This issue of the ACAS bulletin is devoted to generating and engaging debate about race and racism in Africa, a subject that is too often silenced and taboo in popular culture, as well as political and academic discourses in Africa and the West.  It is probable that much of the difficulty in such discussions, a difficulty experienced similarly throughout the rest of the world to varying degrees, is that race is not just an historical phenomenon.  Rather, race is an active and powerful social category that frames and shapes identities and social hierarchies in the societies in which these discussions are so difficult to find, let alone sustain.  Race is an uncomfortable topic for those who wish to benefit silently from their racial privileges, whether in the academy or not, and race is also a troubling topic for those who wish to suppress their racial identities in an effort to improve their social standing by assimilating or passing into the ranks of more privileged racial strata, particularly by denying blackness, or Africanity.  As such, race and racism in Africa today have numerous and consequential policy implications that are ignored at our common peril.

These phenomena are certainly not unique to Africa.  The categories that colonial racism constructed and invented as part of its processes of rule, its “rule of colonial and racial difference,” continue to operate powerfully to apportion power and well-being in the world today.  This is a central point of many new works on post-Civil Rights and post-Independence racial hierarchies.  A good example is the recent work of Howard Winant, The World is a Ghetto, where he argues that global anti-colonial movements created the false impression to some that racial social cleavages had diminished or dissolved, when in fact they persist and have in many cases solidified.  While his exemplary exposition might raise questions for some about genealogies of knowledge production, the central point is inescapable and salient.

The collection of essays in this ACAS Bulletin are an attempt to join in recent efforts to break the taboos and openly discuss race and racism in Africa.  This was perhaps most forcefully achieved by the Durban World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2001, which the US and Israel strategically withdrew from and boycotted.  The conference Final Report noted “with concern the continued and violent occurrence of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that theories of superiority of certain races and cultures over others, promoted and practiced during the colonial era, continue to be propounded in one form or another even today,” and stood in “solidarity with the people of Africa in their continuing struggle” against these forms of racism and xenophobia.  The Final Report also acknowledged the role of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery, as well as colonialism, nationalism, and continuing economic underdevelopment and marginalization in the continuation of racism as a problem in the world today.

That same year, Mahmood Mamdani added to this important debate with his provocative work, When Victims Become Killers (2001), in which he sketched a schematic model of invented social hierarchies and ethno-racial conflicts for much of the continent.  Regional scholars raised specific concerns with this ambitiously broad model, but few have taken up the broader implications of the conversation Mamdani initiated.  Then the CODESRIA Bulletin (1 & 2, 2004) devoted a double issue to addressing some of these concerns, and succeeded in furthering and pulling together several diverse aspects of this debate.  Much of this, necessarily, centered on post-apartheid South Africa, where both much and little has changed in terms of racial hierarchies and distributions of power in the contemporary social terrain.  Here too, readers partook of the ongoing Mbembe-Zeleza debate, some of which is concerned with the critical underlying questions of whether anti-colonial political economy or post-modern and post-structuralist models provide the most relevant frameworks for critical intellectual and political engagement in Africa today.  While it is important that new models be employed and formulated from within African contexts, there is also concern that we should not be too quick to throw out useful analytic tools whose political efficacy may have dwindled in the current global alignment.  Most recently, Martin Klein edited a collection in the Canadian Journal of African Studies (39:1, 2005), which contributed to the historiography of race and the legacies of racial chattel slavery in diverse regions of Africa.  These works showed the significant “persistence of forms of servility,” and the fact that: “Most slaves stayed where they were.  Slave-master relations were gradually renegotiated…” (Klein 2005: 2-3).  This uncomfortable persistence would rather be ignored by those with privilege today, but cannot be contained indefinitely, so a strategic return to history is important in this context as we seek meaningful paths to a just future.

This should be a central concern: that the hierarchies of slavery, colonialism and their attendant racial models did not simply evaporate upon their juridical dissolution, but continued in cultural and political significance into the current moment.  This was one of Winant’s central points, and in so doing he echoes the concerns, widely uttered at the very moment of decolonization, that what was really occurring at that time was simply neo-colonialism, or colonialism by new means.  Perhaps this is why the 1960s and 1970s cautionaries about neo-colonialism were largely supplanted in the academy by the 1980s with talk of post-colonialism, and scholars today too often ignore the critical work of Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and many others so often read as activists/leaders rather than scholars.  Yet, it must also be said that some of the best critical theorists writing today, who might be labeled post-structuralists by some, do not necessarily make these sorts of errors of academic segregation, but include these formulations and the movements that sustained them in their current critiques of power and identity in the present (Sylvia Wynter 2003, Zine Magubane 1999, 2004).  A recent work by Maghan Keita, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx, argues that race plays a central role in constructions of knowledge about Africa, and the epistemologies that enable them, meaning that race is not just experienced “on the ground,” but also by the academic and/or public media that represent [or misrepresent] these realities.

This special issue comes at a time when tensions around race in Africa are high.  While there is pointed disagreement about it, the conflict in Darfur, Sudan has significant racial tones, and many would argue that conscious mobilizations of race are a primary factor in this conflict.  The legacies of race and its ongoing significance can also be seen in places like Zanzibar, where electoral violence recently erupted again; or Morocco, where issues of African migration to France and Europe have flared into increasingly open conflict and questions of government mishandling and “dumping” of migrants in the desert.  What is needed, and all too often absent, in these contexts, is nuanced and historically informed analyses of how race and racism play a part in these social issues, moving beyond efforts to dismiss race as a factor, but also beyond those who would deploy simple notions of black and white as well.  Together with critiques of the French and Moroccan governments’ responses to issues of African migration, there needs to be discussion of Moroccans demonstrating outside detention centers chanting “We are all Africans,” and analysis of the impact of North and West African hip-hop and music generally on European cultures to the north.  These discussions are especially timely as this issue comes to press, in the wake of the burning of the Paris suburbs and ghettos throughout France as low-income primarily African neighborhoods protested unemployment, police brutality, isolation and frustration brought on by racism and discrimination woven within the French social fabric.

The collection presented here is necessarily fragmentary and incomplete, and calls inherently for more discussions along these lines, more open debate, wrestling with the most contentious of social issues of race and racism throughout the continent and spilling into its Diasporas.  We open the issue with a timely historical contextualization of the Darfur conflict, by Alex de Waal.  Excerpted from the new introduction to the second edition of his Famine That Kills, this portion of his general introduction attempts to connect his earlier analysis of famine and conflict in the region with the cataclysmic events now unfolding in Darfur.  In the process, he provides readers with rare historical insight into some of the elements that lie behind this disturbing situation, including the role of Gaddafi’s militarization of Pan-Arab identification as he recruited soldiers for an ‘Islamic Legion’ to fight in Libya’s war with Chad, some of which is now spilling into and contributing to conflict in the Darfur region, and even Chad itself.  De Waal’s analysis is particularly poignant at this juncture for those of us trying to assemble some critical perspective on what is happening in Darfur, even as we work to support intervention into and resolution of the continuing human rights atrocities there.  Thanks are extended to de Waal for his kind permission to reprint his explosive analysis here, and readers may also wish to see his extended work on this subject, with Julie Flint, in: Darfur: A Short History of a Long War (2006).

Babacar M’bow further stirs some of these issues into our much needed debate, as he engages in general terms the layers of both European and Arab racial formulations vis-à-vis Africa and Africans.  Too often scholars stop at the point of deconstructing the European use of anti-Arab stereotypes to legitimize their chattel slavery and colonial depredations, rightfully refusing these reductive formulations.  Yet, this has resulted in an inability by most to engage pre-colonial, non-Western, Arab, Jewish and Christian forms of racism and anti-Black sentiment, much of which provided the epistemological gateway for Europe’s subsequent “scientific” racism.  The recent work of Jonathon Schorsch (2004), demonstrates through analysis of Jewish texts, carefully embedded in their Islamic and Christian contexts, that anti-black views were well established in the pre-Columbian Mediterranean and Ottoman worlds, less regularized to be sure than they would become in the following centuries, but solid and consistent nonetheless.  The Hamitic hypothesis, and its gradual racialization is carefully traced, largely for the first time in such depth. M’bow challenges us to take seriously the works of C. A. Diop and Chancellor Williams, and the millennial expanse they traverse in their analyses, so that we can engage the Arab and white South African models of racial formation in the continent.  This is not a simple anti-Arab intervention, but a necessary call to engage in issues which the academy has studiously chosen to ignore for the most part.  Vigorous critiques of historical Arab racial attitudes and practices, as well as acknowledgements of less common anti-racist tendencies, are necessary components for contemporary co-existence.  Future installments in this long-term dialogue will undoubtedly include critical Arab perspectives on these issues as well.  Thank you to Babacar for gracing our issue with his honest and tough-minded engagement of difficult social issues, whose implications for politics reach far across wide portions of the African continent and beyond. 

Turning to Zimbabwe, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni pushes in another important direction, by calling into question the ruling party’s nationalist invocations of Pan-African anti-colonialism, and showing how, as has happened throughout many regions of the continent, these ideas have often become slogans papering over authoritarian rule.  Gatsheni calls on us to move past facile colonizer-colonized dichotomies into discussions of the complex and layered ways in which communities resisted and yet necessarily engaged colonialism at political economic and epistemological/cultural levels. Anti-colonial discourses that reproduce colonial binaries of rural/urban, or reproduce the fetishization of technology and modernity may not be that anti-colonial after all.  Since colonialism has necessarily and fundamentally altered the cultural landscape of Africa, the question is less of rejecting than critically engaging these legacies, beyond the very dichotomies imported by the European epistemologies that underpinned colonial transformations.  Here again, the reader is lead directly from theoretical reformulations, in this case about colonial racial and nationalist discourses, to direct policy concerns in the political struggles of Zimbabwe today.

Jesse Benjamin and Lindah Mhando both offer examples of the intersection of theoretical interpretation with policy and power in Africa today.  Benjamin looks at three strands of narrative on coastal East African identity, post-modern Western perspectives on invented identities, ‘neo-nationalist’ Swahili perspectives on Swahili identity, and subaltern counter-hegemonic Mijikenda perspectives on the same issues.  While the former two perspectives generally discounted nineteenth century Swahili and Arab racial formations under the aegis of growing British and French imperialism, the latter grounds its analysis in this period and accurately identifies its legacies in shaping today’s social hierarchies and social categories as they play out in power struggles over land, historiographic representation and economic power.  Similarly, Mhando stretches the theoretical categories of colonialism and identity formation to encompass the better part of modernity, with direct implications for contemporary understandings of both race and gender.  Mhando deftly illustrates the direct relationship between the theoretical tools we use and the understandings of social stratification we construct, underscoring the necessity for socially committed scholarship. 

Finally, Meredeth Turshen rounds out our collection with a review of Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.  Showing that Chua reflects the pro-democracy and globalizations of Thomas Friedman, Turshen reveals a broad conflation of the basic categories employed, such as tribe, ethnicity and nationalism.  Also flattened are broad differences of “minority” groups under colonial domination and acting as agents of colonial domination, as well as differences between white settler and colonized subjects, all of whom are generalized within the same schemata.  As did several of the authors of this collection, Turshen’s review raises questions about many of the categories currently in use even in critical conceptualizations of Africa, and the politics embedded in the division of the world according to them.  This again reveals a powerful connection between epistemology and discourse on the one hand, and political economy and power on the other, or put another way, between theory and politics.

When a colonial model based on the notion that “only the whip can civilize the black,” and which therefore saw extermination and subjugation as ‘proper,’ ‘civilized’ and ‘modernizing,’ ruled Africa and much of the world for the greater part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Lindqvist 1996: 20 and passim), could the legacies of colonial racism be anything but extreme and manifold.  Add the central element that British and other colonial models were explicitly based on developing local collaborators in their divide and rule policies, and the racial-colonial legacies become diverse and persistent.  Unless scholars and activists more rigorously and thoroughly engage these living legacies, we are doomed to witness their reincarnation in ever new and old forms.  It is hoped that this collection, in line with those that recently preceded it, will help further promote dialogue and debate on this most contentious of issues.  Refinements, disputes, additions and corrections are warmly welcomed for future issues on this important subject. 

References:

Cesaire, Aime, Discourse on Colonialism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1955.

de Waal, Alex, Famine That Kills: Darfur, 1984-1985, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

de Waal, Alex, and Julie Flint, Darfur: A Short History of a Long War, London: Zed Books, 2006.

Keita, Maghan, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Klein, Martin, “The Persistence of Servility,” Canadian Journal of African Studies (39:1), 2005.

Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Racism, New York, The New Press, 1996.

Magubane, Zine, “Is the Post in Post-Apartheid the Post in Postcolonial or the Post in Postmodern?” paper presented at the 2nd Annual Conference of the Coloniality Working Group at Binghamton University, April 22-24, 1999.

---- Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Mamdani, Mahmood, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Report of the World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Durban, South Africa, 31 August – 8 September, 2001.

Jonathan Schorsch, Blacks and Jews in the Early Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Winant, Howard, The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II, New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Wynter, Sylvia “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3(3), Fall 2003.