This paper is a response to Matthias Basedau's article published in issue 55/2020 of the present journal. At a time when African Studies scholarship is rising beyond the flogging of dead horses, certain strands in the field in Germany seem to ignore much of the valuable scholarship and intellectual contributions by excellent African and non-African researchers alike. It is striking to see how Basedau falls prey to the same shortcomings that he draws our attention to, that is, the domination of African Studies by sources and figures outside the continent and the construction of Africa as a space of lack. This underscores the urgency of decolonizing African Studies at many levels, including liberating it from the straightjacket of area studies, interrogating purportedly objective scholarship, and opening it up to new theoretical perspectives. The restriction to comparative approaches will only ensure that these strands in African Studies remain stuck in their epistemological cul-de-sac.
Dieser Beitrag ist eine Replik auf den Artikel von Matthias Basedau, der in Ausgabe 55/2020 der vorliegenden Zeitschrift erschienen ist. Während die Afrikawissenschaften im Begriff sind, überkommene Debatten hinter sich zu lassen, scheinen manche Strömungen innerhalb des Feldes in Deutschland intellektuelle Beiträge herausragender afrikanischer und nichtafrikanischer Forscherinnen und Forscher nicht wahrzunehmen. Es ist frappierend, wie Basedau teils dieselben Defizite reproduziert, auf die er aufmerksam machen will, etwa die Dominanz der Afrikastudien durch Arbeiten und Personen von außerhalb des Kontinents oder die Konstruktion Afrikas als einen Ort, dem es an vielem mangelt. Dies unterstreicht die Notwendigkeit einer Dekolonisierung der Afrikastudien auf vielen Ebenen, etwa durch ihre Befreiung aus der Zwangsjacke der Regionalstudien, das Hinterfragen vermeintlich objektiver Wissenschaft und die Öffnung für dekoloniale Ansätze. Die Beschränkung auf vergleichende Perspektiven wird hingegen dafür sorgen, dass die Afrikawissenschaften in einer epistemologischen Sackgasse stecken bleiben.
Keywords: African Studies; knowledge production; decoloniality; Afrikastudien; Wissensproduktion; Dekolonialität
In Africa Spectrum 55/2020, political scientist Matthias Basedau published an article titled, "Rethinking African Studies: Four Challenges and the Case for Comparative African Studies," in which he laid out his vision for African Studies, embedding it in the broader comparative agenda of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). With this response, we would like to take up Basedau's invitation "to disagree and to suggest corrections and modifications" ([
Basedau identifies the four challenges as (
As we argue here, Basedau's argument suffers from a number of flaws that considerably undermine his case. First, even though his initial challenge explicitly raises the issue of the domination of outside perspectives, his proposed solution consists of merely emphasizing, in a rather Eurocentric manner and without referencing the existence of a rich African archive, the need for a "diversity of views in conjunction with constant questioning of our own biases" ([
Second, Basedau's critique of the prevalence of negative views of Africa is built on a questionable claim to impartial scholarship, which further underscores his failure to account for the challenge of decoloniality. His concern is with contemporary Western stereotypes that, according to him, overlook progress in many areas ([
Third, by insisting on the necessity of turning to the study of causes and effects, Basedau displays a rather limited understanding of the questions African Studies needs to answer, as well as a rather narrow view of the field's disciplinary breadth and methodological diversity. Moreover, his take on causes and effects fails to pay the required attention to modes of coloniality and epicoloniality, i.e. colonial characteristics extant at, before or after the historical moment and political–legal relations traditionally ascribed to colonialism. As Kessi et al., have pointed out, "Epicolonial dynamics are phenomena for which the cause may or may not be directly traced to legacies or histories of overt or observed colonial encounters, but in which power relations and outcomes are recognizably colonial" ([
Fourth, Basedau's advocacy of the "big picture" reveals his attachment to the confines of political science and the study of international relations, which once again comes at the expense of decolonial perspectives. Given the fact that "big pictures" are best viewed from a distance, this demand begs the question of white Global North hegemonic epistemological gazes from which this picture is constructed. It is also from here that Basedau's insider/outsider binary needs to be scrutinized: when he posits non-African researchers as "outsiders" to African spaces and contexts whose views need to be complemented by the insights of "insiders" ([
Against this canvas, the problem of African Studies in Germany (or elsewhere) is primarily neither a methodological one, nor is comparison the solution. Since Basedau fails to acknowledge that the challenge is actually of an epistemological nature, his proposal to rethink African Studies leaves us with the rather agonizing impression of African Studies in distress.
In the following, we revisit Basedau's four challenges and his solution in terms of three problems and a conclusion on the urgency of decolonizing African Studies in Germany and beyond. The first problem we will tackle is African Studies without Africans, followed by the politics of impartial scholarship. Next, we will address the pitfalls of cause and effect in African Studies, where we will also emphasize the added value of taking a relational perspective in studying African lifeworlds. The concluding section, "Critical African Studies or Comparative Area (African) Studies?", makes the case for the former, underscoring the need for an epistemic turn toward decoloniality, not only in terms of theory, but also as a research practice.
African Studies refers to transdisciplinary knowledge production concerning Africa or Africans. This includes scholarship in, by, with, for, of, on, and from Africa and Africans. Shose Kessi, Zoe Marks & Elelwani Ramugondo[
In late May 2019, selected members of the Vereinigung für Afrikawissenschaften in Deutschland (VAD), the largest African Studies association in Germany, convened in Frankfurt am Main to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Notably predominantly white male German scholars were invited as panelists to engage in reflections on the history of German African Studies. Three weeks earlier, the historian Jürgen Zimmerer of the University of Hamburg had declared his intention to terminate his VAD membership, unless the organizers revised their plans not to include African scholars as speakers at the event. In his response, Hans Peter Hahn, professor of anthropology at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the chairperson of the VAD at the time, expressed his regrets over Zimmerer's stance, pointing out that the event had been planned well in advance, whereby all VAD members had been invited to weigh in on questions of panel organization.[
This episode is indicative of a larger problem that pervades African Studies not only in Germany, but other countries in the Global North as well: the continued lack of involvement of Africans in African Studies, be it in academic positions, in the curriculum, or in the bibliographies of the articles and books published by white scholars. Even though Basedau acknowledges this persistent imbalance in his remarks on the domination of outside perspectives, one notes that the institution he is directing—GIGA's Institute for African Affairs—featured exactly one African woman researcher out of a total of 29 listed on the website in December 2020.[
To be fair, it needs to be acknowledged that the researcher demographics do not look much better at most African Studies institutions in Germany. Interestingly, for Basedau the underrepresentation of Africans in African Studies is not primarily due to "intentional marginalization," but rather attributable to the lack of higher education opportunities in Africa ([
Basedau's suggested remedy for this discrepancy entails "efforts to 'research with the region'," which he sees particularly well implemented in the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), run jointly by the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute in Freiburg and the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana ([
Be that as it may, the predicament is not limited to the level of representation. Albeit desirable solutions include recruiting more African or Afro-German researchers in African Studies in Germany, improving African scholars' access to publishing in certain journals, and increasing collaborations between African and non-African researchers, the problem's root cause concerns the terms and modes of knowledge production. Following in the footsteps of the conveners of the VAD golden jubilee then, Basedau's failure to recognize the epistemological dimension of the problem is rather disillusioning.
An illustrative example of this failure is Basedau's deployment of the insider/outsider binary in African Studies. Equating the "insider" with the African view and the "outsider" with the non-African, Western perspective, he maintains that "African realities should not (only) be recounted by outside voices," and that "the broader inclusion of African views offers some distinct benefits" ([
While it is clear that future VAD anniversaries should be unthinkable without African speakers and that a GIGA Institute for African Affairs cannot be viable without greater visibility and integration of non-white researchers, it is our contention that the only substantial remedy for the lack of African perspectives in African Studies is a clear epistemological shift, which has to go much deeper than merely increasing the representation of Africans. The epistemic position matters more than the geographic location or origin of the researcher. We should expect all scholars of African Studies, whether White, Black, or People of Color, to be "insiders" engaging with the African archive and thus shaping and transforming their field. The "big picture" also needs to take into account current knowledge production strands by Black German and African scholars and activists if the efforts to diversify perspectives in African Studies are serious.[
To conclude this section, we would like to underscore the urgency for African Studies scholars at German institutions (and elsewhere in the Global North) to address the two core questions of decoloniality and strive toward the structural and conceptual changes needed to conduct research together with Africans: who produces knowledge on Africa, and where is the African archive in this knowledge production? In the words of Liberian scholar Robtel Neajai Pailey: "We need to put the 'African' in African Studies, not as a token gesture, but as an affirmation that Africans have always produced knowledge about their continent" ([
Nowhere is it, in the long run, more difficult to preserve the interest of scholarship than there, where uncomfortable facts and the hardship of the realities of life are denied. Max Weber[
At the end of his introduction, Basedau undertakes the laudable attempt "to reveal my personal background and related biases" ([
Even if we acknowledge Basedau's willingness to reflect on his preconceptions, his claims about impartial scholarship are problematic and, when seen against the backdrop of the history of African Studies, also troubling. The question of epistemology and ideology, objectivity and subjectivity, and worse still of science versus culture is at the core of knowledge politics in general ([
Indeed, Weber's own observation of the difficulty of preserving "the interest of scholarship," quoted in the epigraph to this section, makes the notion of Weberian "impartiality" appear a conundrum. Are research agendas not set up to interrogate "uncomfortable facts and hardships of the realities of life"? Do personal experiences and political convictions not contribute to formulating the very questions that shape academic stances and research agendas? Here, African feminist scholar Amina Mama's observation in one of her seminal essays bears some scrutiny:
African scholarly traditions have consistently rejected the liberal philosophical assumption that demands disengagement and distance from social context rather than engagement and action. For Africans, ethical scholarship is socially responsible scholarship that supports freedom, not scholarship that is free from social responsibility. ([
Hence, while the non-African "outsider" can afford to remain "impartial" and disengage from social context in knowledge production, s*he leaves the onus of socially responsible scholarship with the African "insider."[
Reflexivity in this context refers to the assessment of the influence of the researcher's background and ways of perceiving reality, perceptions, experiences, ideological biases and interests during research. The researcher is the main data collection instrument. The researcher also analyses, interprets and reports the findings. It is important, therefore, that the researcher's thoughts, feelings, frustrations, fears, concerns, problems and ideas are recorded throughout the study. ([
Thus, in the light of the above, the solution to the problem of objectivity and subjectivity is not to seek impartiality in scholarship, but rather to grapple with the issues that are at the core of the question of knowledge production, including power, identity, geography, biography, and ego-politics as captured in the Cartesian principle cogito ergo sum. We are called upon to be attentive to the complex intersections of social positionality, geographical location, and epistemic location of knowledge producers, issues that are still widely ignored or misunderstood. Grosfoguel's observation (unwittingly confirmed by Max Weber in retrospect) merits attention here: "Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial/capitalist/patriarchal world-system" ([
While some scholars appear better than others in concealing their political-cognitive commitments and personal convictions, their academic stances are articulated from particular loci of enunciation, implying that no academic work is entirely free from political positions and personal ideals. Even Max Weber's works are obviously inscribed in his worldview and socialization as a white-privileged cis-heteropatriarchal masculine subject at the time of the German Kaiserreich and the post-First World War German Republic. Given Basedau's own white German masculine locus of enunciation from Hamburg – a city whose academic institutions and economy was highly implicated in Germany's colonial past – it is remarkable that he entertains pretenses to impartial scholarship devoid of engagements with neocolonial, neoliberal, patriarchal, and indeed locational issues within the present global capitalist world order.
What is even more problematic than the illusion of impartial scholarship is the politics behind claims to objectivity. The history of African Studies is full of examples where white-positioned privileged professors successfully undermined the credibility of African or African-American scholars by upholding the elusive ideal of neutrality ([
What is at issue is the primacy of relations over relata and the intra-active emergence of "cause" and "effect" as enacted by the agential practices that cut things together and apart. Karen Barad[
Apart from promoting Comparative African Studies, the major conceptual intervention Basedau seeks to make pertains to what he calls "the causal revolution." Meaningful research, he suggests, is that which looks into the causes and effects of the phenomena under study. Positing causality as a "precondition for designing policies that can solve problems" ([
Considering his stance on objectivity, it is not surprising that Basedau promotes causality as its corollary. Although he does not disclose the philosophical or theoretical premises underlying his approach to the study of cause and effect, what he seems to have in mind are recent trends in economics, international relations, and political science that propagate causal identification aimed at isolating the cause-and-effect mechanism between two or more variables (see ibid.: 199–200). Here, causal inference is based on methods to compute causal relations between variables encoded in relationships among other variables in a system. The principal problem with such approaches, even when they involve a qualitative research design, is that they rest on quantitative decisions made by the researcher: which effects and interactions are presumed to be relevant, which ones are not? As the choice of the variables already involves presumptions about the cause, the problem of circularity cannot easily be ruled out. Last but not least, such approaches might not always accurately reveal the causal impact and the direction of causation.
However, most of the methodological approaches Basedau refers to are not directly connected to the algorithms and computing methods hailed as the "causal revolution." He seems content with any work engaged with the search for causes, lamenting that, according to his survey of 66 articles published in selected African Studies journals in 2019 and early 2020, only 4.5% explicitly mention the identification of causality among their objectives ([
These methodological debates aside, there is a much more fundamental issue that needs to be resolved before we proceed to identifying the proper mix of methods: are we actually asking the right question? Is the predicament of Africa and African Studies a causal one that can only be resolved through causal explanations? Is it worthwhile, let alone feasible, to focus on "ruling out variables other than the presumed cause of a given effect" ([
Basedau's desire to "promote further progress" by identifying causes ([
Again, we do not deny that there are instances where the search for causes and effects might indeed prove adequate. Yet, the project of rethinking African Studies should be concerned with a much broader agenda of exploring and analyzing the multiplicity of African and African diasporic lifeworlds. Shifting the research focus toward the continuous relational processes that bring these lifeworlds into being would be more productive and indeed more appropriate. As Spies and Seesemann have argued in their case for taking a relational perspective, such an analytical focus is "capable of accommodating the entire range of options together with the concomitant power structures, constraints, and inequalities" ([
The epigraph to this section by material feminist Karen Barad underscores the added value of the study of relations. Even if her ontological premise that relata do not preexist relations may be debatable, Barad's notion of intra-action between cause and effect, and thus the shift of the focus to relationality, "constitutes a reworking of the traditional notion of causality" ([
Toward the end of his article, Basedau proceeds to propose Comparative African Studies, or CAS, as the way forward and invites others to join this initiative. His version of CAS piggybacks on Comparative Area Studies, which appears to have developed into GIGA's flagship approach over the past few years. While it is reasonable for researchers based at an area studies institution to insist on the value of comparison and to present this enterprise in terms of overhauling previous approaches, we doubt that it will provide an effective response to current challenges in African Studies.
Basedau's promotion of comparison as the singular answer to his four challenges reveals limitations similar to his advocacy of causality, as outlined above. It also begs a number of questions, including but not limited to the following: What is "Africa" being compared with? Are intra-African comparisons to be undertaken? Or comparisons to other formerly colonized spaces and societies, such as the Caribbean, South America, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, or New Zealand, for example? Are there comparisons to be made between "Africa" and former colonizers and their historical frames of advancement, which still have bearing today in representations and discussions of African modernities, histories, and levels of developmental progress? Whose definitions of modernity and progress are being accessed to set up frames of comparison, and to what ends?
Before we lay out our own vision of Critical rather than Comparative African Studies, let us take a closer look at the arguments on which Basedau builds his case for comparison. His first concern is the surmounting of a hegemonic "Western" perspective, which he sees as unilateral and external to African contexts:
First, comparison can also help us overcome a one-sided, outside (particularly Western) view. If we compare—or, better, combine—different perspectives, we may be able to provide a more nuanced picture. Contradicting views can be put to the test, revealing what better matches multi-faceted realities. ([
However, it remains unclear how the comparative contemplation of contradicting views helps overcome the limitations of one-sided views. Wouldn't this require an epistemic shift and a critical questioning of the "white gaze" ([
Basedau further claims that comparison can serve as a corrective to sweeping representations of Africa:
Second, [...] Comparative African Studies will be useful to correct the often undifferentiated and mostly negative views on Africa. Comparing different African countries and subnational units of analysis will quickly reveal many differences along with more positive examples and promising trends. ([
Yet, isn't the best way to correct undifferentiated views of Africa to stop relegating the African archive to the margins? Rather than Western scholarship determining what is "positive" and defining what is "promising", don't we need engaged, critical scholarship by (continental and diasporic) African and non-African researchers who take up the challenge of decoloniality? Still, Basedau is convinced that adopting comparative approaches in German research contexts will bulk out the field:
Third, by adding "comparative" to "African Studies" or "Area Studies," we can also strengthen a field in which social sciences still form the minority, at least in the German university landscape. ([
He does not tell us, however, how German African Studies as a whole can benefit from comparative approaches when they are read as a means to compensate for the purported minoritization of the social sciences.
Against Basedau's advocacy of a comparative framework meant to resonate with his four challenges, we set out a decolonial agenda to work toward the reconfiguration of African Studies, an agenda that makes the long overdue move from what V.Y. Mudimbe famously called the "colonial library" to the African archive and that is built on decolonial perspectives and methodologies.
This rich African archive is not only essential in laying the foundation for Critical African Studies, but also capable of addressing some of Basedau's challenges. For example, in his Social Science as Imperialism (1979), the political scientist Claude Ake addressed a number of concerns about the comparative approach to African Studies, particularly pointing to the problem of the embedded white gaze. In his seminal 1996 study Citizens and Subjects, Mahmood Mamdani warned about the problem of writing the history of Africa through "analogy." More recently, [
Critical African Studies can draw on the African archive to address even the issues of longue durée and concerns about "micro" as opposed to "macro" raised by Basedau. We invoke here Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi's A Thousand Years of West African History (1965), which tackled the question of longue durée in African history more than half a century ago. Similarly, the expansive scholarship of Ali A. Mazrui and Samir Amin is exemplary in dealing with macro issues pertaining to Africa, and is indicative of the rich output generated from Africa by African scholars. This output goes back to the dawn of political independence and even beyond, and it keeps on flowing, with institutions like the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) leading the way.
At the same time, the response to current challenges in African Studies cannot be limited to giving the African archive – of which we have only scratched the Anglophone surface here – the place it deserves. It needs to be coupled with a turn to decolonial epistemologies. As [
We are aware that the promotion of decolonial scholarship has recently become commonplace in certain academic contexts, to the extent that the precise contours and the practical consequences of decoloniality have become blurred. For example, Christopher Clapham recently observed "such a diverse and confusing range of claims that it becomes difficult to disentangle what "decolonising African studies" actually means" ([
This entails the necessity of scrutinizing Global North scholarship's relations to African epistemologies and of engendering rigorous engagements with intersectional inequalities. We need to foreground sociopolitical phenomena ensuing from colonial and epicolonial marginalizations that are intertwined with gendered, racialized, epistemic, religious, ethnolinguistic, and embodied hierarchies. These dimensions of epistemic decolonization cannot be eschewed in serious attempts to rethink African Studies ([
As a related analytical approach, critical diversity literacy posits that changing environments and research contexts require new skills from those who have attained high levels of education and leadership positions as educators, researchers, and public intellectuals within their respective fields. Researchers then need to move beyond the constraints of a single history and understand human reality as multi-perspectival, relational, historicized, context-bound, and structured through power hierarchies ([
We thus propose to pursue the central decolonial concerns of Critical African Studies, powerfully encapsulated by Kessi et al., as political and ethical practices of "unlearning and dismantling unjust practices, assumptions, and institutions – as well as persistent positive action to create and build alternative spaces, networks and ways of knowing that transcend our epicolonial inheritance" ([
- Structural decolonizing entails the redistribution of material resources and opportunities, which are currently distributed in ways that replicate colonial relations and power structures benefitting academic "insiders" from the Global North. Such resources include professional recognition through tenure track jobs and titles, leadership and gatekeeping roles, scholarships, research funding, and budgets, admissions, and integration into institutions. This mode of decolonization requires considering intersectional inequalities concerning Black women and women of color among other vulnerable groups (e.g. LGBTQI and disabled communities), who are marginalized (and often tokenized) in academic precarity.
- Epistemic decolonization concerns the reclaiming of worldviews and epistemologies not entrenched in, nor oriented around Euro-American theorization. The pivot of epistemological decolonization is rejecting the notion that scholarly knowledge is inherently and necessarily rational, objective, and universal – a claim grounded in the European Age of Enlightenment. The focus of attention needs to be redirected to include questions of subjectivity and situatedness of dehumanized and erased positions, to be addressed through thick scholarship that enables unlearning and delinking from epicolonial thought processes and practices, while questioning the power structures undergirding these.
- Personal decolonization focuses on the cultivation of occupational consciousness and commitment to counter Global North hegemony and to override white privilege in knowledge production processes. Such commitment entails identifying, assessing, and resisting power structures where identity categories such as race, gender, sexuality, and class are implemented as markers of subservience and subjugation.
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Relational decolonization recognizes human agency and interdependence in structures, epistemologies, and (inter) actions. Knowledge production processes are dependent on human relations, which are organized and influenced by power hierarchies. Consistent critical engagement working against the grain of current modes of privilege must engage with intersectional inequalities. This mode of decolonization requires white-positioned European and North American scholars to go the extra mile, to catch up with African-led debates, indigenous knowledge processes, and public discourses for the purposes of listening, dialogue, and the active generation and practice of equality and reciprocity. Contingent on this is the realization that much of white-positioned Global North scholarship has been embedded in extractivist, commodifying, or co-opted methods of knowledge production.[
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While not dismissive of the potential value of comparative approaches based on critical social scientific perspectives, we posit the necessity of an epistemic shift in African Studies as a precondition for any meaningful engagement with the decolonial challenge. Reaffirming Basedau's invitation "Let's get to it!" ([
This paper emerged out of the context of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1 – 390713894. The authors would like to thank the participants in the Cluster's Knowledge Lab session on January 21, 2021 for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni holds the chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is a leading decolonial theorist with over a 100 publications in the fields of African history, African politics, African development, and decolonial theory. Email: Sabelo.Ndlovu-Gatsheni@uni-bayreuth.de
Rüdiger Seesemann is a professor of Islamic Studies and currently acts as the Dean of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth. He specializes in the study of Islam in Africa, with a thematic focus on Sufism, Islam and politics, and theories and practices of Islamic knowledge. Email: Ruediger.Seesemann@uni-bayreuth.de
Christine Vogt-William specializes in literary and cultural studies and takes great interest in questions of intersectionality and decoloniality. She is director of the Gender & Diversity Office in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence and is currently working on a book on cultural representations of biological twinship in Anglophone literatures. Email: Christine.Vogt-William@uni-bayreuth.de
By Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni; Rüdiger Seesemann and Christine Vogt-William
Reported by Author; Author; Author
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni holds the chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is a leading decolonial theorist with over a 100 publications in the fields of African history, African politics, African development, and decolonial theory. Sabelo.Ndlovu-Gatsheni@uni-bayreuth.de
Rüdiger Seesemann is a professor of Islamic Studies and currently acts as the Dean of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth. He specializes in the study of Islam in Africa, with a thematic focus on Sufism, Islam and politics, and theories and practices of Islamic knowledge. Ruediger.Seesemann@uni-bayreuth.de
Christine Vogt-William specializes in literary and cultural studies and takes great interest in questions of intersectionality and decoloniality. She is director of the Gender & Diversity Office in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence and is currently working on a book on cultural representations of biological twinship in Anglophone literatures. Christine.Vogt-William@uni-bayreuth.de