Lesson Text

@yaatheplant here, on the colonial nature of African Studies:⁣ ⁣ This was written to supplement ’Study:After The End Of The World’, a pre-recorded conversation between @vodougem and I as part of @guts_gallery ’s fundraising exhibition for @freeblackuni Live on their website now💥We’re really good friends so we joke around quite a bit but also make some points lol 🌱 __________⁣ Text:⁣ ⁣ Gilberto and I met in the metropole- University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Established in 1916, SOAS began as a school of colonial intelligence: teaching language and culture to colonial administrators, military officers, missionaries, doctors, and teachers to be posted to Africa+Asia and uphold the British Empire from within. Thus, the uncanniness of me meeting one of my oldest co-conspirators here is not lost on me. Because of the regulation of access and resources, there’s a long history (documented and otherwise) of anticolonial organzing and relationship building formed while abroad, studying in the heart of empire. We go into this in the talk but its an hour long so for example: Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Leon Damas came to Paris to study in the colonial capital and later formed a literary and political movement of Pan-African intellectuals, known as  "négritude”.⁣ ⁣ While SOAS has since rebranded into a ‘woke’ socially progressive institution, the agenda on which it was founded is still present in the university today- particularly the construction of African studies as an apolitical study of a purely geographical/economic phonemonenon. This cognitive dissonance plays out in the faculty still being mostly white and in my experience, still peddling archaic and ahistorical analyses of Africa with little critical race engagement.⁣ ⁣ This is in line with the work of early Africanists (or better described, agents of empire) such as R.S Rattray, an anthropologist from Oxford. Finding his way in through claims of ‘preservation’ and ‘archiving’, he was a heavy documenter of the Asante Kingdom in the 20th century.⁣

When a new Anthropological Department was set up in Ashanti in the 1920s, Rattray was charged with the task of re-searching the law and constitution of Ashanti, to assist the colonial administrators in ruling the Ashantis. With his office in the Anthropological Department in Ashanti, Rattray set out to do detailed and voluminous research on Ashanti religion, customs law, art, beliefs, folktales, and proverbs. His personal contact with the people of Ashanti afforded him an intimate knowledge of their culture, which is reflected in his thoughtful and nuanced writing on them." ⁣ -Yankah Kwesi, African Folklore: An Encyclopedia, (2004)⁣ ⁣ This ultimately eurocentric, anthropological approach of ‘study’ permeates the African studies field today (even on the continent). Area studies departments are windows into study as a tool of imperialism- a site of knowledge to be conquered and for conquer. ⁣ Many students in African Studies, in line with International Relations/Political Science, later go into governmental, foreign service, ‘diplomacy’ and development work,⁣ ⁣ *looks at camera*⁣ 👁 ⁣ Imagine the consequences of this. ⁣ ⁣ How might we reimagine ‘learning’ for liberatory means?⁣