20th Annual Meeting of MAAAS
University of Kansas
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 03
1:20 to 3:00: Decolonizing Archives (Commons, Spooner Hall)
Bridging Continents: Africanist Librarianship in the 21st Century; Brian D. Moss, University of Kansas
This presentation will examine the state of information exchange between the U.S. and Africa, focusing primarily on the evolving role of Africanist librarianship in the U.S. What types of materials do academic libraries in the U.S. provide to their users, both in terms of creative literature and in terms of scholarly output from and about Africa? Just as importantly, what sorts of glaring gaps exist in those collections? How are those collections formed, how are they shared within and among universities, and what is the outlook for improved access in the future? Attendees will be encouraged to share stories of success and failure from their own institutions’ libraries in an effort to help further this important dialog regarding how academic libraries in the U.S. can better support Africanist scholarship in the 21st century.
Disseminating Public Health and Development Knowledge through the Community Tool Box; Ithar Hassaballa, University of Kansas; Stephen Fawcett, University of Kansas; Davison Munodawafa, World Health Organization; Peter Phori, World Health Organization; Christina Holt, University of Kansas
The Community Tool Box (CTB) is a free, online resource that provides people with tools for planning public health and development efforts. It is used globally, with 60% of its 4.5 million unique visitors from outside the U.S. A particular challenge for international NGOs is securing resources for capacity building, particularly in Africa. Culturally-sensitive tools for addressing public health and development are needed by global health partners.
The World Health Organization in the African Region (WHO-AFRO) has adopted the CTB as one of four key Health Promotion Strategies. As a WHO Collaborating Center, the University of Kansas team identified global health tools for planning public health and development efforts and provided Africa-based examples of efforts in the region. Using WHO-AFRO’s Framework—these tools are then utilized by African practitioners to address public health and development concerns. Through the CTB, public health practitioners are provided with free access to culturally-relevant and problem-specific guides for taking action. Qualitative data of the CTB online traffic—using Google Analytics—will provide an indicator of success in dissemination.
Preliminary data suggests there are differences in accessing the tools among countries based on their language, geographic location, and other country-specific factors. There is a significant increase in utilization of CTB tools in English-speaking countries, but far less use in French-speaking countries. Due to the recent Arabic translation, the CTB has seen an increase in Arabic-speaking North Africa. This results suggests that easy access to culturally-specific capacity-building online tools catalyze the planning of public health and development efforts. Practitioners in Africa are also invited to share their own frameworks and tools within the CTB in order to create a culture of free, available information to be used within and outside the continent.
Decolonizing Biodiversity Knowledge: Digital Enabling of Botanical Data for West Africa; A. Townsend Peterson, University of Kansas; A. Asase, University of Ghana; Jean Ganglo University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin; Pierre Radji, University of Lomé, Togo; Omokafe Ugbogu, Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria; Sainge Nsanyi Moses, Tropical Plant Exploration Group, Cameroon
Biodiversity data are notoriously imbalanced in their distribution: countries rich in biodiversity tend to be quite poor in biodiversity information, and biodiversity-poor countries tend to be therepositories of the bulk of biodiversity data for the rest of the world. These imbalanceshark back to the colonial history of tropical portions of the world. Africa is an important case in point in this regard: the great bulk of African biodiversity information is held in biocollections institutions in Europe and North America. What is more, those repository institutions have tended to be rather slow in digitizing their biodiversity data, and rather reticent to share openly what data they do have in digital formats. The West African Plants Initiative represents an effort led by West African botanists to digitize, enrich, share, and use data on West African plants that will involve capture of plant data at 5 West African institutions and 6 European and North American institutions. Theeffort will, in effect,‘decolonize’ one portion of biodiversity knowledge for West Africa, and will provide a template or prototype for parallel efforts for other regions and other taxa.
Decolonizing Understandings of Rhetoric and Nation Building in the Work of Kenya’s Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission; Lindsay Harroff, University of Kansas
On December 30, 2007, moments after Kenya’s electoral commission announced incumbent President Mwai Kibaki won the presidential election, violence erupted across Kenya. Although immediately sparked by the contested election results, the violence resulted from and revealed longstanding social divisions and political injustices. In an address to the National Assembly, newly elected president Mwai Kibaki identified the crisis as a “turning point” and called for the construction of a “new Kenya.” As part of this effort, the National Assembly established the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) in October 2008. In this paper, I analyze the TJRC’s final report to better understand the challenges to constructing a “new Kenya,” as well as rhetoric’s potential contribution. Numerous scholars study rhetoric’s role in defining national identity and constituting a community (Beasley 2004, Charland 1987, McGee 1975, Mercieca 2010, Taylor 2004). However, much of the rhetorical scholarship focuses on relatively stable Western societies and a correspondingly narrow perception of national unity and the rhetoric that constitutes it. Understanding rhetoric’s potential contribution to nation building after Kenya’s post-election crisis disrupts the traditional binary between ethnic and civic nationalism and reliance on a rational attachment to a set of political practices, institutions, and values as the foundation of community. In particular, the construction of a “new Kenya” must account for the irreducibility of ethnic identity in politics and recognize a violent and divisive past. I argue the TJRC operates through the rhetorical performance of “truth telling,” which promotes national unity by fostering identification among individuals.
3:20 to 5:00: Decolonizing the Past (Commons, Spooner Hall)
Religious Practice and Decolonial Imaginaries in Equatorial Africa; John Cinnamon, Miami University
This paper looks historically and methodologically at equatorial African religious imaginaries and practices as forms of knowledge. I begin with a broad question: how have religious practices, particularly in northern Gabon, sought both to engage and decolonize “externally imposed” forms of knowledge? In what ways are colonial and postcolonial religious movements grounded in African ways of knowing and imagining the world while at the same time bearing the indelible imprint of colonial knowledge production? To frame this paper, I draw on Vansina’s longue-durée “equatorial African tradition,” Guyer’s “traditions of invention,” MacGaffey’s “conceptual challenge of the particular,” Bayart’s “extraversion” (both pre-colonial and colonial), Balandier’s “colonial situation,” as well as Tonda’s insights into divine healing and “the modern sovereign.” All of these approaches provide important insights into equatorial Africa systems of knowledge and power. More concretely, I outline shifting northern Gabonese religious practices up to the mid-twentieth century late colonial moment. These included ancestor “cults” and initiation societies increasingly under duress, composed power objects, sorcery and anti-sorcery, missionary Christianity, and Bwiti and Mimbiri that had been borrowed and adapted from southern Gabonese peoples. This complex, competitive, and shifting religious landscape in turn provided the context for the late colonial Mademoiselle movement that swept across northern Gabon in the 1950s. But as Peel (2000) has argued, the effort to reconstruct African religious knowledge and practice is hampered by our sources—written accounts almost always filtered through colonial prerogatives or more recent African accounts (and ethnography) that necessarily internalize colonial and postcolonial knowledge.
Conflict versus Cohabitation: Uncovering the African-Indigenous World of Sixteenth Century Mexico; Robert C. Schwaller, University of Kansas
From the earliest years of conquest and colonization, Spanish authorities viewed their African slaves and servants as natural antagonists to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Early legislation prohibited intermarriage between Africans and Native Americans and even barred Africans and their descendants from living within indigenous communities. The view that Africans were detrimental to indigenous groups has been preserved and perpetuated thanks to the voluminous documentation produced by conflicts between these two subaltern groups. However, underneath the history of conflict lies another history, one that exists in contrast to the colonial ideal of separation. Using a close reading of various Spanish colonial sources, this paper argues that the longstanding colonial perception that Africans and Native Americans lived in a constant state of conflict reflects the perpetuation of Spanish prejudice and overlooks the strong ties that could be forged between these two diverse people groups.
In fact, from the outset of Spanish colonial rule shared occupations and residence helped forge ties that eventually facilitated African-indigenous families. Overtime, these families served as cultural crucibles that helped produce afro-indigenous individuals capable of navigating across the diverse social and cultural spaces of early colonial society. Overall, this paper deconstructs the persistent prejudices produced by Spanish colonialism to help recover the history and experiences of Africans and their descendants in the earliest colonies of the Americas.
“Archdemon” Walter E. Owen and Edith B. Downer: Rewriting Missionary Experience in Colonial Kenya; Hannington Ochwada, University of Kansas
This paper attempts to interrogate the contributions of Walter Edwin Owen, archdeacon of Kavirondo (hereafter Abaluyia and Joluo communities) and the lady missionary named Edith B. Downer’s experiences in western Kenya. Owen arrived in East Africa as a missionary in 1904, serving in Bunyoro, Kyagwe, Ankole, Toro, and Budu in the Uganda Protectorate before being moved to work among Abaluyia and Joluo in present-day Kenya. On the other hand, Downer arrived in Lagos, West Africa in 1907 where she severed her first missionary assignment on the continent before being moved to Uganda in 1914. Downer was transferred to work among Abaluyia and Joluo in the early 1920s. Owen was an energetic and intellectually perceptive missionary whose tenure with the Anglican Church was shrouded in a myriad controversy. On the other hand, Downer was that enigmatic women who performed tasks that straddled the gender divide with amazing easiness that defied the ubiquitous Victorian perceptions of domesticity. Suffice to mention that Owen was a forceful but tactful cleric whom the British administration and the CMS diocese within the region found difficult to contain and use himto turn Christianity to the service of the colonial state. On her part as a female educator in western Kenya Downer was involved in vocational training and activities such as carpentry and animal husbandry that defied not only the Victorian perceptions of domesticity but also conflicted with the indigenous African gender relations during that period. While Owen persistently pointed out the misdeeds of the white settler administration and the CMS studious silence over real and imagined colonial injustices, he also criticized Africans for holding rather tightly onto their indigenous customs he considered incompatible with Anglicanism and the whole mission of European civilization. In her missionary work, Downer made gigantic steps in introducing new skills that would transform the lives of both men and women in western Kenya. Using archival materials from the Church Missionary Society Archives at the University of Birmingham in the UK and other secondary materials I will analyze how cultural and social differences existing between the British missionaries, the colonial state and Africans in western Kenya were negotiated.
Ade-Ajayi and the Study of African History; Bukola Oyeniyi, Missouri State University
This paper spotlights the contributions of Jacob Festus Adeniyi Ajayi to the study of African history. Ade-Ajayi, as he is popularly known, was a pioneer academic historian who, in league with Kenneth Dike and others, championed the struggle to confront the Eurocentric denial of African historicity. As a representative of a generation, Ade-Ajayi’s scholarship focused on the use of oral traditions as credible sources in documenting African history. His scholarship traversed key areas in African history; contributing to our understanding of missions and missionaries, the formation of a new Western educated elite and the transformations that took place in the long and eventful nineteenth century. He was adept at locating the internal forces that drive changes, an orientation that can be described as the “African perspective” of writing, as opposed to the Eurocentric.
The demography of Ade-Ajayi’s scholarship revealed the complexities of institutions, practices, and beliefs that emerged in the processes of European encounters, seen either through the lenses of imposition or African agencies. He engaged in the analysis of the colonial era, which he declared as a mere episode. Where others saw a break in the past, he saw continuity. In this regard, he synchronized the histories of Western and African institutions, without sacrificing African cultures. While maintaining a view of the past, Ade-Ajayi advocated a forward thrust for African study, calling on historians to adopt new tools, new methodologies, and new skills in order to reach the rich ores of African history, which, as he asserted, still remained under the crust of the African earth. He declared that first generation historians merely scratched the surface of African history and that the task of bringing forth the rich ore should be the engagement of modern Africanists.
SATURDAY, 04 OCTOBER
9:00 to 10:40 Ken Lohrentz Graduate Paper Award Presentations (Malott Room, Kansas Union)
Progress Towards Sustainable and Equitable Waste Management at the University of Ghana, Legon; Matt DeCapo, Kansas State University
Waste management at the University of Ghana could benefit significantly from waste separation, composting, and organized recycling systems. There are no hazardous waste disposal sites, and much of the waste generated on campus ends up getting dumped in the bushes or burned. Batteries and compact fluorescent bulbs litter the environment and allow the spread of toxic chemicals. Students studying agriculture are taught about composting, but there has not been a place on campus where they can see these ideas put into practice. We started a composting operation nearby a market on campus and trained the staff to separate food waste from other waste. We would pick up these bins and transport them to our compost site. Many people were educated about how to compost. We gave presentations at conferences to spread awareness about potential solutions to the waste issues in Accra, Ghana. We documented the people scavenging through the dumps. The place where the waste from campus is taken, Abokobi dump site, was photographed and documented. There are large human rights abuses in the waste management infrastructure of Accra. The increasing consumption of plastic that is encouraged by large corporations is resulting in larger volumes of plastic being burned every day, releasing toxic chemicals. People’s attitudes about waste management were documented. A garden was installed near the market to spread awareness. We have found that community based solutions that teach people how to compost, how to organize recycling systems, and why burning waste is so dangerous are the most effective.