African Studies Centre

ASC seminar by Dan Hodgkinson, Luke Melchiorre and Marcia Schenck. Dan Hodgkinson, Luke Melchiorre and Marcia Schenck launch the Africa special issue: Student activism in an era of decolonization.

'The articles collected in this special issue, and first presented at a workshop entitled 'Student Activism Reconsidered' at the University of Oxford in July 2016, seek to develop understandings of African student activism during this critical period by revisiting postcolonial Africa's first student protests and experiences of university life. Many of the debates that these students initiated on campus would come, in subsequent decades, to be rearticulated on the national political stage through former students who went into prominent public positions or who set up or entered governing or opposition parties. As such, appreciating the ideas, behaviours and dreams that these people adopted during their university experiences can provide important insights into how they responded, as professionals and political leaders, to the challenges of economic crisis, structural adjustment and increasingly repressive authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s.'

Please note that, because of recording difficulties, the final portion of the seminar (by Marcia Schenck) is not included in this podcast. The full journal issue is available here (and Hodgkinson and Melchiorre's introduction is open access): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/issue/450ED9F309972E6B034AEB155590EA9A.

ASC seminar by Olumide Popoola and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf. For the last seminar of Michaelmas Term, we were joined by author Olumide Popoola and publisher Bibi Bakare-Yusuf for an interview with Olly Owen on Popoola's new book, 'When We Speak of Nothing' and the bigger vision of Cassava Republic Press, a Nigerian publishing house which aims to generate the 'African archival future.'

Book abstract:

Best mates Karl and Abu are both 17 and live near Kings Cross. It’s 2011 and racial tensions are set to explode across London. Abu is infatuated with gorgeous classmate Nalini but dares not speak to her. Meanwhile, Karl is the target of the local ‘wannabe’ thugs just for being different. When Karl finds out his father lives in Nigeria, he decides that Port Harcourt is the best place to escape the sound and fury of London, and connect with a Dad he’s never known. Rejected on arrival, Karl befriends Nakale, an activist who wants to expose the ecocide in the Niger Delta to the world. Increasingly distant from happenings in London, Karl falls headlong for Nakale’s feisty cousin, Janoma.Meanwhile, the murder of Mark Duggan triggers a full-scale riot in London. Abu finds himself caught up in its midst, leading to a tragedy that forces Karl to race back home. When We Speak of Nothing launches a powerful new talent. The stream of consciousness prose, peppered with contemporary slang, captures what it means to be young, black and queer in London. If grime music were a novel, it would be this.

ASC seminar by Oliver Owen (Oxford) This ongoing research showcases oral history work with surviving Nigerian veterans of the British Army's 81 and 82 Divisions who fought the Japanese in the jungle war in Burma. It foregrounds their memories and interpretations of the experience, and uses popular culture of the period, particularly soldiers' songs, as part of a public engagement project. It also highlights two legacies of war service: The institutionalisation of the postcolonial military, and ethno-regional political consciousness in the central regions of Nigeria.

Links to resources mentioned in podcast:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/aug/10/forgotten-army-world-war-two-west-african-soldiers-burma-video

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80022228

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeracorrespondent/2011/08/2011828135228487172.html

http://nsibidiinstitute.org/

http://www.commonwealthveterans.org.uk/

ASC seminar by Edith Ojo (Brighton based arts freelancer) & Nicola Stylianou (MoDa, Middlesex University) The Fashioning Africa project at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (2015-2018) aimed to develop a new collection of African dress from 1960-2007. This was an area where existing British museum collections were weak to the point of virtual non-existence. The project was innovative in other ways too, because, as a collaboration between the Museum’s World Art (formerly ‘Ethnography’, later ‘Non-Western’) and Fashion & Textiles sections, it cross-cut conventional curatorial divisions and allowed the Museum to transcend the problem of reproducing the split between ‘African dress’ and ‘Western fashion’. Moreover, it aimed to explore new ways of collecting by devolving decisions over what to acquire to an external panel, thus aspiring to look beyond expertise in the field of museology to co-produce the new collection with diverse interested parties bringing other forms of knowledge to bear. This paper will address why African dress hasn’t been systematically collected in the post- independence period and explore the methodology of co-production.

Edith Ojo is an Arts Consultant based in Brighton who has always worked closely with diverse artists and art organisations across the region. She also currently sits on the Fashioning Africa Collection Panel, Brighton Museum. Prior to becoming a freelance consultant, Edith worked at Arts Council England for several years as Diversity in Arts Relationship Manager. She holds an MA in African Studies (SOAS), and a BA in Fine Art (Chelsea College of Art & Design). She is also currently a Trustee at a local Brighton Community organisation, Trust for Developing Communities.

Nicola Stylianou was awarded a PhD in 2013 for her thesis ‘Producing and Collecting for Empire: African textiles at the V&A 1852-2002.’ She went on to work at the V&A on a two-room display about the African objects in the V&A collection. She currently works at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. In January she takes up a position at the University of Sussex to work as a post-doctoral researcher on Making African Connections in Sussex and Kent Museums: De-colonial futures for colonial collections. She is a participant in the Fashioning Africa Collection Panel at Brighton Museum, a project to acquire African fashion and textiles from 1960-2000.

ASC seminar by Yusuf Kajura Serunkuma (Makerere University) Exploiting the craft and aesthetics of popular culture—music, poetry, paintings, monuments, coffeehouses, fliers, flags, popular narratives, national celebrations, cultural sites, book fairs, everyday practices such as vehicle tinting—through recent ethnography in Hargeisa (March-October, 2015), literary and discourse analysis, this study examined the ways in which Somaliland nationalism is imagined and mobilised after the 1991 civil war. It springs from the understanding that nationalist sentiments are not born, but are mobilised in time and space. Setting out to answer questions relating to history, identity and aspirations of the people of Somaliland in the 1991 nationalist imaginary, this study broadly concludes that Somaliland is constructed and represented mimetically as a foil for Somalia. Specifically, in its secessionist ideations, Somaliland is mobilized as standing for (a) a stricter Islamic public identity, (b) victims of a failed ant-colonial nationalist project, which ended in genocide and human rights abuses, and (c) a ‘progressive’ state; democratic and free, of literatis and open to the outside world, anti-extremism, and stable.

ASC seminar by Florence Bernault (Sciences Po)

ASC seminar by Judith Byfield (Cornell University). Byfield offers a riveting narrative of the unexpected convergence of interest between educated Christians and market women in forming the Abeokuta Women's Union in Nigeria, setting this in a wider context of gendered political mobilization in post-WWII Nigeria.

Prof Yemi Osinbajo inaugurates the ASC's new International Advisory Board with a lecture on 'The Challenges of Human Development in 21st Century Africa'. On 12 October 2018, the African Studies Centre inaugurated an International Advisory Board to further links between the Centre, and institutions and organizations on the continent. As part of the event, Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, SAN, delivered the lecture recorded here. We very much look forward to working with members of the Board (listed below) in the future to further grow the Centre!

- Mr Tito Mboweni – Finance Minister, South Africa

- Madame Monica Geingos – Lawyer and First Lady of the Republic of Namibia

- Mr Gareth Ackerman – Chairman, Pick’n Pay, South Africa

- Dr Charlotte Scott – Former First Lady of Zambia

- Governor Nasir El-Rufai – Governor of Kaduna State, Nigeria

- Ms Linda Mabhena-Olagunju – Founder and Managing Director, DLO Energy Group (Pty) Ltd, South Africa

- Mr Alex Duncan – Development economist and Director, Policy Practice, UK

- Mr Ivor Agyeman-Duah – Economist and author, Accra, Ghana

- Prof Ibrahim Gambari – Former UN Under-Secretary for Political Affairs; former Nigerian External Affairs Minister

Suad Musa kicks off a new term of ASC seminars by launching her new book. Al-Hakkamat Baggara women hold an instrumental position in rural Sudan, wielding agency, social and political power. This book uncovers their significant, but widely overlooked, role during the war in Darfur from the 1970s, and into today’s continuing conflict. The author examines, in depth, the influence they exercised through composing and reciting poems and songs and through informal speech and other symbolic acts and analyses their impact in the social and political domain. Challenging the pervasive portrayal of women as natural peacebuilders and their roles as passive and submissive, she highlights how Sudan’s state government co-opted al-Hakkamat Baggara women to lobby on its behalf, to rally for war and to advocate for peace. They played a critical role in war, and understanding how they can contribute to the resolution and resettlement processes is vital to sustainable reconciliation and post-conflict transformation of the unstable state.

Booklaunch of Democracy in Africa which provides the 1st comprehensive overview of the history of contemporary democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Speakers: Professor Nic Cheeseman, Oxford University; Professor Stephen Chan OBE, SOAS; Dr Phil Clark, SOAS. Chaired by Professor Catherine Boone, LSE. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.

During this event the author Professor Nic Cheeseman and a panel of experts will explore some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today in the wake of recent events in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.