Introduction: The politics of whiteness in Africa

This part issue presents the first comparative conversation on the politics of whiteness in Africa.¹ It draws together a collection of ethnographic studies that reveal the multifarious manifestations of white African subjectivities, power and privilege in their historical and geographical specificity. This initiates a wider discussion that places the heterogeneity of African whiteness in minority contexts alongside the staying power of white power, privilege and supremacy. In this way, this collection provides insight into the ways in which the shift from colonial-era political dominance to postcolonial minority status has affected issues of race on the continent. This moves Africa to the forefront of the study of race, power and the post-colonial moment.

Since the end of white colonial rule in Africa, the racial divide between white and black no longer neatly maps onto the divide between dominator and dominated. Racist, colonial-era regimes have been replaced by black, majority governments. Yet historical, racialized inequalities persist on the continent, and new social arrangements and institutions, as well as the global reach of capitalism, seem to reproduce racial disparities on the ground.

Recent events in South Africa demonstrate the urgency of this reality. In early 2015, a movement largely made up of black students mobilized against the memorialization of imperialist Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. What became known as the #RhodesMustFall movement set in motion a series of similar protests across and beyond campuses, some turning violent and threatening already-fragile social cohesion in the country. While initially directed against conspicuous monuments to white power, these movements gave voice to discontent about persisting patterns of racial as well as class and gender inequality, which continue to shape South African society more than twenty years after the official end of apartheid. In many cases, this translated into a call for the 'decolonization' of the South African academy, and society at large.

While such emancipatory language is politically evocative, it has, however, only limited ability to effectively explain and challenge prevailing structures of racialized power and meaning in the absence of minority rule.

How, then, are we to understand the manner in which ideas of and practices surrounding race continue to shape political, economic and cultural processes in Africa–either implicitly or explicitly? Why do powerful white minorities remain a reality in various black majority contexts? And, crucially, how should racialized inequality in the postcolony be studied, its continuities and discontinuities analysed, conceptualized, and explained? Certainly, in the light of recent events in South Africa–from #RhodesMustFall² to recurring xenophobic violence–these are apposite and timely questions.

We argue that the use of whiteness as a conceptual prism to study race offers a productive way to analyse the contemporary operation of race and manifestations of racial inequality on the African continent. Whiteness is here understood as a configuration of power, privilege and identity consisting of white racialized ideologies and practices, with material and social ramifications. This focus on racialization and how power and privilege are bound up with the social construction of identity–that is, on the distinct yet connected constitutive elements of whiteness–is an important conceptual move. It allows us to begin to answer questions of how race operates in postcolonial contexts and how its power and meaning-making is contested. Moreover, as the articles show, it brings the heterogeneity of whiteness and of white communities into view, thus working against the essentializing tendencies that in the past have earned whiteness studies the ire of some scholars.

The conceptualization of race by whiteness studies offers a vocabulary that challenges the unmarked and normative nature of racial hegemony, thus rendering its racial politics analytically tangible. Empirically, this collection's focus on the African context in which whites are a small minority, but have historically exercised power disproportionate to their size, provides a unique opportunity to study the changing dynamics of whiteness in a context in which it is often explicit and self-conscious–in contrast, arguably, to that of the global North. Existing scholarship on whiteness in Africa has been concentrated on South Africa, while research...