Beiheft 32

History Making in Africa

Edited by V. Y. Mudimbe and B. Jewsiewicki

Cover image: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, by Ernmuhl at lb.wikipedia (uploaded November 8, 2005)

+ V. Y. MUDIMBE and B. JEWSIEWICKI, Africans' Memories and Contemporary History of Africa, History and Theory, Beiheft 32 (December 1993).

No abstract.

+ JEAN-LOUP AMSELLE, Anthropology and Historicity, History and Theory, Beiheft 32 (December 1993), 12-31.

This article tries to assess the component of French anthropology influenced by the Marxist paradigm, while also showing the links of Marxism to functionalism. With the collapse of the Marxist problematic one must establish a new anthropology that gives greater attention to history in "primitive" societies. It is also necessary to rethink some of the central problems confronting anthropology: in particular, to reevaluate the links between anthropology and development; to locate constructivism in the discipline; to measure the extent of phenomena of reappropriation in exotic societies; and to examine the aptness of binary oppositions such as "state" versus "stateless societies," and "individual" versus "community." By thus questioning some of the central images of anthropology, one is led to pose the problem of "primordial syncretism," that is, the diffusion of institutions spreading from a common cultural ground or background, as well as the problem of the links between universalism and culturalism. At the end of this itinerary, and by taking the example of the pair "people of power" versus "people of the earth," it is argued that the prevalence of the phenomena of reappropriation in exotic societies is explained by the universality of certain values.

+ DAVID SCHOENBRUN, A Past Whose Time Has Come: Historical Context and History in Eastern Africa's Great Lakes, History and Theory, Beiheft 32 (December 1993), 32-56.

The essay examines precolonial, colonial, academic, and post-independence African voices that describe and promote special versions of the past in one part of eastern Africa. By studying the connections among African intellectuals, local discursive and political constraints, and overseas discursive and political constraints which emerged between 1890 and the present, the article outlines many of the themes that constitute academic African history. With this critical historiography at hand, we may see how struggles for control of discourse on the African past are breaking free of an essentially European-derived conceptual framework by attending to local and regional forms of historical action. Both male and female competent speakers participate, often in radically different ways. Studying them, and those who listen to them and support them, will historians of Africa a sense of African actors' historical creativity as well as their arts of resistance.

+ JOCELYNE DAKHLIA, Collective Memory and the Story of History: Lineage and Nation in a North African Oasis, History and Theory, Beiheft 32 (December 1993), 57-79.

Collective memory is not always synonymous with tradition on the one hand or with the recollection of collective history on the other. The example of a South Tunisian oasis, located in a region with a strong tradition of literacy, shows a process of rupture with autochthonous (non-Arab and pre-Islamic) history, a rupture based on the reappropriation of scholarly works of colonial administrators. Local memory is essentially based on the history of family and lineage origins, ideally founded on Shereefian ancestry, a genealogy going back to the prophet Mohammed. This lineage memory, which a long sociological tradition has described as scheduled to merge into the nation, has in fact been constantly built up, activated largely by colonial and contemporary ethnography. The forgetting that affects other dimensions of the past, and in particular the integration into the nation, should not be interpreted as a mere vanishing but as a form of mute claim.

+ DAVID COPLAN, History Is Eaten Whole: Consuming Tropes in Sesotho Auriture, History and Theory, Beiheft 32 (December 1993), 80-104.

For some time, historians and anthropologists have been collaborating on the excavation of Africa's history through the analysis of transcriptions of unwritten sources. A major obstacle has been the forms, the generic structures of African historical discourse, which constitute a style of historiography culturally contrasting with our own. This paper examines two central vehicles of this historiography: the temporal, situational, and generic elaboration of historical "master metaphors," and the performative contexts and processes in which they are necessarily expressed. Here, the formal and semantic resources and procedures of African historical narrative are analyzed in certain performance genres of the Basotho of southern Africa (Lesotho). In revealing how Africans' experience of events is rhetorically encoded and interpreted, the discussion emphasizes the importance of performance as the constitutive context of African historical discourse, militating against the separation of history from the aesthetic of its representation. More important, it demonstrates how historians working in an empirical, positivist narrative framework can go beyond attempts to glean isolated "facts" and referential content from African texts, and use what I have termed "auriture"--performative realizations--to draw out the ideological and structural context that informs African constructions of history.

+ PATRICK HARRIES, Imagery, Symbolism, and Tradition in a South African Bantustan: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha, and Zulu History, History and Theory, Beiheft 32 (December 1993), 105-125.

During the precolonial period Zulu identity was based on a set of cultural markers defined by the royal family. But European linguists extended the borders of Zulu, as a written language, to include the peoples living to the south of the Tugela river in the colony of Natal. Folklorists, anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists, as well as European employers, adopted this view of the Zulu as a people or Volk. Following the defeat of the Zulu kingdom in 1879, and the decline of the royal family, migrant workers increasingly returned home with this new notion of what it meant to be Zulu. This essentially European interpretation of the word was embraced and spread by Christian converts who, in the twentieth century, sought to mobilize an ethnic political following. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi has continued with this tradition. In his speeches he represents the Zulu in primordial terms as a bounded group that historically has occupied both Natal and the old precolonial kingdom. The bantustan of KwaZulu, delineated and defined by the policy of apartheid, is presented as the natural heir to the Zulu kingdom and the Inkatha Freedom Party is portrayed as the guardian of the essence of Zuluness. An attractive historical self-imagery encourages people to define themselves in an exclusive manner as Zulu. Firm values and standards provide an ontological security and a network of assistance for sons abroad. Through a martial imagery, Buthelezi has represented the seven million Zulu as historically the most powerful obstacle to white supremacy. But since the resurgence of nationalist politics in the mid-1980s, and especially since the democratization started in 1990, Inkatha has attempted to attract the Zulu as a people in opposition to the ANC and their allies. This has most visibly resulted in a violent struggle for power; but it has also led to a virulent struggle over what it means to be Zulu.