African intellectuals

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thankdika Mkandawire
Keyword(s):  
African Intellectuals

Exiled from History: Africa in Hegel’s Academic Practice

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 165-194
Author(s):  
Tom C. McCaskie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Academic Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
Shadow Cast ◽  
To Come ◽  
African Intellectuals ◽  
Educational Formation

Abstract:Many scholars, African and otherwise, have excoriated G.W.F. Hegel for his dismissal of Africa from history and progress in his lectures on the philosophies of history and religion. This has been done by quoting his texts and setting his words in the context of his influence on nineteenth-century European imperialism and racism. A different approach informs this paper. I treat Hegel, a complicated person, as a working university academic with a career to make and an overriding desire to publicize his own thought. I provide biographical insights relevant to these matters, and go on to examine specific texts about Africa that Hegel either sought out or chanced upon, read, misread, excerpted, used, and misused in support of his theorizing and apriorism. Attention is paid throughout to the construction, recording, and dissemination of Hegel’s lectures, and to aspects of their reception and authority in the educational formation of selected modern African intellectuals. I argue that such persons and African studies more widely are still trying to come to grips with the long and enduring shadow cast by Hegel over both the past and present of the continent.

Lost and Found

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-64
Author(s):  
Bennetta Jules-Rosette ◽  
J.R. Osborn
Keyword(s):  
African Art ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Lost And Found ◽  
Evidential Support ◽  
Front Stage ◽  
Historical Antecedents ◽  
African Intellectuals ◽  
European Museum

This chapter examines systems of classification supporting the front stage of museum exhibits. It traces the roots of European museum taxonomies found in colonial expositions and early museums of African art. It discusses the floorplans and displays strategies of French museums and contrasts them with theories proposed by anthropologists and African intellectuals. Museum classifications reflect inherited epistemologies and those of their era. These classifications are translated into labels and strategies for staging displays exhibitions, and expositions, that is, into exhibitionary complexes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of reconfigurations of the museum landscape with contrasting evidential support. It explores French museum closings and their deconstruction in relationship to historical antecedents and problems of labeling and reinstallation.

First International Congress of Africanists

1963 ◽  
Vol 6 (01) ◽  
pp. 38-42
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
International Congress ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Disciplinary Boundary ◽  
Preliminary Planning ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Ghana ◽  
African Intellectuals ◽  
Boundary Lines

After more than two years of preliminary planning, the First International Congress of Africanists convened at the University of Ghana, Legon, on December 11, 1962. More than 600 scholars and observers attended the sessions, and both the size of the Congress and its organizational problems make an adequate report difficult. This brief summary by the editor of the Bulletin has been compiled with the assistance of other ASA members present in Accra; it attempts to convey a sense of the conference atmosphere as well as record its formal sessions. The proceedings of the Conference will be published by UNESCO. The conference opened with an address by President Nkrumah in which he stressed the importance of African studies in revitalizing Africa's cultural heritage, and in developing a sense of nationality and Africanness. He considered in detail the development of African studies as a serious academic study, the coming of age of African intellectuals, and the necessity of utilizing a subject such as sociology in planning for an African future, contrasting this with anthropology which he felt had little to offer modern Africa. His speech helped to establish a tone for the conference; in addition to academic matters strictly defined the conference participants found themselves concerned with such questions as the role of African and non-African Africanists, differing viewpoints of English and French speakers, and geographic and disciplinary boundary lines. Perhaps naturally at a first international conference, there were many preliminary problems to sort out before serious scholarly discussion could take place.

Oral Traditions as Sources

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Belcher
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
The Face ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
African Intellectuals ◽  
Oral Information ◽  
Creative Endeavor

The use of oral tradition is a distinctive and essential element in many fields of African studies. History must acknowledge it; literature sees it as the medium for much of the indigenous creative endeavor across African cultures; anthropology and its cousin disciplines rely upon oral information for their understanding of traditional societies. An appreciation of the value of the oral tradition as a source across disciplines involves two efforts: first, a survey of the reported oral tradition as available and documented in past periods, and second, a review of the principles and practices involved in the collection, analysis, and presentation of the oral tradition. The paucity of written records has been grounds for dismissal of the notion of African history—most notoriously in the case of Hegel, who in ignorance wrote off the home of the human species—and more recently a cause of pride among African intellectuals who have asserted the value of the oral tradition in the face of skepticism rooted in prejudice and too often in overt racism. An appreciation of the value of the oral tradition threads its path between extremes and occasional controversy. The era of the smartphone has made the documentation (and creation) of oral tradition almost too easy. Past generations made do in different ways. Their reports should not be dismissed, but studied; they are the available background to information collected in the modern era. Accurate collection and critical analysis are the essential tools for the understanding of oral tradition.

The World the Students Made: Agriculture and Education at American Missions in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1930–1960

2007 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd H. Leedy
Keyword(s):  
Agricultural Education ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Dominance ◽  
The World ◽  
African Intellectuals

In 1930, the same year in which the segregationist Land Apportionment Act was passed, the governor of Rhodesia addressed a meeting of representatives from the various missionary organizations operating in the colony. He proceeded to argue against the sort of education that might create a class of African intellectuals who would eventually challenge white economic and political dominance:The nature of the intellectual advance to be aimed at should be one of which advantage can be taken in the ordinary daily lives of the people, and should be a step forward in a field already familiar to them, rather than a violent transition into fields which belong to a different type of civilization. As the life of African peoples is to a preponderating extent agricultural, education should aim at making them better agriculturalists and better able to appreciate all the natural processes with which agriculture is connected.

Welfare Associations and other Instruments of Accommodation in the Rhodesias between the World Wars

1966 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Hooker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
African History ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Organizational Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
African Intellectuals

During the 1930's, especially in the early depression years, welfare associations of African intellectuals, for the most part Government clerks or mission employees, were formed in Northern Rhodesia. Originally conceived as guilds of conscious elites, what many Europeans of the period distastefully referred to as ”detribalized natives“, these associations quickly became, or were considered to have become, organs of wider significance. Many persons who later rose to prominence in politics and the trade union movement acquired their first organizational experience in these short-lived, rather underestimated protest bodies. As the name suggests, there were many resemblances to nineteenth-century British workmens' associations; certainly in the line of rail towns stretching from the Falls to Ndola, the Duke of Wellington's convictions were resurrected by Government a century later in another land. When Government directed its basilisk gaze at these associations in 1933, they quickly succumbed. Still, one is justified in studying them, if only because they serve to increase the number of Africans in African history.

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