Lexicons of African Freedoms
In his role as Researcher at the PRIN Genealogies of African Freedoms, Università di Pavia, APC Research Associate Dr. Ettore Morelli organised the symposium, Lexicons of African Freedoms, 29-30 April 2022.
The Symposium hosted contributions dealing with concepts and conditions of freedom in past and present Africa and changing notions of freedom in African vocabularies, including issues of transcription and translation.
As the Symposium provocation put it, Africans of the past are often alleged to have understood freedom in terms of belonging, that is, as the full inclusion into the safe net of kinship groups, communities, polities, and religious cults. Modern Western thought, on the other hand, has come to link the word freedom to the idea of individual autonomy, which is currently considered by many as the very essence of the concept. Scholars, however, have for long time objected to simplistic dichotomies. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff famously analysed African forms of slavery opposing them to the concept of belonging rather than freedom (1979), whereas Orlando Patterson pointed out that the modern idea of freedom specifically emerged from the historical developments of slavery and the slave trade in Western history (1992). Indeed, there is enough historical evidence to suggest that belonging and personal autonomy were not mutually exclusive and that, in Africa as elsewhere, they coexisted with several other meanings, conditions, and practices of freedom. The symposium leveraged off these insights to invite reflection on four core issues: 1) the unstable and controversial nexus between freedom and equality; 2) the potential for asserting individual autonomy vis-à-vis genealogical issues of purity and autochthony; 3) the ethical dimension of belonging to a given community, and 4) the modern conceptualizations of citizenship as full individual enfranchisement.
Pierluigi Valsecchi, Professor of the History of Africa in the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Pavia, and Morelli introduced the concerns of the symposium. In the first session Alice Bellagamba from the University of Milan Bicocca offered a paper on freedom from the slaves’ perspective in Fulfulde-speaking contexts in Southern Senegal. Francesca Declich of the University of Urbino looked at perspectives of freedom among free and freed people in Somalia. A big take away from this session was recognition of belonging as a form of freedom involving continuous and active work, tacking backwards and forwards across time involving the past, present and future. In the next session Armando Cutolo from the University of Siena discussed the case of Laurent Gbagbo in Abidjan while Marco Gardini, University of Pavia, offered a paper on “Tombs, Famadihana and Freedom in the Highlands of Madagascar.” By the end of the first day two pithy observations were firmly instantiated: freedom as a "chameleon” and freedom as a prisoner of history.
Three papers were presented on the second day. Alessandro Gusman from the University of Turin discussed the making of spiritual kinship among Congolese refugees in Kampala, an important contribution to the growing body of work in anthropology on “kin-ing”. APC Chair Carolyn Hamilton presented her paper “Remembering Fluid Pasts: Freedom and Mobility Before Colonialism” and Ettore Morelli his paper “ ‘A Bushman Cannot Rule’: Power, Movement and Freedom in Central Southern Africa.” The discussion yielded yet another useful pointer to an emerging body of literature in anthropology, on “potentializing.” (See the work of Paolo Gaibazzi).
The Symposium was testimony to the vibrancy of African Studies in Italy and to the productivity of exchanges between anthropologists and historians, as well as to the intellectual strength of the ongoing work by the cohort of scholars closely involved in the Genealogies of African Freedoms focus of which the Symposium was apart.
The Association of African Studies in Italy (ASAI) will hold its biennial Conference, “Third millennium Africas in the global world. Challenges, reconfigurations, and opportunities”at Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, at the end of June 2022. (https://www.asaiafrica.org/conferenze-asai/)