Situating Africa: An Alter-geopolitics of Knowledge, or Chapungu Rises

Only when universities on the continent fully recover and take their rightful—and leading—role in the production of African scholarly knowledge will African studies in the rest of the world become a truly strong field

(Paul Tiyambe Zeleza 2009:133).

This journal issue marks the beginning of a new partnership with African Arts as Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, joins the editorial consortium. As the National Research Foundation Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa,¹ I will work with collaborators based largely on the African continent to produce one issue of African Arts per year. This first issue has grown out of conversations with artists, curators, and writers based in Uganda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa at a publishing workshop organized by Rhodes University, as well as an institutional collaboration with Makerere University in Uganda. It also includes a dialogue with colleagues in Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, the US, Uganda, and Angola/Portugal. A core goal of our work is to significantly increase the participation of authors based on the African continent as a way of strengthening our discipline with a scholarly approach that takes seriously an alter-geopolitics of knowledge as a decolonial concept (Koopman 2011; Mignolo 2002).²

At the time of writing and compiling the articles for this African Arts issue, Rhodes University, or UCKAR—the University Currently Known as Rhodes (a name that registers the lobby for an official name change)—was disrupted by heavy-handed police presence and the intermittent sound of rubber bullets being shot at students. Along with other campuses across South Africa, this place of knowledge-production became, for many students and staff, a site of intense trauma and violence (Fig. 1). Shortly after the nationwide higher education protests peaked and the militaristic response of the police severely deepened the crisis, students and colleagues at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, similarly experienced a lockdown accompanied by violence and state control when President Yoweri Museveni officially shut down the university (Marks 2016; Niwamanya 2016). How do we grapple with knowledge-production when the people producing knowledge—students, lecturers and researchers—are being faced with physical harm in response to the fact that they are, in part, challenging epistemic violence? How do we write about the arts of Africa in a global academy that still privileges Western epistemological traditions when questions that are being asked on the African continent about ways of situating Africa, African knowledge, and African universities³ result, at times, in the spilling of blood? How do we teach from this body of knowledge that we and others in our discipline produce when the people we teach and learn from are not safe in our places of learning?

1.

Lee-Roy Jason. Documentation of the police response to the Fees Must Fall protests on the University of Witwatersrand campus. 2016.

Photo: Lee-Roy Jason

In this First Word and in the dialogue “Reaching Sideways, Writing Our Ways,” I reflect on the current status of the scholarly field of the visual and performing arts of Africa at this particular time of revived calls on the African continent for the decolonization of knowledge (Heleta 2016; Mbembe 2016). It is significant to recognize that the recent protests in South African higher education, which incorporate a critique of curricula and pedagogical approaches in South African universities, were historically preceded by the call in the late 1960s by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo, Henry Owuor-Anyumba, and Taban Lo Liyong at the University of Nairobi to decenter Western modernity and British literature, to prioritize African literature by abolishing inherited structures, and to place Kenya, East Africa, and Africa at the core of the curriculum in order to focus, first and foremost, on the situation of Kenyans and Africans (Garuba 2015; Ngũgĩ 2012; Gates 1984:10–13).⁴

Refusing both a universalist defense of post-place constructions of knowledge and a continentalist defense of reductionistic notions of knowledge, I contemplate how Africa is situated in our discourse. My use of the word “situating” refers to...