A hundred years ago, Africa was in the throes of colonial and imperial imaginations that sought to exalt Western powers after the devastation of their First Great War, sometimes called a World War. ...While the nineteenth century was a period of terrible expansion of the colonial order, subjugating many independent territories and nations to colonial rule and colonial capitalist expansion, the early twentieth century was a period of consolidation. The League of Nations' mandate over Cameroon found expression exactly a hundred years ago. Parts of this territory would later be cut off to form part of Nigeria and others would fall elsewhere. It was an experiment in mapping others' territories at will, without any regard to the wishes and aspirations of indigenous people. The latter were seen as sub-beings who lacked the moral weight ascribed to human beings and whose maltreatment thus did not have any moral implications at all. In the same year, Niger formally became Colonie du Niger. This was necessary for the reordering of territories in this part of Africa by the French. Parts of Niger west of the Niger River were moved to the newly created Upper Volta colony and other parts were ceded to the French colony of Chad. A few years later, the French Upper Volta colony would be divided up amongst the neighbouring French colonies. This was a period of reordering for the purpose of asserting the imposed French sovereignty over large numbers of pre-existing kingdoms and empires. This conjures up a picture of what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2009) calls dismemberment, in that it is disorienting and induces dizziness just to try to follow the reterritorialising of the land to satisfy French imaginaries. It must have left the victims confused and perhaps even culturally dead, as Cheikh Anta Diop (1991) would put it, since such reordering of territory could not happen without cutting long-lasting ties, pulling asunder pre-existing cosmologies, and disrupting local notions of territory and citizenship. This illustrates the fundamental issues about the making of modern Africa that should not be ignored when explaining the stubborn persistence of interstate and intra-state conflict, terrorism, armed banditry, corruption, mal-governance, instability, disease
One of the main implications of the push for transition from the monoculture of Eurocentric scientific knowledge towards the ecology of knowledge is to force us to pose the question: what does a ...decolonial turn in International Relations (IR) entail? This article grapples with this question in light of growing demands for a decolonial turn in knowledge and power. The aim is to meditate on this question with a view to open up new avenues for a structured conversation on decolonising IR and its theory. This imperative to decolonise is linked to the question of epistemic justice with implications for the epistemological structure underpinning IR, methodological frameworks for the study of IR, theoretical outlines and the teaching of the discipline. Epistemic justice is a necessity alongside historical justice for those on the margins of a world system constructed with the help of imperialism, systematic enslavement and colonialism. This article discusses the question of the decolonial turn in IR in the hope of stimulating debates on the views of the margins regarding the present state and the future of this area of knowledge, and thus move us closer to an ecology of knowledge and power.
Towards an Intellectual Adwa, the Isandlwana of Today Zondi, Siphamandla
International Journal of African Renaissance Studies - Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity,
07/2022, Volume:
17, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
On March 1, 1896, an African people in modern-day Ethiopia successfully mounted a spirited defence of their sovereignty, freedom, and self-determination against the marauding Italian colonial empire. ...This put a spanner in the works in relation to the Italian ambition to join other European powers, such as Britain, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, in subjugating Africa on terms set out at their Berlin Conference in 1885. It embarrassed the Berlin plan and caused questions to be asked-even at that point already-about the imperialist designs on Africa. This, like the defeat of the British at the Battle of Isandlwana seventeen years earlier, also did much to spread awareness among Africans regarding self-determination and the nefarious ends of the colonial empires' claims that they were spreading modern civilisation. The memory of the successful Haiti Revolution of 1799 refreshes our resolve to be free. As we commemorate these key moments in history, we are inspired to reaffirm our commitment to the equality of human beings and the end of all forms of colonialismincluding the British and US colonial occupation of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. This is a determination to free ourselves, by any means necessary, in order to realise the renaissance, the renewal of our dreams to prosper and be free. African renaissance is being given new impetus by the memory of these and other examples of belligerence. We have long known that ours is a battle against forgetting. It is a battle to not have our history of inspirational efforts, battles, and exploits erased from the books and from our memories. To remember, in this case, is to re-member; it is to reconnect with the memories that are meaningful for our strategic intent to be free, prosperous, and united into the future. This edition is dedicated to this intellectual Adwa, Isandlwana, Haiti, and so forth. It is dedicated to the memory of efforts that inspire work towards freeing Africa and its diaspora today from all remaining vestiges of coloniality, including the invasion of the mental universes by Eurocentrism.
Analyzes Vineet Thakur and Peter Vale's book South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations, a recipient of the 2021 Francesco Giucciardini Prize.
As African countries battled the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, one of the questions that were raised was whether the state was taking a central stage in the affairs of society, especially solutions to ...major problems. The question was triggered by the fact that there has been a decline in the capacity, role and prestige of the state in Africa for decades. Yet it seems that the responses to Covid-19, following the WHO guidelines, have placed the state at the centre, without dislocating other stakeholders like the private sector and the civil society. This paper uses the evidence from a select number of African countries of different sizes in various regions of the continent to provide an empirical perspective on the role of the state in Covid-19 responses in 2020 to answer the question of whether Covid-19 has occasioned a return of the state, thus reversing the neoliberal designs in favour of a lean and mean state in Africa.
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