Seminars

While transition-era concessions that protected privileges in South Africa’s formerly white public schools were rationalized on preventing white exodus to private schools, the resulting maintenance of a bifurcated public system has produced a recent boom in “low-fee” private schools driven by Black exodus from township school conditions unconducive to aspirations for social mobility. In this talk, I draw on long-term ethnographic research in and around a low-fee private school in Cape Town’s oldest township to explore the complex maneuvering Black youth and families do to navigate the city’s racialized, competitive marketplace of schools. I show how, in their efforts to work toward competing aspirations for both mobility and equity, Black students and families are burdened with a double bind between school “choice” and education crisis. I argue that the coupling of school desegregation with devolution and marketization has ostensibly deracialized access to privilege without fundamentally dismantling racial capitalism, enabling the persistence of apartheid schooling geography and limiting the redistribution of educational resources, despite the advent of nonracial democracy.

Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of colonialism across the African continent and the world's first Black socialist state. Utilising materials from Ghanaian, Russian, English, and American archives, Nana Osei-Opare offers a provocative and new reading of this defining moment in world history through the eyes of workers, writers, students, technical-experts, ministers, and diplomats. Osei-Opare shows how race and Ghana-Soviet spaces influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana's transformational socialist, Cold War, and decolonization projects to achieve Black freedom. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Mistaking Order for Anarchy: Territory, Mobility and Security in the Sahel challenges the common sense that territorial governance is a necessary foundation for international security. The book examines statebuilding projects in the West African Sahel, from the 19th to 21st centuries, as a context in which the territorial spatial logics of modern international order can be put into relief. Like other arid zones, order and security in the Sahel have depended more on the preservation of mobility through space than control over space. By examining relationships between political order, security, and the production of space, the book shows not only that stable forms of social and political order do not necessarily require territorial control or definition, but also that the territorialization of order is itself a transformative political process whose relationship to security is variable and contingent. This has important implications for contemporary theories and practices of international security. McNeill argues that understanding and responding to global security conditions requires delinking security, conceptually and practically, from the project of territorial control and containment.

In interwar Burundi, successive waves of gregarious locust swarms preyed on fields and grazing grounds, exacerbating the vulnerability of its (non)-human inhabitants. The locusts also constituted an acute governance issue for the Belgian colonial administration, which struggled to devise efficient modes of acridian containment and destruction. By using the locusts being-in-the-world as a vantage point, this paper proposes to study the complex interactions between insectile hazards and the segregated human communities who had to face them. The 'interspecies contact zone’ can function as a framework to make sense of multilayered more-than-human encounters occurring in the fraught context of colonial societies.

This presentation is about the archaeological and political history of South Africa's Mapungubwe National Park, with a particular focus on the reserve's role during apartheid as a rehabilitation camp for gay military conscripts and recreational drug users. The talk examines the much-neglected role of the apartheid military in fashioning a notion of normalcy founded on arbitrary distinctions between black and white, gay and straight, as well as 'normal' and 'abnormal.'

Rarely do archivists meet the people who provide their archives, or historians the individuals who created the documents they study, and too infrequently do the archivists who provide order to the files discuss their contents directly with the scholars who make use of them. This meeting will be a conversation between all three— and with the audience, many of whom are researching subjects that will provide future perspectives on current history. This conversation will feature elements of the life, work, and archives of Winifred Armstrong, an early member of the African Studies Association and a long-term participant in the Columbia University Seminar, Studies in Contemporary Africa, from the perspective of an archivist who catalogued some of her collections, a historian who worked in them, and the woman in question herself.