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African Studies Review 49.1 (2006) 15-30



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What Is Africa to Me?

Knowledge Possession, Knowledge Production, and the Health of Our Bodies Politic in Africa and the Africa Diaspora

(Editors' note: The following essay is the text of the Mashood Abiola Memorial Lecture, delivered on November 10, 2005, at a plenary session of the African Studies Association at its annual meeting. Abena Busia, Associate Professor of English and Woman's Studies at Rutgers University, was selected by the ASA Executive Board to give the 2005 Abiola Lecture.)
At home Death claims
Two streams from women's eyes
And many day-long dirges;
Gnashes, red eyes and sighs from men,
The wailing of drums and muskets
And a procession of the townsfolk
Impeded
Only if the coffin decides
To take one last look at the home.

But here I see
Three cars in procession.
The first holds three—
A driver chatting gaily with a mate,
And behind them, flowers on a bier.
The second holds five, and the third too. [End Page 15]
A procession
Efficiently arranged by the undertaker,
From the brass fittings on the bier
To the looks of sorrow on the mourners' faces.
And Death is escorted
Tearlessly but efficiently
By
Three cars in procession.

Jawa Apronti, "Funeral"
Funerals are important,
away from home we cannot lay
our dead to rest,
for we alone have given them
no fitting burial.

Self conscious of our absence,
brooding over distances in western lands
we must rehearse,
the planned performance of our rites
til we return.

And meanwhile through the years,
our unburied dead eat with us,
follow behind through bedroom doors

Abena P. A. Busia, "Exiles"

In 1976, in the middle of what was for us a second exile, my father's younger brother died. This death was shortly followed by the news of the death of his 112-year-old aunt, the only grandmother we had ever known. In accordance with custom and tradition, a few weeks later, and against the odds, the family in Wenchi, a town in the Brong-Ahafo region in the middle of Ghana, managed to send to Papa in Standlake, a small village in the countryside west of Oxford, the fragment of the burial cloth that was his aunt's and which he would have received on the day of the burial, had he been there. My father had by then lost his sight, but the strip of cloth was put in his hand, and he kept it in his bedside drawer until the day he too went home to his village. When it was given to him, I watched him fingering it over and over and over again, in complete silence. I left him sitting on his bed, fingering that strip in a lonely pensiveness, and was moved to write my poem "Exiles." Funerals are important, and that was the moment I learnt just how important they were. That poem became the first of my poems I ever read to my father (though there had been many others written earlier). It thus also became the poem which made my father aware [End Page 16] that, and express his consciousness of the fact that, his political decisions had affected us, his children, so very personally, in ways he had never realized or anticipated. That is the private face of death from the perspective of exile, and is only one of the generative threads or colors with which these meditations begin. There are many threads running through these remarks I share with you this evening—the question of rituals of mourning is one, the meaning of those practices for those of diasporas old and new is another.

That as communities of learning we are now strategically aware of the need for African studies to be at the center of diaspora studies and for disapora studies to be integral to African studies is absolutely critical. But these days, we are increasingly aware of multiple diaspora, including...

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