Exploring African Dynamics in a Multipolar World
Brenton Maart (2012): From the series Bophuthatswana Air Force Base, pigment ink print on aluminium, 60 x 70cm
By Brenton Maart
The 2013 European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) conference was a case study in how to plan, convene, administer and manage a formal event that - because of its interests spanning histories, geographies and research disciplines - requires a programme that is as diverse as its participants. It was with this in mind that the three days in Lisbon became a celebration of the multiple facets that made up the conference theme of African Dynamics in a Multipolar World, selected in partial recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Organisation of African Unity, an occasion marked by the declaration of 2013 as the year of Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance.
In his welcome note to the conference, Paul Nugent, President of AEGIS, outlined the rationale that drives contemporary European research in Africa: 'Over the past decades... African countries were heavily oriented towards the former colonial powers [and] also to emergent donor states. The onset of the global financial crisis has had the most dramatic effect on Europe... By contrast, many African countries have weathered the storm much better. Buoyed up by high commodity prices, African countries are in the process of forging closer links with Asia and Latin America... We are seeing the emergence of greater differentiation between African countries, with some experiencing robust economic growth and a consolidation of institutions, while others are condemned to re-live a torrid past.'
Clara Carvalo and Manuel João Ramos from ECAS's steering committee continued this rationale when they noted that the conference theme 'highlights the fact that international forces are no longer unipolarized or bipolarized and African countries, as global partners, are having a growing influence...' They also noted that, 'the current challenges that Africa faces include the promotion of peace and security, human rights, democratic institutions and particularly the integration and socio-economic development of Africans. ECAS 2013 will discuss three aspects of this new configuration and its effects on African societies: political challenges, economic and development changes and social creativity. The conference's main focus will be the contemporary period, while taking into account the historical dimension of these issues.'
The conference boasted a series of keynote speakers, plenary and round-table sessions, workshops, film screenings, music performances, exhibitions and book displays. The ambitious main programme comprised 177 panels, and presentations by nearly 1 500 authors, ranging alphabetically from Abbink's exploration of 'Menstrual synchrony' claims among Suri girls: Biology vs. culture in the sexual politics of an agro-pastoral society in southwest Ethiopia to Zorzani e Silva's Governance of foreign investment in developing countries: The case of Mozambique.
A key strength of the design of the panels was it focus on topic, not region, thus allowing comparisons and links to be made between very different countries. The more than fifty papers concerning South Africa, for example, were presented in panels on courts and politics; pathways to autonomy in a conflicting donor world; large-scale land acquisitions and related resource conflicts; the rush for energy resources southwards of the Sahara; body, culture and social tensions; sexual culture; links between states, their published laws and political legitimacy and a panoply of other topics.
The panel titled The making and unmaking of the postcolonial African archive in a transnational world - convened by Peter Bloom and Stephan Miescher, both from the University of California, Santa Barbara - explored the dynamic nature of the role of archives on the African continent, and the papers they invited collectively addressed 'the production and destruction, the making and unmaking, of conventional and alternative archives and monuments'. The panel was convened to continue discussions initiated at the Conference on Archives of Post-Independence Africa and its Diaspora (Senegal, June 2012) and, in this way, was part of a mapping of the evolution of a scholarship that explores conventional, creative, cultural and artistic expressions in a field concerned with 'preserving and engaging with the past', and also beset with 'frequent neglect and even destruction'.
Collectively, the papers on this panel revealed 'a deeply ambivalent relationship to the past' by demonstrating 'how various archives have fared under the postcolonial state' and examining 'the extent to which they have served as instruments of state power'. My paper was, The development of a novel category of monument, termed the inadvertent monument, as evidenced in selected apartheid buildings in previous South African apartheid native reserves, one of them, and below is an extract from it.
'South African native reserves (also known as homelands or bantustans) served as the heart of the apartheid system. Established as early as 1913, the homelands sought to segregate black from white South Africans by subsidising the construction of decentralized architectural and bureaucratic support structures. At the fall of apartheid in 1994, the homelands were incorporated back into the country and their subsidies were withdrawn, leaving behind rural areas now characterized by severe poverty.
'In many ways then, the legacies of apartheid, in these areas, continue. The research question at the heart of this paper understands that the buildings in the homelands expressed aspects of the ideology of high apartheid; that political change has ensued, apartheid has been dismantled, as has the homeland system, with concomitant ideological changes. The investigation seeks to analyse this shift in meaning by drawing on a contemporary photographic archive of the architectural structures and a collated digital archive of documents relevant to the history of the buildings.
'Current scholarship recognizes two key forms of monument: conventional and counter- (or anti-) monuments. The research fieldwork indicates the possibility of a third, as yet unexplored form, which I have termed the inadvertent monument. By developing new tropes of commemoration, these buildings, through an altogether passive attribution, may be considered as inadvertent monuments. The crux of the theoretical component of the paper will formulate substantive and rhetorical definitions for this new type of monument to the folly of apartheid's ideology of oppression.'