Research seminar: African History and the Challenge of Colonial Historiography

South-South articulations of decolonization have been dominated by reflections on four concerns. These are development and dialogue as well as questions of race and the state. The developmental and racial components have been much covered in the literature on decolonization and thereby seem dated and much on the wane since the 1960s and 1970s. The same might be said concerning the state in postcolonial societies. Its dialogical side has however, received far less scholarly attention. Viewed as development, decolonization critiqued the failure of the colonial project to deliver modernization and scientific progress. Many anti-colonial thinkers thought of colonialism as a betrayed commitment and broken promise. The famous formulation of this critique is Aime Césaire's statement in his Discourse on Colonialism. Different thinkers expressed different positions on the question of race. The idea of the modern state in post-Westphalian Europe that began as a philosophical-political construct meant to deal with widespread conditions of anarchy, chaos and uncertainties through establishing conditions of lasting peace, ordered co-existence and security, sharply contrasts the violent state formation in the South––based on colonial contraptions from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the twentieth century. The resultant contradictions have continued to underline the agenda for post-colonial state reconstruction and rehabilitation.

This lecture presents the dialogical side of decolonization as a corrective intervention to Eurocentricism based on the reconstruction of historical scholarship following uniquely non-metropolitan critiques and interpretations of the lived experiences of non-Western societies. It draws on the sub-discipline of African History and examines the trajectory of decolonization in the colonial and postcolonial periods. It highlights the achievements and constraints of deconstruction historiography in its critique of Africanist and colonial historiography and the production of African historiography from the second half of the twentieth century. Since the annas mirabilis of African history, such compelling accounts have been rare. Yet, the examination of the past-in-the present together with the critical turning-points at which history, in this case, African History failed to turn,  offers an original contribution that an engagement with the intellectual history of the discipline of History in Africa can add to the literature in regard to the transformations taking place across the regions. This lecture reflects on the debates on decolonization in African historiography and the development of African History as a specialized sub-discipline on Africa vis-a-vis the production of historical knowledge on Africa.

Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe teaches Intellectual History, Political Theory and African Politics at the University of Leeds. Between August 2021 and June 2023, he was Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Professor of History, Philosophy and Political Science at Humboldt University of Berlin. He is working at present on two books titled, Autochthony, Democratization and State Building in Nigeria as well as Universities and State Regulations in Africa. He is commissioning and editing a collection of essays titled, Universities and the State in Africa. He is also guest-editing the special issue of Africa: Journal of the International African Institute on The Political Economy of Knowledge Production and the Universities in Africa: Funding, Strikes and the Students.

Rawan Mohamed (She/Her) is a doctoral candidate in the final stages of her PhD. Her research specializes in the abolition of slavery in nineteenth-century Sudan, specifically from 1814 to 1899. She earned her MA in Race and Resistance in 2019, with a dissertation centered on the perceptions of African Muslims within the Sokoto Caliphate in Northern Nigeria (Bilad al-Sudan). Her work explored the socio-economic, political, and cultural transformations that occurred throughout the nineteenth century. Her scholarly interests span transdisciplinary approaches, with a focus on the intersection of disciplines and the role of literature in shaping intellectual discourse.