Of Prepositions and Propositions: Perspectives on Feminism and the Epistemology of Africanist Collaboration [1]

I have been thinking about the Liberian elections, and will soon have some thoughts to share about that, but in my reflections, I came across an old old thing I once did with someone who remains one of my best friends. Perhaps I should mention that she is very blond, very beautiful, very glamorous, and one of the best goddamn minds that have ever crossed my path: this woman is thinking manifested. So it all goes to making one wonder about various things, dunnit? Anyway, this is what I used to do when I was a baby intellectual in graduate school....
This is an abridged version (the full version is much funnier, but almost twice as long), but it was an interesting archival find for me, and perhaps, to some of those who wonder why I think the way I do, it may provide some answers.
But keep posted for my ruminations on the new Liberian elections.

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by Wambui Mwangi and Elisa Forgey, University of Pennsylvania


This is an abridged version of the paper Elisa Forgey presented on behalf of herself and Wambui Mwangi at the Fourth Annual African Studies Workshop held October 4th at the University of Pennyslvania.


In this paper, we argue for collaboration as an act of scholarship that challenges the structural and material inequalities attending the cross-Atlantic intellectual economy that is African Studies. The central focus on collaboration comes from our awareness that it has become virtually impossible to talk honestly and overtly about Feminism, Africa, and African Studies--or any combinations of these--no matter where one is speaking, except through the lenses of conflict. We, as feminists who study Africa, wanted to write about feminism and about the study of Africa and, in the process, to reflect on what the spillages between the two forms of scholarship could mean to our ways of theorizing within, and practicing, each of them. The world which frames this collaboration is the uneasy relationship between scholars of Africa in Africa and scholars of Africa outside of Africa.

So, rather than discussing African feminisms from the outset, we move towards this discussion via an analysis of the rifts among African scholars of Africa and American Africanists, rifts which in many ways structure the debates between African and American feminists. Conflicts among scholars of Africa and among feminists are related to global economic, social, technological, and political changes that have occurred since the 1960s: decolonization, the growing importance of international
organizations set up by Bretton-Woods as well as of multinationals, the deindustrialization of the Western economies, the advent of "flexible accumulation," and the increasingly rapid and voluminous mobility of peoples, goods, and information. Because of the undeniable material basis and social reality of these conflicts, we have focused upon the "politics of location" as the guiding principle of this study. It is important to state here that we are not concerned with consensus, but rather with the possibilities of productive communication across the various and evolving geographical and disciplinary divides, especially as these crystallize along the fault lines of African "insiders" and Africanist "outsiders."

The project of creating a "we" out of our collaborative enterprise forced us to raise, analyze, and take very seriously the material and historical dimensions of our respective intellectual contexts, while paying heed as well to the limitations and falsifications attending a bipolar split along geographical lines between "insiders" and "outsiders." In order to be able to begin to conceive of collaborative epistemology, we had to work through the social reality of inequality, distance, and disaffection that does, in the end, follow the logic of the Africa/West bipolar opposition. It hardly needs to be said that scholars of Africa in Africa work in contexts wildly different from their Africanist colleagues in the U.S. In Africa, academic freedom is largely a matter of personal courage; in the midst of struggles to gain control over and access to resources, create communities for intellectual interaction, invent ways of disseminating the products of scholarly work while negotiating the treacherous ground of their relationship to state authorities, scholars also have to contend with the ordinary daily business of worrying about the payment of their salaries, trying to organize their work around power interruptions, lack of potable tap water, shortages of gas, fuel, matches, various food items, medicine, transportation, etc. Meanwhile, in the U. S., downsizing, decreasing job and grant opportunities, and shifts in administrative priorities and the criteria for professional advancement have lessened both the structural incentives for Africanist scholars to travel to Africa and the intellectual imperatives to maintain networks of communication with African scholars and African realities. The intensification of the pressure to achieve a "high profile" without (and sometimes in the place of) the benefit of recourse to sustained fieldwork experiences, have led to, in Jane Guyer's words, a "decreasing regular involvement of the theoretical wing in day-to-day Africa, and a certain myopia about the current state of Africa on the part of some in the academy." [2]

This social, epistemological, and material distance raises anew the colonial heritage and neo-colonial context of epistemology, and knowledge production, in general. These rifts and heritages have many African scholars concerned that they are either used as producers of "raw data" by powerful Western institutions and scholars or patently ignored. Many African scholars, such as Ayesha Imam and Thandika Mkandawire (as well as Christopher Miller), [3] have pointed out that the structured exclusion of African scholars from elite institutional practice in the United States is based on the dubious propositions that (1) empirical work is a- or pre-theoretical, (2) that theory enjoys some sort of ontological supremacy over empiricism, and (3) that Africans do not in fact produce what can be called "theory." The assumptions behind these propositions are part and parcel of the structured inequality of the so-called "global economy," and a direct progeny of the colonial era. This historical and political-economic burden became the central issue of a recent exchange between Archie Mafeje, from the American University in Cairo, and Sally Falk Moore, from Harvard, in the CODESRIA Bulletin. It began with a critique by Archie Mafeje of Sally Falk Moore's Anthropology and Africa. In this critique, Mafeje attacks the book for telling a story about the discipline of Anthropology that does not engage some of the important debates among social scientists in Africa. Particularly offensive, to him, are what he calls her contemptuous tone regarding those scholars that have sought to deconstruct the "colonial mentality" of Anthropology, the relative absence of Africans in her book, either as citations or as characters, and the marginal causal role she ascribes to African intellectuals in changing the shape and focus of Anthropology in the 1960s. Mafeje's final paragraph is the most vituperative: "Mudimbe's hostility to colonial anthropology is shared by many African scholars. To harbour such feelings an African scholar does not have to be a trained anthropologist....What is important is the images of Africa they conjure up and their association with the colonial past. Sally Moore mistakenly thinks that this does not matter any longer in the post-colonial era and pours scorn on the `colonial period mentality' critique. These issues are still very much alive among African intellectuals, to whom she seems to pay no attention, as is reflected in her references in which Africans are conspicuous only by their absence. This might confirm existing beliefs among Africans about white racism and Eurocentrism. The insistence by writers such as her that anthropology is not, in so many words, a study of the uncivilized by the civilized is likely to aggravate such feelings. Independent Africans are in a position to decide what kind of relations in knowledge-making will be tolerated and which will not be tolerated." [4]

Sally Falk Moore's response is, predictably, equally vituperative, but instead of responding to the central concern voiced by Mafeje--that the current intellectual environment in Africa is ignored time and again by Western scholars-- she attempts to section Mafeje off from a serious intellectual community, and thus to deprive his critique of its impact: she alleges (1) that he is unfamiliar with the new work in anthropology, which is of high quality and very multifaceted; (2) that he did not read her book carefully; (3) that his concerns are outdated and nostalgic, and that he is hence erecting a straw-man; (4) that he is free to write his own book on Anthropology and thus should not criticize hers in such a manner; (4) that he can't pretend to have had any influence on the anthropologists with whom he worked, and thus he greatly overestimates his role, and the role of Africans in general, in effecting a paradigm change in Anthropology, etc. That she finds Mafeje irrelevant becomes quite clear in her final paragraph: "I should add that I am saddened by the fact that Mafeje's tone is so insulting. I realize that there are audiences for which one has only to shout `colonialist, racist, Eurocentrist' as he does referring to me, and it is like shouting `fire' in a crowded theater. There are some people who respond instantly to this kind of name-calling, and many namecallers who legitimate themselves by doing the labeling. I believe that the social science community represented by CODESRIA is more sober in its judgments than that. Surely this undignified display does not pass for scholarly disagreement. There is so much work to be done; there are so many research themes to be explored, so much current history to be recorded, so many serious questions about methods and models to be debated, so many difficulties in the way of open communication, it is a pity to have to waste time on crude invective." [5]

The main bone of contention between these two scholars is something rather elemental: the issue is about who is going to be included and which agendas will be represented in a discussion of the epistemology of Africa. This is not just a matter of Mafeje's ego or of political hysteria, as Falk Moore would have it. Rather, the entire exchange strongly underscores the absence of a sense of a common project between African scholars of Africa and American Africanists. The fact that the disagreement has become so nasty demonstrates that at moments when this lack of a common project becomes glaringly obvious, the inheritance of colonialism and the continuing neo-colonial burden that African Studies must bear begin to be centralized, along with their attendant framing mechanisms.

At the heart of this mutual exclusion is the issue of "authenticity," that is, the means by which scholars seek to claim authority and pertinence for their work. Here we speak not only of that form of authenticity that is so much disparaged in the United States--the claims of those African scholars who assert the primacy of their
interpretive rights, rights which are variously founded on cultural fluency, political engagement, lived experience and immersion in daily Africa, a specifically African epistemological heritage, and so forth. We are also speaking of a much less recognized authenticity, what we call the "new authenticity," one that is forged from the inverted double of the older form. This form no longer bases its claims on the universalism or truth of its categories of analysis, but precisely on their contingency and fragmentation, and which by leveling the justification for any one authoritative voice, or authorizing condition, admits them all into an indeterminate discursive arena wherein they jostle and overlap, producing "hybridity," "polyvocal exchange," and "bricolage."

We believe it is not particularly useful at this time to begin attempting to outwit the logic of authenticity or to make sanctimonious claims that one has indeed escaped it. Claims of authenticity, in all their various formations, are about power, and more pertinently, about power differentials. Thus we agree with Doreen Massey, the British geographer and feminist, who has pointed out that globalization is a "highly complex social differentiation" rather than a mystical system of directionless "flows." To counter the fraught politics of location that are the consequences of globalization, and that are reflected in the Mafeje/Falk Moore debate, Massey suggests scholars begin to conceive of their work, at least in part, as what she calls "a politics of mobility and access," by which she means an intellectual practice that traces the fault lines of, in our case, intellectual production, and the ways in which the various sides are unequally and historically interconnected. [6] Though Doreen Massey does not suggest it, we think central to an intellectual politics of mobility and access is the act of collaboration, in so far as it is only through productive, long-term and continuous dialogue that mutual terms of mobility and access can be successfully negotiated, as many feminists, especially African feminists, have pointed out. [7]

In our paper we investigate an issue in feminism that is so contentious that people can't agree on its designation: female genital mutilation, clitoridectomy, female circumcision, genital surgery. When African feminists charge that Western feminists should research and focus on analogous forms of abuse in their home countries instead of digging up causes in Africa, they are responding to the very real way in which FGM is often discussed, with western feminists in charge of the agenda, receiving the most press and recognition and having an influence on global organizations such as the United Nations, as well as the foreign policies of their respective countries.

In an article entitled "Female Genital Mutilation in Africa: Some African Views," Salem Mekuria points out that African women must be at the lead of any movement to eradicate FGM and to suggest or take measures against it, and that these women should be working as closely with local areas as possible. [8] The ways in which mobilization has been conceptualized after over twenty years of struggle--in which people at different layers of involvement have a level of say directly proportional
to their proximity to the place under discussion--can be seen as a product of the fact that FGM is not, and cannot be, simply a matter of abstract reflection and scholarship. Because it is such a delicate and serious subject, it demands that those working on it consider the effects their representations will have. Needless to say, those people best able to theorize the effects of representations of FGM are those working at and invested in the local level; these are also the people least able to exact control over these representations. In saying this, we do not mean to suggest that people not involved in grassroots activism have nothing to contribute and should remain silent. Rather, we are suggesting that conceptualizing the problem on a multiplicity of layers can lead to more fruitful collaborations, such that much of the hard work expended on the subject will not be wasted and have effects opposite the ones they were intended to have. One imagines a coalition that brings people together from various different groups, places and interests; that drafts an agenda firmly rooted in practice and everyday reality; and that divides up work according to peoples' placements, talents, and areas of expertise.

Projects that recognize the continuing importance and relevance of global inequalities and historical burdens to the context of intellectual production do often arise out of direct collaboration; for example, the Nigerian feminist Molara Ogundipe-Leslie has been involved in global feminism since the 1970s, and a new work by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, is the direct outcome of a fundamental belief in collaboration as the way to, in their words, "formulate transnational feminist alliances." [9] Because of this, we think it would be useful for these projects to be more actively pursued and publicly analyzed and discussed amongst scholars of Africa. Such collaborations need not be grand designs. For example, despite the logistical difficulties, everyone knows that it is possible to keep up correspondences between African scholars in Africa and Africanist scholars in the United States; it would be of great benefit to graduate students in both regions if loose institutional affiliations were kept alive over the long-term, and some new sorts of review practices created to facilitate dialogue and intellectual exchange across the Atlantic, such as the practice of exchanging working papers by graduate students in two different universities. This would, in our opinion, offer graduate students in the West the opportunity to conceive of their invisible audience as including colleagues on the continent, offer graduate students in Africa the same thing, plus hard-to-come by resources (such as articles not available at their university libraries), and could result in the creation of new intellectual problematics, ones that would arise out of years of interpenetration and dialogue, ones that could be seen as the products of an entirely new form of boundary-marking, a "collaborative authenticity," if you will. Projects such as these do not address directly the material inequalities that structure scholarship on Africa; they aim, instead, to build more equitable intellectual alliances that recognize these inequalities, work within them, and harness them to agendas set through negotiation and dialogue. They would be a step, we believe, in positively creative alternatives to the trenchant, bitter, and ultimately divisive colonial "insider/outsider" dichotomy with which we must all still contend.



[1] We would like to extend our thanks to Mamadou Diouf, Jane Guyer and Scott George for their helpful comments on this project.

[2] Guyer, Jane. 1996. African Studies in the United States: a Perspective. Atlanta: ASA Press. p. 7.

[3] Miller, Christopher. 1995. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 7; Mkandawire, Thandika. 1993. "Problems and Prospects of Social Sciences in Africa" International Social Science Journal. p. 135; Imam, Ayesha and Amina Mama. 1994. "The Role of Academics in Limiting and Expanding Academic Freedom," In: Academic Freedom in Africa. Mahmood Mamdani and Mamadou Diouf (eds.) Dakar/London: CODESRIA. p. 77.

[4] Mafeje, Archie. 1996. "A Commentary on Anthropology and Africa," CODESRIA Bulletin 2. pp. 6-13.

[5] Falk Moore, Sally. 1996. "Concerning Archie Mafeje's Reinvention of Anthropology and Africa," CODESRIA Bulletin, forthcoming.

[6] Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 150-151.

[7] See, for example: Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed. pp. 6-7.

[8] Mekuria, Salem. 1995. "Female Genital Mutilation in Africa: Some African Views," ACAS Bulletin 44/45. pp. 2-6.

[9] Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. 1994. "Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity," Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Ogundipe-Leslie discusses her involvement in "global" feminist organizations in her "Introduction" to her book, Re-Creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1994