New Year Lecture 2022 - Prof. Dr. Peter Simatei Tirop
Abstract
- Abstract
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Each year, the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth starts its line of annual activities and events with the New Year Lecture open to the interested public, featuring prominent speakers who address questions and concepts central to the Cluster’s agenda. In 2022 the COVID-19 pandemic forced the Cluster again to move the New Year Lecture to a digital format.
On 13 January 2022 the New Year Lecture was delivered by Prof. Dr. Peter Simatei Tirop, Director of the Moi African Cluster Centre, Professor of Comparative Literature, Dean, School of Arts and Social Sciences at Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya. It was entitled "Ways of Knowing Africa: African Literature and Shifting Imaginaries".
Programme:
Welcome address
Yacouba Banhoro
Director of the Ouaga African Cluster Centre, Professor of History, Joseph Ki-Zerbo University, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
Introduction
Akosua Adomako Ampofo
Spokesperson of the Cluster's Advisory Board, Professor of African and Gender Studies, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Accra
Lecture
Peter Simatei
Director of the Moi African Cluster Centre, Professor of Comparative Literature, Dean, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya
www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de
Description
- Transcript
- ladies and gentlemen i would like to welcome you to the new year lecture of the cluster of excellent africa multiple at the university of baird my name is franz kogelmann i'm the managing director of this cluster of excellence and i'm pleased to welcome you to the third new year lecture unfortunately the pandemic will not allow us to hold this important academic event as a live event this year like last year the new year lecture will take place as an online event the choreography of this event is as follows we were able to win professor jacoba banomuro for the welcome address professor akko ado marco for the introduction of the new year lecture and professor peter simatean for the lecture both professor jakuba banoro and professor professor peter cemetery are directors of our african cluster centers at university gizerbo in varga burkina faso and more university in eldorad kenya respectively institute of african studies university of ghana league chairs the advisory board of the cluster of excellence as a special innovation i would like to point out that this event will also be simultaneously translated into international sign language there will also be a panel discussion at the end of the new year lecture it will be chaired by professors please do not run away after the lecture but participate actively please note that this discussion will be recorded a special thanks goes to our student assistants miss lily geisler and miss stephanie yasser and our team assistant mrs constance herrera well i wish you a happy new year a happy new year lecture good afternoon jay colleagues ng students welcome to this third annual lecture of the cluster of excellence africa malta i am doctor yakuba van gaal professor of history and director of the african cluster center at the university joseph kiser in burkina faso i am very delighted on behalf of the administration and all the members of the cluster to welcome you to this third annual lecture which will be delivered by dr peter simati professor of comparative literature dean of the school of arts and social sciences and director of the african cluster center at moore university in kenya to begin with let me wish you all a happy new year may 2020 to be the beginning of the end of the kobit 19 pandemic there is no doubt that as in 2020 this pandemic was the major contingency to the normal and full functioning of the cluster activities in 2021 nevertheless our centers of excellence africa multiple did not stop its scientific interview which is to reconfigure african studies established in january 2019 by the university of byron africa multiple is a university's based partnership engaging not only the african universities of lagos in nigeria roads in south africa eldorade in kenya wangadugu in burkina faso in the university of baird but also long-standing partners consisting of african studies centers around the world the desire in this partnership to reconfigure african studies through the interaction of researchers from different disciplines in different backgrounds in the production of knowledge on africa allows today a professor from the university joseph ki zerbo of wagatuku to welcome the guests to a lecturer delivered from kenya on behalf of a network of researchers based in different places in the world in the covidon if the kovi 19 pandemic has brought some restrictions to our activities it has also been an opportunity to develop and intensify remote digital communication and cluster members seized this opportunity in those exhausting times to go forward with their common interview of trans collaborative research in fact during 2021 virtual communications between the members of our cluster and their international partners have been multiplied this has given even more meaning to our digital research environment project one of the pillars of collaboration between the different universities as well as of the reconfiguration of african studies thanks to this last digital communication revolution including the popularization of zoom the statutory meetings of the cluster of excellence could be held online or in a hybrid manner this the lectures and workshops in the knowledge lab and in the sex research sections were also held in the same way collaborations through research research project took place either through physical meetings when possible or through to virtual meetings when appropriate in each of african cluster center despite the obstacles related to coffee 19 promises of activities have been fulfilled conferences workshops writing of research projects research training of young researchers integration of gender and diversity in our research activities filled with publication of scientific articles and books our activities that we have carried out during the year 2021 in the spaces of freedom gained naturally or artificially at the expense of the kobe 19 pandemics the second international conference of the africa multiple center of excellence on african in relations held in july 2021 was a cornerstone of our collaboration in 2021 and it kept all its promises even though it was held online in in in a bridge manner let me remind in the words of the cluster's dean professor dr rudiger zesemann that the concept of the annual new year lecture of the africa multiple cluster of excellence stipulates to be one of the first cluster events in the year in the new year creating an official opening of the academic events of the year in january 2020 professor dr zezeman introduced this series of annual new year lectures focusing in his lecture on reconfiguration of african studies in january 2021 the second anniversary was marked by the lecture given by the clusters vice dean of internationalization professor dr utter fendla specialist of african films and literature studies who addressed relationalities in african arts going forward on key concept of the cluster of excellence on the potential of language studies as way of reconfiguring african studies professor dr simati will talk about ways of knowing africa african literature and shifting imaginaries i think professor peter simati for accepting to deliver this third anniversary lecture of the cluster to end i would like to congratulate the administration of the cluster of excellence as well as all its members for their work during the past two years under exhausting conditions due to the pandemic we still have a long way to go and we are looking forward to ways and means to improve our partnership and focus on our goals i wish you a very good new year's lecture greetings my name is akushiyat marco ampafur i'm at the institute of african studies professor of african and gender studies here at the university of ghana and chair of the africa multiple cluster of excellence board last month we lost two formidable individuals who have shared a lot of wisdom with us and have now gone on to become our ancestors and i want to greet you with some very simple words from both that speak i believe to the times we're in as well as the lecture that we will hear shortly bell hook says what we cannot imagine cannot come into being and the archbishop does 122 says we need other human beings in order to be human today i'm very pleased to introduce professor dr simate to deliver the third new year lecture of the cluster he is in good company after the inaugural lecture delivered by professor dr utter fendler in 2020 followed by professor dr rudiger zeissman in 2021 professor dr simatai is the acc director of moore university and the first member from one of our african cluster centers to be delivering the newly a lecture titled ways of knowing africa african literature and shifting imaginaries now you understand bell hooks peter simatai is a professor of comparative literature and dean of the school of arts and social sciences at moore university kenya sometimes it is interesting to know what people studied and where so just fun facts for your information he holds a bachelor of arts in literature and political science from the university of nairobi an m phil from more university where his thesis was on images of post-colonial relationships in the writings of carol phillips and carol phillips is a caribbean british novelist playwright and essayist in the genre of black atlantic writing so we have a sense of what's in store for us and professor simatai holds a phd from the university of byroid his thesis was titled the novel and the politics of nation building in east africa thus to note that professor simatai works in the intersecting fields of postcolonial studies anglophone literatures and diaspora studies should be unsurprising his research enjoys international standing in post-colonial literary and cultural studies with specialization in the areas of east african african and indian diaspora literature and popular culture he focuses on negotiations of diaspora migration and gender and popular culture and seeks to understand the ways in which diaspora and disparate identities work within against and or around national identities and his work makes an important intervention in theories of diaspora that sometimes all too easily discount the centrality of the nation-states to diasporic consciousness some of his publications include in 2019 pleasures of the flesh the image of the prostitute in african literature in an edited collection titled routledge international handbook of sex industry research published in 2019. in 2016 he has an article titled a gloss on perspectives for the study of african literature versus greek and oriental traditions which was published in uh mythical childhood the classics and literature for children and young adults 2011 there's a publication that should interest many of us in diaspora studies east african studies african studies more broadly around the contestations of nation building in the state and it's titled the historic memories and national histories in east african asian writing i found this one as well and kanelanian popular music and the contestation of national space in kenya published in 2010 in the journal of east african studies so you get a sense of both the breadth of his work but also the particularities he has been active in many spheres including as a fellow of the five college african scholars program at the university of massachusetts in the us and as a humbled fellow in germany and it is now my very sincere and deep pleasure to invite professor cimate to share his insights with us thank you very much good afternoon and thank you so much for your kind introduction i'm delighted to give this that new year lecture of the africa multiple cluster of excellence it's always a pleasure of course to be in byroid although this time we are only present virtually the title of my talk as you probably already know is ways of knowing africa african literature and shifting imaginaries the first part of my title ways of knowing africa is an obvious intertextual gesture towards the politics of knowledge production in relation to africa how is knowledge of in and about africa constituted or configured these are questions of course that have been addressed and continue to be addressed in many scholarly debates and the critical questions continue to involve around africa as an object of knowledge and perhaps more importantly is the question of africa's relationship to that very project of knowing these projects have produced an array of conceptual grammars that have shown under terms such as ways of seeing africa thinking africa differently uh africanus and of course our own project reconfiguring african studies and many others that attempt to shape the field of african studies and in so doing contest colonial and economic imposition of particular ways of seeing africa my interest today though is to simply in a general way reflect a bit 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 mods of relations this of course is a broad topic and given that african literature is itself a field of complex and diverse literary texts traditions cultures and languages my talk will be sort of a general assessment of the field i want to begin with hari karupa's reflection on the first question of the role of the african writer and artist in society of course these were issues that 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 own cultures and histories garupa writes for most postcolonial literatures or literatures from imagine literary spaces literary value enhances as much in the teachability of the text as it does in whatever other aesthetic qualities it may possess that is the text ability to illustrate rework or represent some theme or issue considered to be of major significance and open it up for teaching about empire nation and identity proposed nation diaspora and globalization for instance this as much is a source of value as any of its other formal qualities karupa then goes to accu for what he 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 and so forth and so forth karupa's acumen here partly defines what one can call the cognitive projects of african literature and the knowledge about relations human relations that one can unlock from the text through attention to the aesthetics unlike in the informative discourses and practices where knowledge is perhaps propositional the knowledge the literature thoughts of the truths and the insights about the human condition that it leads us to come in forms that question our normative practices and provide new categories for preventing the world in addressing emerging african realities african literature at least in its written form has gone through different but interrelated faces with shifts in thematic engagements reconstitutions of new special temporal configurations and styling stylistic innovations the starting point for the mapping of these different faces is limited in the context of my talk here we might want to probably begin with colonialism and i'm quite aware of the criticism of this kind of periodization that frames africa's longer pre-colonial existence in terms of linearities of imperial history in fact african literature both oral and written exists and existed outside what we now call modern african literature which is a recent phenomena and this has been been well documented by scholars like simon kikandi and so forth paraswati barashas and michel schulz assad to study africa without invoking the the colonial era legacies remains one of the major epistemological challenges and this is something that all of us have to grapple with modern african literature especially has a complex symbiotic relationship with colonialism and has been this has been captured better by simon kikandi when he writes modern african literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism but what is now considered to be the heart of literary scholarship on the continent could not have acquired its current identity or function if the traumatic encounter between africa and europe had not taken place not only were the founders of modern african literature colonial subjects wright ski candy but colonials was also to be the most important and enduring theme in their works and therefore it became the case then that the specificity of african literature its distinctiveness is mapped in part by its relation to imperial history this literature is not only about the history of imperial subjugation of african peoples and their resistance to it it's also its product but it's also more than all these in the sense that while it has articulately protected the complex interplay of the forces shaping the destiny of the african people this literature actively intervenes in the making of that history hence one historical function it has served and continues to serve is that of mapping out unique political cultural consciousness as part of a larger project of liberating the african person from the debilitating conditions created by imperialism and as kram hagen writes 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 refreshing cultural identity deconstructive in so far as it plays on and challenges western regularly expectation and in so doing works towards dismantling self-profiling western mount salvation and thought at least this was the agenda of the pioneer african writers writing up to probably early 1980s and in fact a number of them in their critical essays are found that this indeed was their mission and that their relevance to society lay in the conscious intervention in the unfolding of history what comes to mind quickly of course is the famous and often quoted are assertioned by genuine 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 this very well known quote i put it here i will be quite satisfied if my novels especially the ones i said in the past they didn't know more than teach my readers that their past with all its imperfections was not one long night of several from which the first europeans acting on god's behalf they live at them google young's position of course is is well known and well studied and well discussed so i'll not really realize his politics of decolonization here but let me quickly mention that like other writers of of of that age group and physics literary texts are supporting a structure of values dialectically opposed to those of the ruling class of the oppressing race and nation this may sound simplistically manikin but it's not because in writing against colonial culture and world the african writer seeks to organize our new reality whose contract distinction to the colonial one would be defined not only in terms of its emancipatory potential but also in the forecast for counting of the african as the center of this world this does not imply that african literature functions in such simplistic manner by merely inverting and negating colonialist values it is to admit instead that african literature emerges into being through resistance to conditions that deny possibilities of its existence to establish in the process what omi baba would call spaces of support and signification where totalization is resisted and the calculation of power is disturbed in a sense then we're talking about decolonization as a cultural and political project of african literature in the earth in that early phase of the immediate postcolonial period the concern of african texts was or is still not only to de-colonize the cultures and histories of the african peoples or to put it differently using of course this diet phrase it is not only that they write back to the empire in contestation of european misrepresentations of the continent it also seeks to refill the subtle and indigenous forms which oppressive power has taken in the post-colonial or so-called post-national era hence questions of how colonial power relations endures through the postcolonial state and how it continues to shape everyday life of the people as it subjugates them to its economic interests constitute the central concerns of a significant number of african writers if it is actually this reading of the postcolonial state as a reconfiguration of colonial power that sets the stage for african literature so for african literatures the legitimation of the nationwide project and with it the freeing of literary imagination from the balance of homogeneity of doctrine authenticity and essentialism that defines the nation building projects in the first place but this of course opens up new debates even as we move away from prescriptive agendas for african literature what kind of africa do we claim from the emerging literatures of the 21st century or to put it differently what kind of stories are coming out of africa in the 21st century these questions have been subject of internal scholarly debates as critics try to define the nature of the new literatures from africa the consensus seems to be that periodization seems to be that the periodization we are seeking in order to delineate the new form of the new form from the old is not only impossible but perhaps not even necessary given the fact that and here i called lindsey green sims given the fact that 21st century african writing is by no means monolithic and is certainly still still informed both by the stories of previous generations and by the trade the tragic topics of war anger and violence i know this is quite controversial especially when we start touching things like war anger and violence as most other writers think that this is what people should be running away from writers that frequently top the list of the that generation of african writers of course include chimamanda adichie techol dino mengistu nafalet lawyer in a sense one notes in these writings a kind of a disavowal of both the politics of decolonization and of 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 are created writing 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 remain subjects of global power structures while the task of the pioneer african writer was to reclaim community from within the boundaries defined by colonialism contemporary writings written as it were from transnational locations grapples with realities generated by fluids overlapping and sometimes conflicting spaces it has been argued by some scholars for example that the sql of nationalist politics and disposal of a post-nationalist ethic liberates the african writer from the burden of embodying the story and the politics of the nation of course this is not a new concern or a new debate it definitely recalls the debate that followed jameson's frederick jameson sweeping categorization of that world literatures as mere national allegories which in a sense is a totalizing field that sought in the words of john alley to impose a theoretical template to quite divergent writings falsely rendering it all quite accessible and familiar in analytical terms i think jameson civilization closes over the complex functions of these literatures the critical theoretical issue here is that african literature is in its different phases of development which as i have said are interrelated to not present and mediated access to african realities it instead participates in their constitution and proclamation and problematization of africa's understanding of its multiple self through what crime again 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 as i conclude let me briefly discuss a new kind of writing that sometimes fall under the broad category or rubric of indian ocean imaginaries but which in eastern and southern african scholarship is often categorized or read in in universities as african indian or asian literatures this is the writing that is produced by the third and fourth generation of the indian diaspora in east africa and southern africa and is therefore often designated as a form of diasporic writing just as is the case with the third generation of african writers writing outside the from outside the continent like like in the latter these writings contest and transform relations based on national rootedness and territorial logic their fictional works affirm the multiple histories to which they are air the transnational nature of their present realities becomes fictionalized in their texts an engagement that maps the historic 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 ambitions of the postcolonial situation the proliferate nature of cultural identities and histories within the post colony 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 a national space that is recast by nationalist narratives as to borrow from afrodi stable culturally homogeneous historically unchanging it also means writing a deteritorialized diaspora one that does not return unpounded 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 essentials one is constructed within the nation-state and colonial state where the national people and territory are understood in homogeneous and exclusionary terms the other essentialism of course comes with concepts of diaspora that revive notions of belonging and the roots of migrants in places of origin these texts are from the multiple and fluids identities in the historic experiences as the subjectivities that enable the the east african asian migrant in europe and north america for example to visualize heroes and serve as belonging to both east africa and elsewhere for here and there and in between the two spaces simultaneously thus the diasporic perspective adopted by these writings revolves the east african nation state by problematizing the relationship between centered and hybrid memories of a diasporic subject and the supposedly staple and homogeneous memory formations constituted within the nation state in this case diaspora and the diasporic identities work within against and all around national identities to construct plural spaces for enacting the difference of the diasporic subject this is well demonstrated in most writings by uh east african asian writers but just one example from sanji's novels the in-between world of vikram lang wherever sanji visits india's ambition relationship with kenya's national history and like in the early novels such as the candice and the book of secrets where the concern is about the impossibility of belonging to and the inner inevitability of tripadia from east africa this letter level demonstrates the russians complex entanglement with kenya's equally contested histories it is this 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 others contextually embedded in other spaces by virtue of constitutive relations they share with other places things practices and puzzles in other words a diasporic space is an intersectional intersectional space this space to appropriate india's terms 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 she says to the existence of contradictory and shifting social locations where one might enable be in a position of dominance and support donation simultaneously on the one hand or at different times or spaces or the other in a sense the diasporic subject is caught within intersecting social and even national boundaries if anything the diasporic subject is defined not only by the multiplicity of locations and identities it's heir too but also by the convergence of pluralistic spaces and temporalities the narrator in jamala siddiqui's novel the feast of the nine fagins contemplates this kind of multiple reality stars born in bombay raised in mombasa married in kambala educated in london worked in tehran lived in new york then stuttgart then hong kong and died in vanguard where was this person actually from where is anyone from these days where do they live thank you so much yes um thank you very much uh professor dr peter siemerte for doing the impossible thing for like uh talking about african literatures from past present future from um nation to diaspora all across the world in 23 minutes so thank you so much for this inspiring talk and now we have 40 minutes for q and a and your everyone is welcome to join we thought it would be a good idea that we you can raise your hand and then you are invited um to pose your question to professor simate or to yeah comment on it and um so i see remy chipotle thank you prof thank you susan thank you hello to my vote [Music] i mean i have maybe two questions if i may ask susan the first one is connected to the history even of the cluster africa multiple there are some colleagues here around them susan if you remember the beginning the starting point of what we now call reconfiguring was knowing africa and i remember this uh retreat we had generated the question of knowing claiming to know knowing africa is very western and arrogant now here you here we go professor mate from kenya speaking of knowing africa so this is my first question can one really claim to knowing africa the second question in your title is also connect to your title talk you spoke about you're speaking about african literature in the singular form and you are talking mentioned only writers from african and arab diaspora writing in english at least this is what i got what about the writers in swahili taking up all these languages you know which represent the continent can we speak of african literature in singular thank you yeah i don't see any any other raised hand right now um but i would love to come in here also um so to fall and making a follow-up from from remy's question and because you're inspired me very much with just you know as i said going to so through so many fields and and having so many inspiring thoughts but i also like wanted to pick up what akusura said like quoting well hooks in the beginning what uh we cannot imagine cannot be come into being and i think this is a very legitimacy for for our field literary studies right um because actually i think um gleeson also talks about it sometimes we fail to understand to grasp what is happening but imagination always opens a new field where uh you can enter possibilities that are not yet there and by entering them you can pave the way and and create dreams hopes um interventions and so you also talk very much about imagination and african realities in the very intersection and um and talking also about achievable's great vision you know we as a writer as we can we can intervene into what colonialism did but this is of course ongoing right so literature keeps intervening and so what which role do you see in us as scholars of literature we meets one being to you as well of course but very very much um also being on the urge of not just analyzing knowledge production in the fiction but doing knowledge production and i think this also refers to what remy just said so um uh how how would that affect our own course of studies studying african literature so is this any category that is still viable relevant in the 21st century because as you said like we know this is um a container term that bridges nations that bridges nations via diaspora throughout the continent that bridges past present and future so what does reconfiguring african studies mean to our field of studying african literatures isn't sort of this time now that we have something like nigerian literature kenyan literatures um which then could also integrate the linguistic varieties even more clearly giving certain historical and present and future settings to that so what is your thought on this i think at the end exactly peter maybe you can income in an answer yeah thanks thanks susan well um remy that is that is a really good question that you you you asked and um like like i said you know i i sort of took a very you know broad view of the you know of it of the field trying to make general statements about uh about african literature of course we are so right that um [Music] yeah maybe we also victims of of of our own uh you know uh uh uh discrimination when it comes to uh literature where we actually like i i i spoke about all this and and did not even mention you know you know literally in kiswahili you know even after quoting goku actually insists that we should do uh you know african literature in african languages so yeah that was well a little bit um you know uh a confusion of the fact that i took a very broad view of this but but but remy you're right yeah you know we and and like i said you know these are very complex you know field you know so even to talk about african literature is is is itself complicated in the first place you know because once you say skeletal data you're actually talking about a field that has been you know uh discussed and defined which is not really true you know you you understand the politics of uh definition of african literature you know you know the mccready conference and so forth which actually i think at some point you know the writers themselves accept that you you you you are not going to define african literature let african literature define itself let it come you know you remember the famous uh ingredient present the taika and and so forth so it was like that african literature image and it will define itself so so you're right dreamy you know i was a little bit um you know i i agree that that was not you know the best way to go you know because when you talk about african literatures you you already almost assume you know that this is a field that can be defined but which cannot actually so i was just talking generally about african literature and uh knowing africa and really you're right because i i was also like um um yeah i and that's why i said i you know like that first title the first the first part of the of the of the you know of my of my lucky so-called knowing africa that is exactly what i thought i i i found it interesting that uh you know this knowing thing you know what it's all about what i didn't do in my talk was to actually like you know discuss that bit of knowing africa what what's all these things and i like remy because you you you asked a very good question what is this idea of knowing you know we should know and you're like how can i talk about knowing africa and he's talking from africa you know that kind of thing so it's it's yeah it's interesting politics of uh you know of politics of knowledge production and politics of trying to understand other people and so forth and so forth so once in a while we get caught in in that well susan uh yeah that was that was a good like question and comment and i totally of course you know go with you on on the issues that you have raised completely you know this is this these are these are areas that are so complex and yeah we cannot you know like seem to know really that you know that we can talk about you know literally in one in africa and so forth so i think yeah i i take those comments very very seriously thank you for that susan yeah yeah thank you so much um also like this imagination is knowing i think that is oh yeah yeah yeah yeah okay yeah yeah you're right because um you see actually already i i i forgot about that because this this this this this writing is is it's always a way of you know figuring other other worlds and and and most of them are like fictional works yeah fictional wars you know and what's interesting for example in african literature is that there's a there's a lot of imagination about the possibilities of what should have you know probably taken place as a probably as a as a national probably as um as a country you know and and i i think writers have their own right to to to imagine what should have been possible and in the process of course they criticize their presence you know they criticize what's happening what's what's going on this is not what's without this you know that that kind of that kind of thinking so so we have this fictional walls sometimes very beautiful sometimes very very very ironic ones against the ones that we you know we we live sometimes very topic you know you know in a way you know utopian nations like you know like like knowing for example tries to construct a you know a kind of a socialist utopia i think it's also because of course yeah it's like there could have been a possibility of doing this thing differently yeah thank you peter i saw your niece um do you want to yes thank you chair um i'd like to be to begin by thanking uh professor simatei for oblivion presentation uh it's so successful that in 23 minutes you've been able to raise so much um energy you know in the room and so much response that's great but to follow up on the conversation around um knowing africa i think we don't ever know anything live alone africa africa is so complicated uh but so are the spaces and i doubt that we ever get to know anything that probably you would have considered a topic like exploring africa we are permanently exploring even ourselves and um i'm thinking about the comment you made about this person that is born in one part of the world grows up i don't know where visits where i end up dying i don't know where you know and i'm thinking that's just you're only touching the service of human identity and the construction and the constructions of those identities and moralities for that matter because it's not just the physical movement human beings are always moving in this world because as we are doing right now you are environment and you are not in viroit you know yes you are experiencing i am experiencing by right right now and so it's going to define my next thinking my next identity of myself so life is a little too complicated and especially when you begin thinking about the human person because the human person is not just the body there is also the spirit that hovers all over so that you can't restrict or restrain the african to remain in africa even those who have trouble like you said you are in the diaspora they may have been born in germany for example and their parents may even have been born in germany but that doesn't stop them from having an african experience because they may be reading about their ancestors and the ancestors may be communicating with them so i'm just thinking how complicated this subject is and i'm so excited that africa multiple is thinking of reconfiguring african studies even though we don't know what this african studies is thank you that's just a comment thank you thank you very much yeah thank you thanks for that actually you're right you know like well um i think i should have said that when i use the word you know um ways of knowing africa i i i i i meant it to be ironic actually you know now that there is no there are never actually there is no one way of knowing africa africa is as complex as as it comes you know that kind of thing so you are ready thank you for that yeah yeah yeah oh thank you from my end at uh dear eunice camara and we have two more questions come one from christopher udyambo and the second one by akimayova akin i think i saw your hand as well as kenya niri so maybe we have the three questions in a row okay i thank you very much uh peter for that very interesting uh presentation that covers quite a lot but i'm just wondering um when we're talking about knowing africa through african literature and wondering about the polemics that were raised about um knowing african and knowing africa through african literature uh by the works of chinuaezu at all towards the colonization of african literature so how do we know africa when we already contesting the imaginations of african writers who are also trying to know africa through certain forms of aesthetics what would be your comment on that thank you yeah and we collect and then akin mayor we cannot hear you properly okay can you hear me now yes yeah yeah yeah okay can you hear me yeah excellent all right i i want to react to well beautiful talk to star wheat thank you very much professor peter and it's thought provoking i want to react to the question of knowing possibility of knowing africa or not knowing africa i i think it's it's i'm not too comfortable with saying you cannot know africa to say that africa is complex is already known in africa because you're already saying something about africa not to be able to know africa means reconfiguring african studies is impossible so what i want us to begin to do is to begin to speak to the complexity of africa and in speaking to the complexity of africa means we're going to be taking aspects what we had in the past is generalizations and over generalizations so if we begin to take aspects of africa they were gradually speaking to africa and about africa i don't feel comfortable when we say we cannot know africa africa is knowable that's why we're discussing africa africa has multiple facets africa has multiple aspects africa is dynamic in its culture and i think we need to begin to settle for that so that even if it is a very minute part of africa we speak about that is africa that is an aspect of africa so to to to say we cannot know africa um maybe maybe he wouldn't sit well with with some person like me we can know africa gradually we can begin to speak about the aspects of africa and i think that is what reconfiguring africa is all about it means we're going from generalization and over generalization to speaking particular and to speaking specific about africa thank you thank you so much then we can you and then it's your turn again [Music] hello okay i am kenyan jerry and i am so excited to be part of this conversation and um especially when it's one that deals with knowing africa first i am blessed to have studied literature at the university and i would authoritatively support uh professor simatei when he says that africa is quite complicated why because for instance we come from the exact same country with professor peters mate but we don't have the same culture and if we were to look at literature as the only source of understanding the african person we would have a very hard time because you first must understand peter as a different entity from kenya and jerry his way of doing things is so different from mine and certainly his literature would be affected from his creativity that of course comes from his environment and that of his culture then a lot has been told about africa but still depends on who was telling our story if you read the history of africa you'll always realize that it is always biased depending on who was telling a story i am so excited right now to know that most africans are telling their story and now we will no longer have that kind of and victimization where we think oh they said bad things about us no no no they said the things they said they wrote the things they wrote depending on where they came from and they have all the rights the writer has the right to kill a story and i'm just very excited to be part of this conversation and thank you thank you yeah i think those are very very you know very good and great comments by the way um you know is right i mean um and and so is uh uh my confirmed from nigeria because you see the the the big question about african literature already literally in general is that this is not this is not um well this this is not this this is not information as in you you you you go and read african literature in order to know africa you you don't go and read african literature in order to get some uh you know details about africa like i said you know it's not an anthropological uh you know a textbook where you're like okay let me check you know of god and when when i when i when i read it i will understand the ikibo society we are saying that literature is also you know complex in its wrong way it relays you know it relays um uh information in its own special way as a literature and and so we cannot say that today i'm going to to take uh things fall apart and from there i will know about the hebrew culture because literally it's also literally you know it it it complicates its own uh relay of information and realities so um what we are actually saying like you know the question that cj was asking what you're actually saying is that we we cannot pick a novel for example you know uh petals of blood by lukewa and say that this one will give us a window into what happens in in in kenya we should be able to say okay this is a novel and it complicates its own presentation of of of of of realities so so the literature that we must read as literature and at the same time we are like okay let's see what what does it tell us about uh you know the cultures and and and values of of kenyan people like indian is saying you know goku will write and um you know inject a lot of uh values and and stuff like that but but which are also like representative of of kenyan cultures in a way you know we should be able to say okay yeah i think i i i get a claims of of what happens in kenya by reading you know i when i i i went to the to the so-called african you know five you know five what is it five colleges uh i've transparent project um uh a professor of history actually invited me to go and you know talk to his students about the novels you know i i i think we discussed like three novels by google adiongo at us by mr monkey and and i asked him why are you teaching you know uh uh history students novels and he told me that actually through novels we we we understand you know the the the the very you know difficult issues about the country you know and i was like oh that is very interesting so so like you know students come and you're like before we start teaching you history of east africa can you read what young girls you know the river between or petals of platinum so forth so so there's that element but it's not that he's going to to to take the the information that comes out of that uh of that novel as historical fact no it's it's the argument was that people will understand you know the values you know and types of of kenyan people through this before we we start talking about mao mao and our colonialism you know the fastest kenya and so forth so i think yeah these are very interesting uh suggestions and uh yeah i'm happy about them yeah thank you so much uh for this eloquent discussion and as uh my dear colleague um doctor kogan i said in the beginning don't run away but have to head towards the discussion in this sense we still have time for another round of comments or questions maybe also covering other aspects that we've heard oh yes i want to invite my dear colleague tiku muhammad um to our discussion and if there are two more then we can make it a row and the last row before peter will answer again clarissa one more otherwise we close the question round okay then we close it here and have question from dico and can you hear me yes good um thank you professor uh peter schmidt ah thank you susan thank you everyone um a lot has been said about especially i mean most of the discussions are going back to the past but i'm interested in um the comments like the quotation started by the professor from ghana uh from bell hooks so um professor mata what do you think of the future when you look at the present kind of literary writings coming up from africa i just want to i'm curious about that what do you think of the future i mean most of the writers now you you see that they are just in a way um joining part of the global conversations about climate about um uh raise issues about so many things global justice and the other skills i don't know what do you think of the future what's better than that thank you thank you so much [Music] that's a very good question and um you know um there's a lot of debate you know um about uh like future african writings or you know like i mentioned about the new the new imaging writings and which are actually like um uh you know written from what i call translocational spaces and uh you know in most cases you know these these are young writers were writing from whatever europe you know us wherever and um there's a lot of debate you know like uh writers are even like uh fashioning themselves that that you know the debate about their you know um uh is it afropolitan sim that that kind of thing but i think what's happening is um we have a situation where you know uh we have writers who who get like um you know forecast by western publishing houses and western uh uh you know um prices you know and and and they kept like you know they they get elevated because of that but we also have writers who struggle you know back home in ghana in kenya and so forth with with local publishers who might not even be able to like you know market them and so forth what i'm seeing is a situation of course where writers you know from you know the so-called diaspora whatever that means i mean people are writing from the different uh uh global locations begin to tell stories about about about about africans in those places you know and those stories uh begin to fail in in in that sense you know the more we have these writings from these locations the more we begin to imagine a different reality for africa you know in that sense that people will will write about issues facing africans in vienna in you know in germany things like that the question really is what what is what is the reality you know what is reality back home you know and these stories that are written you know back in in ghana and uganda and somalia how do they impact on the global understanding of the global idea about africa okay let me not use the time knowing africa this time around but what do they tell us about africa and what the other stories tell us about africa you know stories that are told in london by our own writers and who are focusing on on cosmopolitan realities and it's true they they live those lives and they have to write that story so i'm seeing a situation where we we're going to have a very interesting complex you know um sort of stories that emerge from the different places but about africa through presence of europe through prisms of you know africa and so forth so i i i think we're going to have very interesting stories can we put it that way thank you yeah we have uh clarissa and uh abby hello good evening thank you peter for a great presentation and thanks susan my my question is how does literary studies or comparative literary studies does it need to reconfigure itself as well in its way of knowing africa so now i'm just i'm just quoting you one thing is the language question which remy already raised but the other thing um spivak in in her book death of a discipline uh well quite some time ago already said there is the market is kind of very eager to have diversity and the other so it becomes very commercialized how is there resistance possible and how does literary studies also react to that thank you yeah maybe the last question also in peter from abyssalia you reply and have the final say okay thank you very much suzanne um very good presentation professor simatai this presentation reminds me of one of the discussions we have at the lagos acc on the redefinition of africa um this happened about a few months ago and what this makes me to um understand and to agree that truly there's a problem of epistemology about africa uh because number one even for us to be talking about this at this stage as a problem for us to be talking about this even in this project in this old cluster thing to be talking about the definition of africa then truly there's a problem about the knowledge of africa but i think that in a heavily heterogeneous society like africa it is just normal for us to have this kind of challenge of course we know there are about over 2000 cultures in africa alone how do we then conclude that this is what we mean when we define africa as an entity so i think what we need to look at is the is that africa needs contextualization um we did a workshop in lagos cc about two months ago and we talked about developed development in africa and one of our takeaways was that um development in africa is um needs to be contextualized um because we do not need to compare what we have in africa with um that of the other parts of the world and i think that is the same thing that is a kind of extension to the definition of what africa is and i can bet that this discussion will continue for god knows when until we can all come together and decide on what we sh we mean by africa and i don't see us doing that the best we can do is to continue this kind of discussion so thank you very much thank you ah thank you family i i think that's that's a great comment actually right i think we we can actually agree that um like someone said um i think we can agree that um africa is unknowable and that's why you keep we keep saying ways of knowing africa you know those kind of things but but the other the other well that was you know not being seriously but but i think the other question really is um one that uh is captured by uh you know uh that that equal phrase in insidious and novels you know you know that if you want to if you want to if you want to see is it like if you want to see a mask dancing or something like that if you have to move from one position to the other thing is that it's as complex as that and and we can only approach it from the different perspectives if you want to is it like even is it like the world is like a mask dancing you want to understand it you approach it from the different directions and i and i think that's it about africa um but i think you're also right the question is why why why why why why these issues of knowing africa why am i not knowing europe or something like that but as we're in this business of reconfiguring african studies i think the the point really is let's know it from the different disciplinary perspectives thank you yeah thank you very much i i don't see any uh further hand and we are also very much close towards our end so uh of course we like covered this huge field of knowing and then we have who knows um what is silenced by the knowing but imagination goes beyond that silencing and and we could go on for hours and we hoped like to see your book published on this very soon and maybe we could also have a workshop engaging more because that was really inspiring and so many thanks to all of you and again like happy new year to all of you may this talk inspire us for an ongoing brilliant nice warm future collaboration take good care thanks again to all and particularly of course to peter and the entire team who made this impossible thank you thank you susan thank you everybody
Origins & context
- Title
- New Year Lecture 2022 - Prof. Dr. Peter Simatei Tirop
- Language
- English
- YouTube playlist
- New Year Lecture
- Date
- January 31, 2022
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