Studies in Contemporary Africa

Founded
1956
Seminar Number
435

The seminar provides a lively forum for historians and social scientists engaged in the advanced study of Sub-Saharan Africa. Faculty and visiting scholars from Columbia University and neighboring institutions actively participate in the monthly evening sessions. Seminar discussions often focus on theoretical and comparative approaches to the study of colonial and contemporary states, processes in political mobilization and leadership, the impact of the international community, and the roles of gender and cultural identities.

Chairs
Professor Gregory Mann
gm522@columbia.edu

Professor Hlonipha A. Mokoena
ham2101@columbia.edu

Rapporteur
Samuel Daly
Columbia University
sfd2107@columbia.edu

Welcome

Meetings

04/30/2013	207 Knox Hall 6:00 PM	Prof. Zoe Crossland, Columbia University

04/03/2013	509 Knox Hall 6:00 PM	Save the Girl Hawker, Save the World: Gender, Generation, and Child Labor in Colonial Lagos Prof. Abosede George, Barnard College Abstract Abstract This talk centers on a period in the history of Lagos when elite Lagosian women, later in collaboration with the British colonial social workers in Nigeria, tried to reshape the idea and experience of girlhood among the Lagosian working class. In looking at the interconnected development projects of women reformers and colonial social workers, I am interested in exploring two related questions: how girls worked and what work they did. On one level, I mean to investigate the literal labor activities that girls performed and the constitutive relationship between gender, class, generation, and labor practices. On another level, I seek to discuss the various ways in which girls were ideationally constructed and the function of particular ideas of the girl for elites, colonists, politicians, and the state.

03/14/2013	Faculty House 6:00 PM	Lucas the Baboon Boy, and Other Stories: Towards a History of Popular Racism in South Africa, 1910-1948 Roger S. Levine, Sewanee - University of the South Abstract Abstract This talk explores a historiographic intervention I have framed around the concept of "popular racism" – popular understandings of race, gender, and segregation in the post-Union era of burgeoning African urban migration in early to mid twentieth century South Africa. The project has its origins in the fascinating case of Lucas, the Baboon Boy. Lucas was an African man who claimed to have been raised by baboons, and around whom a firestorm of publicity arose in the late 1930s. This frenzy was abetted by police affidavits, scientific testimonials by leading South African anthropologists, and laudatory accounts by prominent novelists. The project also examines the Black Peril Scare on the Rand in 1912, which, as historians have argued, reveals deep-seated fears about the continuation of European social, political, and sexual dominance, but also a public discussion of the necessity of segregation and the complex and highly ambiguous contradictions at its core. Lastly, it turns to children’s literature, to literary magazines, such as Voorslag, and to mass market magazines such as The Outspan and The South African Ladies Pictorial.

02/12/2013	Faculty House 6:00 PM	A History of Motherhood in Nineteenth Century Uganda Rhiannon Stephens, Columbia University Abstract Abstract This paper traces the very different ways in which people mobilised motherhood as a social institution and an ideology in central and eastern Uganda as they faced the rapid economic and political changes of the nineteenth century. It argues that this was a period of contradictions in relation to motherhood’s role in the societies of the region. Motherhood remained central to social cohesion, particularly in the east, in a continuation albeit not unchanged of a much older tradition. This was reflected in the power wielded by queen mothers and in the political and ritual importance of a woman’s children to her kin. At the same time and especially in Buganda, men sought – often through violence – to undermine both the queen mother’s authority and the importance of her family in the kingdom. These tensions came to a head at the end of the century with the imposition of colonial rule and the exclusion of women from power.

09/20/2012	Faculty House 6:00 PM	Exile Knows no Dignity: Migration, Locality and Belonging in an African Postcolony Bruce Whitehouse, Lehigh University

10/19/2012	Faculty House 6:00 PM	Apartheid's Art School: Art, Education and the Beauty of 20th Century South Africa Daniel Magaziner, Yale University
		Notes: Abstract: This paper considers the trajectory of the education of African art teachers both before and during apartheid in South Africa. It argues that although the government intended art education to promote the notion of African difference, art educators saw the study and teaching of art as essential to the development of creative, modern individuals. Rather than experience apartheid schools as simply oppressive, these teachers and their students saw them as a potentially privileged forum, where a new African subject was under development. Apartheid's Art School thus asks new questions about 20th century South African intellectual history and attempts to reorder - or break apart - old binaries about the nature of social and intellectual experience under apartheid.
10/30/2012	Faculty House 6:00 PM	Lucas the Baboon Boy, and Other Stories: Towards a History of Popular Racism in South Africa, 1910-1948 Roger S. Levine, Sewanee University
		Notes: Abstract: This talk explores a historiographic intervention I have framed around the concept of "popular racism" – popular understandings of race, gender, and segregation in the post-Union era of burgeoning African urban migration in early to mid twentieth century South Africa. The project has its origins in the fascinating case of Lucas, the Baboon Boy. Lucas was an African man who claimed to have been raised by baboons, and around whom a firestorm of publicity arose in the late 1930s. This frenzy was abetted by police affidavits, scientific testimonials by leading South African anthropologists, and laudatory accounts by prominent novelists. The project also examines the Black Peril Scare on the Rand in 1912, which, as historians have argued, reveals deep-seated fears about the continuation of European social, political, and sexual dominance, but also a public discussion of the necessity of segregation and the complex and highly ambiguous contradictions at its core. Lastly, it turns to children’s literature, to literary magazines, such as Voorslag, and to mass market magazines such as The Outspan and The South African Ladies Pictorial.
11/27/2012	Faculty House 6:00 PM	New State, New Methods, New Directives...Time for a New History? Rethinking Portugal’s Colonialism Eric Allina, University of Ottowa
		Notes: Abstract: Portugal is well and widely known for having been ‘first in and last out’ among the European colonial powers in Africa. Enhancing the image of a colonialism unlike any other is the perception that Lisbon’s rule not only lasted longer, but also diverged sharply from others in the imperial pantheon, above all in the sphere of what contemporaries called ‘native policy.’ Yet the close examination of such policy offered here, focusing on the watershed interwar years, shows that Portuguese colonial rule closely tracked the trajectory of other powers. Looking behind the bluster of ministerial decrees and examining the ideas and actions of administrators in the field exposes how the Portugal’s colonialism cleaved much more closely to the norm than has been understood. Deviation from that norm came late and was the product of post-war transformation rather than any deeply rooted difference.

Studies in Contemporary Africa

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