in some sort of liminal season
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of humanity cannot be denied. What is arguably most needed now is a rediscovery of and a
capacity to co-exist with the unknown, to dismantle that which no longer serves ideals, to embrace
uncertainty, and to return to a deeper exploration of possibilities in the realm of the imagination.
Among the questions that undergird this paper, one of them is this, given the context of our
explorations, and the theme of this event:
Where are the primary receptacles for the gathering of and engagement with quintessential
African storying, imagining and knowing located? Are these the African Studies Centres? The
correct answer is, unfortunately, yes. But whose interests, ideas, ideologies, aspirations and
futures do these serve primarily given where they are located? What role is accorded to those
from the ‘peripheries’ who enter into the spaces? This is not a judgement call, by the way. The fact
that the primary repositories of African related, derived knowledge, imagining and exploration
are within these sites is not the fault of these sites, the responsibility is… African. Ours is the dearth
of imagination, the inability to prioritise the urgent need to harness the superpower of our
thought, vision and imagination as a strategy to gain power, control, wealth and intelligence linked
to creating futures. Ours is the refusal to prioritise ourselves and our strategy for thought, for
humanity and for ourselves, and doing this on, in and within our continent. As the ontological
origins of these centres are mostly derived from mostly bizarre fantasies of an Africa that exists
mostly in the lurid imagination of the stranger, and built on contested and muted histories, it
should be no shock that the primary characteristic of these spaces is at least overtly—we are not
ignorant of the intelligence and information gathering covert purposes of some of these spaces—
(except for this one); is a ceaseless circling of metaphorical and historical wounds, of generating
abstraction and concepts which often fail to turn ideas into, not just practice, but tangible life-
products.
Aren’t we bored yet?
Another question, underpinning this soul searching eruption is this: with all this decolonising
going on, are we to assume that we all sing from a common and cosmological script, that the
substance and structure of things are not infused by cultural biases and iterations, and that all that
is needed to get things right is to tweak here and there? You who are most invested in these
processes, do you actually believe that? I am not being doubtful, I just really want to know.
Also, what is the point of an intricate and ambitious pedagogical process that does not improve
human beingness? Let’s put it another way? To what goal is education, knowledge, and research?
What purposes do these serve? Knowledge for the sake of knowledge? Given the state of the world
today, is that still possible? Has there been a clarity in and of motivation by all agents? What do
we actually desire? What do we need and what do we want? What do we want to accomplish?
What have we not yet accomplished? What is the inevitability that we push against? It has already
made its presence intensely felt. Yet one of the finest things to return to the site of the knowledge
search is uncertainty, the unknown and the possibility of fresh questions.
Anyway, Majority World people inhabiting Africa Studies departments – most of which –not yours
– were renamed, restructured anthropology, ethnography, study-of-the colonised-as object
research centres, where said objects, corrupted, have their humanity negated—so , what do you
get? What is the knowledge and truth you desire, want, and need? Do you obtain aesthetic joy in
the process? I do understand that in Euro America, these are seemingly benign spaces out of which
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one can observe the culture, gain intelligence about the habits of these. But on the other hand,
might some of you be interested in the things these «African» studies don’t ever even imagine for
you: like Yacht design, the axial point of Science and Technology, Futurism? Ah….The internet of
things? No? Artificial Intelligence, Geoscience – since everyone is obsessed with where the African
resources are? No? Cosmology, Forensic History, The Geopolitics of Namibian Diamonds?
Astrophysics and Underwater Geology? Deep Mind? How about studies in Dogon Mathematics?
The Science of Gold Extraction? No? The Lunatic Mind and Manifest Destiny? African Studies on
the themes of Donald Trump, Brexit, Lebanon or even the US and NATO withdrawal of troops from
Afghanistan? Surrealism? Cezanne, Michael Armitage, Paul Onditi, Reflections on European
Coloniality in Europe: Case studies, Ireland, Scotland and Post-War Germany. Mythologising
Wilderness, African-Asian worldbuilding? I know! How about Ballet in Lagos? If any of you reacted
negatively—How do these fit into African studies, how do they echo African reality? See your life!
Ask yourself, why you resisted these. Isn’t the problem, then in the structuring of Africa studies,
what they mean, who creates them, for whom, and to what purpose? By the way, when will the
old tropes and tired metaphors, be made to evaporate? What do they serve? Aren’t the centres
tired of having to force the threshold, mercurial worlds of Africa into a paper-thin constrained
imagination, an invention of a place that does not exist? Why not offer room for a muscular
grammar to emerge, one that will overwhelm and deconstruct a useless lexicon and prepare to
receive a new-emerging world?
But these lead to a crucial question. For whom are the assorted Africa Study Centres established?
No, I am not interested in the public relations statements in the brochures and websites, I tried
for a quick audit of outcomes of placements, of where those involved show up. This was a thumb-
suck internet cursory check. The results are at best, a wispy smoke signal. The main themes:
security—different forms, policy-making, mostly associated with that strange word—
‘governance’, and, of course, the bogey-man themes favoured by the Euro-American metropole,
such as the hyperinflated ‘immigration’. Next to nothing that engages the continent as a
protagonist in the world, with its agency, ambitions, and opinions. No wonder Africa’s young
people are looking eastwards for life-giving ideas and energy.
Does this very preliminary finding coincide with your own? You can form your conclusions—I
have formed mine. Namely this, “Get Out!” You are stuck in the sunken place. No, actually… more
seriously: What’s the point? I’m not being facetious: What’s the point? In the interstices of this long
encounter, where are the tangible, mutually beneficial, scaled-up, life-enhancing outcomes,
products, and resolutions? How has the subtext of the grammar of engagement evolved from the
400-year-old fantastical eruptions? In the words of business, for whom do these hubs exist? And
having confronted the reality—not the propaganda, then ask yourselves, is this service necessary?
For whom? How do these serve the African imagination, its ideals? Do current area studies in
general, Africa studies in particular, have anything to offer in terms of African future crafting and
world-building? And yet I must wonder, as an outsider, how do you purport to enter into the realm
of big ideas under a constraining reality? Moreover, how do you propose to do this when the
ontological foundations of these spaces are barely acknowledged or examined? Moreover, your
academic grammar with its terror of the affect—will not permit a vigorous encounter and
engagement with the full gamut of human experience, how then does it purport to serve human
reality?
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I ask this as pluricentric, and a pluriversalist African who negotiates, traverses, and occupies
worlds within and without, and sometimes simultaneously. I am a card-carrying cheering squad
member for multi-polarity, a stalker of the Mignolo-led ‘pluriversality as a universal project’
initiative—anyway, I ask this of you as a passer-by called to comment on a crime scene. Is one to
assume that intrinsic histories, cultural pathologies, faults, insecurities, and biases automatically
evaporate when a culture defines and projects an epistemological framework? If this is the case,
shouldn't knowledge then deliver an overt movement towards a horizon, or is stasis acceptable
as a part of the knowledge generation enterprise? In a world beset by so many forces, can these
states of affairs persist?
Ennui: I looked it up: “a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation
or excitement.” For example, when the European vaccine regimen announced that they were
closing entry to those who were vaccinated by products they had not approved, thereby creating
legitimacy to close entry access to Majority World’s people particularly from Africa, those
monitoring social media replies were struck by the sound of….crickets....Indifference. The other
response was the approval given to the Chinese vaccines—almost to underline a point—which I
think the EU will have missed—and to prepare to set up local vaccine production hubs, with
priority given to—you got it—Sinovac and Sinopharm. Before the pandemic, there would have
been a storming of the bridges by the many; there would have been howls of «unfair», and appeals
for rightness.
But something has entered our world: an apathy and weariness, “the inability to rouse oneself to
give a damn”, a quotation taken from the notes on Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Boredom (2005),
and this from the Majority World, a distancing note has entered into the old Africa-European
dynamic. I might be wrong, but I sense that there are other and deeper currents underway,
something more pertinent, something that offers a change of theme, a change of rhythm, pitch, of
register, co-ordinates, and a change in the prevailing story of the world. The old story has
delivered to itself its own obsolescence.
This aesthetic orientation of Majority World peoples—that is, most of us—is a powerful signal.
There are some reasons for this: the emergence of China as a force of epochal transformation, the
demands of the digital age for our attention, the public witness of the decline of the long-
entrenched occidental hegemon: a combination of the arrival of Mr Trump, the January 6, 2021
America events where the bastion of the ‘international rules-based order’ was interfered with and
desecrated, and the thorough public discombobulation that was the Euro-American Covid-19
responses. It feels a bit Wizard of Oz—ish, right? Or Humpty Dumpty’s great fall. I know all the
king’s horses and all the king’s men and their media machinery are trying to put Humpty Dumpty
together again, mostly by touting vaccine nationalism—but we know, you know that we know
that, to borrow from another fairy tale, «the emperor is naked». Sneaking out of Afghanistan in
the middle of the night after twenty years does not underline the Master of the Universe thing.
Not one bit. But what does anything mean for ‘the now’? What invitations do we gather from this
threshold moment? We know that there is no ‘normal’ to return to, don’t we? There is something
so tiresome and dull having to endure the hegemonical scramble to restore the old status quo by
destabilising another country. The demonisation, dehumanisation, debilitisation of others script
is so overdone, as is all the consent manufacturing to justify abysmal evil visited on newly
designated enemies. The virtue-signalling, the pearl clutching it is madness, and it does not serve
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the emerging age. The moral vacuum serves nobody. The part that is always left out is a concerted
effort by centres of scholarship to examine the effects of such interventions on the now-
devastated country. Have African study centres studied Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and even
Vietnam? Syria, Somalia, and the Sahel? Is it a theme area under the Migration/Immigration
rubric?
This is as much about an orientation to a common vision of reality and sense of humanity as it is
an inquiry into how to meet the summons of the age. If the old world order is weakening, what is
our future stake? What is our collective imagination that can offer another way of imagining
spaces of in the world of study? What new alignments present themselves, and invite us to rethink
how we set up spaces of inquiry? What do we do with our uncertainties? Can these be tapped into
to allow a different sort of dreaming, hoping, imagining? How do we intend to craft the future of
academia, of the knowledge hubs, and these in a way that serves the demands of the continent and
the epochs?
What is our point of pedagogical reference? What is the premise of education, and education for
our worlds, including the continent, Africa? What undergirding philosophy would govern our
educational choices? What assumptions and projections are still wrapped in our intellectual
agenda? What African intellectual agenda matters? Where does one access it? What theories of
knowledge, of meaning, of being inform our collective educational impulses? For what, and for
whom, are our knowledge creation interventions? Which of the humans should these serve? Does
anyone know?
Work on the ground, even attached to associated projects tends to reveal a tally of compromises,
twisted-arm deals, and a profit under-all-costs game, not just the vaccine game, but the HIV/AIDS
therapeutics before that—ten years, the hideously skewed commodities markets—that is a whole
other gap, the recent story of the dumping of whey with palm oil replacement milk substances and
destroying the pastoralist livelihoods and economies in Burkina Faso, while through the side lips
of the same mouths decrying rising malnutrition rates in West Africa.19 I wonder, I wonder often
if perhaps even we, the thinkers, are climbing up the wrong tree. What point is anything if we are
still in doubt about the humanity of others? Isn’t this a more psychological and spiritual crisis that
requires other methods to be resolved? What does the humanity of Africans mean for Africans
and the Centres of African Study?
By the way, how many dedicated European Studies Centres are hosted by and within African
academic institutions? Couldn’t find one. Why? And if they exist, which ones are dealing with
futuristic themes and epistemologies rather than say Governance and Democracy, Security (aka,
how do we sell arms here/plant the seed of new wars there?) Agriculture (which European seeds
and equipment do we sell)? or Borders and Boundaries (Immigration is a problem and let’s not
talk about what we did in Libya, or Syria or Afghanistan). The trending themes are «Indo-Pacific»
with its focus on crushing China, coupled with an eerie obsession with Africa-China relationships.
There is a problem of perspective and lens: most Africa studies Centres centralise the notion of
the Euro-American as coloniser. It means that when China shows up in Africa scholars are
19
https://www.politico.eu/interactive/the-eu-milk-lookalike-that-is-devastating-west-africas-dairy-sector/.
The
article is by Simon Marks and Emmet Livingstone (retrieved on August 12, 2020).
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compelled to apply that lens, unique to Euro-America to explore and explain what is, in fact, a new
phenomenon in the world and in history. This myopic lens rubs out African agency or, its pre-
European engagements with the rest of the World by way of its seas. There is little consideration
that a general African pro-China stance is linked to historical connections, anti-colonial nostalgia,
a shared consciousness of world-losing because of a pathological incursion; that it could also be a
pushback for European perfidy in Libya, and that May 13, 2000 sneering cover of the Economist
and its “Hopeless Continent” title.20 The paucity of thought that imagines that this relationship
sprouts only out of Euro-American absences or lack is puerile. It also points tot he overarching
question: of what value then are these Africa Studies hubs as they are structured today, if they are
unable to grasp even these fundamentals of an evolving relationship?
But isn’t this part of a larger epistemological fault with its undercurrent of infantilising and
negating African agency, fragmenting the continent’s geographies, dispossessing and dislocating
its diverse peoples from, especially their historical maritime networks, insisting that every time
Africa connected persons are found to have deep roots elsewhere, as in India, Turkey or Iraq,
Kazakhstan they could only have gone there as slaves, even though the genealogical chronicles
propose a different story. When some Pate islanders long ago referred to their very apparent
China lineages, they were told they were speaking nonsense even as the tombs were being
desecrated and stripped off their ceramics by the same genealogy-deniers.
And Sub-Sahara?
Sub-Sahara?
Let me not start.
Of this typology, and those who insist upon it—it is as useful as speaking of «Sub-Scandinavian»
or Sub-Channellic Europe. In imagining the future, the challenge is in bringing down the edifices
of lunacy that infect ideas and their propositions. Is that possible in this weary world? Put another
way, in this summons to reorder our existence, to what can we devote the power and contents of
our imagination? We are at another threshold in the history of our existence. We find ourselves in
an ambiguous state of being with an awareness of a huge storm brewing. I am an amused but
interested reader of the notes from the recent G-Whatever summit. The anti-China shrillness is a
bit much, a bit unsettling, a lot…not reassuring, and the fact that the interlocutors lost sight of that
was fascinating. If the Africa Studies Centres were liberated spaces, these could form a compelling
study on the state and shape of the world; they would be as neutral brokers of emerging ideas.
Against the crumbling of the Reformation/Enlightenment hegemonic matrix, what futures
present themselves to all of us? What are the possibilities? The only risk is a return to the
debilitating past. Whatever comes next cannot be as ghastly as what has gone before. It is telling
that this season is marking its exit by sneaking out of Kabul in the middle of the night after an
odious war that has achieved nothing, and also excelled in the egregious slaughter of especially
young men—those offered as a sacrifice to bloodthirsty politicians and traders in human anguish.
Much profit has been made, weapons have been tested on humans for effectiveness, and deaths
20 https://www.economist.com/leaders/2000/05/11/hopeless-africa (checked last time on February 11, 2024).
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have been quietly miscounted, with Afghani war deaths minimised—in the name of democracy,
human rights, and the rules-based order…of course.
I have been waiting for African studies centre environmentalists to lament the mountains and
caves that were blown up by the peddlers of democracy, human rights and the rules-based-order.
But….nothing. Not even a squeak.
Anyway, my point is that we have entered a liminal place of being. I want to include a similar word:
the transitive verb—to limn ‘to suffuse or highlight something with colour or light, to delineate’.
Because of all the pandemic dramatics, new pathways within and elsewhere have formed; a river
always finds a course. I think the zeitgeist is stimulating this as part of its shifting:
Three pivots:
Turning within—a movement towards interiority—in Kenya, by the way, the local tourism sector
that survived during the long Covid season did so because they had marketed themselves to the
locals, and to the region. The fossils in the Tourism Board snapped awake to the obvious; their
need to prioritise domestic and intra-African tourism. The second turn, that serves the interest of
the Majority World is among ourselves, without Occidental mediation—which is difficult because
that is another popular habit, mediation via institutions and businesses. The third turning, is a
wilful one to broaden one's options and prioritise connections with Asia, South America, and the
Middle East, and take new pleasure in the new, the refreshed, the change of conversation and
themes of preoccupation.
Here is a suggestion:
Let’s use this threshold season to make pilgrimages to sites where another imagination of reality
proposes itself. We each bear in our spirits the memories, hopes and metaphors of another way
of seeing and being. A consciousness of being sheltered in the innermost images our ten thousand
languages. It is time. Don’t you desire a firm stake in the maps of the futures shimmering into
existence? What new scopes of mutuality based on deep interest? What would the grammar of our
new encounters produce?
Imagine that.
Anyway, now, a story, a propos of nothing: Actually, I lie. It is a convenient one:
Ready?
Once upon a time, on a bright and cheerful morning, with dew on the ground, the scent of new
grass in the air, and vast horizons shimmering orange and indigo, the great chief among all beings,
the lion, stood on a rock overlooking the rolling plains and distant hills, not dissimilar to that one
the monkey used to lift the lion cub Simba in the film ‘The Lion King’. Lion surveyed the realm and
all territories above and below that were under his domination and jurisdiction. Satisfaction made
his chest swell. Descending, he stopped at a nearby ecologically certified rain puddle for a fairly
traded sip of water. Mid stoop, Lion in the mirror of the water, Lion saw his golden face, his thick
black mane, his fierce eyes, and the long history of his exploits and uncontested hegemony. Stirred,
he realised he needed to radiate the glory upon the creatures of the realm, and have it reflected
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back to him. Such a reflection made him shine even brighter. He framed the question and decided
on the methodology of a fact-confirmation tour of his constituency.
In an enclosure next to the acacias he happened upon the Colobus monkey sucking the place of his
hand where a thumb was absent: “Roooooar!” declared the Lion, baying into the monkey face,
“Who is master of the plains, emperor of all that is surveyed, commander of the forests and
admiral of its waters, King of creatures above, below and under the ground, who alone decrees
who should live and who must die?”
The Colobus kowtowed, stretched prostrate on the ground, and stuttered, “It is thou oh great Lion,
only thou.”
Lion approved of that response. “Carry on, carry on… rise, once you see my back.” He ambled
onward.
Turning west, Lion happened upon an eland having early morning breakfast. Eland froze with the
leaves in his mouth at the grand and terrible thing he saw before him. Without hesitation,
contemplating the possibility of regime change, Lion pounced and held Eland down by his neck.
Breathing his mouth-washed breath over Eland, he growled, the question, the only question:
“Roooooar! Who is master of the plains, emperor of all that is surveyed, commander of the forests
and admiral of its waters, king of creatures above, below and under the ground, who alone decrees
who should live and who must die?”
The Eland, spat out the answer with the soggy grass in his mouth: “It is thou great and merciful
Lion, only thou.”
Lion felt even better, and therefore extended his charity to a hapless beast. He patted Eland on his
head, and announced, magnanimously, “Oh well, as you were. Eat, eat. Be happy. Live long.” With
a wave, he left, circumnavigating the landscape, encountering, among others, the marabout Stork,
the warthog, and the pangolin who all delivered variations of “it is thou oh fine beast who are king
of the plains, conqueror of the savannah, etc., etc.”
Near lunchtime, Lion feeling peckish thought about taking out a zebra for his snack after Zebra
had delivered the answer to the question, the only question. But, ho! What was this? Fifty metres
away Great-Aunt Elephant was browsing, delicately picking out seeds from a baobab pod,
and…ignoring him.
“Rooooooar,” Lion announced himself after gliding over majestically...
No response, no reaction.
“Roooooar! I demand that you tell me who is master of the plains, emperor of all that is surveyed,
commander of the forests and admiral of its waters, king of creatures above, below and under the
ground, who alone decrees who should live and who must die?”
Elephant did not bother to raise her head. A little confused about that, and concluding that
Elephant, must be deaf, Lion raised his volume, and the sound was as thunder in the hearts of all
beings, who shivered where they hid, and waited to die.
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Rooooooar! Roooooar! Who is master of the plains, emperor of all that is surveyed, commander of
the forests and admiral of the waters, king of ….”
Elephant sighed heavily, and even the trees trembled. This situation had not been in her plans
when she set out for the day. She did not need such negativity in her headspace. She turned to
stare at the Lion whose fangs were now bared. Elephant took hold of Lion with her tusks. She
tossed Lion up in the air. Lion came crashing down and dislocated his hips. Elephant proceeded to
deliver a thorough beating to Lion who lost four teeth, fractured his paw, and turned an
unfortunate blue.
Elephant then resumed her delicate snacking. After a while, there was a firm drag on her tail.
“Ethcuse me”, Lion, lisped through gaps in his mouth, as he gathered pieces of himself. His look
was hurt. “Ethcuse me.” He repeated. Elephant looked over her shoulder. Lion continued,
aggrieved. “I’m dithguthted! Dithguthted! Why thuch tangential violenth? If you do not know the
anther…you should athk. I would have told you. You should have asthed me, ”Who is mathter of
the plains, emperor of all that is thurveyed…?”
Elephant trumpeted once. Lion hastened away, hobbled, grumbling, flinching in pain, speaking to
himself. “If you don’t know the anthwer to thomething, athk those who know. Just athk. What’s
tho hard about athking?”
The world as we have known it has changed in a way that I am not even sure our humanity realizes
or understands. The fallout from our ongoing virus crisis, the general failures in human solidarity
in the face of a shared existential threat will have implications to our human and ecological
relations going forward. As an old power hegemony shakes from the world, a very challenging
adjustment period emerges as power centres realign, move and reform the way the world looks.
The struggle to consolidate old abandoned positions is likely to accelerate. Given the heavy burden
of societal and earth challenges, the soul exhaustion most of humanity is enduring, mirrors the
groaning of nature, I presume, of which we are a part, a quest for all manner of revitalization
becomes intrinsic to policy re-examination.
Now, time for a public confession:
The boredom bit of things.
«Decolonial»?
I don’t care for it one way or another. Let me tell you why? As long as the colonial bit is in the
morpheme, the predator centres itself, as an agent, a force, a site of meaning. It does not mind
being an agent of and for evil, just as long as it has agency.
I can’t.
The role assigned to Africa and Africans of perpetual victim is tedious. The embodiment of this
victimisation serves only the predator, whose satisfaction is sustained, who also hast he free gift
of an eternal scapegoat upon whom to projects its pathologies and moral decrepitude.
So, no.
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I am pro indifference, and pro self-indulgent Africa centering and privileging itself. I am pro
African retreat, pro «Learn-from-China», and write a script oft the future of the world with Africa
as the main protagonist.
The elephant, you see, has entered the WhatsApp group.
Finally, and maybe this is the meat of the text—but I won’t go far into that point, it is one of those
conversations that in the parlance of Kenyan wedding committees—let me code switch—watu wa
ocha tupatane nyuma ya hema.
History itself offers us a camouflaged source of power, the violent and tragic encounter with
Europe, and in most places of the North of Africa, with Arabia, forced a change in consciousness,
and reorientation of the certainties of what it meant to be human. The centuries have been
relentless on the continent and a break and pause to quietly reflect has been absent. Six seething
centuries and constantly fending off—often losing, wily invaders craving your bounty— is also
exhausting isn’t it? It takes its toll: I was thinking of the giant tuskers, the bull elephants who
before the European hunters showed up, would parade African landscapes with massive tusks.
Nature collaborated with the pachyderm collective, and the next generation bulls have been born
with smaller tusks. Don’t you wonder how the African collective and psyche evolved to survive
human predators? What new archetypes have entered into the terrain of our unconscious? What
new visions and gifts these bear? How do we get to know? But the awesome fact of African and
others’ endurance is a feat of nature, of time, and of a people. Look at China! And no, I am not going
to use that word I dislike in the way it is applied to our people—resilience—the word I want is
not yet born—but it refers to a superpower. In this corner of the world, the relevance of Africa
had been pretend-assumed to be done and dusted—Exhibit B—The Economist of May 13, 2000:
The Hopeless Continent—the gods must have already been making mad those it intended to
destroy for that was also the year of the first Africa-China Economic summit.
Look, what would it take to gently inhabit a space of Us? Step into it and get on with the re-
languaging, re-dreaming, reframing; working on a new lexis of and for all of us. Rediscovering,
delighting in, and co-operating with one another, with a deliberate intent of inscribing themselves
into the future, as imagined by, expressed through, painted and written through a thorough,
truthful, engaged and shared being, a rediscovery of the sense of each other and the world, and a
wilful habitation of the transcendentals (goddesses, truth, justice, beauty) they hold in common.
Africans, here, there, wherever, what do we desire for ourselves, for the universe, on our dream-
terms? What is the story of us groaning to be born that will define our interests, our ambitions,
our own intents to power, wealth, security and our pedagogical aspirations, and to mutuality?
Ours is the biggest, wealthiest continent; the world depends on our wealth to create their wealth.
But should we waste the gift of our imagination explaining ourselves to others in energy-sapping
sessions that lead only into labyrinths?
China did its soul searching through thought hubs that consolidated their imagination, thoughts
and vision into what we read as the Belt Road Initiative. It is a story that reaches the galaxies.
What of us? What story can we summon for ourselves and the world, one in which we are
expansive protagonists of our destiny inhabiting a restored and fecund universe in a simple
tribute to our pleasure in existence? Nobody in the universe will ever create for us a centre of
study that will satisfy our yearnings, nor will they imagine us as coherent, luminous or glorious—
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that responsibility, the power, the imagination, the coherence and the grammar for this is entirely
ours to own, to illuminate, to use and to give and that, my dears, is the most difficult task of all,
harder than independence.
Incidentally, the new post-pandemic documents by IMF and UNDP could not wait to return to the
grammar of African victimhood, propped, of course, by—Western-trained policy heads and our
reliably, apathetic leaders.—those ventriloquist dummies. I watch in disgust as the stories of
African agency—the Senegal researchers, the Kenyan biomedical engineers get swept off the page.
I had to wonder: who is served by an embodiment of African victimhood? Who is most threatened
by African agency? Whose story is reinforced by the projection of an Africa that is a perpetual site
of doom, gloom, misery, and the beneficiary of Euro-American largesse?
The site of human contestation starts in the realm of the imagination. And we, the many peoples
who form Africa, have not yet fully entered the gladiatorial arena intending to secure authority
over it. Isn’t it time, though? The language in the story is constructed does not matter at all; its test
of meaning is in its translatability anyway, what matters most is meaning, and ist activation as life.
What do you do with your inner worlds, Africa persons?
These are the realms of generation and expansion that are the rabbit holes that lead to a holy grail.
I am convinced of this. Caught up in the fully dull and drained-of-life framing that institutions use
to frame the structuring and distribution of knowledge, which also serve to domesticate the
fecund human imagination, including wonder and creativity, the question is which other methods
exist that will restore and replenish our human sense of enchantment? Such little stuff is produced
that reveals our gorgeousness and the beauty of the histories over which we are custodians. The
relentless bombardment of negativity and a grammar of diminution has pressed down our spirits
and bodies. The demand for themes and studies that serve to prove our lack and pathologies—
takes a toll. It takes a toll. Even in European culture, malediction—words and phrases (linked to
image) repeated over and over and directed at another with the intent of inciting and inflicting
evil upon this other—is well understood.
Why would we wilfully enter into the game of cursing ourselves, even for a degree?
Centuries of such necromancy will have an impact. Malefic repetitions incite a trance state.
But enough!
Enough.
The pandemic season offered a brief reprieve from these gross incantations. For a time, in an equal
world struggling the same way, struggling with a common experience, there was clarity. Our duty,
work, knowledge, immensities, and timelessness as inheritors and custodians of a cosmos, its
dreamings, and indeed, failings. But only Ours. There are more exuberant stories that live trapped
in many innermost lives. What treasures are kept within? What languages do these speak
particularly to our ideals and idyll, our longing for wholeness, community; for dominion,
abundance, family, beauty, justice, goodness, order, and truth?
New and grand worlds emerge only out of an intentional meeting of imagination with
consciousness.
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So, after this intervention, Watu wa ocha, people of the house, let’s meet and ‘have tea’ behind the
tent. The shemeji—our in-laws and entanglements: Asia, Oceania, The Middle East, The Caribbean,
South America, wait a bit, we’ll call you in an hour; there’s a thing we need to discuss. As for the
rest, don’t mind us; the music is good, the food plentiful, the cake is served, eat, dance, and leave
at your leisure.
References
Svendsen, Lars. 2005. A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books.
Walsh, Catherine. 2018. Decoloniality in/as Praxis. Part One. In On Decoloniality. Concepts,
Analytics, Praxis, ed. Walter Mingolo and Catherine Walsh. 15-103. Durham and London: Duke
University Press.
Modalities of Theorizing
An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Conspiracy
Theories
Joschka Philipps & Aurélien Gillier
Abstract
A conspiracy theorist and a social theorist differ in their modalities of “theorizing”; a sociologist
and a photographer use different modalities of “researching”. This paper revolves around these
contrasts. Our aim is to tease out the added value of working with modalities as a heuristic lens.
We, the sociologist and the photographer mentioned above, reflect on our quest to depict and
analyze conspiracy theories from different angles and through different media, notably text and
image. In Conakry, the unruly capital city of the Republic of Guinea, our respective modalities of
research were tested and challenged, readapted and modified through exchanges with a growing
interdisciplinary research team. Drawing from these experiences, our core argument in this article
is reflexive: modalities help us highlight the partial nature of our own methodological, theoretical
and epistemological approaches. They demonstrate that our tools for depicting and
understanding the world around us (the camera, the notebook, the conspiracy theory, the
interview, the body, etc.) structure not only what we see, but also what we ignore in the world. As
such, modalities hint not only at the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue and a critical
eclecticism of methods and approaches. They also call for a more self-critical approach in the
study of conspiracy theories, beyond depicting them as the theoretical “other”, against which the
social sciences assume their legitimacy and authority.
Keywords: modalities, conspiracy theories, mixed methods, photography, sociology
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Modalities of Theorizing
Figure 1: Chasing spirits. Guinea 2022.
Introduction
How to address a topic that is elusive by nature?21 How to understand and describe, let alone
analyze, what eludes understanding? A lucky coincidence, or fate, brought about the collaboration
21 This article is the outcome of research conducted within the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of
Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s
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between sociologist Joschka Philipps and historian-turned-photographer Aure lien Gillier who
shared and cherished these ultimately methodological questions from their respective
disciplinary perspectives. The idea of turning them into an interdisciplinary endeavour was to
address the elusive and the unknown—and notably their political significance—from a
sociological and a photographic viewpoint. In terms of modalities, the task was to fathom what a
sociological mode of research could accomplish and express through text, and what a
photographer’s mode of research could do and express through images. This division of labour
came initially with a sense of liberation. In highly simplified terms, the sociologist would be able
to delegate his concern for ambiguity and ambivalence to the photographer whose images, he
believed, were much better suited to take care of them than his textual approaches. The
photographer, in turn, who is also a former researcher, would be free to focus on the creative
performativity of his art and leave the task of description and analysis to the sociologist.
This, in the proverbial nutshell, is the initial idea behind the Junior Research Group “Politics of the
Unknown. Conspiracism and conflict.” Based at the Africa Multiple Cluster at the University of
Bayreuth, Germany, it has since its launch in 2021 gained new members, foci, and topics, but the
overarching interest still concerns a critically eclectic approach to phenomena that straddle the
divide between the imaginary and the real (Halloran 1983). A key focus is on conspiracy theories,
as imagined theories about how power is organized and abused. Sociological and photographic
methods constitute different modalities of researching and theorizing about, and ultimately
relating to, conspiracy theories. As the initiators and co-authors of the present article, we seek
here to provide a reflection on that interdisciplinary approach and how the concept of modalities
can help us make sense of different modes of researching and theorizing.
Addressing the concept of modalities in this regard comes with a particular challenge, for the term
‘modalities’ is way more amenable to conceptual discussions than to photographic
interpretations. Whereas long debates may be justified in defining and discussing the concept of
‘modalities’, it is difficult to imagine what image comes to mind when hearing ‘modalities’.22 If
‘modalities’ as a concept thus mirrors the humanities’ and social sciences’ weddedness to a kind
of complexity that necessitates textual approaches, photography as a research practice allows for
a counter perspective, not least of relating differently to an object of study. This has to do with the
final product photography aims at. Photographic images, compared to academic texts, are
sufficiently idiosyncratic media—they capture one situation rather than making a general
statement—and sufficiently open to manifold interpretations—different viewers looking at
different details of the image rather than having to follow a linear structure—so that
photographers do not have to justify why they took a given shot from a given angle, let alone to
theorize about what often boils down to their inexplicable intuition.
Aure lien Gillier’s modality of research, to avoid speaking of the photographer’s modality, thus
revolves around the task of making images that can lend credence to a general idea that is not
Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1-390713894. The authors thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful
comments.
22 To be sure, the magnificent metaphor of Tierno Bokar Saalif Tall, quoted in the introduction, of Islam as “water that
takes the colour of the landscape through which it is running,” evokes a powerful image of modalities—so strong that
one might ask to what degree an image, if given the opportunity, can inform a concept.
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Modalities of Theorizing
necessarily confined to his own concept of that idea. The multiplicity of interpretations is
inescapable: once the photos are out, he leaves the question of what they mean to other people. In
contrast, Joschka Philipps’s modality of research is about defining sociological interpretations of
social realities that hold general plausibility beyond his subjective viewpoint, for instance by
providing a methodological rationale, accounting for his own positionality and implicit value
judgements, and aligning himself with reputable theoretical schools while discussing alternative
approaches. Besides the risk of missing essential elements, the fear of being misinterpreted by
others constitutes a key motivational driver in refining his conceptual apparatuses and
methodological approaches. In this regard, the discussion about modalities is inextricably linked
to that about medialities, in the sense that the modality of research and theorizing is strongly
informed by the media it employs—be it the camera, the recording device, the questionnaire, the
immersed body or the research journal—and by the media by which the research is rendered
public, be it texts (novels, policy papers, biographies, scientific studies, etc.) or images (portraits,
mise-en-sce ne, documentary photographs, etc.).
The question we discuss in this article is how the concept ‘modalities’ allows us to capture
different ways of researching and theorizing, both in an inter- or transdisciplinary relation
between photographic and sociological modes, and with regards to sociological vs. conspiracy
theories of power. The double comparison thrives on a presumably clear contrast. On the one
hand, the collaboration between photography and social science research is widely encouraged
and practiced in various forms, including in African studies (de Boeck and Plissart 2004; Cohen
2021; Hoffman 2017). On the other hand, the relation between academic and conspiracy
theorizing usually boils down to fierce antagonism. One could go as far as arguing that conspiracy
theories, a term that “always includes an accusation” (Boltanski 2014: 196), constitute the
theoretical ‘other’ against which the social sciences assume their legitimacy and authority. While
we shall end up emphasizing that neither the collaboration nor the antagonism are as clear-cut as
perhaps expected, this comparison will help us to deal with different modalities of researching
and theorizing from a sufficiently abstract perspective informed by two dissimilar concerns.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. The first part elaborates on the relation
between sociological and conspiracy theories as two modalities of theorizing. ‘Modalities’ serves
here as a concept that enables distinction. For instance, conspiracy theorizing can be depicted as
an actor-centered modality of theorizing, focused on secret groups of powerful actors, whereas
the sociological modality of theorizing conceptualizes agency in terms of structures and forces
that remain largely anonymous. While the two modalities are usually framed in terms of an
opposition, the coming section also looks at the overlaps between them.
In the second part of the paper we address how modalities of researching interact with one
another, as in interdisciplinary research. In form of a dialogue between the sociologist and the
photographer, it describes our interactions in the field and how we followed different research
modalities based on the media we were working with. Carrying a camera or a notebook, looking
for suitable photographic objects or anticipating how to conceptualize a given reality, these
modalities shaped our relations with the people, knowledges, and circumstances in the field.
Ultimately, we describe how our relation as researchers changed from an interdisciplinary to a
transdisciplinary modality. The conclusion finally reflects on what binds the two parts together:
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the fact that modalities of researching and theorizing are always partial, and that they structure
not only what we see in the world, but also what we ignore and what remains unknown to us.
Part I: Modalities of theorizing — conspiracy theories and social
theory
Ever since conspiracy theories have become an object of scientific inquiry, academics have
attacked them with a sense of urgency to draw the line between critical thinking and misguided
paranoia (Hofstadter 1964; Popper 1962)23. Recent academic contributions in Germany have
gone as far as advocating for dropping the term ‘conspiracy theory’ altogether, for it “would grant
too much ‘academic honour’ to this kind of thinking and put it on a par with developed scientific
theories - which would not be appropriate […] even vis-a -vis theoretical approaches that are
controversial in scientific discourse” (Pfahl-Traughber 2019).24 This reluctance to accept
conspiracy theories as theories is singularly prominent in Germany (Butter 2020). Whether or not
this has to do with their significant role during the Nazi regime is a matter of speculation, but
deserves consideration. Antisemitic theories about a globe-spanning Jewish conspiracy
constituted the rhetoric and ideological backbone of the Holocaust; the “Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion”, a forged account of the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, were one of Hitler’s
key references in this regard. Even though the Protocols were exposed as a hoax as early as 1920,
its central idea of a Jewish world conspiracy lives on (Cohn 1966; Landes and Katz 2012; Wolf
1920). If Nazi Germany’s history obliges us thus to be vigilant vis-a -vis the political risks of
conspiracy theories, we should remember that scientific theories were a prominent tool of Nazi
ideology, too. Using the term ‘conspiracy theory’ thus is not necessarily intended to grant
legitimacy, but to critically assess different modes of theorizing without buying precipitously into
the concept of ‘theory’ as validated by scientific rationality.
The generalizing talk about scientific rationality is suspicious to begin with. Science, as Knorr-
Cetina (1999: 4) has shown in her magistral ethnography of high energy physics and molecular
biology, “is not one enterprise but many, a whole landscape—or market—of independent
epistemic monopolies producing vastly different products.” The scientific study of conspiracy
theories is thus equally divided by different disciplines that work with vastly different
conceptualizations, methodologies and core assumptions, some of them “almost diametrically
opposed” (Butter and Knight 2019: 43). Dismissing conspiracy theories against the backdrop of a
unified set of accepted scientific principles may thrive on the idealized image of science as an
authoritative source of truth, but remains fundamentally flawed because it mistakes science for a
matter of consensus.
If one were however to break down the notion of theory as providing “a better understanding of
the world” (Butter 2018: 53), if only subjectively, then conspiracy theories can indeed be thought
of as theories. Michael Butter, a key author in the field, argues precisely that, adding that their
emphasis on human agency makes them particularly popular and attractive: "Conspiracy theories
23 For a brilliant discussion on the concept of paranoia and its historical evolution, see Boltanski (2014: 170-77).
24 Translated from German. For similar positions in the German academic discussion, see Go tz-Votteler and Hespers
(2019); Nocun and Lamberty (2020); for counter positions, see Anton and Schink (2021: 19ff.); Butter (2020).
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Modalities of Theorizing
create meaning and emphasize human agency; they make it possible to identify the alleged
culprits and convey the hope that they can be stopped” (Butter 2018: 104). Butter identifies here
one key difference vis-a -vis social scientific theorizing. Whereas conspiracy theories consider
history as plannable by people, the social sciences consider the driving forces of history to be
largely anonymous (Butter 2018: 40): social structures and relations, besides a whole array of
unpredictable coincidences, can generally not be planned. While conspiracies happen, conspiracy
theories are wrong, Butter argues, insofar as they theorize the world based on the idea of an all-
powerful agency that is sociologically inconceivable. Hofstadter (1964) makes a similar argument,
though in a more dismissive fashion, in his foundational essay “The Paranoid Style in American
Politics,” which has been fundamental in lending legitimacy to the social sciences in contrast to
conspiracy theories. The vast majority of academic analysts thus conceptualizes conspiracy
theories not as theories about conspiracies, but as theories about particularly unlikely or
impossible conspiracies.
Such a specification may seem outright bizarre, but it has very serious consequences for fields that
seek to study real political collusion and deceit. As Cribb (2009: 2) argues, the academic study of
“shadow governance” or “parapolitics” has been seriously compromised by the field’s “inability to
distinguish itself sharply from grand conspiracy theory.” Parapolitics scholars insist that there is
a need to study real conspiracies at the micro- and meso level and theorize about their
implications for transnational politics without being associated with the mainstream concept of
conspiracy theories. Collusion has always been a hallmark of power dynamics after all (cite
Machiavelli), and even the core entity of political science, the state, historically emerged in Europe
as a criminal protection racket (Tilly 1990). But while political science relies on today’s liberal-
democratic state as an idealized regulative entity to theorizes politics, it is bound to ignore the
politics “besides the state” (Bellagamba and Klute 2008) that operate secretly and covertly—as in
conspiracy theories. An alternative conceptualization of conspiracy theories would thus see them
as theories about the role of conspiracies in politics.
Stripped of its speculative and sensationalist armature, ‘conspiracy theory’ stands
revealed as the merely self-consciously parapolitical realisation that covert agencies
and actions are an integral part of the practical exercise of governance within both
national and transnational spaces. Global governance is never politically neutral or
morally innocent as it is always highly prone towards the fostering of deep politics,
even within its most innocuous forms […] (Wilson 2009: 37).
Historically, such a perspective is embedded in a conception of the political world in which
decolonization, enfranchisement and suffrage have allowed for occasional democratic outcomes
while threatening “important, entrenched political, social and economic interests” that continue
to operate below the radar of political normalcy of liberal statehood (Cribb 2009: 6).
Luc Boltanski (2014: 201) is one of the very few academics to address in detail the difficulty of
deciding “whether one is confronting a ‘real’ or an ‘imaginary’ conspiracy.” He thoroughly
problematizes mainstream scholarship’s reductionist preoccupation with the absurd and
“paranoid” outliers on a large spectrum of what could count as a conspiracy theory. But Boltanski
also flips the question around: if social scientists tend to dismiss grand conspiracy theories as
paranoid imaginations, what about the imagined character of the entities that social scientists deal
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with, such as nation-states, ethnic groups, or civil societies?25 Given that these entities are at not
empirically observable in their entirety, let alone the causal relations between them, the question
arises “as to whether what [sociology] is describing belongs to the order of reality or to the order
of metaphor” (Boltanski 2014: 228). Since the core concepts, or metaphors, of sociology are
frequently used by sociologists and non-sociologists alike, Boltanski (2014: 229) furthermore
argues that sociology copes with an inherent anxiety about the allegedly “shameful promiscuity”
between itself and other people’s (non-sociological) explanations of the social world. This anxiety
over the promiscuity with non-sociological explanations, we argue, underlies the mainstream
conceptualization of conspiracy theories. Constructed as a presumably outlandish object of
analysis, conspiracy theories actually reflect, in the true sense of the word, sociology’s inner-most
fears of not being sufficiently scientific, i.e. not sufficiently different from (and intellectually
superior to) quotidian explanations of the social world. How not to read the harsh accusations
levelled against conspiracy theories as the very accusations that ‘sociology’ is most afraid of? Of
being not sufficiently objective, not really falsifiable, of being circular and shot through with
confirmation bias, and perhaps most importantly, of being naĩ ve in its conception of the political
world?
Based on similar self-interrogations, there is today a well-established field of scholars who
address conspiracy theories as a means to critically assess the social sciences and humanities.
Their arguments, to cite but a few, range from problematizing the media’s marginalization of
racial minorities by calling them conspiracy theorists (Orr and Husting 2019) to wondering about
the “real difference between conspiracists and […] social critique” (Latour 2004: 228), up to
accepting “Human Science as Conspiracy Theory” (Parker 2000). Even positivist scholars in
psychology and the cognitive sciences have written about the cognitive biases that explain why
we all, as humans, are susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories (Brotherton 2015). Such
research perspectives may be marginal in the larger public concern, or moral panic, over
conspiracy theories, but they do gain credence in scientific debates. As Joe Uscinski (2019: ix–x)
confesses, somewhat perplexed, in his edited volume on “Conspiracy Theories and Those who
Believe in Them”, published by Oxford University Press and uniting a large array of scholars from
various disciplines: “I did not know that the dividing line between those who studied [conspiracy
theories] and those who believed in them might be so fuzzy at times!”
By contraposing ‘sociological’ theories and ‘conspiracy’ theories as different modalities of
theorizing, we can see how modalities are constructed to enable distinctions. These distinctions
can in turn be contested. In other words, the degree to which one considers sociological theories
and conspiracy theories as radically different or similar modalities depends on the ways in which
we conceptualize each modality at the outset. Whether I see social theory in the light of scientific
rationality or in terms of critical reflexivity changes the matter just as profoundly as whether I see
conspiracy theories a priori as false or as potentially true. Even the core difference observed by
Michael Butter, who distinguishes actor-centered conspiracy theories from concept-guided social
25 It is moreover fundamentally contested to what degree these concepts point to a plausible ontological unit, not the
least in African Studies. On the state, see Abrams (1988), Niang (2018); on ethnic groups, see Brubaker (2002); on civil
society, see Bayart (1986), Comaroff and Comaroff (1999), Makumbe (1998).
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Modalities of Theorizing
theory, may be questioned if one understands both actors and concepts as “metaphors we live by,”
each standing for something else (Lakoff and Johnson 2003).26
Understanding different ways of theorizing in terms of different ‘modalities’ can thus be
considered a starting point that enables distinction, for whatever purpose this may be useful. In
the following part of the paper we address how modalities of researching interact with one
another, as in interdisciplinary research. While the previous section focused thus on an abstract
distinction between sociological and conspiracist modalities of theorizing—and how such
distinctions can in turn be contested—the second part of this article is more practice-oriented. It
shows how we, the authors, were equipped with different research modalities and how we
interacted with the knowledges, people, and circumstances in Conakry in ways that were initially
contingent on these modalities. Ultimately, we describe how our relation as researchers changed
from an interdisciplinary to a transdisciplinary modality.
Part II: Modalities of researching — photography and sociology
We initially thought of our interdisciplinary encounter in terms of a stark distinction between the
image and the text, if not a competition between the arts and the social sciences. This was based
on our appreciation of their dissimilar capacities. Distinguishing between the true and the false,
for instance, remains a key concern of the sciences (see Luhmann 1992), while the arts can
playfully and creatively subvert these categories with no need for a coherent framework. For sure,
conceptual art and postmodern social theory have blurred these distinctions from both sides
(Collins 1998). But on the most general level, as Lawson (2001) puts it, science is invested in the
search for “closure” while the arts are invested in the search for “openness”. Our fieldwork,
however, and not least the task of co-authoring the present article, made us increasingly aware
how different modalities of research can interact to the point of fusing, to become a third,
transdisciplinary modality, in which each initial modality was transformed by working with the
other.
In this second part of this chapter, we address this interplay of modalities in form of a dialogue.
What may initially look like an interview is ultimately a stylized exchange based on various
recorded conversations, field notes, memories and images from our three research stays in
Conakry since 2019. We choose this dialogical form not only to allow for a less formal exchange,
but also to highlight our (inter-)subjectivities as inevitable parts of the research. The topics, listed
as subheadings, are arranged chronologically, starting with a reflection on the concept ‘modalities’
and then describing the evolution of the project from our first field research in 2019 to the more
recent stints in Conakry. For each topic, we drafted separate answers, then discussed and
amended them so that our respective parts speak to one another.
26 This is ultimately the position of Bruno Latour (2004: 229), who concentrates not on the central building blocks of
critical social theory, but its overarching motive of unveiling the “powerful agents hidden in the dark”, whether we call
them “society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, [or] capitalism”, that makes them akin to
conspiracy theories.
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1 What are ‘modalities’?
Aurélien Gillier: In my photographic practice, I don't think I work with ‘modalities’, a notion that
is foreign to me. Of course, there are rules or artistic codes that guide my way of doing things, but
they are more unconscious or incorporated, than thought and theorized. The photographic
practice that I defend is less conceptual than sensitive, impulsive. The only ‘modality’ that prevails
would be to let myself be guided by my subject (my theme) and by my subjects (the people and
objects photographed) in order to tell a story that is never written in advance. Fluidity and
adaptation to the moments, situations, and relationships that develop in the field are therefore
fundamental and can hardly be confined or reduced to a pre-established framework or modality.
This is particularly true with regards to the themes of rumour and conspiracy, which invite us to
let ourselves be guided, or rather lost, in unforeseen imaginations, in representations that elude
my understanding to the point of confusion. Capturing them in fixed images is a challenge that is
all the greater since I aim to fix in a photograph what is usually conceived of as elusive: the
complexity of a conspiracy and the dynamic nature of rumour. To photograph the rumour, I chose
to use all genres of photography: staged photographs with actors (mises-en-sce ne) to represent
the imaginary, descriptive snapshots to capture the social interactions that form the everyday
theatre of the rumour, portraits to try to capture the emotions and embody the subjects of the
investigation because the rumour is populated and spread by individuals. The modalities are only
identifiable a posteriori, and still the way I evoke them here is a reconstruction, full of
justifications and rationalizations that betray the multiple improvisations and errors committed.
Joschka Philipps: For me, the concept of ‘modalities’ would mean more generally and simply that
one thing can manifest itself in various different ways; the term highlights for me a multiplicity
that is usually absorbed by a concept. Let us take conspiracy theories, for instance. Many authors
highlight the ‘heterodox’ modality of conspiracy theorizing, understood as a social critique against
an orthodox mainstream27. Others emphasize the ironic or sarcastic modality of conspiracy
theorizing,28 where conspiracy theories are basically political gossip, playing with scandalous
exaggerations to entertain and capture people’s attention. What strikes me is that most analysts
have adopted this concept as if the phenomenon, i.e., conspiracy theories, was clearly identifiable
in social life. As soon as you do fieldwork on the topic, you realize how difficult it is to identify an
isolated “conspiracy theory”. What you have is conversations between people, and sometimes
someone may voice a suspicion about the secret machinations of some powerful group. This can
be meant in such a variety of ‘modalities’ that it ultimately begs the question whether we are
talking about different modalities of the same thing or about different things altogether?
Moreover, as we could witness in Guinea, however, where the concept is not used in public
discourse,29 or in Co te d’Ivoire for that matter,30 conspiracy theorizing is ubiquitous but so
interwoven with other forms of political discourse to the point where it is hardly detectable as a
specific modality.
27 See Anton, Schetsche, and Walter (2014); Fassin (2021); Latour (2004).
28 See Birchall (2006); Knight (2002).
29 See Philipps and Sagnane (2023).
30 See Boukari and Philipps (2023).
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Modalities of Theorizing
That being said, I think Aure lien’s ‘non-modality’ of photography is not too different from an
inductive modality in sociological research. The key difference may be the photographer’s
potential of harnessing the spontaneity of inspiration: that he may suddenly see something, meet
a person, or capture a situation that inspires, or sensitizes him to new modalities. A sociologist
would have to contemplate, read, compare and study the existing fields of research before
carefully planning a new modality and putting it in place.
2 2019: Stumbling into the “field”
Joschka Philipps: The choice of the Republic of Guinea as a central case study was self-evident,
for me especially because I had worked in and on Guinea since 2009, and for Aure lien especially
as a former historian. Guinea’s history is indeed crucial for shedding a postcolonial perspective on
conspiracy theories. In 1958, Guinea was the only French colony in sub-Saharan Africa that
overwhelmingly voted against being part of the Communaute Française. De Gaulle was furious,31
and the French secret service tried hard to overthrow the new regime of Se kou Toure . Guinea was
thus increasingly ruled against the backdrop of a “complot permanent”, a permanent plot, by neo-
colonial forces, both real and imaginary. The question of whether Se kou Toure used the “complot
permanent” narrative (or conspiracy theory) as a pretext for totalitarian repression, or whether
the conspiracy was real and the totalitarian nature of the regime justified, has never been officially
addressed under subsequent regimes. While both stances are true in a way, there has hardly been
any room for mediating between the two radical positions. Se kou Toure tends to be seen either as
a hero or as a tyrant,32 or is simply forgotten. Given the ubiquity of such unsettled questions in
Guinean history, author Tierno Monenembo speaks of a “total confusion” that permeates the
Guinean public sphere.33 However, after Brexit, Donald Trump, and the various conspiracy
theories about Covid-19, such total confusion is clearly no longer a hallmark of Guinea. As
regrettable as one may find the alleged trend towards “post-truth politics”,34 it has the merit of
deconstructing the self-righteous myth of ‘rationality’ that the so-called global north has claimed
for itself since the Enlightenment.35 This allows us to treat Guinea, and African cases more
generally, no longer as an exception. The challenge for us was to turn the historically informed
idea into an interdisciplinary practice, and to find collective entry points into the ‘field’, which was
obviously not Guinea’s history, but contemporary Conakry, Guinea’s capital city.
Aurélien Gillier: The apprehension of the urban space of Conakry constituted my entry in the
field. It was a matter of becoming familiar with the territory that would be the scene of the
photographic investigation. During this preparatory work, I followed Joschka to the field, meeting
his interlocutors and respondents. To meet his subjects who were not yet—or perhaps never
would be—mine. A first evidence appeared: researcher and photographer do not necessarily
31 Jacques Foccart, de Gaulle’s middleman for “African Affairs” cites the French President as asking to “do anything to
overthrow Se kou Toure ” (RFI & FIDH 2018: 115).
32 See Kake (1987).
33 See Monenembo (2018).
34 See Flood (2016).
35 See Macamo (2014, 2022b).
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approach the same subject through the same ‘subjects’. The obvious discomfort of this first
fieldwork is found in my first series of photographs. They are abstract shots, usually taken with
my phone rather than a camera, and show my difficulty of interacting with people. I look for traces
of rumour in my daily life (in cabs, in the streets, in the city, in the urban design), the way ordinary
noise and anger circulate. I try to capture the pulse of the "rumour of the city" as Eugene Smith
(1958: 99) put it.
Series 1: Conakry, September 2019
Figure 2: Conakry traffic. Guinea 2019.
Joschka Philipps: There is something extremely photogenic about Conakry’s urbanity that I
always felt incapable of capturing. Aure lien’s photographs of this urbanity thus never appeared to
me as a failure but as a confirmation of how important images were to provide a visual sense of
what we wanted to describe.36 Neither did I think Aure lien would find it difficult to interact with
people. His ability to fade into the background of a situation (his tallness and our whiteness
notwithstanding) inspired a certain awe in me, and sometimes an awkwardness of being observed
in the ‘field’ myself. Aure lien mirrored to me, like others before, the strangeness of the
sociologist’s or anthropologist’s relation to people, who are often friends and informants at the
same time, and whose closeness and trust bear a strategic utility. Our conversations, mostly with
36 See Schindler 2018: 117.
38
Modalities of Theorizing
journalists, intellectuals, and academics, friends and acquaintances from my previous research
trips, were part of such information gathering. Seeking information and interpretations from them
about the ‘politics of the unknown’ (rather than immersing ourselves in the phenomenon)
highlights a methodological difficulty in the ethnographic study of conspiracy theorizing.37 In
contrast to the widespread trope of conspiracist milieus, most statistical analyses show that
beliefs in conspiracy theories are spread quite evenly across strata and social categories38 and I
explicitly wanted to avoid associating them with a certain milieu, least of all with Conakry’s self-
proclaimed “ghetto youth”, whom I had previously worked with and written about with regards
to their role in urban protests.39 In turn, I have struggled tremendously to find an anchor-point for
studying the elusive phenomenon in any concrete way.
3 2022: Souloumou souloumoui and the biographics of Nana
Joschka Philipps: As our interdisciplinary project evolved, I found myself in the role of a curator
of different research and artistic modalities. Since becoming part of the Africa Multiple Cluster in
2021, the team had expanded and was joined, amongst others, by two doctoral students, various
artists and associated researchers. In our project on Guinea, Guinean anthropologist and doctoral
student Saĩ kou Oumar Sagnane took on multiple roles: that of a self-reflexive ethnographer of our
project, of a connector between the arts and social sciences, and also as a critical challenger of the
concepts we worked with. Sagnane suggested, for instance, to use the Soussou40 concept of
“souloumou souloumoui” (in French: “les bruits qui courent”; in English: "the sounds that
circulate"), which was more common in Conakry and had a less negative connotation than
‘conspiracy theories’ or ‘rumours.’
The term souloumou souloumoui refers to information that is usually given discreetly by word of
mouth, in whispers or behind someone's back. "Wo na minse souloumou souloumou fe ?" ("What
are you up to against me?") is a common expression of someone who hears whispers from others
and suspects that they are talking about him. More broadly, we can think of these ‘sounds’ as an
instant social reaction to an event or a condition that preoccupies a good number of people,
whether within the extended family, a neighbourhood or village, the national or even
transnational public. The speed with which these sounds or rumours spread through different
networks very often exceeds that of news disseminated by radio, television or the written press.
Furthermore, compared with radio, newspapers or television, souloumou souloumoui are less
controlled and more inclusive in the sense that they spread across all social strata, regardless of
internet access and literacy levels, and take different forms depending on the social context. The
upshot of souloumou souloumoui was that of turning towards a more general concern with the
circulation of information, and also made me realize that my underlying research questions about
37 See Rakopoulos (2022).
38 See, for instance, Brotherton (2015); Uscinski et al. (2020), or my own survey of 612 respondents in Guinea (Philipps
and Sagnane 2023). For a counter position that insists on gender differences in conspiracy theorizing, i.e., on women
being significantly less likely than men to believe in Covid-19-related conspiracy theories, see Cassese, Farhart, and
Miller (2020).
39 See Philipps (2013).
40 Soussou is the lingua franca of Maritime Guinea and the capital city Conakry.
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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‘conspiracy theories’ emerged from a clearly Western or Northern context. Asking how people
make sense of politics that are too inaccessible to be known and too significant to be ignored or
left uncertain, for instance, frames transparency as a political norm and opacity as a problem.41
This underestimates the insouciance, as Sagnane termed it, that comes with living in a political
context where power is routinely veiled and secret, replete with conspiracies that are known only
to the initiated.
On a methodological level, while curating different research and artistic modalities, I had yet to
find my own modality of researching and theorizing. The more I got caught up in conceptual
debates, the more I found myself yearning for doing a concrete empirical study of the lived
realities of what Boltanski (2011: 56) calls the “radical uncertainty” of the social world. Such a
study, I figured, would need to describe how actual individuals (rather than constructed social
categories) experience radical uncertainty, while allowing for the radical uncertainty on the part
of the researcher to emerge as well (Berthelot 1996). Finally, since my research question turned
out to be transnational (or trans-cultural), I also needed a transnational object of analysis that
would allow me to follow and shift between different registers and conceptualizations of the social
world.
I do not have a satisfying explanation for why it took me so long to realize that a long-cherished
writing project, sitting patiently in the back of my mind since 2014, provided exactly that. Nana
B.’s biography is replete with ambiguities and uncertainties and enmeshed with souloumou
souloumoui, rumours and conspiracy theories.42 Her transnational life—she was born in Conakry
and currently lives in France—revolves around questions of economic emancipation, womanhood
and political power, and involves myriad epistemological perspectives, ranging from mystical and
spiritual conceptualizations, various religious worldviews, to secular, agnostic, and atheist
frameworks, and rationalistic-scientific approaches, all of them routinely overlapping across
contradictions to fit the given task at hand (see Philipps 2023). The conspiracist elements in this
complex array of worldviews result not least from her concrete experiences of Guinean politics.
As a transnational drug courier under the regime of Lansana Conte , an NGO founder in the context
of development politics, and a muse of political Big Men, she has had first-hand experiences of the
Machiavellian kind of politics that necessitate certain forms of secrecy and conspiracy to get things
done.
I met Nana in 2013 in a Lebanese-owned cafe in Kaloum, Conakry’s colonial, political and
economic city centre, located at the tip of the peninsular capital. A friend introduced me to her
after we were coming from an EU-organized debate on youth—I was all dressed up in suit pants.
Nana and I had hardly exchanged more than five sentences when she asked me whether I was
ready to go elsewhere. What followed was a tour through what she would describe as “Le Power”:
the city centre’s intricate infrastructure of Guinean parapolitics. These concealed spaces, ranging
from backyard sheds to bars, littoral hangouts and restaurants, assembled Kaloum’s politicians,
black-market peddlers, soldiers and gendarmes, businessmen and sex workers, for various
pastimes to be shared, deals to be made, schemes to be concocted, or simply to watch television
41 See Comaroff and Comaroff (2003).
42 Nana and the people mentioned in her narrative and shown in our photos have agreed for their stories to be shared
in academic texts like this one. We still decided to keep Nana’s family name concealed.
40
Modalities of Theorizing
in a milieu-transcending insouciance that I had not witnessed in Conakry before. Nana provided,
in that regard, an intriguing contrast to my previous work, which revolved around the masculine
juvenile world of the ghetto and its anti-government protests in Conakry’s banlieue area.
Series 4: Conakry, March 2022
Figure 3: The burden of history. Guinea 2022
Aure lien was immediately up for making the biography a central piece of our project. We visited
Nana in the French city she lived in and one week later travelled together to Conakry, where we
also met up with Sagnane. Sharing Nana as a concrete focal point (or refracting diamond, as
Aure lien put it) was a breakthrough for our ability to transform our interdisciplinary modality
into a transdisciplinary one. The ‘data’ was plenty and yet concentrated in one person’s life and
interactions. Her radical openness and generosity to us, and of course vis-a -vis her various social
circles of family, friends, “tontons”, and spontaneous acquaintances we met in following her,
allowed for a kind of collective and reciprocal observation to emerge between Nana, Aure lien,
myself, and whoever was with us. It helped, in this regard, that Nana took ownership of our project
and also made it hers. As the story’s hero and our guide, she developed entry points to various
spaces in Conakry we had not dreamed of entering, and certainly not with a camera. And yet, she
also exposed her fragility, which Aure lien helped me to see in her, by putting herself into complex
and difficult biographical situations, such as visiting formerly close friends and family members
whom she had avoided to meet. While her biography concerns her actual true life, it also straddles
the divide between fact and fiction, truth and imagination. Nana’s rich repertoire of idioms in this
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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regard (“Me me atamara atanara » [Me me si c’est pas ça, c’est ça »]; « je ne sais pas si c’est vrai ou
pas ; en tout cas, je l’ai ve cu »)43 hint at this complexity.
Aurélien Gillier: To embody rumour by starting with individuals seemed fundamental to me.
Joschka's investigation of Nana's life trajectory offered a new way of understanding the imaginary
world of conspiracy and rumour. As mentioned above, this biographical investigation also allowed
us to truly cross our sociological and photographic views and methods. The long-standing
relationship of trust between Joschka and Nana facilitated my entry into the field while assigning
me a peripheral position in this pairing. This in-between position is an undeniable asset for the
photographer, who can observe in complete freedom, but it also introduces a disruptive element
into the setting: the sociologist. For me, it is not a question of reporting on the investigation but
on Nana, and thus of taking Joschka, an essential pillar of the interaction, out of the frame. The
sociological and photographic investigation here take opposite paths: for me it is not a question
of capturing and describing the ‘reality’ of a situation but of telling a story that resonates, in
whatever way, with universal themes and concerns. The photographic narrative does not
intervene as an illustration of the research but must keep its own autonomy and interpretative
force. The relationship with reality introduced by the presence of the sociologist thus upsets the
quest for the imaginary.
Figure 4: Untitled, Guinea 2022.
43 In English: "That’s it, even if it's not "; "I don't know if it's true or not; in any case, I experienced it."
42
Modalities of Theorizing
The above photograph, for instance, was taken in Conakry during a reunion between Nana, who
has been living in France for several years, and a former friend who was a sex worker. In the
interaction between the two women, Nana is in a dominant position because of her social status
and because she is accompanied by two white friends. Their glances and gestures show mutual
respect but also the battle that takes place before our eyes, between promises made by one and
lessons given by the other. With Joschka, we are spectators of a scene that we observe in different
ways. The sociologist listens to the words, observes the gestures, tonalities and body positions.
For my part, I ask myself how to photograph the scene between the two women. I observe their
movements, the light, I watch the scene and background, and I keep coming up against an element
in the background: the sociologist. If I were documenting the investigation, I could have
introduced him into my frame, but that is not my goal. To find another angle or to tell Joschka to
move would mean to run the risk of breaking the intensity of the interaction that is taking place.
If we are actors in this scene by our presence, we must remain passive observers: immobile, silent.
The sociologist will undoubtedly draw data from it. Me a failed photo.
Representing a life requires diversifying the register of images by following Nana to her family
and to her friends, at work, in her public and private life. In the collaboration with Nana, it was
decided from the start that some of the photos I would take would be for her own use. I take on
the role of ‘wedding and family photographer’ and try to respond to her orders. On these pictures,
Nana's relatives show happy, smiling, frozen faces. They pose in groups, wave their hands, show
that they are posing for the photographer. These photographs are essential because they are the
ones that Nana will publish on her social networks and share with friends. This work is like a
costume: it legitimizes my presence, defuses potential mistrust, and is part of the give-and-take
inherent in any social relationship. It also allows me to enter easily into the intimacy of Nana who
imposes my presence on her entourage. But this dress is also a straitjacket from which it is difficult
to escape: Nana's relatives automatically pose as soon as they see me pointing the camera. So I
accumulate pictures for her, not for our project. In the world of photography—and more recently
in research—the question of the agreement of the photographed subjects has been much
discussed. If this agreement is fundamental to enter the field, it is just as fundamental to get rid of
it in order to capture the immediacy and improvisation of a given situation. As a photographer it
is not always to represent the world as its subjects would like it to be, but also to open the doors
of the imaginary, to break the usual codes, to question our certainties: those of the photographer,
of the photographed, and of the spectators.
Another complexity: Nana consciously challenges my codes of photographic investigation. She
imposes herself in the settings I had planned, bursts into the frame, transforms the meaning of the
image by her presence. She refuses to confine herself to the role of an intermediary and conquers
the image. She is defiant: are we not making her biography? Totally different images are born. In
my work on the National Museum of Conakry and the traces of the past, Nana introduces herself
into history. As a female figure and boldly bling-bling, she reverses the codes, and makes absurd,
the grandeur of the bust of the colonizer Georges Poiret (Lieutenant-Governor of Guinea) and the
smallness of the father of independence Se kou Toure . Adorned with a beret that she borrowed
from a customs officer, she invites herself into this masculine history of the colonial and post-
colonial order, into a history of violence that her pink jacket disrupts. She imposes herself in my
visual narration and then leaves as if nothing had happened.
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In sum, my photographic investigation is ultimately a matter of improvisation, trial and error and
permanent adaptation to the interactions on the ground with the people I wish to photograph.
This way of doing things is more like DIY than a well-defined protocol. By choosing to let myself
be guided by my subjects, I take the risk of letting myself be overwhelmed and losing myself in
their representations. The feeling of failure that arises is undoubtedly the result of my loss of
control. But this loss of control seems necessary to me in order to open new doors and follow
unexpected threads. This type of photographic investigation implies long term work. The skein of
the different tracks followed only makes sense afterwards during the different editing phases
which allow to build the story and to prepare the next stays. The ‘failures’ sometimes find a place.
4 Conclusion
If “concepts hide more than they reveal” (Macamo 2022a), one promise of the concept ‘modalities’
is to acknowledge the multiplicity of realities covered by a given concept. ‘Conspiracy theories,’ as
we have argued in the first part of this chapter, can be grasped in infinitely more complex ways
than the concept suggests. Their modalities are contingent on the contexts in which they are
practiced and the contexts in which they are talked about. And as we have seen, scientists may
arguably be the worst-placed to say something insightful about conspiracy theories, for it is
science, and notably sociology, that has distinguished itself historically in opposition to them.
Though there are notable exceptions (e.g., Boltanski 2014; White 2007), most scientists have a
hard time letting go of treating conspiracy theories as “the other.” That being said, embracing the
concept ‘modalities’ is not without risks. For there is, in our different and limited understandings
of the term, a paradox. If we agree that concepts, like metaphors, do not reveal the real world but
shape our perceptions of it (Lakoff and Johnson 2003), advertising new concepts as answers to
epistemological problems ultimately proceeds by the same conceptualist logics that our reference
to ‘modalities’ seeks to subvert. Shifting the conceptual struggles to ever-higher levels of
abstraction then bears the risk of being increasingly scholastic about the things we care about.
Interdisciplinarity, as we have introduced it in the second part of this chapter, may serve as a more
practical approach to modalities. Engaging with an object of analysis through different
disciplinary lenses and through different methods enables an opening up to the different
modalities of that object. It demonstrates and provides an understanding of its multiplicity and
contingency in terms of the multiple possibilities of relating to it—leaving open whether or not ‘it’
is an ontological or epistemological category, or both.44 When interdisciplinary approaches
include non-textual and non-scientific approaches, moreover, they highlight that these
possibilities of relating extend far beyond the multiplicity of conceptual apparatuses and
theoretical frameworks. As Macamo and Weber (2021) argue, such “progressive”
interdisciplinarity is predicated upon combining “unlikely bedfellows” whose differences are the
starting point of reflection, which means that interdisciplinarity may ultimately not even be about
scientific “disciplines” but about contrasting views and approaches.
Indeed, if modalities of theorizing and researching are united in the motivation of gaining “a better
understanding of the world” (Butter 2018: 53), interdisciplinary work reveals how such an
44 On this matter, we side with Simondon’s philosophy of the transindividual (Combes 2013), arguing for a relational
perspective that links ontology and epistemology (Simondon 1989, 1995, 2005).
44
Modalities of Theorizing
understanding is always a function of the respective theory employed. In the highly fragmented
realm of the social sciences and humanities (see Berthelot 2010:174), there is no objective
‘outside’ from where to evaluate if a certain understanding is ‘better’ than another (Lawson 2001).
For sure, certain theories are more useful for carving out certain aspects of a given phenomenon
than others. But the assumption of having a better general understanding is inherent in the
theoretical perspective itself, and often boils down to confirmation bias, i.e. finding evidence that
fits our preconceptions (Nickerson 1998). While conspiracy theorizing is routinely accused of
particularly high degrees of confirmation bias (Brotherton 2015: 221–39), the problem concerns
all modalities of theorizing, and interdisciplinarity ideally make us aware of that.
In this article, we reflected in particular on the interdisciplinary relation between sociology and
photography, the different research modalities that each approach brings to the table, and on the
different objects and concepts that the photographer and the sociologist grappled with, changing
them considerably along the way. Neither photography nor sociology were confined to one
respective modality of research, but adapted their multiple repertoires in relation to changing
objects of analysis. This relation to objects is important when asking what changed the research
endeavour from an interdisciplinary into a transdisciplinary one. On the one hand, it may simply
have taken time for the sociologist and the photographer to transcend their disciplinary
boundaries and to arrive at a third, transdisciplinary modality. On the other hand, the object of
analysis seemed to have played an important role as well, for the two perspectives ultimately
converged when focusing on the biography of Nana. This object, moreover, is also a subject, i.e., a
person, and perhaps another discipline altogether, who allowed the sociologist and the
photographer to experience, beyond the confines of their respective fields, what they were after
when entering the politics of the unknown.
Our inter- and transdisciplinary work on conspiracy theories follows a multi-modal principle that
Halloran (1983) calls “critical eclecticism”: the attempt of combining different perspectives on a
complex and multifaceted phenomenon, in which each perspective critically reflects on capacities
and blind spots of the other. The underlying assumption is that our heuristic tools structure not
only what we see in the world, but also what we ignore and what remains unknown to us. This is
evident not only in interdisciplinary research, but should also be kept in mind when sociologists
study conspiracy theories. In a context like Guinea, where parapolitical actors are at the heart of
large-scale collusion and transnational extraction, a critically eclectic perspective is two-
directional: the problem it evokes is not only that conspiracy theories are too actor-centred and
seek to personify structures of power that are much broader than actual networks of people. The
problem is also that most sociological theories focus so much on broad anonymous structures—
and on how to conceptualize them—that they make fine-grained research on actual networks of
collusion very difficult and seemingly un-academic (Cribb 2009). As to photography and
sociology, a photographic approach illustrates, quite literally, the complexity and ambiguity of
concrete situations that elude sociological capture (Simone 2022), while sociological approaches
can go beyond the immediacy of the photographic snapshot and make broader arguments across
specific instances. In sum, then, the problem is choosing one perspective without assuming its
partial nature (Collins 1999: 290). Working with modalities as a guiding heuristic angle highlights
this partial nature of accessing and understanding phenomena, and this, for us, is the most
valuable upshot of the concept modalities.
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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Figure 5: Milky way. Guinea 2022.
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Modalities of Theorizing
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Arguing for Integrative Medicine
in Diversity
Appraising Diagnosis in Western and Yoruba Health
Care Systems
Akinmayowa Akin-Otiko
Abstract
Modes of relating to diseases are visible in the practice of Yoruba Traditional Medicine (YTM).
Modes exists because of the belief in the dual existence of forces in nature, there is the spiritual as
well as the material mode of existence. For the Yoruba, life situations, including diseases are often
interpreted from a dualistic position. ‘Thinking’ in dual categories affects prescriptions and
treatments; this is noticeable when comparing diagnosis of difficult conditions in Western health
care to what is done in the Yoruba traditional health care system. Diseases in Western medicine
are mainly caused by explainable causes making treatment explainable, whereas, in Yoruba
traditional health care, there are explainable and unexplainable causes and treatment of diseases.
The thinking pattern in these two health care approaches makes the idea of integrative medicine
interesting. This study highlights and compares the thinking (diagnosis) and actions (treatment
and prescription) in Western and Yoruba Traditional health care systems with particular focus on
somatoform disorder. There were key informant interviews of selected Western health care
practitioners regarding diagnosis and treatment of somatoform disorder; these responses were
compared to modes of diagnosis and treatment in Yoruba health care system. Results show
possible link between thinking and acting in the area of health care, thereby making a case for
relational and integrative modes of health care as scholars reconfigure African Studies.
Keywords: diagnosis, health care, integrative, somatoform disorder, Western, Yoruba
52
Arguing for Integrative Medicine in Diversity
1 Introduction
I would like to begin this paper using a known situation; during the soccer match between
Finnland and Denmark at the Euro 2020, a News Paper, Premium Times (2021) reported ‘Panic as
Danish star Eriksen slumps on the pitch’. Christian Erikson slumps on the field of play, and
western medical officials thought he had a cardiac arrest. The same experience of Christian
Erikson can be diagnosed in another way based on the thinking emanating from different medical
paradigms. The worldview of a people defines the thinking process and this necessarily guides the
diagnosis and treatment of diseases. In the Yoruba medical context, there is the possibility of
Christian Erikson being diagnosed as one afflicted by some evil force. This type of diagnosis is
perfectly understood by Yoruba because of the types of disease aetiologies that exist in their
healthcare practice.
Although contemporary medicine argues for the removal of dychotomies in the methods of
healthcare, the practice of medicine among the Yoruba still allows the same disease to be
interpreted from two perspectives to achieve the goal of integrative medicine. That is the same
condition can be diagnosed as cardiac arrest or a spiritual attack because of a dual disease
aetiology. This, will be integrating the explainable with the inexplainable methods. Among the
Yoruba, diagnosis takes on a dual perspective because symptoms are either explainable or not
(Akin-Otiko 2018). For the explainable, there is àìsàn ara (bodily ailment) (Jegede A. S. 2010) on
the one hand, and for the unexplainable, there is àmódi (somatoform disorder - ailments that are
difficult to diagnose) (Akin-Otiko 2018).
A condition is a ĩ sa n ara if the ailment affects only the body, such ailments can be easily diagnosed
or explained; the treatment is herbal and explainable. This is very similar to what happens in
western health care practice. In the cases of a ĩ sa n ara, diagnosis does not immediately follow a
dualistic thinking, it is when health conditions become difficult that the dualistic method of
thinking becomes prominent. The “Yoruba view a ĩ sa n [ailment] as a pathological problem”
(Jegede A. S. 2010: 158). But if the condition is a mo di, the treatment will require more than herbs.
For a mo di, there is the need to appease the spiritual forces identified to be responsible for the
ailment. A mo di which is somatoform disorder are conditions that are considered to have spiritual
and not natural causes (Akin-Otiko 2018). For example, there is a cult (S o pa nna cult) that is
believed to be responsible for the prevention of smallpox in Yoruba (Jegede, O. 2010). It has been
argued that the function of traditional Yoruba religion is to ward off evil occurrences such as
sickness and in most critical periods to heal the victims (Osunwole 1989). It is in cases like this
that integrative medicine is evident.
The need for integrative medicine exists because diagnosis could have been that Christian was
attacked by someone he offended or someone who is not too happy with his position and role in
the team. Quoting Ayodele (2002), scholars noted that "diseases mostly revolve around
witchcraft/sorcery, gods or ancestors, natural, as well as inherited“ (Ezekwesili-Ofili and Okaka
2019). In this case, rather than respond with the best of technologies alone, there will be
divination to find out who Christian offended and what is required to appease the aggrieved
person(s).
This speaks to the reality of integrative medicine, that is, the bringing together “of different
approaches, treatments, and institutions that people use to maintain health or treat illness”
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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(Khalikova 2023). This is developing on medical pluralism that is refered to as the “differentially
designed and conceived medical systems’ in a single society” (Janzen 1978: xviii). Integrative
medicine has developed to include systems of health care across “local systems (folk medicine),
regional systems (like Unani medicine or traditional Chinese medicine), and cosmopolitan
medicine” (Dunn 1976).
The contemporary acceptance of integrative medicine takes place when different health care
systems understand and agree on the diagnosis of symptoms as Khalikova (2023) noted that
“cancer patients might complement chemotherapy with acupuncture and religious healing; or
women who want to get pregnant might combine hormonal treatment with home remedies and
Yoga.” Complementary medicine builds on pluralism of health care where disease aetiologies are
different. In the case of the Yoruba health care system, the effects of supernatural forces and
spiritual afflictions are accepted as possible disease aetiology along with the naturally caused
diseases. This is because “in African traditional setting, there was always an explanation as to why
someone was suffering from a certain disease at a particular time” (Ezekwesili-Ofili and Okaka
2019). Differences in the understanding of disease aetiologies makes it important to listen and
understand African traditional medicine as a different but useful health care system. If this is not
done, it can lead to loss of the value of integrative system, as well as exclude the role of Africa
traditional medicine especially when diseases have causes that are outside the scope of Western
health care.
The dualistic reality in the worldview of the Yoruba enhanced the complementary indigeous
responses to COVID-19; they substantially regarded COVID-19 as a condition that was both a ĩ sa n
ara and a mo di. COVID-19 was believed to have dual causation, the explainable and the
inexplainable, the natural as well the supernatural causation. This dualistic kind of thinking
resulted in the integrative responses that Yoruba indigenous medicine practitioners provided in
response to COVID-19 (Akin-Otiko 2020). Many used known recipies for boosting their immune
system, and to complement that, there were consultations through divinations to address the
possible spiritual dimention of COVID-19. This mirrors the position “that perception of illness is
affected or influenced by belief systems in African societies” (Jegede, A. S. 2010: 77).
In the case of COVID-19, the non-pharmaceutical protocols such as social distancing, use of
facemask, avoidance of handshakes, etc. were found to be useful, however, there were sacrifices
made by the practitioners of indigenous medicine to appease the spiritual causes of COVID-19.
This integrative acting has placed indigenous medicine on the front burner of many critiques,
particularly because indigenous health care is not yet seen as playing a complementary role. The
rejection of the dual disease aetiology does not remove the fact that every culture responds to
health care concerns based on the accepted disease aetiologies (Akin-Otiko 2018).
Contemporary research in health care considers pluralism of modes that result in integrative
medicine, however, problem with African health care mode often emanates because scholars with
competence in western care reject African paradigm that they do not understand. This study is
aimed at providing a basis for complementary modes of health care even when diagnosis are
different. The differences in the way western and Yoruba health care systems respond to the same
condition does not exclude the possibility of complementarity when holistic health care is the
focus. Appraisal of modes in health care is necessary for the appreciation of multiplicity of ideas
especially as it applies to the western and Yoruba Traditional Medicine mode.
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Arguing for Integrative Medicine in Diversity
2 Theory
This study adopts a principle of deriving theories from data gathered from the field, people’s lived
experiences and responses from interviews. This method of theorizing has been referred to as
grounded theory. Grounded theory (GT) is a research method concerned with the generation of
theory, (Glaser and Strauss 1967) which is ‘grounded’ in data that has been systematically
collected and analysed (Strauss and Corbin 1994). GT has been used to uncover social processes,
that is, principles that guide social relationships and behaviours of groups (Crooks 2001). GT was
developed in California, USA by Glaser and Strauss during their study— ‘Awareness of Dying’
(Glaser and Strauss 1967). It is believed that GT will help this study to systematically develop what
people think and believe about health care and diseases in general.
One of the grounded hypothesis derived from this study is, ‘Ohun ti o wa leyi eji, o ju eta lo’, “there
is more to life than meets the eyes”. This hypothesis emerged from the fact that the Yoruba believe
that there are two realities operational in the world, the visible and the invisible. There is always
something more to perceive or realize beyond what has been manifested. In the case of diseases,
it is believed that there are things that may be responsible for conditions of patients that the
sequence of symptoms may not capture or reveal. This is the basis for the theory of ‘Ohun ti o wa
leyi eji, o ju eta lo’. This and more strengthened the basis for medical pluralism to become a
theoretical framework which “was developed in the second half of the twentieth century to
examine local medical traditions in their diversity, co-existence, and competition, especially with
biomedicine” (Khalikova 2023).
If there is a western understanding of diseases that can be understood exhaustively by what is
revealed, it means that there is no need to look further than the symptoms, whereas in the Yoruba
paradigm of health care, there can be more to the symptoms that have been presented. This
difference between western and Yoruba indigenous health care paradigms, makes a case for
integrative modes of care especially because one mode relates to the other to achieve adequate
health care process.
3 Method and data
Data was gathered in 2013 and a post thesis fieldwork in 2022 validated the data. Twenty-four
patients with a mo di - somatoform disorder (ailments that are difficult to diagnose) were selected
across the six Southwestern states of Nigeria based on established diagnosis and the fact that they
had been to formal government hospitals, only to be discharged and told to find some help
traditionally. Patients were identified through selected Babalawo (diviners) using snowball
method. All the conditions were first diagnosed based on the understanding of dualism in disease
aetiologies and treatments were administered with a 100% recovery rate. This was possible
because dualism exists in the understanding of disease aetiologies among the Yoruba. For this
study, seven cases that represent types or groups of diseases out of the twenty-four somatoform
disorder cases were selected. Each of the selected cases represents one of the seven identified
classes or disease aetiologies among the Yoruba. These disease aetiologies represent the modes
of thinking and the types of treatment that were provided. The findings of the study showed seven
different groups of disease causation; these groupings also determined the type of treatment that
were provided. These seven diagnoses and treatments found among the Yoruba were compared
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with possible diagnosis and treatment of the same conditions as known and practiced by Western
trained medical Doctors. The findings show how modes of thinking (diagnosis) impact actions
(treatment) in the two health care paradigms, this makes a case for modalities in the methods of
responding to reality, especially diseases that are interpreted within the worldview of the Yoruba
and the need to decolonise African Studies.
4 Group view of cases
This group was developed to represent the established possible categories of disease aetiology in
Yoruba indigenous medicine. And each represents the grouping in the fieldwork of Akin-Otiko
(2013).
Table 1: Possible aetiologies, diagnosis and recovery time in YTM
(adapted from Akin-Otiko 2013).
Grp
Patient
Age
Sex
Religion
Time
before
treat-
ment
Time of
recovery
Condition/
symptom
Diagnosis
1
A
36
F
Muslim
10 yrs
1 mnths
Always felt
heat in the
stomach,
could not
get
pregnant
Odù Òsá-Èșù: Òrìșà:
Ìjà Èsù- Attack from
Èsù.
2
C
25
M
Christian
19
months
2 mnths
Skin ulcer
Odù Òfún-Òdí: Àì gbo ́
ìkìlo ̀ - refusal to heed
warning.
3
G
40
M
Christian
5 yrs
1 day
Could not
have
erection
Odù Òdí- Ògúndá:
Aya o ̀run- spiritual
wife.
4
M
32
M
ATR
4 yrs
6 mnths
Coughing
out blood
Odù O ̀sé-Òsá: Ìdúró
pé òun ní agbára -
daring others.
5
Q
28
M
Muslim
1 yrs
3 days
Audible
birdlike
noise from
stomach,
loss of
weight
Odù Ìrosùn- O ̀sé:
Ọwo ́ ayé (attack
from witches)
6
T
40
M
Muslim
2 yrs
15 days
Paralysis
Odù Èjì-Ogbè:
Àședànù nítorí pé kò
béèrè - did not make
inquiry.
7
V
60
F
Christian
Few
mnths
1 week
Strange
actions
Odù Ògúndá-atóríșe:
Owú-jíjẹ - jealousy.
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Arguing for Integrative Medicine in Diversity
Group One: Patient with a condition traced to Òrìșà (Divinity)
This is made up of only one patient (A). This patient complained that she always felt heat in her
stomach. This condition made her go to a number of government hospitals. She was tested for
ulcer, high blood pressure, and some other tests to find out the reason for this condition. She was
also made to go through different tests to ascertain why she could not get pregnant. According to
her, “the doctors always told me that they did not find anything from the result of the tests.” She
was told on different occasions to go home, rest and not worry about anything, but the heat she
felt in her stomach never got better.
Disease Aetiology: The symptoms manifested by this patient were indicative of physical disorder.
This informed the choice of tests that were done, but the babala wo through divination − Odu O sa -
E s u − found the disease aetiology to be I ja E s u , attack from E s u (Akin-Otiko 2013). The Yoruba
believe in the existence of malevolent spirits, which are capable of inflicting harm. The harm from
any such spirits is refered to as a form of ailment. Divinition helps to identify the source of
affliction and the prescription needed for the treatment of the patient.
Group Two: Patient with a condition traced to èèwọ̀ (taboo)
Group two represents diseases caused by taboo. Patient C manifested skin ulcer as his symptom
and Ifa divination linked it to breaking of taboos, it was called A ĩ gbo ĩ kĩ lo (refusal to heed
warning). Patient C was suffering from skin ulcer (egbo a da a jina ). According to the patient, “this
wound had lasted for one year and seven months. The wound prevented me from having
girlfriends. Women avoided me once they found out that I had the wound that had grown very big
and deep.” This wound was around the ankle and had started affecting the way he walked. He said
“I have been to different hospitals and different tests had been carried out, but nothing indicated
the queried causes. I have contemplated suicide on different occasions.”
Disease Aetiology: Odu O fu n-O dĩ (a divination chapter) indicated a ĩ ko gbo ĩ kĩ lo (refusal of the
patient to heed warning from those that had give advise about life choices), which resulted in skin
ulcer. This kind of skin ulcer (egbo a da a jina ) forms a big sore that either starts out as a result of
some minor known injury or one may just suddenly notice some irritation on the skin. These
injuries do not get healed despite treatment and these kinds of injuries have led to many
amputations because they do not respond to treatments; they rather get worse over time (Akin-
Otiko 2013).
Group Three: Patient with a condition traced to Orí (one’s personality soul)
Group three represents diseases caused by Orĩ (one’s personality’s soul), for the Yoruba, there
exists a spiritual element to human existence, which is called the Orĩ ). Patient G is a young man
who on different occasions had refused to get married; according to him, “I have erectile
dysfunction and have gone to different hospitals where tests were carried out to know if I have an
infection, weak erection, or if the nerves were not working well.” He said he was not born like that,
but the doctors found it hard to believe. He had the condition for about five years.
Disease Aetiology: Odu O dĩ -O gu nda (a divination chapter) diagnosed aya o run (spiritual wife,
which is a condition that prevents patients with such condition from having children) as the cause
of the patient’s condition (Akin-Otiko 2013). Every babala wo knows that “it is possible to interfere
with a ya nmo [destiny] through the evil machinations of enemies (o ta )” (Jegede 2002: 324). The
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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concept of Orĩ or a ya nmo (destiny) indicates that the Yoruba have an awareness of hereditary
conditions, which they refer to as a ĩ sa n tĩ orĩ ya n wa sĩ aye (diseases believed to have been chosen
by one’s personal soul from heaven). It is believed that the orĩ chooses what it wants to become
on earth, even the type of affliction that it wants to suffer here on earth. This may include diseases
caused by genetic factors. Odu E jĩ -ogbe talks about a disease that can exist from generation to
generation, this is what is called a ya nmo (destiny) (Akin-Otiko 2013).
Group Four: Patient with a condition traced to ìwà-búburú (bad character)
This group of diseases represent conditions linked to ĩ wa -bu buru (bad character). Patient M
coughed and spat out blood for four years. According to him; “I cough a lot and I notice that blood
comes out whenever I cough. I am scared it may cost me my life.” Odu O se -O sa diagnosed ĩ du ro
pe o un nĩ agba ra (daring others); that is, the patient bragged that nothing can happen to him.
Disease Aetiology: I wa bu buru (bad character) was found to have caused the conditions in patient
M. Yoruba place a big emphasis on ĩ wa , which requires every human being to act rightly. It is
believed that ĩ wa rere l’ e s o e nĩ ya n (good behaviour is a noble adornment of human beings), just
as ĩ wa l’o ba a wu re (good behaviour is the most effective source of blessing) (Akin-Otiko 2013).
Elebuibon (2000: 51) noted that “I wa is a factor, which enables man to accomplish his desires and
aspirations. A man may possess good luck. However, if he possesses bad character, the ugly traits
of his character will negate his good luck.” Such a patient will be asked to return to doing good
actions for healing.
Group Five: Patient with a condition traced to Ayé/Àjẹ́ (witches)
Group five patient complained of physical bodies discomfort. Patient Q had problems with blotted
stomach for years, but it became a problem when he and people around him could hear some bird-
like sound from his stomach (inu kĩ ku n). He said I have inu kĩ ku n and along with it I am losing
weight and people thought that I had HIV.” For a whole year, he ran different tests, but nothing
was diagnosed. Odu I rosu n-O se diagnosed o wo aye (attack from witches). It indicated that the
patient belonged to a cult and his members were disturbing him.
Disease Aetiology: Aye /a je /a wo n ĩ ya mi (witches) were found to be responsible for the conditions
of patient Q. Aye (witches) are some human or supernatural beings that are capable of afflicting
humans with illness or misfortune. All the babala wo that were interviewed in this study share a
common belief in the existence of Aye (Akin-Otiko 2013). Parrinder (1976) noted that this disease
aetiology is possible because witches are believed to have the power to feast on human souls while
their bodies are asleep. “The soul is closely linked to the body, and as the witches devour the
spiritual body, so the mortal frame weakens… Pain, paralysis or impotence appears in different
members. When the centre of the blood, the heart or liver is reached, then the victim dies”
(Parrinder 1976: 127). This has been called “spiritual cannibalism” (Omoyajowo 1998: 317).
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Arguing for Integrative Medicine in Diversity
Group Six: Patient with a condition traced to àì-kò-béèrè (lack of divination)
Group six has a Patient T that could not walk, he had pain in his knees. The legs looked like they
were broken bones. According to him; “I have been to different hospitals and x-rays were taken,
but nothing was found. My condition got so bad that I have not walked for about two years. At
some point I started losing weight and all they were giving him in the hospitals were sedatives to
kill the pain I was having, including pints of blood and drips.” Odu E jĩ -Ogbe diagnosed A s eda nu
nĩ torĩ pe ko be e re (wastage because he did not make inquiry – For the Yoruba, divination is made
before taking significant steps in life, when ignored, one of the consiquences is waste of time or
resources). The patient was warned about a certain trip, but ignored the warning.
Disease Aetiology: A ĩ -ko -be e re (lack of divination) is a possible disease aetiology in the worldview
of the Yoruba, because divination plays a big role not just in diagnosis of diseases and conditions,
but also as a preventive measure when it is done at the beginning of every significant stage in life.
Such moments reveal what has to be done to avoid diseases, mistakes, misfortunes, etc. When one
refuses to ask, then diseases are caused or not prevented.
Among the Yoruba, it is believed that “on the third day after a child’s birth, the oracle must be
consulted” (Idowu 1996: 192). This rite is called E se nba le /I ko se -wa ye (inquiries at birth to find
out what a child will become), and it is meant to find out what sort of child the infant is, and what
destiny it has chosen. If there are things to be corrected, the rite will guide and direct the process
of correcting whatever is wrong. It will also help to know what is meant to be the child’s taboo so
that it can be avoided. That way, sickness or conditions that may affect the future of the child is
prevented.
Group Seven: Patients with conditions traced to ìrírí ayé (life experience, these are
conditions that emanate from human interactions with other humans)
Patient V was a businesswoman who was said to have been doing very well in her market.
According to her; “I suddenly started to behave strangely, frequently complained of fever. Tests
revealed nothing about what was wrong with me. People tell me also that I am not coordinated in
my speech.” The hospitals recommended psychiatric treatments. Odu O gu nda -at’o rĩ s e found
Owu -jĩ je (jealousy), attack from the market where she sold her goods (Akin-Otiko 2013).
Disease Aetiology: I rĩ rĩ aye (life experience) is considered to be a kind of disease aetiology. Yoruba
believe that ‘Ile aye , ile ogun ni’ (the world is a battlefield). This means that everyone should be
prepared for any eventuality in the world. Humans are definitely going to struggle for things,
positions and opportunities, and it is only normal for the fittest to outwit the weak ones. One is
expected to fortify oneself and one’s belonging because others will struggle for them. Diagnosis
revealed that life experiences positioned patients V to be envied, and this led to the conditions she
suffered.
5 Arguing for integrative methods of diagnosis: YTM and Western
health care
The above diagnosis and prescription in YTM are significantly different from what is obtainable
in the Western framework as will be shown in the comparative work in the table and narrative
after the table. The differences show the need for integrative health care, it highlights the need not
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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to be boxed into one mode of health care even when diseases are diagnosed and understood in a
mode.
Table 2: Comparing diagnosis in YTM and Western medical paradigms.
S/N Condition/symptoms
Diagnosis in YTM
Possible Diagnosis
in Western Health
Care
1
Always felt heat in the stomach and
could not get pregnant
Odù Òsá-Èșù: Òrìșà:
Ìjà Èsù- Attack from Èsù.
A case of Premature
ovarian
failure.
The
heat could be a sign of
early menopause with
infertility.
2
Skin ulcer
Odù Òfún-Òdí: Àì gbo ́ ìkìlo ̀ -
refusal to heed warning.
A typical skin ulcer.
Slow healing as a result
of either malnutrition
or Diabetes.
3
Could not have erection
Odù Òdí- Ògúndá: Aya o ̀run-
spiritual wife.
A
case
of
erectile
dysfunction. Caused by
emotional stress.
4
Coughing out blood
Odù O ̀sé-Òsá: Ìdúró pé òun ní
agbára - daring others.
A case of lung cancer or
Tuberculosis.
5
Audible birdlike noise from the
stomach, loss of weight
Odù Ìrosùn- O ̀sé: Ọwo ́ ayé - attack
from witches.
A sign of excessive gas
in the stomach and the
weight loss can point
towards
stomach
cancer.
6
Paralysis
Odù Èjì-Ogbè: Àședànù nítorí pé
kò béèrè - did not make inquiry.
Possible stroke in the
area
of
the
brain
controlling the affected
body part.
7
Strange actions
Odù Ògúndá-atóríșe: Owú-jíjẹ -
jealousy.
Dementia and possibly
psychosis.
Patient 1 – In the Western medical paradigm, these symptoms could be representative of a case
of Premature ovarian failure. The heat could be a sign of early menopause with infertility.
Whereas, in the Yoruba indigenous medical paradigm, the diagnosis from Odu O sa -E s u said that
the symptom is caused by O rĩ s a (divinity) and it is I ja E su - Attack from E su .
Patient 2- In Western medical paradigm, the symptoms could be signs of a typical skin ulcer.
Probably complicated with slow healing as a result of an underlying condition like malnutrition
or Diabetes. But in the Yoruba Traditional medical paradigm, it was diagnosed through Odu O fu n-
O dĩ that the patient is suffering from A ĩ gbo ĩ kĩ lo - refusal to heed warning. Preventive efforts could
have averted these conditions.
Patient 3 – In the Western healthcare system, this condition could be a case of erectile dysfunction
caused by emotional stress or other factors. However, in the practice of Yoruba tradition medicine
with diagnosis from Odu O dĩ - O gu nda , the patient was diagnosed to have Aya o run- spiritual wife.
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Arguing for Integrative Medicine in Diversity
Patient 4 – Western trained medical doctors concluded that the history of coughing up blood looks
like a case of lung cancer or Tuberculosis. This is different from the diagnosis in Yoruba traditional
medicine where Odu O se -O sa diagnosed I du ro pe o un nĩ agba ra - daring others.
Patient 5- According to Western trained Doctors, noises from the stomach could be a sign of
excessive gas in the stomach and the weight loss can point towards stomach cancer. This is very
different from what Yoruba traditional medicine using Odu I rosu n- O se , the patient’s condition
was said to have derived from O wo aye (attack from witches).
Patient 6- This could be a case of a possible stroke in the area of the brain controlling the affected
body part. It could also be a cancer with metastases to the spine. However, Odu E jĩ -Ogbe :
diagnosed A s eda nu nĩ torĩ pe ko be e re - did not make inquiry, as the cause of the patient’s
condition.
Patient 7- The disfunctional behaviour was diagnosed to be a case of Dementia and possibly
psychosis. This same case was initially diagnosed using Odu O gu nda -ato rĩ s e, and the divination
process revealed Owu -jĩ je - jealousy as the reason for the condition.
6 Discussion
This study demonstrates how single condition can be better understood through integrative
health care; thereby highlighting unity in multiple health care paradigms and creates a good
ground for collaboration and reconfiguring African Studies. Particularly as Khalikova (2023)
noted that “scholars have experimented with other analytical conceptualisations such as
eclecticism and hybridity (Brooks, Cerulli & Sheldon 2020) to highlight how seemingly distinct
medical traditions can be practiced in eclectic and entangled ways, where every doctor-patient
encounter entails a negotiation of diverse medical ideas and treatments.”
The categories of disease causation found in Yoruba health care system have been highlighted by
Foster and Anderson (1978) and Odejide (1978), to include the natural, which are physical
ailments traceable to known causes; supernatural, ailments traceable to spiritual attacks;
mystical, ailments with recognizable symptoms, but do not respond to known treatments; and
Oke (1982) and Jegede, A. S. (1996) added hereditary to the list of disease aetiologies. These four
disease aetiologies manifest themselves broadly in natural (explicable) and supernatural
(inexplicable) disease (Akin-Otiko 2018). The supernatural diseases have culturally known but
not explicable disease aetiologies.
Although scholars (Osunwole 1989; Jegede, A.S. 1996) have interpreted the distinction between
traditional and western medicine as dychotomies, they are better seen as complementary.
Western medicine lays emphasis on germ theory of disease, which is complemented in Yoruba
indigenous medicine which stresses culturally known disease aetiologies and treatments. It is in
spite of possible significant differences in health care modes that Khalikova (2023) observed that
“Medical pluralism thus provided an important framework that broke away from a reductionist
dichotomy of biomedicine versus ethnomedicine, or the West versus the rest.” This pluralism has
been observed to “provided better health services to Africans. It has continued to receive
increasing acceptance in Nigeria and among many other African nations despite the ground
breaking improvements recorded in the field of orthodox medicine” (Osawu 2021: 161).
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Online (11)
The difference in the modes of diagnosis is possible in the scheme of things among the Yoruba
indigenous health care providers because the prescriptions of Ifa divination sometimes “indicate
the necessity of sacrificing to a neglected ancestor or a deity. It may suggest that the client should
become an adherent of some cult other than the family deity. It may point to disturbed
relationships within the family, and the need to restore good feelings between relatives” (Maclean
1971: 33).
The need for integrative form of medicine as it is understood in contemporary times requires that
the categories of indigenous medicine should be accepted and not excluded from the Western
understanding. There is a complementarity that takes place. Patients should be free to engage the
prescriptions of indigenous medicine for holistic purposes. The idea of exclusion comes in when
a particular method is at a loss as to what the other mode can do in disease contexts. Here,
integrative medicine will be difficult based on a lack of knowledge from either the Western or
Yoruba health care system. Some treatments in YTM are uncommon and non-existent in Western
practice, and this should create the need for complementarity. In the “African context healing is
the restoration of the whole person physically, socially, spiritually mentally and
psychologically. Hence the traditional medicine practitioners treat not only the physical illness
of a patient but also the spiritual to bring about total healing” (Osawu 2021: 168). To achieve this
holistic health, divinities are sometimes consulted; “In the worldview of the Yoruba, E su (a
divinity) is believed to be one of the major O rĩ s a (divinities) such as O rĩ s a -nla , o ru nmĩ la , O gu n,
S a ngo and S o pa nna that exist among the over two hundred divinities” (Akin-Otiko 2013: 94).
These O rĩ s a are believed to “serve the will of Olo du mare in the creation and theocratic
government of the world” (Idowu 1996: 54). Olo du mare is not regarded to be one among them;
“He is wholly other than they. But they are under His constant vigilance and control and to Him
they owe absolute loyalty” (Idowu 1996: 59). These O rĩ s a are known to perform key functions in
the healthcare system of the Yoruba.
Although the Yoruba belief in the existence of dual forces in nature defines interpretations of
disease aetiology and treatment, this does not exclude the contemporary view of integrative
health care. A good understanding of ‘thinking’ in dual categories should enhance ‘acting’
(response) in relational modes. Although diseases in Western medicine are mainly caused by
explainable causes making treatment explainable, whereas, in Yoruba indigenous health care,
there are explainable and unexplainable causes and treatment of diseases. The thinking pattern
in these two health care approaches define actions (treatments) that are provided. This study
highlights the need to integrate the thinking (diagnosis) and actions (treatment and prescription)
in Western health care into the Yoruba indigenous health care with particular focus on
somatoform disorder. Given the possible existence of diseases caused by aetiologies that are
cultural in their understanding and explanation, Ifá divination becomes a possible contribution to
the process of diagnosis and treatment of patients suffering from àmódi (Akin-Otiko 2013). The
undeniable need for integrative health care must highlight the fact that Yoruba health care system
can diagnose as well as prescribe cured for tough diseases. Results showed the link between
thinking and acting in the area of health care, thereby making a case for integrative forms of
acting/health care. This calls for openness to multiple but related ideas in the process of
reconfiguring African Studies.
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Arguing for Integrative Medicine in Diversity
7 Conclusion
Although the Yoruba belief in the existence of dual forces in nature defines interpretations of
disease aetiology and treatment, this does not exclude the contemporary view of integrative
health care. A good understanding of ‘thinking’ in dual categories should enhance ‘acting’
(response) in relational modes. Although diseases in Western medicine are mainly caused by
explainable causes making treatment explainable, whereas, in Yoruba indigenous health care,
there are explainable and unexplainable causes and treatment of diseases. The thinking pattern
in these two health care approaches define actions (treatments) that are provided. This study
highlights the need to integrate the thinking (diagnosis) and actions (treatment and prescription)
in Western health care into the Yoruba indigenous health care with particular focus on
somatoform disorder. Given the possible existence of diseases caused by aetiologies that are
cultural in their understanding and explanation, Ifá divination becomes a possible contribution to
the process of diagnosis and treatment of patients suffering from àmódi (Akin-Otiko 2013). The
undeniable need for integrative health care must highlight the fact that Yoruba health care system
can diagnose as well as prescribe cured for tough diseases. Results showed the link between
thinking and acting in the area of health care, thereby making a case for integrative forms of
acting/health care. This calls for openness to multiple but related ideas in the process of
reconfiguring African Studies.
References
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Publications.
Ways of Knowing Africa: African
Literature and Shifting
Imaginaries
Peter Simatei
Abstract
Starting from the position posited by the Africa Multiple, that Africa is, and always has been,
constituted through its ever-changing relations and is globally entangled and in flux, this article
broaches the subject of the role that African literature has played and continues to play in the
reconstitution of ways of knowing Africa and in the production of new conceptions of African
subjectivities, African ways of life and modes of relations. I proceed from the understanding that
literature’s engagement in world-making involves the construction of fictional spaces that either
contest the existing ones or are relational to them. The article also explores how African literature
contests and transforms current relations of power—whether these relations are subsumed
under such categories as gender, religion, ethnicity, nation, class, or race—to call alternative
temporalities into being. It concludes by focusing on African diasporic writings and their
production of political and cultural realities that contest and transform relations based on
national rootedness and territorial logic as it visualizes diasporic imaginaries and new poetics of
relation.
Keywords: Ways of knowing Africa, Knowledge production, Modes of relations, Fictional spaces,
African literature
The first part of my title, “Ways of Knowing Africa,” is an obvious intertextual gesture toward the
politics of knowledge production in relation to Africa. These questions have been addressed and
continue to be addressed in many scholarly debates. The critical questions continue to revolve
around Africa as an object of knowledge. Perhaps more important is the question of Africa’s
66
Ways of Knowing Africa: African Literature and Shifting Imaginaries
relationship to that very project of knowing. These projects have produced an array of conceptual
grammars subsumed under terms such as “Ways of seeing Africa," “Thinking Africa differently,"
“Africa Knows” and, of course, “Reconfiguring African studies” and many others that attempt to
shape the field of African studies and in doing so contest the colonial and hegemonic imposition
of particular ways of seeing Africa. My interest here is to reflect in a general way on the role that
African literature has played and continues to play in the reconstitution of ways of knowing Africa
and in the production of new conceptions of African subjectivities, African ways of life, and modes
of relations. African literature encompasses complex and diverse literary texts, traditions,
cultures, and languages. However, I will offer a general assessment of the subject at the risk of
simplifying the complex relationships that produce African literature as an object of study that
encapsulates specific knowledge about Africa. When I talk about African literature here, though, I
am referring to recent written literature, which Simon Gikandi describes as “modern African
literature (…) produced in the crucible of colonialism” (Gikandi 2000: 379). I will not, however,
dwell on the numerous debates that go all the way back to the important Makerere Conference of
1962, officially called “the Conference of African Writers of English Expression”, about the nature,
function and relevance of African literature.
African literature’s prominent intervention in the debates about the invention of Africa or ways
of knowing Africa is defined by its confrontation with colonial and Eurocentric perspectives that
would later dominate Western scholarship and which established the idea of Africa as a ‘dark
continent’ in need of European intervention and civilization. Chinua Achebe, for example, has been
at the forefront of this intervention in his creative enterprise. If Achebe’s fiction was central in
defining future directions in the development of the African novel45, even has it recast the Western
canon in a new light, his critical essays, particularly those collected in Morning Yet on Creation Day
(Heinmann 1974) and Hopes and Impediments (Heinemann 1988) directed the focus on the
complicity of European literature and scholarship in the promotion of beliefs and assumptions
that constructed Africa as less civilized and hence in need of Western paternalist assistance. Often
based on this Eurocentric perspective, Western scholarship on Africa constructed the latter as a
place of ignorance, barbarism, and primitivism.
Harry Garuba’s reflection on the role of the African writer and the artist in the reconstitution of
contemporary Africa is a good beginning in understanding the shifting imaginaries about Africa
and its place in the world. Questions concerning the role of writers and artists in society were
quite relevant in the decolonization period, where writers vested upon themselves or were
bestowed by society the role of guiding their people to be proper ‘subjects’ of their cultures and
histories. Garuba asserts:
For most postcolonial literatures or literatures from emergent literary spaces, literary
value inheres as much in the teachability of the text as it does in whatever other
aesthetic qualities it may possess; that is, the text’s ability to illustrate, rework, or
represent some theme or issue considered to be of major significance and to open it
up for teaching—about empire, nation, and identity, or post nation, diaspora, and
45 For my discussion of Achebe’s role in evolving new ways of seeing Africa, see Simatei 2006: 228-238.
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Online (11)
globalization, for instance—is as much a source of value as any of its other formal
qualities. (Garuba 2017: 10)
Garuba then argues for what he (2017: 19) calls the teacherly texts, texts that “enact the struggle
over different articulations of the structure of social relations, or different narratives of the forms
of subjectivity, gender relations, sexuality, social order et, etc.” Garuba’s arguments here partly
define African literature’s cognitive projects and the knowledge about human relations that one
can unlock from the texts through attention to their aesthetics. Unlike in the informative
discourses and practices, where knowledge is propositional, the knowledge that literature affords
or the truths and the insights about the human condition to which it leads us come in forms that
question our normative practices and provide new categories for apprehending the world.
In addressing emerging African realities, at least in its written form, African literature has
undergone different but interrelated phases with shifts in thematic engagements, reconstitutions
of new spatial-temporal configurations, and stylistic innovations. The starting point for mapping
these different phases is limited in the context of my article on colonialism. I am aware of the
criticism of this kind of periodization that frames Africa’s longer pre-colonial existence in terms
of the linearities of imperial history. In fact, oral and written African literature existed outside
what we now call modern African literature, which is a recent phenomenon. Scholars like Simon
Gikandi and others have documented this well46. But as Swati Parashar and Michael Schulz (2021:
868) assert, “to study Africa without invoking the colonial-era legacies remains one of the major
epistemological challenges.” Colonial history in Africa is, to echo Gurminder Bhambra’s reading of
Edward Said in a different context, “the product of the West in its actions upon others” (2014:
116) and which, conceived this way, silences articulation of alternative histories, or as Bhambra
puts it, removes “the very question of the ‘other’ in History.” Bethwell A. Ogot, the pioneer Kenyan
historian who was among the founder historians and editor of the UNESCO project, ‘General
History of Africa’ (GHA), similarly argues:
African history was for the most part seen as the history of Europeans in Africa - a
part of the historical progress and development of Western Europe and an appendix
of the national history of the metropolis. It was argued at the time that Africa had no
history because history begins with writing and, thus with the arrival of the
Europeans. (1992: 71)
Ogot demonstrates how Western scholarship linked African historiography with the “colonial
period and its own official historiography, with prejudices, acquired and disseminated as
historical knowledge, and with Eurocentric assumptions and arrogant certainty.” (ibid.: 71). Just
like in the literary projects that challenged the Western construction of Africa as “one long night
of savagery,” (Achebe 1974: 59) the challenge to imperial historiographical hegemony was part of
the decolonization process. The ‘General History of Africa’ project was, according to Casper
Andersen (2022: 49), a “scholarly undertaking but was at the same time regarded as a frame for
the enactment of national and transnational memory political agendas that shifted during the
project spanned.” In a sense, ideological factors underpinning the politics of national liberation
and nation building greatly determined the directions of disciplines such as history and literature.
46 See for example Gikandi 2000.
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Ways of Knowing Africa: African Literature and Shifting Imaginaries
Modern African literature, for example, has a complex relationship with colonialism, which is well
illustrated by Simon Gikandi, who attributes the rise of literary scholarship in Africa and its
current identity or function to “the traumatic encounter between Africa and Europe.” Arguing that
modern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism, Gikandi (2000: 379)
asserts, “(N)ot only were the founders of modern African literature colonial subjects, but
colonialism was also to be the most important and enduring theme in their works.”
Modern African literature’s distinctiveness, specificity, and identity are partly marked by its
paradoxical relationship to imperial history. Paradoxical in the sense that this literature is not
only about the history of imperialist subjugation of African peoples and their resistance to it; it is
also its product. Yet it is also more than all this in the sense that while it has articulately projected
the complex interplay of the forces shaping the destiny of the African people, this literature
actively intervenes in making that history or, as Ammaria Lanasri (2001: 58) would put it in the
context of Algeria, such literature is “compelled to bear the evidence of historical processes […]
and regarded as a contribution to national resistance, political freedom and cultural identity.”
Hence, one historical function it has served and continues to serve is mapping out a unique
politico-cultural consciousness as part of a larger project of liberating the African person from the
debilitating conditions created by colonialism.
Ogot quoted before envisions the task of decolonization for the nascent African historiography,
and the same can be said of the project of modern African literature. Here, decolonization as a
literary and historiographic project occurs simultaneously as the freeing of modes of
representation from European traditions and the reconstitution of decolonial spaces that disrupt
hegemonic power structures and ideologies. African literature is often seen as working to counter
the colonial distortion of African identities and to recover lost histories, traditions, and cultural
codes erased or suppressed by the colonial experience. In a sense, this was a quest for relevance,
an effort to reclaim agency. In such context, the writers’ relevance to society is attained through a
conscious intervention in the unfolding of history, an intervention which, as a kind of artistic
mission, is already over-determined by the inhuman politics of both colonial and postcolonial
epochs. The African writer testifies Nuruddin Farah “is engaged in the unfolding of history in its
rawness, engaged in the making of history” (quoted in Ewen 1984: 193).
The writer’s participation in the making of history begins with the construction of what Edward
Said calls “a new mythos” that seems at first to suggest “a return to an African Africa” (Said 1994:
211). Said cites as an example Ngu gĩ ’s first novel, The River Between. One may include works such
as Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Camara Laye’s The African Child, Flora
Nwapa’s Efuru, Grace Ogot’s Land Without Thunder etc. Such works participate in “the charting of
cultural territory” (Said 1994: 209) through “validation of the African culture denied by colonial
historiography” (Gikandi 1996: 7). To paraphrase Said, the role of this literature has included that
of reinstating native idioms, reimagining and refiguring local histories, geographies, and
communities (Said: 1993). Close to this position is Graham Huggan’s understanding of African
literature as playing a “recuperative” as well as a “deconstructive” role. He argues:
Like other postcolonial literatures, African literature might be seen in very general
terms as having both a recuperative and a deconstructive dimension: recuperative
insofar as it conscripts the literary text into the service of a continually refashioned
cultural identity; deconstructive insofar as it plays on and challenges Western
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readerly expectation, and in so doing works toward dismantling self-privileging
Western modes of vision and thought. (Huggan 2008: 40)
At least, this was the agenda of the African pioneer writers writing up to the early 1980s. In their
critical essays, they affirm that this was their mission and that their relevance to society lies in
their conscious intervention in the unfolding of history. What comes to mind quickly is the famous
and often quoted assertion by Chinua Achebe on the role of the African writer in the period of
decolonization, where he sees the role of the writer as that of re-education and regeneration that
must be done after colonialism. This is the role that he expected his novels to play and especially
those of his novels that are set in the past:
I will be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more
than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long
night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered
them. (Achebe 1974: 59)
Ngu gĩ wa Thiong’o’s position on this is well-known and well-studied, and I do not need to rehearse
his politics of decolonization. Still, it is worth noting that, like other writers, Ngu gĩ envisaged
African literary texts as embodying “a structure of values dialectically opposed to those of the
ruling class of the oppressing race and nation” (Ngu gĩ 1972: 27). This may sound simplistically
Manichean. Still, in writing against colonial culture and world, the African writer in this epoch
sought to organize a whole new reality whose mode of relation to the colonial one would be
defined not only in terms of its emancipatory potential but also in the foregrounding of the African
as the center of this world. This does not imply that African literature functions in such a simplistic
manner by merely inverting and negating colonialist values. It is to admit instead that African
literature emerges through resistance to conditions that deny possibilities of its existence to
establish in the process what Homi Bhabha would call “spaces of subaltern signification” where
totalization is resisted, and “the calculation of power is disturbed” (Bhabha 1990: 312).
Decolonization in that early postcolonial period was a cultural and political project of African
literature. The concern of African texts was/is not only to decolonize the cultures and histories of
the African peoples or, to put it differently, using a tired phrase; it is not only that they “write back
to the empire” in the contestation of European misrepresentations of the continent; it also seeks
to reveal the subtle and indigenized forms which oppressive power has taken in the post-
colonial/post-national era. Hence, questions of how colonial power relations endure through the
post-colonial state and how it continues to shape the everyday life of the people as it subjugates
them to its hegemonic interests constitute the central concerns of many African writings.
This reading of the postcolonial state as a reconfiguration of colonial power sets the stage for
African literature’s de-legitimation of the nationalist project and, with it, the freeing of literary
imagination from the burdens of homogeneity, autochthony, authenticity, and essentialisms that
defined the nation-building projects in the first place. But this opens new debates even as one
moves away from prescriptive agendas for African literature. What kind of Africa do we glimpse
from the emerging works of literature? Or, to put it differently, what kind of stories are coming
out of Africa in the twenty-first century? These questions have been the subject of intense
scholarly debates as writers and literary scholars grapple with the nature of the new African
writings. The consensus seems to be that the periodization we seek to delineate the new from the
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Ways of Knowing Africa: African Literature and Shifting Imaginaries
old is impossible and perhaps not even necessary, for it simplifies the spatio-temporal complexity
that defines these writings. For example, in his critique of the concept of “Third generation
Nigerian literature” and the kind of periodization that yields this classification, Hamish Dalley
(2013: 15) argues that it is a “reliance on spatio-temporal constructs that fail to account for the
complexity of the texts it classifies.” Using two recent Nigerian novels—Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s
I Do Not Come to You by Chance (2009) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011)—to illustrate his point,
Dalley reads in these novels “models of time and space that complicate their insertion into critical
narratives predicated on concepts like “generation” and “nation” (Falley 2023: 16). Like Dalley,
Lindsey Green-Simms (2013: 4), points to the complexity of twenty-first African writing arguing
that it “is by no means monolithic and is certainly still informed both by the stories of previous
generations and by the tragic topics of war, hunger, and violence” but also defined by “factors such
as globalization, uneven development, and urbanization.”
Writers who frequently top the list of so-called third-generation African writers include
Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, NoViolet Bulawayo, Helon Habila, Adaobi Tricia
Nwaubani, Binyavanga Wainaina, Aminatta Forna, Taiye Selasi, and Nadifa Mohamed. In a sense,
one notes in their writings a disavowal of the politics of decolonization and identity formations
within the confines of national spaces as they seek to address emerging identities in the
transnational and cosmopolitan locations and diasporic spaces from where they write. Writings
from these locations give rise to texts that affirm the multiple, hybrid, and fluid identities of
Africans in the metropolitan capitals of the West but who, nevertheless, remain subjects of global
power structures even as they celebrate their newfound sense of agency and empowerment.
Amatoritsero Ede (2018: 38) has argued that the works of these writers—he refers to them as
“third generation African diaspora”—“focalise characters who are socially empowered, confident,
upwardly mobile, and relatively in control of their destinies.” He (2018: 36) argues that it is
through professional excellence that this diaspora can “subvert metropolitan hierarchies of
subjugation and powerlessness.” Ede’s reflection is in the context of Afropolitanism and is partly
a celebration of the same, especially the kind well popularized by Taiye Selasi (2005) and which,
one may argue, is structured by a grammar of disengagement with Africa. Afropolitanism has been
heavily challenged for its elitist posture, consumerist orientation, and apolitical disposition (see
among others: Gikandi 2011; Bwesigye 2013; Debra 2016; Gerhmann 2016; Musila 2016; Harris
2019).
While the task of the first-generation and even second-generation African writers was to reclaim
community from within the boundaries defined by colonialism, contemporary writing, written as
it were from transnational locations, grapples with realities generated by fluid, overlapping, and
sometimes conflicting spaces. The “nation-centeredness”—to use Timothy Brennen’s phrase—of
the first-generation writers ceases to work as a framework for representing complex intertwined
global hegemonic realities that transcend the nation. However, an absolute disengagement with
the nation is perhaps impossible, given that it continues to be a constitutive space in forming a
diasporic or even a cosmopolitan consciousness. In other words, despite its tendency towards
monolithic, exclusionary, and hegemonic politics, the nation is reconstituted by a diasporic logic
as a multivalent space within which contending narratives and identities can be enacted.
Some scholars have argued that the eschewal of nationalist politics and espousal of a post-
nationalist ethic liberates the African writer from the burden of embodying the story and the
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politics of the nation. Of course, this is not a new concern. It recalls the debate that followed
Jameson’s sweeping categorization of “Third World literatures” as mere national allegories which
in a sense is a totalizing view that sort to, in the words of John Hawley, “imposes a theoretical
template to […] quite divergent writings, falsely rendering it all quite accessible and familiar.”
(Hawley xv:1996). In analytical terms, Jameson’s totalization glosses over the complex functions
of this literature. The critical theoretical issue here is that African literature in its different phases
of development, which as I have pointed out, are interrelated, do not present unmediated access
to African realities; it instead participates in their constitution and problematization of Africa’s
understanding of its multiple self through what Graham Huggan (2008: 111) has called
“structured interplay between modified local and imported aesthetic traditions; their cultivated
ambiguities; their subtle modulations of voice and perspective in the multifaceted portrayal of the
various cultural environments they represent.” African literature, diasporic or otherwise,
envisages diverse and heterogeneous social formations within the nation-space and amplifies
such formations as structures within which emancipatory politics can be organized.
As I conclude, let me briefly discuss a new kind of writing that sometimes falls under the broad
rubric of Indian Ocean imaginaries but is often categorized as Asian-African literature in Eastern
and Southern African scholarship. This is the writing produced by the third and fourth generation
of the Indian diaspora in East Africa and is therefore usually designated as a form of diasporic
writing, just as is the case with the third generation of African writers writing from outside the
continent. I am treating the East African Asian diaspora as an African diaspora in the sense that in
its narratives—often conceived in North America and Britain, where most of the writers migrated
to—it defines itself as such. And yet, by defining this diaspora as African, I am not ‘territorializing’
it in any way. The stories that tell its experience are complex ones that exhibit multiple linkages
of three continents; the Indian sub-continent, Africa, and Europe/North America, so that its
narratives are no longer concerned with the tracing of stable roots and histories of origin but with
tracking the non-linear routes that map instead what Paul Gilroy (1993: 276) would call “fragile
communicative relationships across time and space that are the basis not of diaspora identities
but of diaspora identifications.”
It is in this sense that the East African Asian diaspora can be seen as being both African as well as
Indian. It is for similar reasons that I read the literatures of this diaspora as interlaces of shifting
diasporic narratives or, to borrow from Carole Boyce Davies (1994: 4) on black women writing,
as “a series of boundary crossings rather than a fixed, geographical, ethnically and nationally
bound category of writing.” Read this way the tale of East African Asian diaspora redefines the
historical experience and identities in East Africa away from the nationalist discourses that sought
to reconstitute the post-colonial nation and identities in monolithic terms. This perspective
enables the Asian subject in East Africa to claim their East African identity by negotiating the
otherwise exclusionary structures of the post-colonial nation. This category of literature
envisages the diasporic subject as a gathering of differential moments characterized by a multi-
positionality that transgresses the purity of boundaries and locations constructed in national
discourses. This affirmation of multiple, split and fluid identities in diasporic re-imaginations
enables the East African Asian migrants in Europe and North America to visualize themselves as
belonging to both East Africa and ‘elsewhere’ or ‘here’ and ‘there’ and in-between the two spaces
simultaneously.
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Like in the new African writing discussed above, the East African Asian writings contest and
transform relations based on national rootedness and territorial logic. Their fictional works affirm
the multiple histories to which they are heir. The transnational nature of their present realities
becomes fictionalized in their texts, an engagement that maps diasporic politics as a critical
feature of their writing. Also amplified in their writings are the pet concerns of diaspora
discourses, that include the politics of home and belonging in displacement, the ambivalence of
the postcolonial situation, the polyvalent nature of cultural identities and histories within the
postcolony, and the coexistence of a multiplicity of cultural cartographies associated with it.
For this kind of literature, the constitution of alternative imaginaries involves not only the
translation of national spaces that are recast by nationalist narratives as, to borrow from
Mavroudi (2007: 270), “stable, culturally homogeneous, historically unchanging; it also means
writing a de-territorialized diaspora, one that does not return, unbounded category of people not
connected with a specific homeland. What is imagined here are individual identities that are
malleable hybrid and multiple.” In other words, this literature counters two kinds of
essentialisms: one that is constructed within the nation-state and the colonial state (where the
national people and territory are understood in homogeneous and exclusionary terms); the other
essentialism comes with concepts of diaspora that reify notions of belonging and the “roots” of
migrants in places of origin (So kefeld 2006: 265).
Thus, the diasporic perspective adopted by East African Asian writings reworlds the East African
nation-state by problematizing the relationship between decentered and hybrid memories of the
diasporic subject, and the supposedly stable and homogenous memory formations constituted
within the nation-state. In this case, diaspora and diasporic identities work within, against, and/or
around national identities to construct plural spaces for enacting the difference of the diasporic
subject. This is well demonstrated, for example, in one of Moyez Vassanji’s novels, The In-Between
World of Vikram Lall, where Vassanji revisits Indians’ ambivalent relationships with Kenya’s
national history. Unlike in his early novels such as The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets—where
the concern is the impossibility of belonging to, and the inevitability of departure from East
Africa—this later novel demonstrates the Asians’ complex entanglement with Kenya’s equally
contested histories.
It is in locating East African Indian writing within the historical circumstances of its production
that we begin to understand how this diaspora constitutes a space that is, to borrow from Jones
and Roberts (1997: xxvii), “contextually embedded in other spaces by virtue of constitutive
relations they share with other places, things, practices, and persons.” In other words, a diasporic
space is an intersectional space. This space is, to appropriate Anthias term, “translocational,” a
term she uses to describe:
… the ways in which social locations are products of particular constellations of social
relations, and in terms of relationality and experience at determinate points in time …
It points to the existence of contradictory and shifting social locations where one
might be in a position of dominance and subordination simultaneously on the one
hand or at different times or spaces on the other (Anthias 2008: 107).
In a sense, the diasporic subject is caught within intersecting social and even national boundaries.
If anything, the diasporic subject is defined by the multiplicity of locations and identities and is
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heir the convergence of pluralistic spaces and temporalities. The protagonists in this literature
are often migrants in Europe or North America who, confronted with generalized racism against
Asians, strategically perform their East African identities as a mark of difference. Yet this relating
to East Africa is problematic to the extent that East Africa emerges contradictorily both as home
and as the site of expulsion and pain, promising no clear affiliation to the subject. The subject’s
longing for East Africa (as home) is defined by what Gikandi in his reading of Rushdie’s Imaginary
Homelands describes as “anxieties that emerge when nostalgia accompanies trauma but also
impelled by the desire for recovery and commemoration.” (Gikandi 1996: 201)
As can be seen in the writings of Vassanji, it is the recognition of this contradiction that enables a
demystification of diaspora’s theoretically produced hyperreality, a demystification that leads to
the historicization of diaspora “as a condition of pain and double alienation” rather than its
glorification “as a mode of perennial liminality” (Radhakrishnan 1996: 74). Fiction tends almost
always to confront the often-bleak material conditions of diasporans/migrants and the histories
that have led to them, a contrast to idealistic cosmopolitan abstractions one sees in Afropolitanism
that threatens, through decontextualization, to evacuate diasporic subjects from historical
specificities.
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Consentient Citizenship and the
Making of Infrastructural
Frontiers in East Africa
Paddy Kinyera and Martin Doevenspeck
Abstract
Within the context of an Africa said to be rising, infrastructures remain the key diagnosis of
development challenges across different parts of the continent. Remedial prescriptions have come
in different forms, from different angles: increase in national government’s infrastructure
spending; tailored-loans from development finance institutions such as the World Bank, African
Development Bank; and international infrastructure-cooperation drives such as China-led Belt
and Road Initiative. Over the past decade and counting, East Africa has witnessed a significant rise
in infrastructure programs that have become structural apparatus for instauration of new state-
society relations. The underlying vision in the high-way schemes, the Standard Gauge Railways,
the oil pipelines, resort cities, hydro-power programs, among others, is the transformation of the
region’s economy, with a potentially positive trickle-down effect on the wellbeing of the
population. The making of this wellbeing is pegged to the assumption that mobilities along and
within these infrastructures have the potential to create productive interconnections between the
population and forces of change located in the distant far. Drawing on the development of a crude
oil pipeline project in Uganda and a multimodal transport corridor in Kenya, this chapter
examines how these two projects shape citizenship and subaltern idealization of socioeconomic
transformation. Developed within a proposed conceptual frame of “consentient citizenship” the
chapter is an empirical exploration of emergent multidimensional modes of relations between
socio-material realties of the local communities and the establishment of corridors for mega
mobility infrastructures.
Keywords: East Africa, EACOP, LAPSSET, infrastructure, frontier.
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1 Citizenship and Infrastructures
Citizenship debates emerged in the second half of the 20th century as part of discourses of rights
and class struggles, highlighting the dynamics of structural relations of the ‘capitalist society’
(Turner 1990; see also Mann, 1987). Through the decade leading up to the start of the 21st century,
citizenship increasingly became a mainstay of institutional politics and discourse of participatory
governance, in which it serves as the foundation for solidarity in making resource claims within a
given nation-state (see Turner 1997; Donati 1995). Contemporary debates about citizenship,
although maintaining the concept’s foundational pillars, have seen the rise of different
perspectives intersect with a broad range of emerging sociocultural, politico-economic and
environmental realities of our time (see Carter 2021; Watt 2018; Schattle 2009). The term
citizenship has more often been used as the rightmost endocentric element of morphological
formulations such as corporate citizenship, participatory citizenship, global citizenship,
infrastructural citizenship, among many others.47
Farhana Sultana (2020: 3) has recently argued that citizenship is not a status, but a terrain of
continual contests “fraught with difficulties and tensions”. She suggests that the concept is better
understood in relation to claims of belonging that (r)evolve around/through unfixed daily
experiences. Although in this particular work Sultana is more concerned with the intersectionality
between infrastructures and gender in the urban setting, her framing of citizenship is important
to infrastructure studies. This chapter builds on this understanding of infrastructure-citizenship
intersections. Not only are infrastructures socio-technological apparatuses of governmentality
that patterns forms of relations in space and time (Larkin 2013), they are ontologically and
epistemologically significant objects that mediate different forms of human interactions
(Niewo hner 2015). In rural contexts, infrastructures are often packaged with inventive
imaginations of a world of hope and futurity towards which social groups become oriented—what
Michael Truscello (2020) framed as “[pavers] of modern life”. That infrastructures appeal
differently to a wide range of stakeholders, their creation tends to invoke certain illusions about
the future. These illusions lay the foundations for particular types of socio-material interactions;
claims and counterclaims; promises, hopes and fears that eventually shape the character of these
infrastructure.
In many parts of Africa, infrastructures remain the single most important indicator of the
envisioned “rise” of the continent (see Caldero n, Cantu , and Chuhan-Pole 2018). In light of this
prospect of becoming better, continental initiatives to push for prioritization of investments in
what has been described as “impactful infrastructures” (World Bank 2021), have proliferated over
the past decade. The push to develop the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) between Uganda and
Kenya and transboundary transport corridors such as Kenya’s Lamu-Port South-Sudan-Ethiopia
(LAPSSET) project are good examples. In this regard, the endorsement of the Programme for
Africa’s Infrastructure Development (PIDA) by the African Union in 201248 marked the onset of
what can be said to be the continent’s “infrastructure turn”, at the heart of which lies the drive
47 See Andriof and Mcintosh 2001; Ananya 2009; Lemanski 2020; Carter 2021.
48 OECD/ACET, ‘Quality Infrastructure in 21st Century Africa: Prioritising, Accelerating and Scaling up in the Context of
PIDA (2021-2030)’, 2020.
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towards a more mediated intra-African economic cooperation, integration and trade (see Olney
2020).
Broadly speaking, there is a considerable degree of consent among development policy experts
that the future of Africa and its population lies in the quantity and quality of infrastructures,
implicitly echoing Paul Edward’s idea that “modern citizens live by means of infrastructures”
(cited in Aalders 2021: 1001). However, a recent study published by McKinsey & Company
indicates that there is a remarkable paradox surrounding the development of infrastructures that
have hampered the implementation of various projects (see Lakmeeharan et al 2020). Their
analyses show that although there exists a great deal of transnational investment interest in
Africa’s infrastructure projects, only 10% of the projects take effect and reach a successful closure,
with 90% drop-off rate immediately after feasibility studies have been done. That is, at the point
where the developers seek to gain approval for the projects through multiple forms of stakeholder
engagement.
We perceive stakeholder engagements in the context of infrastructure projects to be processes of
frontier-making that entails building relations among different actors, often bringing citizens, the
state, and corporations into particular modes of relations. Thought so, the epistemological
demand is to pay attention to ways in which stakeholders engage, conventionally or otherwise, to
reach a consensus on where, when, why and how infrastructures are developed. The communities,
who are differently entangled in the infrastructure-making process, are important, not just for
their being within the reach of particular projects, but also being actors from whose perspectives
such projects bring about different interpretations, challenges and subaltern socio-material
configurations. Framed this way, academic and policy debates about infrastructures should
attempt to make sense, not just of how infrastructures mediate societal relations, but also how
these relations are brought about in concrete ontological terms, particularly before the
infrastructures are themselves put in place.
In expanding the debate about infrastructures as fixed and mobile entities for relations, the
concept of “infrastructural citizenship” (Lemanski 2022) has recently emerged as a tool to explain
the ways in which mega projects intersect with citizenship. Infrastructural citizenship reflects the
socio-material binaries that are produced by modes of relational practices around built
environments (Lemanski 2022). Whereas these binaries are often real in urban settings where
infrastructures exist, they are often imagined in the rural areas where infrastructure-makings are
crafted in ways that link particular social groups to certain ways of thinking and acting.
In relation to this chapter, Kenya’s Lamu-Port-South-Sudan Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET)
corridor project, for example, is a “modernist-impulse” (see Chome 2020) for future-making,
designed to change internal socio-economic and political interactions within the country, as well
as its interaction with the rest of the world through, for instance, the Lamu port. Viewed this way,
the project is a symbolic socio-political and geo-economic imagination framed within an
ambitious national vision, charted as a multi-modal path towards making the presence of
Kenya(ns) felt from the centre, through objects of modernity, to the marginalized drylands (see
Mkutu, Mu ller-Kone and Otieno Owino 2021). There is evidence in infrastructure research that at
different levels, the materialization of mega projects tend to be met with unique and (but
sometimes) predictable challenges in space and time. This points to significant empirical and
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Consentient Citizenship and the Making of Infrastructural Frontiers in East Africa
conceptual opportunities for research in an attempt to make sense of mega infrastructure projects
beyond the mantra of transformation that they are often embellished with.
From an empirical angle, we examine the process of developing a common understanding
between stakeholders, in the interactive processes of materializing mega infrastructures. Taking
Uganda’s East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Kenya’s transboundary LAPSSET corridor
as examples, we pose two empirical questions: what forms of relations emerge in the process of
making infrastructures in real time and space? How can these forms of infrastructural-relations
improve our understanding of citizenship? These empirical questions demand a complex
triangulation of different conceptual and epistemological strands.
From the conceptual angle, we pursue these questions in two ways: first, we view infrastructures
as ways of moving development boundaries to relatively remote areas, conceived of here as
frontier lands. We propose the notion infrastructural frontier, by which we imply, on the one hand,
the deliberate institutional agenda of the state to reach frontier-areas by way of targeted
infrastructure projects. In this regard, we explore the ways in which the expansive technologies
of state power navigate contentions that arise in the endeavour to materialize such mega projects.
On the other hand, infrastructural frontier also illustrates a sort of property-rush: the move by the
rich elite in the urban areas, who under no compelling crises, decide to establish themselves in
the rural areas, in anticipation of material gains out of infrastructure projects. As a result, property
contentions emerge, which invoke the notion of citizenship, and the right to own property by both
the mobile elite, and the original occupants of the frontier lands. This is the most problematic
mode of relation brought about by infrastructure developments, as it is not only unpredictable,
but also ungovernable.
Unlike the speculative elite who strategically extend their influence to the peripheries, the state
and corporations are guided by conventional principles advanced by the International Financial
Corporations (IFCs) led by the World Bank on the question of free consent prior to development
of mega projects.49 Although often read as a guide for project operations in the context of
indigenous peoples, the underlying principles of free prior informed consent (FPIC) generally
implores corporations to exercise a sense of responsibility, especially where their operations pose
significant socioeconomic, cultural and environmental threats to particular social groups.
In the context of development practice, FPIC emerged as a vibrant field of policy debate,
specifically linked to large-scale infrastructures, evolving alongside notions of “democratic
community” and indigenous rights.50 Although this chapter does not delve into elaborate
discussions about free prior informed consent, it is important to reflect upon the idea of free
consent, particular the question of how free consent can be said to be free. We reflect upon this
with a conceptual framing that links the production of consent to exercise of responsible
citizenship, particularly in state-citizen relations; and citizenship frictions, in this case, between
the speculative elite in the metropole and the rural poor.
49 In this regard, see World Bank 2017, particularly Performance Standard (PS)7.
50 See, for instance: Barelli 2012; Mohanty and Macdermott 2013; Dunlap 2018; among others.
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The idea of consentient citizenship is used here to highlight two things: the first is the view that
consent is a bio-political category based on free-will. This relates with communities ‘freely’
agreeing to institutional dispossession made possible by their own rational self-calculations, and
the ability to anticipate, and aspire to be part of development agendas framed within specific
infrastructure projects. Here, the population depicts relative awareness of the potential gains
from infrastructure projects such jobs, business opportunities, and, most importantly, their link
with the affluent world.
The second case is one of consent being a manufactured (or invented) category, originating from
apparent subaltern resistances to certain infrastructure projects. Although the IFCs—which often
fund mega projects—encourage stakeholders to undertake the first case, we will show empirically
that the absence of bio-political free-will may not necessarily imply the abandonment of the
projects. Consent is, therefore, manufactured. This does not only apply to institutionalized forms
of dispossession, but also to socio-material frictions resulting from what can be said to be elite
invasion. It is the second of case that we develop further along which line, we draw on the ways
in which on the other hand, narratives of transformation, wealth and better life have been
packaged for local communities, to help the state and the corporations navigate around critical
attitudes and recalcitrant behaviours towards the projects.
On the other hand, we also examine instances of invention and elicitation of risks and fears to
influence the behaviour of the citizens, to compel them to heed to the call that they consent to
being dispossessed. In short, the chapter explores the ways in which the implementation of the
two mega projects brings about the modelling of frontier-behaviours and attitudes towards forces
that are said to be intended to incorporate the peripheries into the politico-economic and socio-
material configurations of metropolitan modernity.
2 Infrastructural Frontier
The concept of frontier has a long history that cannot be exhaustively rehearsed here. However,
the rich archive of the literature points to its links with spatial concepts such as borders,
boundaries, zones, among others.51 Frontier theory originates in the work of Fredrick Jackson
Turner, that is said to have had great influence on the attitudes of “Americans towards the role of
the West in shaping American values and institutions” (Turner 1920: 48). Turner’s original thesis
presents the frontier as vacant land that needed to be conquered and effectively occupied. This
was later developed further by different scholars. Ladis Kristof, for example, writing in the 1960s,
pointed out that the term frontier draws its meaning from the word “front” (Kristof 1959)—
alluding to the realms of expansion towards what lies ahead in either in spatial terms, or in terms
of the next level in a continuum that has to be achieved. To Kristof, frontier is about integration
and transition from one sphere of life to another; an opportunity to manipulate and reconfigure
patterns of rudimentarily organised socio-political and cultural entities (Kristof 1959).
With this framing, Kristof re-echoes Turner’s tidal metaphor, by which frontiers are signified as
empty fields of opportunities, which if effectively taken up, represent progress that are capable of
expanding the horizons of possibilities. However, the idea of frontiers’ emptiness should not be
51 See, for example, Hasson 1996; Rasmussen and Lund 2018; Mueller 2021.
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read in relation to the other side of it: empty is only so when something else is also filled-up. In
this context, it is a relational conception—a kind of imaginative social-spatial juxtaposition
between here (assumed or known to be filled-up) and there (assumed or known to be empty, and
is, therefore, expected to be-/come filled-up). Framed this way, the idea that something is ‘empty’
designs pathways towards it’s being filled-up. In the context of his writing, Turner noted that the
advancement of American settlement on what was then empty should explain what American
development has been all about (see Turner 1893).
In the context of Africa, the foundation of the frontier debate was laid by an anthropologist—Igor
Kopytoff (1987). With his notion of the “internal frontier”, Kopytoff is concerned about the
internal re-organisation of African societies resulting from interstitial crises within a metropole,
whereby, distressed social groups break away from the metropole and occupy existing spaces at
the margins (see Korf, Hagmann, and Doevenspeck 2013). Whereas to Turner, the empty is
imagined to be in the far distant, Kopytoff’s frontier represents frictions of socio-material and
political organisations from within entities. Whether viewed as a “teleological territorial
penetration” (Korf, Hagmann, and Doevenspeck 2013: 34) or as an interstitial expression of
disenchantment and the reorganisation of the metropole, different debates about the concept of
the frontier generally make reference to forms of mobilities, exchange, exploitation and
subjugation.
We attempt to reflect on these ideas by viewing mega infrastructures projects as means through
which frontiers (are made to) become mobile, or are absorbed by metropole. There are two
dimensions to this. Whereas on the one hand, there is the impending extension of the frontier
itself, as forces of the metropole surge in; there is, on the other, the mobilization of elements of
the frontier such as resources, farm products, labour, among others. This takes place in what
Timothy Raeymaeker’s calls a “structural setting” for constant interactions (Raeymaekers 2009).
With the two projects in Uganda and Kenya as examples, we view mega infrastructures as
structural techno-geometrical spaces in which relations of power attempt to draw elements that
presumably lie in the margins of modernity, represented as empty and “not yet” civilized (Korf,
Hagmann, and Doevenspeck 2013: 30)—into contact and interactive mediation with forces of
hyper-modernity of the metropole.
That said, the terminology of the infrastructural frontier which we deploy here is used to refer to
the structuring of development practice in peripheral regions through infrastructures. Not only
are infrastructures opening up possibilities for the metropole to get into the peripheral areas,
these (peripheral areas) are also getting exposed to mobile modernities of the metropole that are
instrumentalized by infrastructures. We are making attempts to see frontiers differently, not
necessarily as the empty, but the empty as presumed by the one who seeks to have them filled-up.
In this section, we outline the key features of these two projects laying the foundation for
empirical discussion of consentient citizenship in the subsequent section.
3 The East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) Project
Uganda’s EACOP project is a core element of the multi-billion-dollar oil-infrastructure investment
project to which the country has committed the future of its hydrocarbon industry. That the
project is the only established plausible way in which land-locked Uganda can move its crude oil
to the international market, it is only when it is completed that Uganda can fully get into the global
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matrix of the oil industry. Thought to be the most realistic commercialisation plan for the
country’s oil, the processual development of the crude oil pipeline is a demonstrable space of
production of different modes and trajectories of relations at different levels.
Part of the relations and the politics surrounding their production started with the decision for
Uganda to choose between Kenya and Tanzania, for what would be the path of the infrastructure.
Between 2015 and 2016, Kenya was in the cards as the likely transit country for the crude-oil
pipeline project. This was not realised due to what some critics framed as “the Magufuli factor”
and Tanzania’s “politics of doing Kenya” (Pers. com. 11/2018). In 2017, Uganda and Tanzania
signed an intergovernmental agreement that determined, not just the final international route,
but also the name—the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). This is to start at Kabaale
(formerly, an area made up of 11 remote and hard-to-reach predominantly agrarian villages, now
being transformed into an Industrial Park with an international airport) in Hoima, to the north-
eastern Tanzanian port of Tanga, covering an approximate distance of 1,445 kilometres (Map 1).
Map 1: Trajectory of the Ugandan Section of the EACOP System
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Envisioned to bring this remote part of Uganda and its poor population into contact with various
dimensions of the global oil-complex, the pipeline is an infrastructural frontier of fundamental
scalar significance. It is a politico-economic, socio-technical and geometric field of expression of
multiple dimensions of power relations, and the desire to make things better through oil
exploitation: to the government of Uganda, the EACOP is a strategic investment that is anticipated
to kick-start an oil-driven boost of the country’s revenue base—the vessel not just to move
Uganda’s natural resource fortunes to the market, but also to move the economy to a vibrant
position by achieving lower-middle income status.52 Within its 30-metre corridor Right-of-Way,
the EACOP, the world’s longest electrically heated crude oil pipeline system is a geometry of
power that is expected to deliver the country to new forms of inter and trans-national cooperation.
As these scales of relations take shape, the development of the EACOP at the local levels is a
platform for the configuration of micro-modes of relation within Uganda that draw on different
socio-material realities along the 296-kilometre stretch. That the 30-metre Right-of-Way (ROW)
of the pipeline infrastructure cuts through over 170 villages, it has brought different communities
along its southerly trajectory into direct and indirect contacts with activities surrounding its
making, to get oil moving. The EACOP riparian communities between Hoima (the starting point)
and Kyotera to end point of the project within Uganda have different socioeconomic orientations,
making it difficult to describe them in specific terms. What is clear is that their different
sociomaterialities have interacted with the process of making the right-of-way for the project in
unique ways.
At an estimated cost of US$3.5 billion, the crude-oil pipeline is to be developed through a joint-
venture partnership arrangement constituted by four actors: French Oil Corporation TOTAL
E&P—the lead developer of the project with stake of 62%; two state-owned enterprises (Uganda’s
National Oil Company (UNOC) and Tanzania’s Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC)), each
holding 15% stake; and China’s China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) with 8% stake.
At full scale, the EACOP is expected to evacuate over 200,000 barrels of crude oil per day, which,
depending on the stability of prices on the global market, could be a game-changer for Uganda’s
national economy.
The stake is high for the country, not just with the EACOP, but with the oil industry as a whole.
Proscovia Nabbanja, the CEO of Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC) argued that for every dollar
that Uganda invests, the country is likely to return 10 (see Atuhaire 2022), an impressive
economic embroidery that is just too attractive to be true, particularly with an industry as volatile
as oil. However, the process of realizing this great national politico-economic incentive, as will be
expressed in subsequent sections, entailed the determination and concretization of the pipeline’s
right-of-way between Hoima and Kyotera. Arguably, this was the most contentious subnational
exercise for the government of Uganda and the lead investor—TOTAL to undertake.
52 National Resistance Movement, ‘Securing Your Future: 2021-2026 Manifesto’ (Kampala: National Resistance
Movement, n.d.), www.nrm.ug.
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Figure 1: Illustration of the Transboundary EACOP System
The system is designed in such a way that many of its components will be subsoil—that is, buried
at depth of approximately 2 meters. This, as one of the experts noted, is to guard against exposure
to risks of sabotage (Interview, Kampala: December 2019). Apart from the subsoil components,
the general oil movement activity starting from the feeder lines, to and through the EACOP will be
monitored by several above-ground installations such as pump stations, metering valves, strain
detection features and storage facilities (Figure 1). In February 2022, a final investment decision
(FID) with a financial commitment in the region of US$ 10 billion was signed by the three partners
to develop the transboundary crude-oil pipeline alongside two crude-production fields—the
Tilenga (in Buliisa) and Kingfisher (in Buhuka).53 The FID paved the way for intensification of field
operations, including compensation of people in the context of project-related socio-economic
disturbances and dispossession (framed as land acquisition) such as displacements along the
ROW.
Generally, the process of land acquisition (dispossession, compensation and displacements)
draws our attention to two important moments: the first is the subaltern push for infrastructural-
citizenship, which entailed a demonstrable awareness of benefits of being within reach of the
project areas. Such awareness created a space of potential enactment of consent, even when the
immediate effects of the projects are expected to be negative, for instance, through loss of
property and displacement. The second moment was the institutionalization of a portfolio of hope
among the citizens to match their aspiration of becoming agential actors in different aspects of
the oil industry. Portfolios of hope is demonstrable by, among other things, the enactment of
corporate citizenship. For instance, the creation of, as we shall show later on, the so-called
“national supplier database” by the Ugandan government as a channel for digitally expressing
interest in being agential actors in projects related to the oil industry.
53 See Petroleum Authority of Uganda 2022.
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4 The Lapsset Corridor Project
The LAPSSET corridor project has been an attractive field of empirical research in recent years
(see Enns 2017). Developed as a flagship project of Kenya’s national Vision 2030, it is an
infrastructure-cocktail of seven sub-projects, all together, being aimed at boosting Kenya’s
position as a leading logistic handling and transport hub in the East African Community bloc, and
the Horn of Africa.54 The key components of the project are: 32 berths at Manda bay in Lamu,
which is envisioned to expand Kenya’s inter-continental freight handling; national and
intracontinental highways, particularly linking Lamu to South Sudan, and Lamu to Addis-Ababa;
Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) lines along the same routes; oil-pipelines (Juba-Lokichar-Lamu, for
crude oil, and Lamu-Isiolo-Moyala-Addis-Ababa, for refined product); three international airports
and three resort cities each in the counties of Lamu, Isiolo and Turkana55 (Map 2).
Map 2: Key Components of Kenya’s LAPSSET Project
54
Government
of
Kenya,
‘About
the
Vision’,
Kenya
Vision
2030,
accessed
17
March
2022,
https://vision2030.go.ke/about-vision-2030/; Government of Kenya, ‘Kenya Vision 2030: The Popular Version’
(Nairobi: Government of Kenya, 2007).
55 Government of Kenya, ‘LAPSSET Projects’, A Seamless Connected Africa: Infinite Possibilities, Endless Opportunities,
2021, https://www.lapsset.go.ke/#1461328856794-2dee9bba-e774.
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Seen from this collection of multiple infrastructure projects, the underlying logic of the LAPSSET
corridor is to enhance different dimensions of growth opportunities in sectors such as tourism
alongside the grand plan of the country becoming a logistic transit hub for landlocked countries
such as South Sudan. The opportunities as well as the fear that marginalized communities could
be further pushed to the edges of survival is a mainstay of local narratives around the project. As
recent studies suggest, the localization of anticipations of the opportunities that are (to be)
brought about by the project have raised ethno-political and socioeconomic stakes, laying
foundations for sentiments of belonging, a fundamental expression of citizenship among
pastoralists (Mkutu, Mu ller-Kone , and Owino 2021).
In the north-eastern region of Turkana, three components of the LAPSSET project are envisioned
to draw the Turkana communities closer to infrastructural modernity—a modernity which is
contemporaneously defined by particular sets of infrastructures (see Larkin 2013; Niewo hner
2015). In this case, the planned resort city at the Eliye Springs (west of Lake Turkana) will boost
tourism in the region; planned oil-pipeline will transport crude oil produced from the oil-rich
Lokichar basin to Lamu (part of the oil revenues are expected to be channelled back to the
communities); and a highway will make the region more accessible to boost local, national and
international mobility and trade, among others. By and large, Turkana region, like never before,
is viewed from the optics of an infrastructural modernity marked by objects of affluence, speed
and comfort.
Although different components of the project are at different stages of completion elsewhere,
there hasn’t been much progress in Turkana, where the most important interpretation of the
project is its link with Tullow’s extraction of crude oil from the Lokichar basin. This interpretation
is made in light, on the one hand, of the idea of that once oil goes to the market, the Turkana will
be rich and, on the other, an anticipated institutional re-organisation of socio-economic and
cultural foundations of land ownership (Interview, Member of Turkana Council of Elders,
Lokichar: February 2020).
5 Consentient Citizenship and Mega Infrastructures
East Africa’s infrastructure vigour—the so-called “infrastructure-turn” (Dye 2020) continues to
attract continental praise. During the 7th PIDA week (28th February to 2nd March 2022) held in
Nairobi, for example, the African Union Development Agency of the New Partnership for African
Development (AUDA-NEPAD) awarded the regional bloc—the East African Community—for its
efforts to move infrastructure projects from conceptualization phases, to phases of allocation of
funds for preliminary studies and designs.56 If such an award is important at all, then it is probably
fair to take seriously the research findings of Kannan Lakmeeharan and colleagues (2020), that
warranted their framing of much of Africa’s infrastructure investment situation as infrastructure
paradox referred to earlier.
The said paradoxes, an argument can be made, emerge from contradictions in engagements
among stakeholders in relation to the real and imagined effects of the projects at the local levels.
56 See East African Community, ‘EAC Secretariat Receives Top Award during 7th PIDA Week Held in Nairobi’,
Infrastructure,
2022,
https://www.eac.int/press-releases/150-infrastructure/2389-eac-secretariat-receives-top-
award-during-7th-pida-week-held-in-nairobi.
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Yet such engagements are intended to create a broad-based understanding of, and consent about
the projects, the lack of which often slows the process and sometimes blocks the implementation
of the projects. That the EACOP and the LAPSSET have to be implemented at all costs, it is
important that consent is sought for, or invented at different points of the projects, making for a
field of different modes of relations among the stakeholders. The foundation of consent is built
around two competing perspectives.
There is the risk perspective, in which project-related negative effects are weighed against its
benefits both in the short and long term. This is often curated in extensive preliminary risk
analyses, conventionally undertaken in the form of tailored environmental and social impact
assessments (EISAs). Although such preliminary studies often identify risks associated with the
implementation of different projects in concrete terms, critical empirical studies indicate that the
risks are never dealt with comprehensively, particularly in the underdeveloped world (see Carroll
2012). Yet, as part of the regulatory responsibility of the International Financial Institutions
(IFCs), local communities are being encouraged to play active roles in setting conditions for the
implementation of projects, as the developers make attempts to satisfy such conditions (see
Harvey and Bice 2014).
Above all other socioeconomic risks, studies have showed that the implementation of
infrastructure projects, particularly in the global south where the predominantly poor
communities live off the land tend to bring about the risk of land loss and socioeconomic
displacements (see Kochore 2016; Li 2014). As a result, it is suggested that actual project
conditions have to be understood in terms of the socioeconomic context of their
implementation—that is, the lived realities of different social groups (how they interact on day-
to-day basis); their cultures (sets of shared beliefs and values); their communitarianism; among
others (see Vanclay 2002).
In December 2019, a group of Kenyan leaders from the Turkana region (with funding from
International Alert – Kenya) visited Uganda’s emerging oil-city of Hoima and had discussions with
the key institutional actors in the Uganda’s oil industry. The discussions focused on how Uganda
is approaching its future with oil, particularly the strategy for the country to use its oil to
transform the lives of the citizens; and what the community leaders from Turkana can learn and
take back to Kenya. A question was posed by A Kenyan participant to a key official from the
Petroleum Authority of Uganda (PAU) about how the Ugandan government has planned the
spreading of opportunities to the local communities: The response of the Ugandan official is worth
quoting:
Every year before the companies begin implementation, we look at their work
programs. We look at the procurement plans they are proposing for the year… [such
as] the contracts at the end of the quota. [Then], we also have the national supplier
database where they register. These are some of the tools that help us understand
work programs [of foreign companies]. When we see that [a company is] going to
come in and do ABCD, we come in to say okay, this is what is going to be done. Which
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of these do you propose will go to Ugandan companies? They make their proposal,
and then they go into the procurement process.57
For Uganda, the opportunities for oil-related transformations are interpreted in terms of a
national-level value addition: that is, the sustainably retainable value that different project
operations could bring to the country, most especially, in terms of local capacity enhancement;
enterprise development; knowledge and technology transfer and the employment of local
labour.58 The EACOP is one of the oil-projects that are associated with a wide range of
opportunities both in the short, intermediate and long run. In Kenya, there are indications that the
Turkana are seeing the LAPSSET through the lens of the oil industry. As noted by a sub-county
official in Lokichar, the “LAPSSET means up-scaling the early oil pilot scheme (EOPS)” which has
been the epitome of hope of a socio-economically better future for the local communities (pers.
com. February 2020).
Built around the idea of the frontier, the ‘emptiness’ of an area may mean its assumed
unproductivity, as, for example, is the description often made of the drylands of northern Kenya;
or the inferiority in value, as is the case with the rural areas of the global south. The two
infrastructure projects are, therefore, possible ways in which ‘the empty’ can be filled; the
‘valueless’ can be made valuable, and the peripheral is connected with the centre. But since the
processes of making these infrastructures entail balancing risks and benefits, they often lay the
foundation for particular modes of relations between “those in power [who presume particular
forms of emptiness] and those not-so-powerful”, who become the targets of strategic re-creation
(Van Wolputte 2013: 2). Power is an important element in the process of manufacturing consent.
It is only those who have access to and control (re)sources of power that engage in the practice of
enacting consent.
In the context of the two projects, the consent of the local population, to have their areas subjected
to such infrastructural reconfiguration have partly been undertaken through different functions
of power, operating on the realities of the local communities and the kind of future that they
envision and anticipate. In the next section, we examine three ways in which power is deployed
to invent consentient citizenship in relation to the two infrastructural frontiers.
The government knowledge of movement
The first notable mode of invention of consent is what we describe as the government of
knowledge movement—that is, the regulation of flow of information about activities related with
the two infrastructure projects. The regulation of knowledge flow has two dimensions: on the one
hand, there is the deployment of resources of power to contain critical perspectives about the
development of the projects, often treated by state agencies as attitudes of sabotage. In relation to
this, systems of knowledge production and information flow such as academic research are areas
of regulation. In Uganda, for example, local communities along the pipeline’s right-of-way have
been told by what they describe as the “EACOP People” not to speak to anyone, should they be
approached and asked questions about their interactions with project activities. A local council
57 Official from the Petroleum Authority of Uganda (PAU) speaking at a workshop organized by International Alert –
Kenya in Uganda (December 2019).
58 Ibid.
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chairperson of a village in Lwengo that partly lies within the right-of-way pointed this out during
a conversation in early 2020:
The ‘EACOP people’59 told the PAPs [project affected persons] not to speak with
people that they do not know. They told us to keep ourselves away from wrong
information that we will be getting from many people who will be coming to us to talk
about the pipeline… that when someone called us, we should refer that person to
them… because such people will confuse us (pers. com.: January 2020)
It is believed that once the contact between the local communities and the often radically critical
non-state actors is regulated, the flow of negative information that bear the possibility to trigger
resistance to the project is contained. In Rakai and some parts of Kyotera, for example, where
many of the PAPs filed complaints about project activities, critical voices from civil society
organizations such as Global Rights Alert (GRA) are said to be triggering these complaints.
However, according to the authorities, the local leaders were also to blame for what has been
described as the “inability to do a good job”—that is, the failure in making attempts to counter the
narratives of the civil society organizations by, among other things, beseeching the PAPs to
support the project (pers. com.: February, 2022).
The second dimension of the regulation of flow of information is associated with the power of
narratives—that is, the very nature of information that is passed on to the project riparian
communities. The notion of “good job” cited above entails packaging particularly positive
narratives about the EACOP project—narratives that would make the local communities see
themselves as beneficiaries of the projects, other than social entities who are merely negatively
affected. In Kenya’s Turkana area, information about the LAPSSET to the communities, for
example, has been packaged with powerful ideas of wealth and good life for which the pastoral
communities should aspire. Most importantly, this has been done in ways that link the LAPSSET
to the oil industry. So, since oil in Turkana is envisioned as the commodity for the region’s wealthy
future and the impetus for transition to urbanity, the LAPSSET is the vessel that will deliver this
vision.
Although this is an attractive narrative to pass on to a population that is at the margins of state
benevolence, there counteracting voices among educated members of the Turkana communities
that have scrutinised the narratives of the state and its agents. These relatively knowledgeable
members suggest that the authorities and the project developers could simply be seeking consent
from the locals by building such attractive narratives. A community activist in Lokichar argued
that, the Turkana are disadvantaged because…
…97% of [them] are illiterate pastoralists [who can be] lied to… They have no idea
pertaining oil and gas industry because when you talk about oil, they will not be able
to tell you much. When [the Central government and Tullow-oil] came they said [to
the local communities]: ‘once the oil is produced, you people will be rich’… and the
locals were happy because we have heard about Nigeria, about Ghana… and about big
59 The so-called “EACOP People” are the institutional actors such as New Plan and the Petroleum Authority of Uganda.
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[cities] like Lagos and Abuja… now we thought even Lokichar is going to be the same
way. So, we received this industry in good faith (pers. com.: February, 2020)
The “good faith” with which communities receive projects were based on the information they are
given, regardless of whether such information is realistic, or are simply strategic ploys to win over
local communities and minimise resistances. It is upon such good faith that consent—the so-called
“social license to operate”—is built (Vanclay 2017; Harvey and Bice 2014).
Breaking foundations of collectivism
The second mode of invention of consentient citizenship is by breaking foundations of socio-
material collectivism. The two infrastructure projects have significant socio-material dimensions
that have been widely viewed through the lens of collective good. The term “project affected
persons” (PAPs) which conventionally refers to groups of individuals, households and
communities whose daily activities are impinged upon by mega projects is a problematic tag. With
this identity, the attitude of ‘the collective’ through which voices of decent are raised against
projects are often strong and tend to draw significant attention. In Uganda, activities around oil
exploitation continues to bring about project-affected communities in different locations.
Situations of massive infrastructure-led displacements, such as one that was undertaken in 2017
to pave the way for the construction of the Kabaale Industrial Park in Hoima raised significant
collective outcry from the affected communities. In many ways, the locals (who formed solidarity
groups such as the “Oil Refinery Residents Association” (ORRA) challenged the authorities to meet
their collective demands, using what can be described as collective social power—the power of
collectivism. The demands included timely and adequate compensation before being dispossessed
of their land marked for project development. This kind of demand created contentious modes of
relations, which among other things, compelled the authorities to bring authoritarian measures
into the relations. The state deployed both coercion and strategic deception and cultivation of
ignorance to force consent.
For the EACOP project, although individuals and households were differently affected by the
determination of the project’s right-of-way, their institutional identity of “project affected
persons” (PAPs) laid the foundation for what in the view of state authorities are pockets of
problematic solidarities. The collective ‘we’ and ‘ours’ (as PAPs) is more prominent than the
singular ‘I’ and ‘mine’. PAPs in Luanda sub-county, in Rakai for example, collectively petitioned
the government and called for a proper mechanism of dealing with their collective grievances,
particularly in regard to the value of commodities that they were offered as compensation: “they
rejected the rates, and complained to the district…” (pers. com.: March, 2021).
Asked what response the PAPs received from the district, a community conflict monitor, who
through her work with Global Rights Alert—a civil society organization had interacted with many
of the PAPs as well as the district officials pointed that the district authorities referred them to the
“EACOP people” who they approached, but…
they told the PAPs that their issues will be sent to Kampala and they will be addressed
on individual basis. Some PAPs were even told to go to Kampala, but they refused
because they did not know what was going to happen. They don’t want to talk about
the issues in public gatherings… (pers. com.: March, 2021).
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In Buliisa, for example, a similar strategy was deployed. In the context of the Tilenga project in
Ngwedo, Total Energies and its agencies deployed locally recruited community liaison officers
(CLOs) to undertake door-to-door invention of consent—that is, to speak to and convince
individual PAPs in privacy, to accept and sign the declaration (of compensation) forms. Individuals
felt acknowledged by the government and the companies once they were spoken to at their homes.
One respondent expressed how her mother was delighted to receive CLOs with her papers at her
home:
After speaking to her individually, I could see that she was going to accept to be
relocated… She signed the forms… the strategy of visiting her at home worked, yet she
has all this while, been against the idea of being relocated (pers. com.: December,
2019).
In Kenya, the institutional formalisation of land ownership by registration that is being
encouraged among highly communitarian pastoralists can be viewed as a process of de-
collectivization of property ownership. Among the Turkana, for example, the communal
ownership and use of land has posed a significant challenge to the implementation of development
projects, particularly those that demand the acquisition of land such as the LAPSSET. There are
contradictions and frictions about who the central government should contact on matters
pertaining to land. While the sub-county officials argue that land in Turkana is held in trust by the
county government on behalf of different pastoral clans, some voices from the council of elders
argue that negotiating land acquisition by anyone should be brought down to the “right people”—
the clan elders who govern the day-to-day land-use activities of different clans (pers. com.:
February, 2020).
In light of this, the institutional gesture of reconfiguring land ownership through registration has
instigated mixed perceptions. There is a point of view from which this as regarded as a strategic
move by the state to break the foundations of collectivism that continues to render project-related
land acquisition in Turkana contentious and difficult to effect. This point of view considers the
registration of land as an institutional strategy that is expected to lay the foundation for
consentient citizenship whereby, other than the state having to deal with an often-resistant
collective voice, it would rather negotiate and arrive at a point of consent with specific
institutionally recognized land owners. As explained by a member of a community empowerment
group—the Turkana Empowerment Advocacy Group (TEAG) that was formed in light of
heightened oil activities in the region,
…the idea of land registration by the National Land Commission is good, although it
directly works against the practice of communal land ownership. The county
authorities do not like it, and some communities also still do not buy the idea. But
what the Kenyan government is trying to do is to attach a name to each of these pieces
of what we know as communal land. You cannot negotiate with the community… but
it is easy to negotiate with individuals (pers. com.: February, 2020).
The other point of view is agreeable to the idea of land registration, a direct contrast of the faction
that is coy about this institutional endeavour. To this faction, the county leadership under
Governor Josephat Koli Nanok has not given the right information to the Turkana people about
the benefits of land registration. Asked whether she had registered their land already, as per the
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guidelines of the National Land Commission, a respondent indicated that there are conflicting
views within Turkana itself:
The current governor [refused], imagine. He wanted to register the whole Turkana
land, including our ngirerea60 in his name. We have already submitted a petition
against that… Let me tell you one thing: The Turkana people are now much wiser
because the elite created awareness regarding land issues (pers. com.: February,
2022).
It is not uncommon for mega projects to bring about collective aspirations and micro socio-
material solidarities that are not always easy to align with trans- and inter-(national) processes.
The fundamental contradiction is that the foundations for these micro-solidarities are often laid
by the very institutional processes that later seek to undo them. For instance, the production of
project-based subjectivities in the form of project-affected-persons (PAPs). In the context of
Uganda’s EACOP project, that the PAPs in some areas were non-consenting to what comes with
their subjectivities, the state and its agencies have had to micro-manage them, by individualizing
their concerns. In the Kenyan LAPSSET case, the collective view of pastoral communities such as
the Turkana as a homogenous group, and the inherent clan-based divides are two competing
perspectives that have rendered consent to the LAPSSET project a difficult undertaking. The push
for land registration in the names of individuals and clans, as opposed to land being held as a
communal property by the county government can be viewed as an attempt to break the
foundation of collectivism, so as to enact new modes of micro-governable socio-material relations.
Enactment of corporate citizenship
The third mode of invention of consentient citizenship in the context of mega projects is what we
describe as the enactment of corporate citizenship that has been evident in the two projects.
Corporate citizenship is used here to refer to socioeconomic relations that are triggered by
investment by major corporations in the development of infrastructures of transnational
significance. In the context of the two projects treated here, corporate citizenship has two
dimensions: the first has to do with the role of corporate agencies in building particular modes of
relations with communities in the areas where they operate. This is commonly known as
corporate social responsibility (CSR) (see Carroll 2005). The second dimension has to do the
attempt to transform communities into corporate actors, by enacting in them (what Tania Li
(2010: 405) refers to as) “neoliberal multiculturalism”. In both the LAPSSET and the EACOP
projects, there have been endeavours to enact corporate citizenship that reflect the principles of
good conduct of business by multinational corporations, by way of modelling relations and
interactions between local communities and project operations.
In Uganda, apart from different forms of corporate social investments that directly target specific
deficiencies among the local communities—such as improvement of infrastructures of common
good like roads, hospitals, and schools, there is a continued reiteration of the need for Ugandans
to be corporate actors in the EACOP project, as well as many other components of the country’s
oil industry. This is part of the so-called “national (or local) content”—a strategy by which certain
ventures have been exclusively ring-fenced for Ugandan enterprises. To operationalize this, the
60 A portion of grazing area owned by a particular Turkana community (usually a clan) under an elder.
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Consentient Citizenship and the Making of Infrastructural Frontiers in East Africa
Ugandan government has developed an online corporate information and codification portal—
the national supplier database (NSD), a digital relational space between the government and
potential corporate actors in the oil industry. Local entities who aspire to be corporate actors in
the EACOP project are institutionally conditioned to submit their business details to this database.
This information is then centrally verified, and the enterprise is issued an NSD code, and then
marked with citizenship tag: “Ugandan or Non-Ugandan” (Table 1). However, the submission of
an enterprise’s information to the database and the receipt of the NSD Code do not necessarily
guarantee participation in the oil industry, but it guarantees relations of hope, akin to what Ngala
Chome (2020) describes, in the case of the LAPSSET project in Lamu, as “economies of
anticipation”.
Table1: Extract from the online database that expresses institutionalized corporate
mentalities in Uganda’s oil industry (*pending verification).
The NSD has at least three purposes. First, it is a framework for institutional standardization of
corporate mentalities and relations in the oil industry by way of identification of entities that
qualify to play active entrepreneurial roles in the oil industry. Second, it is a system of codification
of corporate citizenship with a pre-determined framework of consent to and control of
institutionally pre-determined standards of operations in the oil industry. Third and most
important, the NSD is a system of power as it defines who can and cannot be involved in the oil
industry, and who has the technical capacity to decide what is standard and what is not. As of
February 2022, more than 1600 enterprises had submitted their particulars to the NSD, with over
90% of the submissions pending verification from the authorities, before they can become
codified.
In Kenya’s Turkana, the enactment of consentient corporate citizenship is demonstrable by the
attempt to pass on investment benefits to the local communities. This resulted from the demand
by local pressure groups involving women, youth and organised advocacy agencies such as the
Turkana Empowerment Advocacy Group (TEAG). The social investments ranged from the
provision of education bursaries to members of the local communities; looping local enterprises
to business schemes, particularly the logistic supply chain; and direct tangible support to
communities such as water trucking during times of drought. These practices, widely known as
corporate social responsibility (CSR) are founded on the principle that corporate entities should
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make decisions and follow lines of actions that are desirable for the society in different contexts
of business operations (Carroll 2008: 25).
In the frontier regions of the global south, CSR practices have increasingly become strategies for
enhancing consent—often termed as “social license” (Esteves 2008: 41)—among local
communities particularly in situations where mega infrastructure projects bear the likelihood of
undesirably reconfiguring the socio-material realities. From the perspective of the Turkana elite,
for example, there are resounding fears that the local pastoralists are likely to be hoodwinked by
(what one interlocutor termed as) “small things” so that they continue supporting infrastructure
projects that are associated with the oil industry (pers. com.: February 2020). Although such
“small things” have continued to mediate the relations between the pastoralists and the project
operators, there is the question of sustainability, not just of the “small things”, but also of their
mediating effect on corporate-social relations.
In the context of infrastructure developments in Turkana’s oil-rich Lokichar basin, for example,
the continued flow of such corporate gestures were tied to the level of submission by the locals to
project operations. The water-trucking scheme during drought, a respondent narrated, gives a
good impression of its purpose:
There was an arrangement to provide us with some water with trucks… not piped
water. Trucks took water to the villages where there was no water. So, when there
were demonstrations and the [Turkana] people said they want [a portion of what is
to be the oil] revenue, they said [they] won’t supply [us] with water. So, this water
was there for a bargain (pers. Com.: February 2020).
In a number of ways, therefore, the two infrastructure projects are fields of enactment of
corporate citizenship that is fundamentally built around relations of different dimensions of
power that navigate slippery terrains of attitudes, desires and aspirations of different project-
affected-communities.
6 Conclusion
In this chapter, we bring forward the understanding that infrastructure projects produce spaces
of different modalities of relations among entangled entities. The making of infrastructural
frontiers tends to bear high potentials for contentions at different sites, triggering strategic
deployment of different technologies and resources of power. In view of this, relations of consent
whether organic or invented, help operationalize the implementation of the projects. Negative
attitudes towards project operations by the so-called project affected persons (PAPs) are often
counteracted by a number of strategies—three of which have been outlined in this chapter. The
EACOP and the LAPSSET projects in Uganda and Kenya respectively are not just techno-
geometries of vision, power and development; they are also inherently fields of enactment of
consentient mentalities among the project’s riparian communities.
The fact that these projects bring the peripheral regions of the two countries into contact with the
rest of the metropolitan world of neoliberal capitalism, this contribution adds to the frontier
debate, how mobility infrastructures highlight the interconnections between remote frontiers and
the metropole: that is, the endeavour by the metropole to extend its reach to the periphery and
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Consentient Citizenship and the Making of Infrastructural Frontiers in East Africa
the periphery’s potential to be absorbed into the order of the metropole. That citizens are at the
heart of the making of infrastructural frontiers, they are constituent targets of development that,
in most parts of the developing world, need to be mobilized to support and be absorbed into the
operational dynamics of what Tania Li (2020) terms as “neoliberal multiculturalism”. In essence,
they are to be strategically rallied to consent to project operations, even when the immediate
effects of such operations are negative to their socio-material realties.
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Senghor et les expositions du
Musée Dynamique de Dakar
Babacar Mbaye Diop
Abstract
On March 31, 1966, Le opold Se dar Senghor, President of the Republic of Senegal, inaugurated the
Dynamic Museum in Dakar. The following day, April 1st, the Museum hosted the main exhibition
of the first world festival of Negro arts. Senghor has made this Museum a cosmopolitan place and
a high level of encounters and dialogue of cultures in which every year an artist of international
dimension is invited. Thus, exhibitions of works by great artists such as Leonardo da Vinci,
Kandinsky, Miro , Marc Chagall, Picasso, Hundertwasser, Soulages, Alfred Manessier, Olivier Debre
and Iba Ndiaye have marked the history of this Museum.
1 Introduction
« Or donc, nous avons forme le projet d’organiser, chaque anne e, a partir de 1973 et
pendant le premier trimestre, une Saison de Dakar, ou les arts plastiques occuperaient
une place de choix avec, comme ho te d’honneur, au Muse e Dynamique, un artiste de
qualite internationale » (Senghor 1977a: 324).
Dans le Dakar-Matin61 du 02 juillet 1964, le conseiller culturel du Pre sident Senghor, Andre
Terrisse de clarait, a la veille de la pose de la premie re pierre, que le Muse e Dynamique « sera la
te te de pont enfin jete e entre l’Occident, l’Orient et le Monde Noir, le point d’osmose entre les
valeurs spe cifiques de la Ne gritude et de la Civilisation de l’Universel »62. Le opold Se dar Senghor,
dans son allocution a l’inauguration du muse e, le 31 mars 1966, disait de ja que le Muse e
Dynamique « sera le vrai centre du Premier Festival mondial des arts ne gres, qui en sera, dans
l’avenir, le te moignage le plus signifiant » (Senghor 1977a: 64). Construit par les architectes
61 Journal officiel, ance tre du journal Le Soleil.
62 Dakar-Matin du 02 juillet 1964.
102
Senghor et les expositions du Musée Dynamique de Dakar
français et italien Chesneau et Verola, ce ba timent a pe ristyle s’inspire de l’architecture de la Gre ce
antique et refle te ainsi le dialogue des cultures, cher a Senghor.
Jusqu’a sa premie re fermeture en 1977 – j’y reviendrai – , le Muse e Dynamique a accueilli de
grandes expositions internationales parmi lesquelles : l’exposition phare du premier festival
mondial des arts ne gres : « «Art ne gre» : sources, e volution, expansion » en 1966, des dessins de
Le onard de Vinci en 197063, Kandinsky et Miro en 1970, Chagall en 1971, Picasso en 1972,
Hundertwasser en 1973, Soulages en 1974, l’exposition « Art contemporain du Se ne gal »64 en
1974, Manessier en 1976, Iba Ndiaye en 1977 (Huchard 1989, 2010).
Me me si chaque exposition pre sente un inte re t particulier, qu’est-ce que les lie toutes ? Senghor
voulait-il approfondir ou rendre plus concre tes ses ide es sur le dialogue et la rencontre des
cultures ? Si Senghor a de cide de fermer le muse e apre s ces grandes expositions, ses ide es sur
l’art et la ne gritude situe e dans l’universalite sont-elles noye es au fil des expositions ? E tait-il a la
hauteur de ses ambitions ? Ce muse e e tait-il une utopie dont Senghor aurait pris conscience ?
L’histoire de ce muse e n’est pas que celle de ces expositions prestigieuses, mais aussi celle des
re actions a cette expe rience unique en Afrique. Comment donc le public et les artistes se ne galais
ont ve cu ces e ve nements ? Si l’enthousiasme de Senghor e tait bien connu, quel e tait celui du public
et des artistes se ne galais ?
Ces grandes expositions au Se ne gal confirment l’ide e que leur prometteur, Senghor, avait de la
rencontre et du dialogue des cultures. Au-dela du muse e « imaginaire » et « universel » dont
chantait Malraux, Senghor avait mis en place un muse e re el, cosmopolite et sans frontie res qui
accueillait des artistes et visiteurs e trangers. Car si ces artistes de renoms ont franchi les murs du
Muse e Dynamique, c’est qu’ils ont ve cu « la rencontre des valeurs culturelles des diffe rentes
ethnies et nations au niveau de l’Universel »65.
Parmi les raisons pour lesquelles Senghor avait choisi d’exposer ou de faire d’exposer ces artistes,
« il y avait souvent les analogies, les similitudes ou les convergences de l’œuvre de l’artiste avec
l’art ne gre » (Sylla 2002, 239). Il voulait ainsi mettre en pratique sa the orie de l’esthe tique de la
ne gritude : « l’enracinement et l’ouverture, mais e galement l’humanisme et le dialogue des
cultures et des civilisations, que ve hiculaient les œuvres des artistes en question » (Sylla 2002,
239).
Toutes ces expositions ou pratiques muse ales en Afrique ont un he ritage enracine dans le
colonialisme. Aujourd’hui encore, et plus de soixante ans apre s les inde pendances africaines, des
muse es africains qui n’ont pas encore choisi une direction proprement africaine continuent a
63 Une exposition itine rante de l’Unesco. Des dessins se lectionne s en 1952 a l’occasion de la comme moration du 500eme
anniversaire de la naissance Le onard de Vinci.
64 Cette exposition sera ensuite monte e au Grand Palais a Paris, mais aussi dans beaucoup de pays europe ens, en
Ame rique et en Asie.
65 Senghor 1977b.
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exposer dans un mime tisme occidental. Le pre sident de l’ICOM66, Alpha Omar Konare 67, de clarait
de ja en 1991, a Lome , qu’il fallait « tuer le mode le occidental des muse es». Il nous invitait ainsi a
re inventer le muse e africain, a remettre en cause l’institution muse ale he rite e de l’e poque
coloniale.
Toutes les grandes puissances occidentales ont leur muse e consacre a l’art africain. Le
de veloppement des muse es ou collections d’objets d’art africain en Occident coĩ ncide avec la
colonisation et l’essor de l’action missionnaire. La plupart de ces collections sont, en effet, le
re sultat de pillages militaires, de vols ou de ventes ille gales. Plusieurs voix se sont leve es pour
re clamer le retour de ce patrimoine artistique en Afrique. Mais ce retour passe par une
de colonisation et une refondation des muse es d’Afrique.
L’histoire du Muse e Dynamique permet de lire la de colonisation des muse es africains et la
question de la restitution du patrimoine africain expose dans les muse es occidentaux et sa
pre sentation en Afrique.
Cette e tude ne pourra pas revenir sur toutes les expositions du muse e dynamique68 ni sur
l’histoire du premier festival mondial des arts ne gres69 − de toute façon un seul article ne m’aurait
nullement permis de faire ce travail. Je me contenterai ici de ne traiter que quelques expositions
qui ont laisse une empreinte toujours vive dans le milieu culturel se ne galais, celles dont Senghor
usa de ses relations privile gie es pour exposer de grands noms tels que : l’exposition « Art ne gre »
du premier festival mondial des arts ne gres, mais e galement celles consacre es a Chagall, Picasso,
Soulages, Manessier et Iba Ndiaye. Ce texte propose ici s’appuie sur une lecture approfondie des
diffe rents catalogues d’expositions ainsi que des entretiens recueillis aupre s de quelques te moins
de cet a ge d’or au Se ne gal.
Je m’inte resse d'abord a l'exposition "Art ne gre" du premier Festival mondial des arts ne gres, puis
a quelques expositions individuelles des artistes connus que je viens de mentionner, suivi de la
politique muse ale de Senghor. Dans une quatrie me et dernie re partie, je montre comment cette
histoire du Muse e Dynamique permet de rede finir les muse es africains surtout avec la question
tre s actuelle de la restitution des objets d’art africain.
L’exposition « Art nègre » du premier festival mondial des arts
nègres
Inaugure le 31 mars 1966, le Muse e Dynamique ouvre ses portes a partir du 1er avril pour
accueillir l’exposition principale du premier festival mondial des arts ne gres : « « Art ne gre » :
sources, e volution, expansion » consacre e aux arts anciens d’Afrique. L’objectif e tait d’e changer
66 International Council of Museums (Conseil International des Muse es).
67 Alpha Oumar Konare a e te pre sident de l’ICOM de 1989 a 1992 avant de devenir pre sident de la Re publique du Mali
de 1992 a 2012.
68 De 1966 a sa dernie re fermeture en 1990, le Muse e Dynamique a accueilli plus de 50 expositions.
69 Lire a ce propos l’article de Ficquet et Gallimardet 2009.
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avec tous les peuples du monde en leur re ve lant « l’essence de l’Art Ne gre, son unite et sa riche
diversite » (Mbengue 1974 : 44).
Une e quipe de sept commissaires est cre e e. Elle e tait compose e d’africains et d’europe ens
spe cialistes des civilisations et des arts africains : le muse ologue français Georges-Henri Rivie re
et le dahome en Alexandre Adande pilotaient le commissariat ge ne ral, le français Pierre Meauze et
son adjointe Jacqueline Delange, le camerounais Engelbert Mveng et son assistant se ne galais Salif
Diop et le Suisse Jean Gabus, directeur du muse e d’Ethnographie et de l’Institut d’ethnologie de
Neucha tel, consultant aupre s de l’Unesco pour l’exposition, charge de la muse ographie.
Conçu a partir d’un programme muse ologique de Jean Gabus, quelques 480 objets d’art, pre te s
par de nombreux muse es et collectionneurs a travers le monde, ont e te expose s. Le R.P. Engelbert
Mveng explique, dans le Catalogue de l’exposition, la de marche des commissaires africains
charge s de trouver un peu partout en Afrique des objets pre cieux de l’art ne gre : « « Nous ne
voulons plus e tre des parents pauvres des consommateurs de civilisations ». Et c’est pourquoi a
Dakar, il a e te retenu qu’il appartiendra « a l’Afrique de parler d’elle-me me, a ses propres enfants
et aux hommes de tous les pays » (Huchard 2010: 228).
L’exposition a e te pre sente e au public avec un plan sce nographique compose d’un pre lude avec
des chefs-d’œuvre dogons, balubas du Kassaĩ , du Be nin ; une premie re partie relevant d’une
dimension historique avec des objets culturels antiques (Nok, Ife , Be nin, Zimbabwe, E thiopie, le
bassin du Tchad) pour attester de l’ante riorite des civilisations africaines ; une deuxie me partie
d’une dimension ge ographique pour souligner la diversite de l’art ne gre et de celle de l’Afrique ;
une troisie me partie sur les aspects de la vie (religieuse, politique, militaire, sociale, e conomique
et financie re) ; une quatrie me sur le message de l’art ne gre (avec des costumes, des bijoux, des
masques, l’architecture, les mobiliers) pour montrer sa finalite , sa signification profonde, sa
fonction vitale qui est le fondement de sa beaute esthe tique ; et une cinquie me partie sur le
Dialogue avec le monde seul gage d’une civilisation de l’Universel.
L’exposition e tait conçue pour un double objectif : re ve ler au monde une esthe tique ne gro-
africaine a travers la dispersion du patrimoine artistique africain et a partir de la cre er de
nouvelles identite s. Voila pourquoi, apre s Dakar, l’exposition a e te aussi pre sente e au Grand Palais
a Paris avec les me mes œuvres du 1er juin a la fin aou t 1966. Pour la se lection des œuvres, Mveng
et Gabus se sont rendus dans plusieurs pays d’Afrique, d’Europe et aux E tats-Unis. Ce projet est
issu de la volonte de deux hommes de culture : Senghor et Malraux : ce fut une « manifestation
insolite et audacieuse, ou se sont unis, sans se me ler, les concepts de la plus jeune Europe et de la
plus vieille Afrique, novatrice dans son principe et ardue dans sa conduite, chime rique a ses
de buts et heureuse a sa fin, signal de muse ographie moderne et signe de fraternite humaine,
l’exposition d’art ne gre » (Rivie re 1966: XXXIII).
Cette exposition avait re uni, pour la premie re fois en Afrique, des œuvres d’art africain disperse es
dans les muse es et collections prive es du monde et celles conserve es en Afrique. Plusieurs muse es
d’Afrique, d’Europe, des E tats-Unis et des collectionneurs prive s ont pre te leurs œuvres les plus
prestigieuses. Un grand de fi muse ographique a e te pre sente pour re aliser cette exposition : des
centaines d’œuvres provenant des muse es français, belges, anglais, nige rians, des E tats-Unis, des
chefferies traditionnelles du Cameroun et du Dahomey. Les pre ts d’œuvres d’art sont venus « de
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nombreux gouvernements de pays amis, de leurs institutions publiques et prive es, et de leurs
collectionneurs » (Huchard 2010: 278).
Vingt-huit (28) pays ont participe au festival avec leurs artistes, des experts et des œuvres d’art
traditionnels et contemporains. Cette grande exposition a permis d’illustrer la ne gritude par l’art
ne gre. L’expression « art nègre », on le sait, a e te utilise e pour la premie re fois par les artistes
plasticiens europe ens dont les plus ce le bres sont Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain,
Georges Braque, Maurice de Vlaminck, etc. Picasso dira que l’art africain, c’est « ce que
l’imagination humaine a produit de plus puissant et de plus beau » (Picasso 1999: 10). On
comprend de s lors pourquoi, selon Senghor, l’art africain a inspire l’art moderne, plus
particulie rement la peinture et la sculpture de l’E cole de Paris : « Je le sais, e crit-il, pour avoir
fre quente ses peintres les plus grands comme Pablo qui e taient Me diterrane ens, comme Pablo
Picasso, Vieira da Silva et Pierre Soulages » (Senghor 1991: 8).
Ils ont tous trouve dans l’art africain leurs propres pre occupations esthe tiques. Vlaminick vendit
a Derain le fameux masque blanc fang du Gabon pour lequel il e prouve « une sensation profonde
d’humanite », les visages des Demoiselles d’Avignon de Picasso rappellent certains masques fangs
et annoncent le cubisme et l’artiste fut e branle par un masque baoule , Apollinaire des fe tiches de
bois, Paul Guillaume avait son gou t de cide pour l’art africain (Courthion 1999 : 20), Matisse e tait
e tonne de voir comment est conçu le langage sculptural des statues d’origine africaine (Courthion
1999 : 17). D’une statue achete e par Matisse, Derain affirma que celle-ci « est aussi belle que la
Ve nus de Milo » et Picasso : « c’est plus bo ». Le sculpteur Jacques Lipchitz n’he site pas a de clarer
que les artistes africains ont eu un impact incontestable sur les cre ations occidentales : « leur vraie
compre hension de la proportion, leur sentiment du dessin, leur sens aigu de la re alite nous ont
fait entrevoir, oser me me, beaucoup de choses » (Courthion 1999 : 11).
Les arts plastiques ne gro-africains ont ainsi influence l’art europe en.70 Ces artistes europe ens ont,
en effet, toujours manifeste l’inte re t qu’ils portaient aux objets d’art africain. L’art ne gre va ainsi
« contribuer a la construction de la « modernite universelle » sur laquelle doit reposer le dialogue
des civilisations » (Huchard 2010: 220).
Mais revenons a cette premie re exposition du Muse e Dynamique de die e l’exposition principale du
premier festival mondial des arts ne gres : « « Art ne gre » : sources, e volution, expansion ». Avec
toute la richesse de l’art africain traditionnel, elle est, pour Senghor, la participation de la
Ne gritude a la Civilisation de l’Universel. Elle a permis de « dire la fonction de l’Art Ne gre dans la
vie des peuples noirs. La fonction, c’est-a -dire les signes mais, essentiellement, l’au-dela des signes
qu’est leur signification ».71 La fonction de l’art ne gre est de « toujours actualiser son objet », c’est-
a -dire sa matie re, alors que sa nature est de « toujours exprimer cet objet avec les me mes signes,
dans le me me style profond qui est pre cise ment, de le styliser ».72 Cette exposition avait pour but
non seulement de de fendre l’art africain traditionnel, mais elle devait aussi montrer qu’il est « une
70 Lire l’adresse a la Nation de Senghor du 19 mars 1966 dans laquelle il pre pare l’esprit des Se ne galais dans un appel
solennel dans Huchard (2010 : 230-232).
71 Senghor, « Ni opposition ni racisme, mais dialogue et comple mentarite », discours d’ouverture du Premier Festival
Mondial des Arts Nègres, cite par Huchard (2010: 235).
72 Ibidem, p.236.
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source jaillissante qui ne tarit pas : un e le ment essentiel, parce que signifiant, de la Civilisation de
l’Universel, qui s’e labore, sous nos yeux, par nous et pour nous, par tous et pour tous ».73
Le Pre sident Senghor, Andre Malraux, Alioune Diop, Jacqueline Delange, Amadou Hampa te Ba ,
Aime Ce saire, et tant d’autres grands intellectuels du monde, ont tous reconnu que cette
exposition « a e te une entreprise humaniste exaltante » (Huchard 2010: 287). L’histoire retiendra
de cette exposition « comme un des grands de fis muse ographiques du XXe sie cle » (Huchard 2010:
287). Elle fut l’e ve nement le plus important de ce Premier Festival mondial des Arts ne gres, une
exposition d’art ne gre a laquelle auront participe des artistes venant d’Afrique, d’Europe et
d’Ame rique.
Exemples de quelques expositions individuelles
1.1 Marc Chagall : 18 mars-18 avril 1971
Chagall est un peintre, sculpteur, graveur et de corateur juif ne en 1887 a Liozna, pre s de Vitebsk
en Bie lorussie. Naturalise français en 1937, il est de ce de en 1985 a Saint- Paul-de-Vence en France.
Il fre quente l’E cole des Beaux-arts de Saint-Pe tersbourg a partir de 1907, avant de de couvrir Paris
en 1911. Il y rencontre de nombreux artistes et est te moin du fauvisme finissant et du cubisme
naissant. Avec la Premie re Guerre mondiale, il rentre en Russie et y se journe jusqu’en 1922, date
a laquelle il s’installe a Berlin. Il revient en France en 1923. Avec la Seconde Guerre mondiale et
les menaces sur les communaute s juives, il rejoint les E tats-Unis en 1941. L’anne e 1948, marque
son retour de finitif en France, mais aussi sa reconnaissance au niveau international : il organise
plusieurs expositions re trospectives dans plusieurs pays, produit des ce ramiques murales, des
vitraux, des peintures, des mosaĩ ques, des tapisseries. Il est associe au surre alisme et au ne o-
primitivisme. Il est l’un des artistes e trangers installe s en France les plus connus du 20e sie cle avec
Picasso.
De ce le bres expositions de Marc Chagall ont eu lieu a Paris et a Nice en 1970 avant celle de Dakar
en 1971. A la question de savoir pourquoi exposer l’œuvre de Chagall a Dakar, Senghor donne
deux raisons : d’abord par « la place qu’occupe le Se ne gal dans le domaine culturel, qui a choisi
d’e tre une Gre ce noire » et surtout a cause, dit-il, de l’attention que lui porte Chagall, qui lui a fait
visiter la plus grande exposition de son œuvre organise e au Grand Palais de Paris en 1969.
Chagall fait partie, pour Senghor, des plus grands peintres du XXe sie cle. Cette exposition a Dakar
est l’occasion pour le Pre sident-promoteur-culturel, de montrer la signification que reve t son
œuvre par rapport a l’art ne gre. Ce fut une riche exposition : eaux-fortes, gravures sur bois,
lithographies en couleurs, affiches, reproduction de dessin, d’une aquarelle, d’un vitrail, etc. Les
spectateurs ont eu la chance de de couvrir toute « l’essence du ge nie de Chagall » (Senghor 1997:
257). Il peut sembler paradoxal de parler « d’influence » ou de « convergence » entre Marc Chagall
et l’art ne gre quand on sait qu’« au temps de la re volution ne gre » au de but du 20e sie cle a Paris,
l’artiste n’a pas subi une influence de l’art africain : « Il n’en avait pas besoin », e crit Senghor, parce
qu’il avait apporte de sa Russie natale et de son ascendance se mitique tout ce que « les Ne gres
livraient a l’art surintellectualise de l’Occident europe en » (Senghor 1997: 258).
73 Ibidem, p.237.
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Il y a dans l’œuvre de Chagall, explique Senghor, quelque chose qui « ressemble au style de l’art
ne gre, qui, par-dela le cubisme, rejoint l’art ne gre » (1977a: 259) : le trait, la ge ome trie, les
courbes, les formes, tout converge vers l’art africain. Pour re sumer, l’art de Chagall par rapport a
l’art ne gre, disons tout simplement que « c’est la me me sensibilite » (Senghor 1977a: 259). Les
tableaux de Chagall sont des « ide es peintes », ou, et pour dire la me me chose, des «ide es-
sentiments ». Son art est « un art subjectif, comme l’art ne gre, sentimental » (Senghor 1977a: 258).
Chagall n’exprime pas ses tristesses et ses joies en formes abstraites, mais en « images
identifiables ». Les images qu’il produit « ne sont pas de simples imitations ide alise es de la nature,
comme l’art traditionnel de l’Occident ; ce sont des images-symboles », ou chaque forme et chaque
couleur ont un sens. Avec Chagall, « l’anecdote de passe l’anecdote. Comme dans l’art ne gre, qui
est, lui aussi, fait d’images analogiques, mais rythme es » (Senghor 1977a: 258). Comme dans l’art
ne gre, l’art de Chagall « sche matise », « re sume », « stylise » par une « image-analogie » ; il
s’inte resse a l’image signifiant, a la sensation du signifie .
1.2 Pablo Picasso : 6 avril-6 mai 1972
Peintre, sculpteur, ce ramiste et graveur, Picasso ne en 1881 a Malaga en Espagne et de ce de en
1973 a Mougins en France, est incontestablement l’un des artistes les plus connus du XXe sie cle.
Il a grandi dans l’art : son pe re, conservateur de muse e, enseignait aussi la peinture. C’est a 15 ans,
en 1896, qu’il entre dans la ce le bre e cole d’art et de design de Barcelone, ou enseignait son pe re.
Il repre sente l’Espagne a l’Exposition universelle de Paris en 1900, s’installe a Paris a partir de
1901 et rencontre l’art ne gre. C’est a partir de 1907 que ses peintures et celles de son ami Georges
Braque sont qualifie es de « cubistes ». Pendant la Premie re Guerre mondiale, il s’e loigne peu a peu
de ce style et commence a voyager en Europe. Entre 1925 et 1936, il se lie au mouvement
surre aliste.
« A Pablo Picasso
Elle dort et repose sur la candeur du sable.
Koumba Tam dort. Une palme verte voile la fie vre des cheveux, cuivre le front courbe.
Les paupie res closes, coupe double et sources scelle es.
Ce fin croissant, cette le vre plus noire et lourde a peine – ou’ le sourire de la femme
complice ?
Les pate nes des joues, le dessin du menton chantent l’accord muet.
Visage de masque ferme a l’e phe me re, sans yeux sans matie re.
Te te de bronze parfaite et sa patine de temps.
Que ne souillent fards ni rougeur ni rides, ni traces de larmes ni de baisers
O visage tel que Dieu t’a cre e avant la me moire me me des a ges.
Visage de l’aube du monde, ne t’ouvre pas comme un col tendre pour e mouvoir ma chair.
Je t’adore, o Beaute , de mon œil monocorde ! » (Senghor 1956b).
Ce poe me, « Masque ne gre » de Senghor, extrait du recueil Chants d'ombre, e crit juste apre s la fin
de la guerre en 1945, est un poe me de 12 vers libres, adresse a Pablo Picasso. Senghor se rappelle
de ses origines avec la description d’un visage d'une femme noire a l'apparence de masque.
C’est avec une exposition des œuvres de Picasso que le Muse e Dynamique ouvre la saison de 1972.
Cette anne e-la , le monde entier ce le brait son quatre-vingt-dixie me anniversaire et l’E tat du
Se ne gal a tenu a s’associer a l’e ve nement. Si Picasso est choisi, c’est que, d’une part, nous dit
108
Senghor et les expositions du Musée Dynamique de Dakar
Senghor, l’artiste est un mode le exemplaire pour la jeune E cole de Dakar. Il a eu un he ritage
culturel me tisse tre s riche : andalou, me diterrane en, espagnol. Cette culture hybride lui a permis
d’avoir une force cre atrice « rarement e gale e ». D’autre part, c’est parce qu’il e tait bien impre gne
des valeurs de la ne gritude telles que l’enracinement et l’ouverture. Les liens artistiques entre
Picasso et l’Afrique sont tre s forts. La pe riode la plus importante de sa carrie re est d’ailleurs
souvent qualifie e de « pe riode ne gre ». Les visages des Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) rappellent
certains masques fangs et annoncent la plus grande re volution plastique du sie cle : le cubisme.
Picasso nous apprend d’ailleurs que ses plus grandes e motions artistiques, il les a ressenties
lorsqu’il a vu, pour la premie re fois, les sculptures africaines74.
L’exposition de Picasso du Muse e Dynamique a eu lieu du 06 avril au 06 mai 1972. Le Catalogue
nous apprend que l’exposition embrasse tous les genres artistiques travaille s par Picasso : 6
tableaux dont Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1960) inspire du tableau de Manet, 16 dessins, 30
lithographies en couleurs, 21 gravures sur linole um, 27 gravures en eau-forte, aquatintes et
pointes-se ches, 35 gravures d’une se rie de 347, 7 pie ces en ce ramiques e dite es par les Ateliers
Madoura a Vallauris en France, 2 tapisseries, 2 tapis, 43 affiches de ses expositions, 3 livres
illustre s, 3 albums, 35 livres e crits sur l’artiste. Au total, c’est plus que 236 pie ces qui ont e te
montre es au public dakarois. Du point du nombre d’œuvres expose es, c’est certainement l’une des
plus grandes expositions de Picasso dans le monde.
A la question quel est le rapport entre Picasso et l’art ne gre, Senghor re pond : « Il reste qu’il a e te
le premier, avec ses Demoiselles d’Avignon, a rompre brutalement avec l’esthe tique classique,
voire a de passer les emprunts se mantiques et syntaxiques faits a l’Art ne gre pour aller au cœur
des choses, je veux dire a changer moins de langage que de vision, voire de réalité » (1977a: 326).
Picasso fait ainsi non pas de l’art-imitation, mais de l’art-invention. Il ne repre sente pas la nature,
mais il la reproduit en cre ant « une nature plus humaine » (Senghor 1977a: 326). Comme dans
l’art ne gre, l’art de Picasso n’est pas une « copie d’un archétype répété mille fois » (Senghor 1964a:
207) : il n’imite pas le re el, mais il tend a l’expression essentielle du re el. Il est ainsi a l’oppose du
re alisme classique, celui qui fait de l’œuvre d’art une copie conforme du re el imite : « pour la
premie re fois aux yeux d’un Europe en, fut-il d’Andalousie, l’art tournait le dos a la raison
discursive voire a l’esthe tique grecque. Il n’e tait plus physeos mime sis (imitation de la nature),
mais ad libitum, expression du surre el ou du sous-re el » (Senghor 1993, 130-131).
L’art de Picasso traduit des « ide es-sentiments » ou, et pour dire exactement la me me chose, des
« sentiments-ide es ». Et c’est par la que Picasso rencontre l’art africain. On insiste ge ne ralement
sur le caracte re rationnel des œuvres de Picasso et on soutient que l’artiste condamne la
sentimentalite . Mais pour Senghor, « si Picasso a souvent re cuse la sentimentalite , c’est dans ce
qu’elle a de petit-bourgeois, d’excessif et de naĩ f en me me temps» (Senghor 1977a: 327). Tout son
travail est marque , comme dans l’art africain, par le sentiment, l’e motion et la transe qui sous-
tendent sa cre ation. L’artiste ne cherche pas a ce que son œuvre nous plaise, mais nous e meuve. A
la manie re des Ne gro-africains, Picasso « se sert d’images analogiques, des formes-symboles,
pour, a la fois, exprimer et signifier, sa vision inte rieure » (Senghor 1977a: 329). Tout le travail
artistique de Picasso a sa signification en Afrique : la forme, la couleur, l’image, la matie re. On ne
74 Lire Picasso, cite par Apollinaire 1999.
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peut oublier l’apport de l’Afrique au modernisme artistique avec son ro le joue dans le Cubisme et
le Surre alisme. Pierre Daix e crira a ce propos du cubisme:
Je ne veux pas dire que le cubisme soit fils de l’art africain, je veux dire que dans le
courage intellectuel qu’il a fallu a Picasso et a Braque pour s’attaquer aux trucages et
aux illusions de la peinture classique et de sa perspective conside re e jusque-la comme
rationnelle, il est entre pour beaucoup l’exemple de l’art africain, l’exemple d’une
autre raison plastique, d’une autre expression rationnelle de la troisie me dimension,
expression fonde e sur les signes, des transformations des donne es, sensibles en une
ve ritable e criture plastique conceptuelle. C’est parce que Picasso a tout de suite
compris l’art africain comme un art raisonnable qu’il a su en extraire cette raison-la
(Daix 1975 : 16).
On ne dira jamais assez, le cubisme est un mouvement artistique d’inspiration ne gre. Dans Nations
nègres et culture (1954), Cheikh Anta Diop, dans sa re flexion sur l’art ne gre, soulignait un «
expressionnisme cubiste tre s prononce » (1954: 524) en Co te d’Ivoire avec le style dan et au
Congo avec le style basonge.
1.3 Pierre Soulages : 29 novembre-29 décembre 1974
Apre s Chagall et Picasso, ce fut le tour de Pierre Soulages au Muse e Dynamique. Soulages est un
peintre et graveur français ne en 1919 a Rodez dans l’Aveyron. Il est particulie rement connu pour
son usage de la couleur noire, qu'il appelle lui-me me « noir-lumie re » ou « outrenoir ». Artiste qui,
du noir, fait jaillir ainsi la lumie re, Soulages est une figure majeure de la peinture abstraite
française. Il ne repre sente pas, dit-il, il pre sente. Il ne de peint pas non plus, il peint. Il y a la des
convergences avec l’art ne gre.
Le opold Se dar Senghor dans un article consacre a Soulages e crit : « La premie re fois que je vis un
tableau de Pierre Soulages, ce fut un choc. Je reçus, au creux de l’estomac, un coup qui me fit
vaciller, comme le boxeur, touche , qui soudain s’abĩ me » (Senghor 1964: 232). S’il avait e prouve
un tel sentiment devant l’œuvre de l’artiste, c’est que, ajoute-t-il, il avait senti la me me impression
quand il a vu pour la premie re fois un masque dan.75 Il trouve ainsi des similitudes entre la
peinture de Soulages et les masques africains. Les tableaux de l’artiste lui rappellent, toujours, les
sculptures et les peintures ne gro-africaines. Soulages a le sens des formes non ge ome triques :
« comme les formes ne gro-africaines, elles ne sont trace es ni a la re gle, ni a l’e criture, ni au
compas : elles sont libres, comme mal le che es, avec des empa tements et des glacis, des
protube rances et des creux » (Senghor 1964: 233). Comme dans l’art ne gre, les peintures de
Soulage n’imitent pas le re el. Elles ne reproduisent pas un paysage, un visage ou une sce ne, mais
tendent pluto t a leur expression essentielle, a de crire plastiquement une vision inte rieure. Plus
exactement, il a invente un langage qui lui est propre. Il n’emprunte pas des formes a la nature,
puisqu’il veut exprimer autre chose qu’on ne retrouve pas dans la nature. Il tourne ainsi le dos a
la nature pour faire surgir de nouvelles images. Il y a ainsi chez Soulages, l’ide e d’un « sentiment-
peinture », ou, et pour dire la me me chose, « une ide e-peinture » (Senghor 1964: 233) − Manessier
proce de aussi de cette manie re. Nous y reviendrons. Si Senghor a choisi donc d’exposer les œuvres
de Soulages, c’est qu’elles ont le style des e critures plastiques ne gro-africaines. Il retrouve dans
75 Un peuple d'Afrique de l'Ouest vivant principalement au centre-ouest de la Co te d'Ivoire. On le retrouve aussi au
Libe ria et en Guine e.
110
Senghor et les expositions du Musée Dynamique de Dakar
les peintures de Soulages « l’ide ogramme de l’Homme en signe de croix, qui abonde dans l’art
ne gro-africain » (Senghor 1964: 234).
Ses œuvres ont e te expose es au Muse e Dynamique du 29 novembre-29 de cembre 1974. Si
Senghor a voulu exposer les œuvres de Soulages a Dakar, c’est qu’il e tait tre s frappe par la force
rythmique « qui l’apparentait, paradoxalement, et a l’art ne gre, et a l’art me diterrane en » (Senghor
1977a: 554). Soulages a tourne le dos a l’art comme « imitation de la nature ». Ses œuvres, a partir
de 1968, ont des « formes pures, plus rythme es » (1977a: 556) qui font penser, a Senghor, « à la
grande statuaire soudano-sahélienne, a l’art bambara, dogon ou se noufo » (Senghor 1977a: 556).
Les formes que cre e Soulages sont des me taphores, c’est-a -dire des images analogiques, comme
dans l’art ne gre. On a souvent pense , et a tort, que par son « « refus de la description » et de la «
sentimentalite » » (1977a: 558), « qu’il n’y avait, chez lui [Soulages], ni symbolisme, ni sentiment,
ni e motion » (1977a: 558), « mais il ne faut trop y croire », affirme Senghor. Car « il y a une e nigme
de Soulages », « sa peinture donne un choc : un coup, non au cœur ni a la te te, mais au ventre ». Ce
qu’exprime Soulages dans sa peinture, ce n’est pas une ide e-sentiment, mais une e motion:
« Quand donc le peintre est devant sa toile et qu’il commence de peindre, c’est sous le
coup d’une e motion ou, plus exactement, du souvenir d’une e motion, qui vient, pour
parler comme Soulages, d’«impulsion inte rieure, un de sir de certaines formes,
couleurs, matie res » » (Senghor 1977a: 559).
L’e motion s’exprime chez le peintre par des matie res, des formes rythme es et colore es. Et
Soulages « s’est forge une personnalite picturale, qui se caracte rise par l’e quilibre dans la tension
de l’e motion » (Senghor 1977a: 559). La peinture de Soulages signifie et exprime une rare
puissance d’e motion : « Et c’est pour exprimer cet ineffable phe nome ne humain que Soulages a
cre e un nouveau monde par un art nouveau. Et que cet art soit fre re de l’art ne gro-africain, non
par imitation mais par nature, nous ne serons pas les derniers a nous en re jouir » (Senghor 1977a:
560).
Comme dans l’art africain, l’e motion est aussi au fondement de la cre ation chez Soulages. La
cre ation suscite toujours chez lui une grande e motion.
1.4 Alfred Manessier : 28 mai-27 juin 1976
« Apre s l’inventeur Picasso, le coloriste-poe te Chagall, et le cre ateur de formes Soulages, le Muse e
Dynamique reçoit Alfred Manessier, te moin de la spiritualite ».76 Il rejoint ainsi Teilhard de
Chardin « dans sa que te d’un maintien e gal entre l’univers divin et l’univers naturel et de la place
de l’homme dans l’un et l’autre ». 77 Son œuvre fascine parce qu’elle communique avec le divin.
Bosio ajoute plus loin que : « Beaute de la nature, souffrance humaine, grandeur mystique,
religieuses, telle est la trilogie ascendante, peu commune, de l’œuvre de Manessier ». 78
Ne en 1911 a Saint-Ouen dans la Somme en France et mort en 1993 a Orle ans, Alfred Manessier
est l’auteur de beaucoup de tapisseries, peintures et vitraux dans les lieux de culte. Senghor le
76 Ge rard Bosio dans Muse e Dynamique 1976.
77 Ibidem.
78 Ibidem.
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conside re comme « comme l’un des plus des grands peintres » du XXe sie cle (Senghor 1976: 66).
Comme Picasso et les Cubistes, il a eu aussi sa pe riode ne gre. Il a appris d’eux la valeur des formes
et de leurs rythmes.79 Il a acquis le sens des tons et des nuances. Parlant du style de l’artiste,
Senghor (1976: 65) e crit : « la couleur est, chez Manessier, ce qu’est la me lodie chez le musicien.
Le peintre l’a, lui-me me, souvent sugge re , en comparant son art a la musique. Et elle envahit,
recouvre, colore le noir pour lui donner un sentiment : un sens ».80 Comme l’art ne gre, les cre ations
de Manessier tendent a l’abstraction. Il n’imite pas la nature, mais s’inspire d’elle, de ses formes et
symboliques rythme es, de ses couleurs.
L’œuvre de Manessier n’est donc pas e trange re a l’Afrique. Elle ve hicule un message universel.
Elle est comme ce choc qui nous e branle dans le rythme du tam-tam ce re monial africain. Ses
œuvres expose es au Muse e Dynamique du 28 mai au 27 juin 1976 te moignent de la diversite et
de la profondeur de son art : 24 tableaux de peintures dont « Hommage a Martin Luther King
(1968), « Vietnam-Vietnam (1972), des peintures religieuses telles « Recueillement nocturne II »
et « Les Cloches» et 12 aquarelles dont les « Lumie res cre puscules » (1973), 9 maquettes de
vitraux de l’E glise N.D. de la Pre vo te a Moutier en Suisse, 1 tapisserie intitule e « La joie » et
plusieurs illustrations de livres.
Cette exposition a ainsi pre sente un panorama important de l’œuvre de Manessier. Le visiteur est
heureux de de couvrir des disciplines, des techniques et des the mes tre s diffe rents. Pour reprendre
Bosio, dans le Catalogue de l’exposition, sa peinture, « n’est pas une fin », mais
« un message ». Son art est profond et universel en ce sens qu’il s’adresse a tous les hommes. Il
exprime la transfiguration plastique du spirituel, la puissance du signe et de la couleur. Son
message universel l’invite a rencontrer l’art ne gre. Les artistes ne gro- africains, on le sait, ont
toujours e te fascine s par le sacre . Cette exposition de Manessier a Dakar te moigne du dialogue des
cultures.
La peinture de Manessier est une « expression analogique » et « dramatique » entre le
« spirituel et le mate riel », « le monde inte rieur et le monde exte rieur, spirituel et mate riel »
(Senghor 1976: 60). Il avait, dit Senghor, dans son allocution lors du vernissage de l’exposition du
peintre, une imagination fe conde et « une habilete de ses mains a arranger, recre er les formes et
les couleurs » (Senghor 1976: 60) : « Je commence a peindre quand je ressens une coĩ ncidence
tre s e troite entre le spectacle que j’ai sous les yeux et un e tat inte rieur. Cette correspondance
de clenche une joie cre atrice, que j’ai envie et besoin d’exprimer » (Senghor 1976: 62).81
3.5 Iba Ndiaye en 197782
Si Senghor a choisi d’exposer les œuvres d’Iba Ndiaye, apre s celles des artistes europe ens, parce
que son œuvre te moigne, dit-il, « de la vivacite » de la culture se ne galaise (Senghor 1977b: 2).
Pe re de l’art se ne galais contemporain, Iba Ndiaye a commence sa carrie re dans les anne es
79 « Givre I », « Paysage esquimau » et « le Grand Nord », des tableaux qui figurent dans l’exposition, te moignent de sa
pe riode cubiste.
80 Discours de Senghor lors du vernissage de l’exposition (Senghor 1976).
81 Senghor cite ici les propos de Manessier rapporte s par Bourniquel. Allocution prononce e le 28 mai 1976 a l’occasion
du vernissage de l’exposition du peintre.
82 Je reprends ici une partie de mes articles de ja publie (Diop 2008a, b).
112
Senghor et les expositions du Musée Dynamique de Dakar
cinquante, apre s avoir e tudie a l’E cole d’Architecture de Montpellier puis a l’E cole nationale des
Beaux-arts a Paris. Il expose a Dakar en 1966 au salon d’art contemporain du 1er Festival Mondial
des Arts Ne gres. Son exposition au Muse e Dynamique a lieu en fe vrier 1977. Parmi ses œuvres
expose es, « des images rythmiques, me lodiques » (Senghor 1977b: 2), comme les sce nes de
marche , les sce nes de Tabaski avec le mouton e gorge , le Jazz, des paysages de la Casamance et du
Sahel. Il transcende ainsi la tradition « pour atteindre un langage universel » (Senghor 1977b: 2).
Iba Ndiaye a pu exprimer l’Afrique a travers des techniques picturales europe ennes telles que le
fondu de ses huiles et les lavis. Andre Guillabert, dans le catalogue de l’exposition se demande si
les œuvres pre sente es « ne nous permettent-elles pas d’e crire qu’avec Iba Ndiaye l’avenir est de ja
le pre sent ».83 La ce le bre se rie d’huiles sur toile, peinte sur le the me de la Tabaski (le sacrifice
rituel du mouton), est l’une des plus connues. Ces peintures sont, en effet, d’une rare intensite ;
elles expriment le sang, la douleur, la souffrance et sont tre s convoite es par les plus grands muse es
du monde. « Peindre est se souvenir » aimait a dire Iba Ndiaye. Le rituel du mouton lui rappelle
son enfance au Se ne gal ; il le peint en tant que te moin « de ce qui s’implique de magie dans un tel
sacrifice » (Ndiaye 1994: 38). Au Se ne gal ou la population est en majorite musulmane, c’est la plus
grande fe te religieuse du pays. C’est cette atmosphe re qu’Iba Ndiaye de crit dans ses toiles
intitule es Tabaski. Les images de prie re et de fe te sont pourtant plus fortes a cette occasion, mais
Iba Ndiaye a choisi de peindre l’image sanglante du sacrifice.
Dans La ronde à qui le tour ? (1970), on voit un mouton e gorge et d’autres qui de filent autour dans
un environnement ensanglante se demandant a quand leur tour. L’artiste s’interroge ici sur la
mort qui attend ces moutons mais nous interpelle tous, en tant qu’humains, sur nos
comportements. Il le dit sans e quivoque : « Les e le ments plastiques que sont la couleur du sang,
le sol craquele des late rites africaines, la ronde sacrificielle me sont apparus comme des
traductions possibles de l’oppression d’un peuple sur un autre ou d’un individu sur un autre »
(Ndiaye 1994: 56).
L’oppression dont il parle, c’est d’abord l’esclavage, ensuite la colonisation mais aussi le ne o-
colonialisme, l’exploitation des ressources africaines, la triste situation dans laquelle l’Afrique est
plonge e avec ses guerres civiles et ethniques. Ses toiles sur le sacrifice du mouton portent le sang
de son univers. Tous ceux qui se conduisent comme des moutons finiront par e tre « e gorge s
comme des moutons ». Iba Ndiaye refuse ainsi la paresse, la me diocrite et l’assistance. Pour lui,
tout peuple doit avoir « une conscience de re volte » car « la carence d’une conscience de re volte
ame ne toujours a e tre le mouton de quelqu’un d’autre » (Ndiaye 1994: 58).
La couleur rouge et les squelettes expriment toute sa sensibilite a l’e ve nement. Ces tableaux
te moignent de la vie, des e tres, des choses, de la mort, de l’au-dela . Ils parlent de rituels, de vie
quotidienne, de coutumes et de mythes. L’artiste peint avec force un langage plastique et des
the matiques qui correspondent a ses pulsions. Ses tableaux donnent l’impression du de ja ve cu :
sa peinture, dit-il, est une « ne cessite inte rieure » qui lui permet d’exprimer ses sentiments. Son
art est un art engage , un art de « combat » ; en ce sens qu’il prend position sur « les proble mes
existentiels » (Ndiaye 1994: 45).
83 Muse e Dynamique 1977.
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Son espace pictural est en complicite avec son inspiration. Il a un regard particulier sur sa
tradition, ses e motions, les proble mes de l’Afrique qu’il veut restituer et faire connaĩ tre au monde
entier. Il utilise la peinture pour combattre l’injustice. Le mouton repre sente « le symbole de
toutes les victimes » (Ndiaye 1994: 43). A travers ces peintures ou le « muscle saigne », il e voque
la souffrance. Ces variations sont aussi « a interpre ter comme des me taphores de la liaison
spirituelle avec les ance tres... » (Ndiaye 1994: 43). Ces images rituelles, peintes avec « des couleurs
consciemment dissonantes », nous font revivre l’e ve nement de la Tabaski. Pour reprendre une
expression de Senghor (du catalogue du Muse e Dynamique 1977 avec Iba Ndiaye), « la tradition
est transcende e pour atteindre un langage universel ».
Iba Ndiaye peint les proble mes majeurs de l’Afrique. Pour comprendre ces tableaux, il faut aller
au-dela de l’image religieuse pour lire le destin du continent si les Africains ne prennent pas en
main les choses de s maintenant. S’ils ne le font pas, l’Afrique sera comme ces moutons e gorge s qui
baignent dans le sang—si elle ne l’est pas de ja avec toutes les guerres et la pauvrete qui secouent
le continent. Il combat ainsi la passivite et affirme, a travers ses toiles, que les initiatives, pour
l’Afrique, ne doivent pas venir des Occidentaux mais pluto t des Africains eux-me mes. Il n’y a pas
de de veloppement hors de l’effort collectif.
La politique muséale de Senghor
Senghor est connu pour e tre un homme d’art et de culture. Pendant ses vingt anne es d’exercice au
pouvoir, il a conçu, de veloppe , promu et applique une politique culturelle fonde e sur l’ide ologie
de la ne gritude : la de fense et la valorisation des valeurs de civilisations ne gro-africaines.
Pre sident de la Re publique, il accordait une place privile gie e aux arts plastiques dans sa politique
de de veloppement de la nation84 ; « d’ou la priorite accorde e, de s l’aube de l’inde pendance, a la
formation de l’homme, aux arts et aux lettres » (Sylla 2006 : 87). Gra ce a lui, le Se ne gal s’est fait
remarquer dans les arts plastiques : les Manufactures se ne galaises des Arts de coratifs de Thie s
cre e es en 1964, cre ation de l’E cole des Beaux-arts en 1966, le Service des Archives culturelles en
1967, cre ation du Muse e Dynamique en 1966 et le premier Festival mondial des Arts ne gres la
me me anne e, le Muse e re gional de Thie s cre e en 1975, le Commissariat aux expositions d’art
se ne galais a l’e tranger cre e en 1977. Senghor a ainsi mis en place une sce ne artistique a part
entie re, avec des structures administratives et des institutions de recherches et de financement
de l’action culturelle, des e coles de formation artistique, des manifestations artistiques, des
galeries et des marchands, etc.85.
Senghor fera de la ne gritude le crite re de me ce nat de l’E tat durant tout son mandat. Les artistes
devaient situer leurs cre ations conforme ment a ce que l’on a appele « L’E cole de Dakar », base e
sur les fondements de la ne gritude86, pour espe rer obtenir des bourses de formation ou avoir des
commandes de l’E tat87. Il avait ainsi ses goûts artistiques pour éduquer le peuple et réformer les arts
84 Sur le me ce nat d’art de Senghor, je renvoie les lecteurs aux ouvrages suivants : Sylla 1998 et 2006.
85 Voir les deux ouvrages d’Abdou Sylla de ja cite s; lire a ce propos Harney : 2004.
86 L’esthe tique senghorienne est fonde e sur les bases de la ne gritude : enracinement et ouverture, raison intuitive,
ontologie des rythmes, force vitale, le paralle lisme asyme trique. Lire a ce propos Diop 2018 et Diagne 2007.
87 Voir Harney 2004.
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Senghor et les expositions du Musée Dynamique de Dakar
au Sénégal. C’est dans ce sens qu’il faut comprendre la création du Musée Dynamique « où les arts
plastiques occupaient une place de choix » avec l’invitation, chaque année d’un « artiste de qualité
internationale » (Senghor 1977b, 324). L’espace d’exposition est constitue de deux grandes salles.
La premie re avec environ 850m2 accueille les expositions temporaires, la deuxie me, une
mezzanine de 490 m2 accueille les collections permanentes du muse e.
La question de la fin des activite s du Muse e Dynamique nous appelle a replacer le projet dans le
contexte de son e poque. C’est Senghor lui-me me qui ferme le muse e pour la premie re fois en 1977,
pour y installer la compagnie de danse Mudra-Afrique dirige e par Maurice Be jart (fils du
philosophe franco-se ne galais Gaston Berger) et Germaine Acogny. Abdou Diouf le ferme a
nouveau en 1990, apre s l’avoir rouvert en 1982, pour y installer la Cour de cassation. A sa
re ouverture en 1982 et jusqu’a sa fermeture de finitive en 1990, il a aussi accueilli des expositions
me morables parmi lesquelles : le premier salon national des artistes (1985), le deuxie me salon
des artistes plasticiens se ne galais (1986), les « Arts vivants du Zaĩ re » (1986), « Alpha Waly Diallo :
un peintre face a son histoire» (1986), « Jacob Yacouba, œuvres re centes » (1987), «Rencontre
plastique germano-se ne galaise (1987), « Luigi Pastori », un peintre italien (1987), «Les tapisseries
de Gracia Cutuli d’Argentine (1987), « El Hadji Sy, œuvres re centes » (1987).
Sur la re ception de ces expositions par les Se ne galais en ge ne ral, certains te moins que j'ai
interviewe s comme Raphae l Ndiaye, actuel directeur de la Fondation Le opold Se dar Senghor,
pensent qu’elles e taient bien suivies par la population, alors que pour d’autres comme Alioune
Badiane ou Penda Mbow, l'engouement des Se ne galais en ge ne ral e tait tre s limite . Dans un
entretien du 02 janvier 2022, Ndiaye de crit : « J'ai re gulie rement visite ces expositions au Muse e
Dynamique. C’e taient de grandes manifestations bien suivies car la culture e tait la ligne directrice
de la politique de Senghor ». Mais pour le critique d’art se ne galais Alioune Badiane, qui a connu
cette e poque, dans un entretien du 1er janvier 2022 objecte : « L’inte re t de ces expositions e tait
limite a l’e lite, aux amis de Senghor, a l’assistance et aux artistes qui allaient alimenter les
expositions. Ces projets e taient tre s distants de la population. Le grand public n’e tait pas tre s
enthousiaste ». Penda Mbow renche rit dans l'interview du vendredi 07 janvier 2022 : « Les e le ves
de Dakar que nous e tions avaient beaucoup de chance, car ils e taient initie s tre s jeunes a
l'esthe tique ne gro-africaine. L'e lite se ne galaise accordait une grande place a la culture, aux Arts
et aux Lettres puisque Senghor les plaçait au cœur de son action. Mais le reste des Se ne galais, sans
comprendre ve ritablement le sens de ces expositions, e taient habitue s a entendre certains noms
a travers les discours de Senghor et les accueils re serve s a ces personnalite s ».
C’est dans ce sens qu’il faut comprendre la cre ation du laboratoire Agit’Art, un collectif d’artistes
fonde a Dakar aux de buts des anne es 1970 pour revitaliser la cre ation artistique et remettre en
cause la philosophie senghorienne de la ne gritude. Parmi les membres de ce mouvement, on peut
citer : Issa Samb Joe Ouakam (artiste interdisciplinaire), El Sy (plasticien), Bouna Me doune Se ye
(photographe),
Djibril
Diop
Mamebety
(cine aste).
Contre
la
fonctionnarisation
et
l’institutionnalisation de l’art, ils se rebellent contre la politique culturelle de Senghor et prennent
leur distance par rapport a la ne gritude et a l’E cole de Dakar. Issa Samb Joe Ouakam, lors de
l’exposition de l’art contemporain se ne galais au Grand Palais a Paris en 1974, bru le ses œuvres
qui devaient figurer dans l’exposition.
Mais au fond, l’homo senegalensis que Senghor voulait façonner avait-il les moyens de faire de l’art
et de la culture des valeurs essentielles ? Le programme de politique culturelle et artistique de
Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Online (11)
Senghor e tait confronte a d’autres proble matiques sociales et e conomiques qui pre occupaient
plus
les
Se ne galais.
Sa
politique
culturelle
e tait
qualifie e
par
ses
opposants
« d’extravertie » et « d’e litiste » (Penda Mbow). Il e tait accuse d’utiliser les deniers publics pour
organiser des e ve nements culturels au lieu de re soudre les proble mes socio-e conomiques
auxquels le pays e tait confronte . C’est peut-e tre dans ce contexte qu’il faut situer et comprendre
la fermeture du Muse e Dynamique. Aujourd’hui, on serait tente de dire qu’il ne reste pas grand-
chose de ces expositions prestigieuses. La Cour de cassation est toujours loge e au Muse e
Dynamique et sa restitution a la culture n’est pas a l’ordre du jour de l’E tat se ne galais. Cet
he bergement qui e tait au de but temporaire est devenu une permanence.
Mais pour Senghor, l’inde pendance politique et e conomique ne peut se faire sans une
inde pendance culturelle. Ainsi, il e tait convaincu que la re solution des proble mes e conomiques et
politiques passe d’abord par la re solution des proble mes culturels. Culture et politique sont ainsi
a l’origine de tout de veloppement re ussi. Car le de veloppement de l’Afrique, selon lui, ne peut se
faire sans le de veloppement de la culture. C’est a travers la culture qu’il comptait amorcer la
renaissance africaine. Voila pourquoi, il lui accordait une importance telle que l’on pense que s’il
a fait de la politique, c’est pour re aliser ses projets culturels. Et c’est pour mettre en valeur cette
culture africaine qu’il s’est lance dans de grands projets culturels tels que le festival mondial des
arts ne gres et les grandes expositions au Muse e Dynamique.
L’histoire retiendra que le Muse e Dynamique de Dakar fut l’un des rares muse es d’Afrique – sinon
le seul – a voir expose , au XXe sie cle, des artistes aussi ce le bres que Le onard de Vinci, Kandinsky,
Miro , Marc Chagall, Picasso, Hundertwasser, Soulages, Alfred Manessier, Olivier Debre , Iba Ndiaye.
Elle retiendra aussi que l’exposition « Art Ne gre » du Premier festival des arts ne gres est l’une des
plus grandes expositions de l’histoire de la muse ologie.
C’est que, en cre ant le Muse e Dynamique, Senghor voulait « placer le Se ne gal au niveau le plus
e leve de ce Dialogue, mais aussi situer les objectifs et les de fis a relever, en donnant a l’institution
une dimension internationale » (Huchard 2010: 355). Le muse e e tait un outil important privile gie
pour le dialogue des cultures. Il e crit a ce propos :
« Si Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Soulages, Alfred Manessier et d’autres grands
artistes ont de ja franchi les murs du Muse e dynamique, consacre a l’Art, sans
frontie res, c’est qu’ils ont, eux aussi, ve cu et exprime ce que nous chantons dans la
se re nite : la rencontre des valeurs culturelles des diffe rentes ethnies et nations au
niveau de l’Universel » (Senghor 1977b: 22).
Le vœu de Senghor e tait d’organiser, chaque anne e, une exposition avec un artiste de qualite
internationale. C’e tait l’a ge d’or des arts plastiques se ne galais. Aujourd’hui, c’est triste de voir que
l’E tat n’est plus investisseur des arts au Se ne gal. Il n’y a plus malheureusement d’expositions
individuelles d’envergure comme celles organise es au Muse e Dynamique lorsque Senghor e tait a
la te te de l’E tat du Se ne gal. Depuis 1990, les locaux du Muse e sont affecte s a la Cour supre me. En
1996, apre s de nombreuses critiques, le chef de l’Etat, Abdou Diouf, avait annonce officiellement
qu’il allait redonner les locaux au ministe re charge de la Culture. Le Pre sident Abdoulaye Wade
durant ses deux mandats n’en a jamais parle . L’espoir est porte sur l’actuel Pre sident Macky Sall.
Le monde de l’art attend toujours la restitution de ce lieu historique de la culture qui est « le
te moignage le plus signifiant » (Senghor 1977b: 64) du premier festival mondial des arts ne gres.
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Senghor et les expositions du Musée Dynamique de Dakar
Restitution du patrimoine africain et décolonisation des musées
La politique muse ale africaine doit e tre pense e en termes de bifurcations. Aujourd’hui, il est temps
de quitter le mime tisme occidental et de choisir une direction proprement africaine. Nous ne
pouvons pas envisager le muse e africain moderne a partir de la colonisation. C’est avec une
e ducation muse ale construite sur la base de re cits africains qu’il sera possible de de coloniser la
muse ologie en Afrique. Il faut rompre avec l’ide ologie occidentale d’une muse ologie unique,
commune ou universelle. Il s’agit de de construire radicalement « l’approche occidentale des
muse es », en allant au-dela des notions de « muse e » et de « collection » he rite es de l’Occident
(Van Geert 2021: 216). L’institution muse ale telle que nous la connaissons aujourd’hui est en effet
introduite en Afrique durant la pe riode coloniale. Les premiers muse es ouest africains, par
exemple, sont cre e s sous l’investigation de l’Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (IFAN) – dont le
sie ge e tait a Dakar et des centres re gionaux a Abidjan, Bamako, Cotonou, Niamey et Ouagadougou.
Leur cre ation permettait aux colons d’e tudier les communaute s pour mieux les dominer et
exploiter leurs ressources. Il est bien possible de collecter et d’exposer des objets ou des tableaux
d’art a partir d’un point de vue africain ; c’est-a -dire en se basant sur des crite res des
communaute s africaines « d’exposer et de concevoir les collections, en se de tachant explicitement
de l’ide e occidentale de muse e » (Van Geert 2021: 217).
Avec la muse ologie de coloniale, il ne s’agit plus d’e tudier les communaute s africaines, mais, de
de construire l’ide e coloniale et occidentale des muse es, de « renverser la manie re de faire « muse e
», d’acque rir et d’exposer des collections, de s’adresser aux publics » (Van Geert 2021: 216). Il
s’agit, pour les Africains, de de cider eux-me mes de comment ils veulent repre senter un muse e et
ses collections. Et puisque les notions me me de muse e et de collection sont introduites par
l’expansion coloniale, il s’agit, de les rede finir et de repenser les pratiques muse ales en Afrique, a
partir du point de vue des Africains. C’est de cette manie re seulement que les muse es africains
pourront se de coloniser des pratiques occidentales.
Mais ce processus de colonial passe d’abord et avant tout par le rapatriement ou la restitution du
patrimoine artistique et culturel africains dans les galeries et muse es occidentaux. Aujourd’hui, la
question de la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain conserve dans les muse es du monde
occidental devrait inciter l’E tat se ne galais a repenser sa politique muse ographique pour pouvoir
accueillir les objets restitue s et les inte grer dans une nouvelle configuration des esthe tiques
ne gro-africaines. Me me si Senghor n’avait pas envisage cette question de la restitution, il avait
bien re fle chi sur la circulation des objets. Pour faire de couvrir au monde entier les cre ations de «
l’E cole de Dakar », il avait fait initier une exposition itine rante d’art contemporain se ne galais a
l’e tranger. La premie re e dition avait eu lieu a Dakar en 1974. L’exposition avait ensuite fait vingt-
cinq villes dans quatorze pays : France, Finlande, Autriche, Italie, Sue de, Norve ge, Mexique, E tats-
Unis, Canada, Bre sil, Japon, Core e du Nord, Core e du Sud et Chine. Elle est rentre e a Dakar en 1985.
L’E tat du Se ne gal avait aussi contribue plusieurs fois a la participation des artistes se ne galais a
des manifestations artistiques a l’e tranger. Senghor n’e tait-il pas trop en avance sur son temps ?
Cette possibilite de circulation et d’e change permet de restituer non seulement les objets, mais
aussi les traductions – pour reprendre une notion che re a Souleymane Bachir Diagne – et
l’esthe tique qu’ils portent. Car ces objets n’ont pas e te seulement de place s de l’Afrique a
l’Occident, ils ont e te aussi transplante s. Partis avec leur propre langue, ils vont retourner dans
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leur terre d’origine avec des langues d’autres cultures. Leur transfert dans les galeries et muse es
occidentaux fut ainsi « transplantation », « traduction » et « translation » (Diagne 2022: 86). Dans
ces lieux, ils ne sont pas reste s fige s, comme on a l’habitude de le penser, ils sont « force de vie et
de transformation » (Diagne 2022: 87) ; car ils sont la preuve de contextes, de lieux et de temps
diffe rents, ils acquie rent de nouvelles significations et parlent une langue d’emprunt.
Ce sont ces objets d’art africain qui vont e tre rapatrie s ou restitue s que S. Bachir Diagne attribue
le nom de « Mutant » – de « mutation », « transmutation ». Expose s dans les muse es occidentaux,
ces objets « sont charge s de significations nouvelles et les restituer signifie de les de raciner a
nouveau ». Ils ont finalement, comme des rhizomes, « pousse des racines ailleurs et ils
appartiennent a plusieurs terres » (Diagne 2022). A leur retour dans leurs pays d’origine, ils
devraient donc habiter dans un lieu, dit « dynamique ». C’est ce que Diagne appelle « le Muse e des
mutants », et c’est exactement l'ide e de Senghor derrie re la notion d’un « Muse e dynamique » :
exposer dans ce lieu des œuvres qui expriment une certaine puissance, une certaine force de vie.
« Dynamis » en grec signifie la puissance, une certaine force. Par conse quent, les objets et les
tableaux d’art qui sont expose s au Muse e Dynamique sont des objets mutants, migrants,
migratoires. Senghor avait ainsi une vision tre s dynamique de l’art africain.
Diagne, reprenant Joshua Cohen (2020), pre conise de suivre la trace des objets d’art africains «
jusqu’a leur traduction dans le langage d’œuvres modernes » (Diagne 2022: 92). On raconte
souvent que Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Georges Braque, Modigliani, Maurice de
Vlaminck, etc., ont de couvert dans les objets d’origine africaine leurs propres pre occupations et
recherches esthe tiques. Et l’on peut lire dans l’Histoire Universelle que « chaque artiste, peintre,
sculpteur, poe te ou musicien, prend conscience qu’il doit cre er son mode d’expression, son
langage, pour livrer sa vision du monde. Cet e tat d’esprit explique l’influence exerce e alors par
l’art ne gre » (Grousset et Le onard 1958 : 98). Ils ont tous e te influence s par le signe plastique
ne gro-africain. De cette influence, naĩ tra le cubisme, le surre alisme, le futurisme et le dadaĩ sme
(Diop 2018). Mais comment un masque Fang a-t-il trouve traduction dans Les baigneuses de
Vlaminck, La Danse de Derain ou Les Demoiselles d’Avignon de Picasso ? Ou comment un masque
Kru de la Cote d’Ivoire a-t-il trouve traduction dans La guitare de Picasso ? Comment ces artistes
ont-ils e te des traducteurs des arts africains ?
Re pondant a ces questions, Diagne donne l’exemple de Derain qui s’est « mis avec respect a la
tache de traducteur des arts d’Afrique » (Diagne 2022: 95) en s’exerçant lors d’une visite au British
Museum de Londres, « a
faire des croquis d’œuvres « primitives », d’Oce anie tout
particulie rement. Le travail a consiste a faire ainsi courir sa main munie d’un crayon comme pour
s’incorporer par elle le langage visuel des objets » (Diagne 2022: 95). On en sait beaucoup aussi
sur les achats de masques africains de Picasso, Matisse, Klee ou Miro et leurs visites de muse es ou
de galeries pour contempler les objets d’art africain. En 1906, Matisse ache te une statuette Vili du
Congo chez un antiquaire. Il est attire par les volumes et les de formations anatomiques. Un an plus
tard, il repre sentera cette statuette dans son tableau Nature morte à la statuette Nègre, peint en
1907.
Ces artistes-traducteurs ont-ils bien traduits le sens de ces objets ? Reprenant Amadou Mahtar
Mbow et Paul Ricœur, Diagne pense que « s’ils ont trahi, c’est [...], pour avoir traduit» (Diagne
2022: 102), nous rappelant le ce le bre adage italien « traduttore, traditore », « traduire, c'est trahir
». Les lobbies anti-restitution soutiennent en ge ne ral que me me restitue s en Afrique, ces objets
118
Senghor et les expositions du Musée Dynamique de Dakar
continueront a parler leur langue d’emprunt. Ceux qui avaient des fonctions bien pre cises avant
leur de part auront perdu leur sens originel a leur retour puisque la plupart des conditions
sociologiques qui pre disposaient a leur cre ation et de leur utilisation n’existant plus, ce serait
absurde de leur donner les me mes significations comme s’ils n’avaient jamais e te jamais
de contextualise s.
Aujourd’hui, a part quelques communaute s qui re clament leurs objets, la plupart de ces objets
sont re clame s par les E tats. Une fois restitue s, ils seront donc dans les muse es comme ils le sont
actuellement en Occident, et non pour reprendre leur fonction d’origine. Ils parleront ainsi une
langue que les Africains devront traduire car « la translation du retour n’annule pas celle de
de part, elle s’y ajoute » (Diagne 2022: 104).
6 Conclusion
Cre e pour les besoins du Premier festival des arts ne gres, le Muse e Dynamique a e te pendant une
de cennie, de 1966 a 1977, une vitrine de l’art moderne avec des expositions clefs de grands
artistes qui ont marque le 20e sie cle, et de l’art contemporain se ne galais avec l’organisation des
salons nationaux des artistes plasticiens se ne galais. Une histoire tumultueuse et passionnante.
Comme dans beaucoup de muse es africains, ces diffe rentes expositions du Muse e Dynamique ont
e te e labore es dans un contexte de l’he ritage de la muse ologie occidentale. Aujourd’hui, et avec la
question tre s actuelle de la restitution du patrimoine africain, l’avenir des muse es d’Afrique passe
par de nouveaux mode les de muse ologie proprement africains.
En Afrique de l’Ouest, a quelques exceptions pre s, les muse es, dont la plupart sont issus de muse es
coloniaux, ont du mal a drainer les populations. Il y a tre s peu de visiteurs, hormis les sorties
pe dagogiques et les touristes. Il est grand temps de tuer « le mode le occidental de muse e en
Afrique pour que s’e panouissent de nouveaux modes de conservation et de promotion du
patrimoine » (Konare 1992). Re inventer ou rede finir les muse es africains revient a les inscrire
dans un imaginaire africain. C’est le sens du Muse e des Civilisations Noires de Dakar (MCN)
inaugure le 06 de cembre 2018, une ide e de Senghor qui remonte au Festival mondial des arts
ne gres de 1966.
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Series
[En
ligne],
49,
2 :
DOI
:
https://doi.org/10.4000/iss.3918.
ISSN 2628-1791
DOI: 10.15495/EPub_UBT_00006772
Clarissa Vierke and Rüdiger Seesemann, eds. 2024. Africa*n Relations. Modalities
Reflected. University of Bayreuth African Studies Online 11. Bayreuth: Institute of
African Studies.
Subjects
People & roles
- Place of publication
- Bayreuth
Origins & context
- Title
- Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected
- Publication type
- Book
- Language
- English
- Series
- University of Bayreuth African Studies Online
- Funded by
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Year
- May 1, 2024
- volume
- 11
- pages
- VIII, 121
- number of pages
- 121
Identifiers & sources
- Source ID (eref-/epub-)
- epub-7499
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