Framing myths of an event and the politics of history

 Whenever you go deep into a controversial or divisive historico-political event (wars, revolutions, coups etc), the first hurdle to a deeper understanding that you must deal with as a historian is the "framing myths" or "just so stories" about the event that make up the "collective memory" of its occurrence. These come in all ideological shapes and sizes and are basically the sum of the average person's understanding of the event from within the society where it occurred. These framing myths are often heavily influenced by school social studies, stories passed down from parents, or homespun narratives of history created by ideological entrepreneurs. The framing myth is a simple, easily communicable narrative of how one ought to understand the event in moral terms, usually propping up the absolute moral rightness of the victors or victims. Ideological entrepreneurs may frame the event as redemptive or tragic, depending on how they perceive the needs of their audience.

In this respect, it is sometimes advantageous for the historian to be an outsider to the events, as they are less prone to have been socialized in the narrative of the victors or the victims. However it is also quite possible for the historian to be seduced by one narrative or the other in the course of their research, and to mistake what their interlocutors told them as the most authentic framing of the event. In reaction, historians may try to balance that with another set of interlocutors, producing a narrative which simply tries to present victor and victim framing myths as co-equal. This is better than adopting one view or the other but is still not an adequate response to the challenge of the contentious past.

Instead the role of the historian is to try to use narrative to delve into the assumptions of both framing myths, unpacking each in different ways. This increases the likelihood that the descendants of victims and victors can gain sympathetic perspective on why each side made the choices they did at the time, how different choices might have led to different outcomes, and how to qualify one's framing of an event with perspectives from the other side. In this case nuance and complexity are not paralyzing paths to inaction but a route to a more robust understanding of the event that could (potentially) transcend the victor/victim dichotomy in the next generation, allowing the descendants of each side to recognize their agentive role in what occurred. In doing so, it becomes less necessary to look backward to the pains of that event to obtain moral legitimacy for the present and more necessary to embrace a generative future that encompasses the descendants of both victors and victims.

Read more...

Historical studies and truth to power

 I dislike histories where the author assumes their personal moral commitments are on the plane of the universal and metaphysical, and then spreads those assumptions all over their historical topic, a style that used to be called "whig history". One aspect that grates me is the egoism--the subtle need to communicate to the reader how much better the author understands things in hindsight than did the people who lived through the events. But there are deeper problems.

For it is surely of much greater benefit to our present to understand the specific rationale of actions later understood to be evil or harmful, then it is to make clear to a reader that they are "beyond the pale" to you in the present. This is bad historical method and is not very useful beyond demonstrating that one holds the current "right" ideas on the subject.

Detaching from snap moral judgements doesn't mean evacuating your moral commitments altogether, it means presenting them in way that respects the sensitivities of multiple readers, including those that disagree with you. For example, a western feminist scholar might disapprove ethically of "polygamy" for example. But instead of condemning it directly or negatively psychologizing those who engaged in it, that scholar could demonstrate some of its negative unintended effects and their larger social implications, without demonizing the institution and everyone part of it, as a whole.

It used to be that critical reviews could hold the tendency to whiggish moralization partially in abeyance, but anymore I wonder. I just completed an otherwise excellent book infused with this sort of moralistic rhetoric. Why do some scholars choose to write this way?

I speculate, but I think it might because I and many progressive scholars embrace an ethos of our work as "speaking truth to power", which was a concept coined in 1942 by Bayard Rustin in a pamphlet on nonviolent resistance to describe the role of a religious group. Applying it to historical studies is an inherently "whiggish idea", for it assumes that truth is out there among the masses or in the archives, merely suppressed by a powerful minority, and can simply be picked up and made visible by the scholar who tells their audience which group was right and which group was wrong.

At the same time, this imagination of "truth" must contend with a social backdrop of the loss of societal-level meta-narratives, the dissolution of truth into multiple perspective-bound truths. In the context of postmodernism, perhaps the whig style helps to broadcast and define communal boundaries within a larger community of scholars, demonstrating who is in, and who is out of a particular moral community.

Beyond speculations as to motivations, I think there are excellent and interesting ways to do morally committed history, that are more effective than placing your hand on the scale of the winners or the scale of the losers and saying, "I'm with them".

Read more...

Miscellaneous thoughts on history, objectivity, activism, and useable pasts

 I thought I'd offer a few thoughts about history and the historical profession from the vantage point of my own (limited) experience. Maybe it will be beneficial in clarifying what is at stake in the current US debates about "presentism" in history.

Coming from a grassroots activist before I entered a History Ph.D. program, I have been steeped in leftist and activist versions of history as "useable past". The relevant political question was always, "what is to be done?"

Gradually as I went through graduate school, I became interested in holding that question in abeyance, so as to ask another question: "what happened/what is happening?" Doing so meant 'unlearning' or complicating some common activist shibboleths.

I came to appreciate the notion of objectivity as incredibly relevant, urgent and necessary to this work. I came to the gradual conviction that characterizations of objectivity as an outdated idea in service to the status quo, err mightily and consequentially. In fact, I concluded the opposite: that embrace of objectivity's irrelevance leads to the gradual hollowing out of an ability to say much of anything of substance. I came to this conviction through a period of soul-searching and encounter with post-modernism, which at the time I was in graduate school, was being treated by many graduate students in diverse disciplines as a kind of academic activism, the path to liberation from the tyranny of reason.

In short, I have become more and more convinced of the value of objectivity, problematic as it may be, for appreciating the strangeness of the past. We are still in the infancy of a comprehensive understanding the evolution and development of ourselves as a human species and civilization; enormous realms of human activity in the past, stretching over hundreds of thousands of years, continue to remain opaque to us in the present. History's relevance goes well beyond present political concerns.

Now what I've observed of the discipline is that a significant number of my senior colleagues came through opposite routes, privileging methodological mastery and academic professionalism all along. For them, I gather, politicizing history and questioning objectivity can feel like a fresh and necessary break from what may have become a stale 'academic' pursuit. The idea that the study of history can and ought to reflect presentist concerns, is liberating for them. While I respect the efforts of colleagues to combat the hide-bound conservatism of the academy, and remain fully committed to the idea of reading history to inform one's activism, I am starting to embrace the reality that my unique past experiences have led me to very different conclusions about the relationship between the academy and activism.

For one, from what I can see, a good deal of those I've observed pushing this direction, are taking their cues from a professional class of media-anointed activists and personalities, rather than the 'grassroots' as such. In my opinion, well-meaning efforts to push the historical discipline to embrace as axiomatic a form of "usable past" activism, has and will continue to contribute to undermining the broader societal relevance of historical thought, rather than contributing to its revival. There are more than a few people I've met over the years under the impression that by criticizing more conservative interpreters in the discipline they are combatting actual Nazis. This lack of perspective is a direct consequence of the lack of contact they have with the grassroots they claim to be producing a usable past for.

Useable pasts are necessary (and unavoidable in politics), but in my opinion historians ought to beware of making their production central to the discipline. In doing so, they undermine the very thing that makes the discipline unique. For me, at this juncture, a historical study conducted with methodological rigor and a commitment to objectivity, is something thousands of times more valuable, enduring, and interesting to read, than a study written to resonate with contemporary orthodoxies, often by those who fatuously claim to have transcended or outgrown the notion of objectivity.

And this brings me to my last notion. A certain dynamic ideological tension is necessary and good for the discipline and for the academy at large. I prefer to inhabit a university where the ideological landscape actually reflects the full and splendid ideological anarchy of the grassroots, not an ideologically purified sanctum. I have no truck for scholars who are serial abusers and do actual material harm. But the problem with mid-career historians embracing activism to go with the times, is that most of that energy is (naturally) turned inward, on others in the discipline who express IDEAS or OPINIONS deemed problematic or even harmful. These sort of efforts alienate me, as I find them highly myopic and often cloyingly self-righteous. In short, while I remain on the left, I find the push towards liberal ideological conformity within the discipline (reflected in the belief that bad ideas are equivalent to harm) incredibly dull and reflective of the alienation of historians from the grassroots. Some of my most interesting presentations have been to an audience of people who sharpened my thinking through vigorous disagreement. This sort of low-level 'conflict' sharpens faculties, increases acuity, and improves my thinking. In my experience, academic aversion to this sort of conflict is also reflective of kind of an alienation from the necessary life experience of encountering frank unvarnished disagreement. I'm grateful for my time as a grassroots activist because of what it taught me about the importance of this kind of contained conflict for a healthy civic life. It is my conviction that such disagreement is normal and necessary to human flourishing, and that it helps, not hurts, the 'left' and the project of studying the past from a 'left' perspective. Demands that historians apologize for the expression of ideas, and the apology for "offensive" ideas, are both symptoms of a more general malaise of bourgeois alienation from the grassroots.

Read more...

Religion, Monotheism, and Ancestral Tradition

Religions that shift veneration away from accomplished and wise ancestors to more abstract, anti-iconic notions of divinity are most successful in times of social crisis, when elders fail in their duties and the collective wisdom of past ancestors seems unable to address the complexity of interpersonal conflict, ecological crisis or the breakdown of political order. In such moments the idea of calling on a force/idea that transcends local ancestral wisdom (a High God) becomes more and more powerful. Originally the High God and the Ancestral traditions could coexist in mutual harmony. But social crisis has tended historically to weaken the ancestral tradition and strengthen the High God tradition (who is seen as above it). This is at least part of the explanation why the original Egyptian religion was weakened over time and eventually abandoned. The reasons for this gradual shift are something I am still studying. Historically, the vulnerability of ancestral transmission as a form of active wisdom, has been replaced by the idea of wisdom as coming in the form of 'revelation' from a High God. An exclusivist 'High God' paradigm has become the new 'norm' of religious practice, condemning the older tradition of ancestral transmission as paganism, shirk, idolatry, kufr, superstition, etc, and projecting itself as ancient and unchanging and true, over against the false idolatry of the ancestral tradition. When believers in the exclusivist High God tradition complain about the anti-iconoclasm of the Wahhabis, they are really complaining about the epistemology at the very core of their own professed tradition, taken to its logical extreme. My own opinion is that the healthiest belief systems have to make room for both communication with ancestral traditions, broadly conceived (an open question is: what does it mean to communicate with ancestors in 2016, when those links were severed in past generations?), and the High God tradition as a form of transcendent 'outside' knowledge. The old ways are not always the best ways, nor are the new ways necessarily an improvement on the past.

Read more...

What Is Bongo Flava?

P Funk speaks on the origins of Swahili hip hop.

Read more...

Silences in African History (book review)

Silences in African History: Between the Syndromes of Discovery and Abolition is a series of related essays on the phenomenon of silence in history. The book is an extended critique of--among others--Ferdinand Braudel, western intellectuals, the World Bank, the IMF, Africanist historians and neo-colonialism. The author Jacques Depelchin is the executive director of the Ota Benga International Alliance for Peace, based in Kinshasa, Congo and Berkeley, CA.

There are a lot of theoretical issues I could explore in relation to the book. I will sum it up by saying it is provocative, dense and deeply committed. Depelchin roundly condemns the moral irrelevance of academia and the limitations, silences and omissions of its theoretical concerns and ontological assumptions. He shows how the "post-colonial" order has largely marginalized African scholars from the mainstream institutions of academic power. As Ibrahim Abdullah writes in the introduction: "is studying Africa the same as writing for Africa?"

Depelchin shows how history needs a new paradigm: just as physics moved beyond a Newtonian model, so history needs a model which will re-theorize the relationship between observer and observed object. Actually this "new" paradigm is far from new, but it was lost or abandoned in the search to make history into an academic science. History is NOT a science. At some point the rules of evidence are not relevant to the choices one makes in a narrative. Moral considerations are. There is no going around this, no finagling it; to avoid it would be cowardly. An ethics of history demands a radical witness to the problems of our day and time. As I have said before on this blog, scholars, especially Western white scholars working on Africa, need to be more concerned to serve as a historical witness against totalizing projects, even if we ourselves are implicated in them! By doing so, we provide the "possibility of the consciousness to resist rather than simply serve the dominant powers of the age."
P.S. Big up to my man Dave B for suggesting this book.

Read more...

Old Picture of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos, Sultan of Oman

Read more...

Untitled Artwork

Monk brings us a dope piece of history through art. I told him he ought to call this one "They Came Before Columbus." You can also check out more of Monk's work.

Read more...

SQCC's website on Indian Ocean History

The folks at Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center in Washington DC have brought the ancient social, political and economic connections of the Indian Ocean together in an interactive and dynamic way for Web 2.0 or 2.5 or whatever the heck version we're on.
Indian Ocean History
If you are an educator or a student of Indian Ocean cultures and societies, this is an indispensable online resource.

Read more...

Pensee #3: Reconceptualizing the "Regions" in "Area Studies"

I couldn't have said it better! As someone who has had the privilege to sit in Dr. Voll's class, his thoughts are on point and very welcome in light of the issues discussed in this blog.
by John Voll, Professor of Islamic History and Associate Director of the Prince al-Waleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
Article originally appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies
“Area studies” as a way of trying to understand human experience is undergoing a major transition. Questioning the connection between Middle East and African studies highlights important dimensions of the changing nature of area studies at the beginning of the 21st century.

The question reminds us that the “regions” at the core of the concept of “area” studies were and are constructs for the convenience of analysts. During the 1950s and 1960s, policymakers and scholars divided the world conceptually into regions for study. In the United States, the definition of these regions crystallized around the list of non-Western “world regions” studied in centers supported by funding initially authorized by the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Although world regions had been (and are still) defined in many different ways, this 1960s conceptual division of the world became widely accepted. It is in this context that the regions involved in “African” studies and “Middle East” studies came to be defined. African studies became primarily the study of sub-Saharan Africa rather than the continent as a whole. The emerging cadre of professional “Africanists” tended to exclude the countries of “North Africa”
from their subject matter.

The definition of the Middle East changed significantly from the early usage by military planners in the 1890s. However, virtually every definition excluded African areas beyond the Mediterranean coast. In one exception, the British War Office during World War II included the Horn of Africa, but by the 1960s, most people accepted the conclusion of one of the standard geography texts of the time that Sudan and the countries of the Horn were “more properly considered as parts of intertropical Africa.”

One important result of this division was that the two fields—African and Middle East studies—developed relatively separately, and the conceptual regions tended to become reified. People spoke of “culture continents” with distinctive identities,2 opening the way for a vision of the world made up of separate—and clashing—“civilizations.” Topics that did not fit into these two conceptual boxes tended to be marginalized in “mainstream” coverage of sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East in conferences and professional associations.

These conditions contributed to two difficulties in the area-studies approach that are now changing. The first is a regionalist primordialism, which endows regions with some essential identity. As a result, interactions among regions are viewed as “borrowing” or “foreign” influences. However, interactions between the Middle East and “Africa” have resulted in dynamic cultural syntheses that are distinctively local but no longer simply manifestations of some primordial essence that has “borrowed” some foreign elements. Studies of these developments require “area-studies” expertise but also require transcending regionalist primordialisms. An interesting example of this postprimordialist analysis is Donald Wright’s study of Islamization and globalization in “a very small place in Africa." A dual regional studies approach, combining African and Middle East studies, is an important part of going beyond the primordialist perspective.

A second difficulty is a monolithic view of the dimensions of human activities in the region under study. Classical area studies tended to see geographicphysical, economic, cultural, and religious boundaries as being roughly the same. However, looking at the Middle East and Africa together reminds us that important regions or networks of interaction cross borders. The networks of Muslim pilgrimage that run from the Atlantic coast of Africa to western Arabia are an integrated region rather than two regions interacting. The networks of economic interaction have little relationship to the boundaries assumed by area-studies definitions of the Middle East and Africa. The classic study of the trans-Saharan trade from antiquity by E. W. Bovill presents an important example of how economic enterprise does not conform to the regions of area
studies. Studies of religious and economic relations between South Arabia and East Africa by scholars like Anne Bang illustrate that there was no clear “regional” boundary between the Middle East and Africa in this broad swath of territory.

Within the framework of these thoughts, why and how should Middle East and African studies be connected? They need to be connected through scholarship that transcends the primordialism and monolithic definitions of old-style area studies because these two regions are not separate “areas” or discrete “civilizations.” Instead, they are interacting and diverse sets of human experiences that historically have influenced and shaped each other. Understanding this will help scholars build a perspective and a methodology that avoids the dangers of old-style cultural essentialism that can lead not only to the conception but also to the reality of a clash of civilizations.

Read more...

Islam and Music

Afropop magazine brings it again with an interesting interview about music and islam. Below is an excerpt:

B.E.: You also looked into the state of this debate about Islam and music in the contemporary American scene. Tell us about Sheikh Tamer Salim.

J.B.: I wanted to get a local perspective from the Muslim community on how teachings and ideas about music play out among Muslims here in the United States. So I went down to Bensonherst, here in Brooklyn, and visited with a young, up-and-coming cleric, Tamer Salim, 27 years old, three years in this country, fresh from Egypt where he was educated at the prestigious Al Azhar Islamic seminary. Tamer is a good-looking, broad smiling, very warm and engaging spiritual leader who has reached out to monotheistic faiths with a hand of friendship and really gotten himself on the map here in New York as a respected Muslim cleric.

When I asked him about ideas about music within his own congregation, he told me:

Tamer Salim: Actually I am being asked about this issue all the time, because you know it’s very hard to avoid listening to music in this country. So when I came here to the United States, I found the people differing about this issue as well. And I found a group of people who are being raised, or even being born in this country, even those people who received their education in this country, who are following directly the rulings of Saudi Arabia, those people who are extreme when it comes to music and musical instruments. For me personally, I would consider it a very extreme view if you tell people not to listen to music in this country. But at same time, I would adopt the view of those moderate people that not every kind of music is worth listening to. So when the Muslim community would come to me asking about this, I would tell them, “Me personally, I don’t see anything wrong with music as long as the content of the music doesn’t have anything contradicting to Islamic culture, or Islamic law.

J.B.: Sheikh Tamer took pains to distinguish himself from the Salafi position, which has that default restrictive attitude toward so many different types of music. He actually made the point that Islam encourages many forms of art, including music, starting with the recitation of the Koran itself:

Tamer Salim: Allah told us to beautify reading and reciting the Koran. If you listen to the Koran from a good reciter, you would find this kind of beauty. Islam is requiring of us that we never read the Koran without making it beautiful in the ears of the people. We try to sing it in a good way. We try to make it affect the hearts of the people who would listen to it. The same is true of the Azan, which is the call for prayer. And actually, at the time of the prophet, when people wanted to make Azan, the Prophet said, ‘Leave that to Bilal,’ one of the companions of the Prophet. Bilal used to have a very beautiful voice when it came to saying the Azan itself. The Prophet would not let just anybody make the call for prayer. He would choose those people who had beautiful voices in order to have an impact on the hearts and the minds of the people. So we are here encouraged in many ways to listen to the beautiful voices of the people, and Islam is encouraging that.

Read more...

Reshaping Muslim World Narratives?

The Rand Corporation is working up a new proposal to 'reshape Muslim world narratives'. This proposal states that the basic problem of Muslim countries is the narrative they possess (that is, the life story that contributes to their identity) is basically 'hostile' and 'violent'. Thus RAND's project " aims to develop national social and historical narratives that can enhance positive cohesion in Muslim world nations." According to the briefing:

"The benefits of such an outcome are obvious. A narrative of this kind can help these societies clarify common goals and direction. It can lend sense' to tragic events of the near and distant past. It can lay the foundation for reconciliation and shared national identity. It can address the deficit of dignity and pride that many believe are at the heart of the current anger and violence emanating from the region."

The author of the briefing is impressed with the US narrative, because it:

"allows each member of society, regardless of which side his or ancestors were on, to identify with all sides of a past conflict--with those who suffered an injustice, with those who were a party to injustice, with the losing side, with the winning side—while still embracing the outcome as the right thing to have happened. Additionally, those whose ancestors were not involved can still identify with the broad themes of unjust suffering, courageous resistance, social advancement, and progress towards greater justice."

So basically there are no losers in the US narrative, only winners, because the US always moves forward in the spirit of justice. While this is, at best, insulting to the thousands of activists who gave their lives in order to make justice a reality for the oppressed and poor of the United States, it is also symptomatic of the false historical narrative of American exceptionalism which we as a nation still believe in (most of us). And the RAND would like to export this model:

"In Phase I, a team of historians, educators, media experts, and political analysts will disassemble the American narrative, identifying the essential components of the narrative, including its themes, catalytic events, and integrative techniques, and create a neutral template from these for application to other nations."

This is the sort of dangerous cultural hubris that should be avoided, not encouraged in US foreign policy. The problem is not the narrative; Arabs are not idiots, and they are quite capable of crafting a resonant historical narrative given the opportunity. I seriously doubt they require the assistance of a special US project. And from the little traveling I have done, residents of these countries are quite capable on the whole, of separating US policy from US citizens.

Perhaps I am misinterpreting the intent of the project, but it seems to me that the real purpose of this project, is to get those who are clear that the US is responsible for a great many of their security issues (i.e. in the targeted nations of Syria, Egypt, and Iraq) to stop thinking of the US as an invader and more as a trusted ally. But you cannot change the facts on the ground. No amount of narrative re-shaping can undo the chaos the US has left in the wake of not one, but two invasions of majority Muslim countries in the past eight years.

Instead, US foreign policy should start from the premise that people are quite capable of crafting their own positive narrative, which will place the US in a constellation of relationships with other nations, IF the US will stop playing carrot-and-stick with Syria, stop propping up the corrupt Mubarak regime, and end the Iraqi occupation. Trying to cram false positivity into an explosive situation will most assuredly have an adverse effect: the US will be seen (correctly) as engaging in cultural propaganda and this will embolden reactionary regimes even further.

Read more...

In An Antique Land

Its hard to describe this engaging book from Amitav Ghosh. Is it a novel? A memoir? A travelogue? A historical reconstruction? A distillation of the best traditions of Orientalistism? In fact it is all these and more, a most remarkable journey into a lost world. Ghosh is an Indian historian researching the history of a 12th century Jewish merchant while living in an Egyptian village. Interwoven with his search for Ben Yiju's life from Mangalore to Aden to Alexandria is an often hilarious account of his relationships with the residents of the village. Ghosh humorously relates the litany of questions he is bombarded with about the customs of India ("Ya Allah, do they REALLY burn their dead in India?" is a constant one)

What emerges most strongly from Ghosh's account is the fluidity of medieval Indian Ocean society; how merchants crossed political boundaries with ease and how this movement generated a level of cosmopolitanism and cultural familiarity, a shared understanding across nation, religion, and ethnicity, which we see through Ghosh's account, has broken down. (if it existed at all for the common people).

One of the most affecting sections of the book involves Ghosh's encounter with a healer named Imam Ibrahim who refuses to part with his knowledge for Ghosh's anthropological interest. Goading Ghosh about 'those savages' who burn their dead and worship cows, he provokes an angry outburst from Ghosh, who brags that his country "has had a nuclear explosion."
Writes Ghosh, "At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person: I could have told him a great deal about it...but it wouldn't have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that was mere fluff: in the end, for millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this--science and tanks and guns and bombs."

Altogether this is a most unusual book, and an interesting diversion from more straight-ahead scholarly treatments.

Read more...

The Frontier in Indian Ocean History

As part of an Envirornmental History class for the esteemed Dr. John McNeill, I am trying to integrate an ecological and envirornmental focus into my study of identity, trade, social change and state building in the Eastern Congo. In other words, I want to know not only how merchants like Tippu Tip built nascent state structures and incorporated Swahili, Manyema, Nyamwezi, and other corporate or ethno-cultural groups into their organization, but also how the movement of these merchant-princes impacted the ecology of the Eastern Congo. What kind of crops did the Swahili Arab settlers plant? What sort of envirornmental changes did they set in motion?

It occured to me that such a project may be difficult to undertake without delving into Congolese and Omani archives. So, as part of a related but alternate set of questions, I would also like to explore how the competing discourses of Belgian, British, German and Arab primary sources sought to portray the envirornmental and social changes the Arabs set in motion. On the one hand, the Arabs called Nyangwe the 'New Bengal' and viewed themselves as bringing civilization and order to the land. They tamed the forest, and brought peace and order.

On the other hand, the many European travel accounts emphasize the devastation of Arab slave-trading, the many famines (which they linked with Arab settlement) and the general negative impact of the Arab presence. Of course this discourse itself, even if it was accurate, came to fulfillment only with European colonization--the worst years of ecological and social devastation were assuredly after the 1890s and the routing of Arab power in the Congo.

This relates back to the concept of the frontier in Indian Ocean history. Is there a way I can talk within an Indian Ocean framework of land-based frontiers? On the surface it doesn't appear to be an obviously helpful narrative framework. However, there are compelling cultural links (the presence of Comorians, Baluchis, and Omani Arabs in the Congo) and economic links (Indian financiers in Zanzibar linked the Congo River basin with the circuits of Indian Ocean capital) that make such a framework interesting. Using the idea of systems theory, which posits that we can find common features of a given 'unit' in terms of shared aspects of organization, I submit we can talk of the penetration of Indian Ocean cultural 'clusters' and the integration of Central Africa into Indian Ocean economic exchange and have legitimate historical evidence to back up our assertion. I am reminded as I consider this question of John Wilkinson's insight about Oman: "Oman as a 'natural' region has no real frontiers: like all such regions it tends to be rather more 'Omani' in places than others."

So it goes with the Indian Ocean: if we identify a set of shared religious practices, common clothing items, culinary features, familial organization, vocabulary, and more, that are found in the Indian Ocean, then certain places will have more ties than others, and this is also related to which 'features' we choose to compare.

Of course the challenge is to determine how much the 'Indian Ocean' actually explains; we want it to do some theoretical work, but we would err to depend on it to do heavy historical work as it relates to Central African history in general--most of the history of the Eastern Congo has logical connections with other lake regions in Tanganyika, Zambia, as well as points north in Uganda. But the fact that so few historians have even attempted to use it to look at the history of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century means that some potentially valuable understandings from this perspective can be integrated in with the existing literature.

Read more...

Historical Method: A Comment on Deeper Roots

The book promised to be "what the other book (Roots) promised to be but never was. Rather than an incapacitating, sentimental Euro-centric tracing of ethnicity, the author reconnects the Americas to the culture of pre-colonial West Africa and the universal way of Islam."

My next door neighbor in Oman gave me the book in our discussions on Islamic theology and law. He has traveled widely in America, so I assume he picked it up there. Anyway, the book brought up an old, yet still relevant issue: did Africans reach America before Columbus? Before I go on, a note on methodology is in order. While I think that is highly likely that Africans did reach the Americas before Columbus (and Dr. Quick presents numerous pieces of evidence, mostly gleaned from the work of Ivan Van Sertima) there is also the problem of how admissible certain pieces of evidence are. The reasoning behind Quick and other scholars' work is that an accumulated mass of similarities must ergo equal pre-Columbian contact. Yet a word from a comparative anthropologist is most germane here:

It can never be assumed that apparent likenesses between cultures are fundamental, while obvious differences are coincidental or due to special local circumstances. The selection of similar elements from different cultures and the dismissal of differences must always be justified logically, in detail, and in both historical and functional terms. As in any scientific enterprise, we must not simply choose our facts to suit our theories but must demonstrate that the cultural similarities considered to be fundamental are similar in detail and durable, while dissimilarities must be logically explicable as easily changeable cultural features.

For example, Quick cites Ferdinand Columbus, who writes about people in northern Honduras as being "black in color. They pierce a hole in their ears large enough to insert a hen's egg." "Black in color" indeed tells us very little of these people's concrete cultural origins, and should not be taken as evidence. However their piercings might tell us a little more. Even if piercing were practiced in West Africa similar to how Columbus described (quite likely), how do we know that this practice emerged in the Americas from contact with Africa? Independent invention seems just as likely. Happily for the scholar, their are some almost irrefutable pieces of evidence relating to language and other traveler's reports which put us on firmer ground. Overall the book gives some fascinating insight into what is in many ways still an underground history. Quick ends by meditating on a dynamic that has been much studied of-late, and remains relevant to African Studies in an Indian Ocean context:

"The real challenge is to be "Mecca-centric" yet in touch with the African world, to be an authentic Muslim yet still in touch with African American spirituality, to be a moral person yet still in touch with the pulse of African American youth, and to develop Islam in America without getting lost in the crises of the Muslim world."

Read more...

The Swahili Coast, 2nd to 19th Centuries

The Swahili Coast, 2nd to 19th Centuries by G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville

I am reading this book in companion with East Africa and The Orient: Cultural Synthesis in Pre-colonial Times ed. Neville Chittick. They both have their virtues, but I prefer Freeman-Grenville's style and communication of ideas; his book is more unitary in theme--constantly returning to certain outstanding features of coastal history and weaving them again and again into East African coastal history from a variety of perspectives.

Freeman-Grenville's erudition is great and his conclusions generally sound. He has some interesting insights into the future of the field, which, although somewhat dated, scholars have increasingly been heeding:

"In the future, the history of the East African coast will of necessity be written by scholars versed in Arabic and Swahili. It will include both public and private records, and likewise oral traditions, some of which have already been collected."

He also has an interesting historical note on the Sidi of India, descendants of enslaved Africans brought there beginning around 1738. Many of them live in Gujarat to this day. They speak a dialect of Swahili. I will have to look and see if any other scholars have done any work on this. He includes some interesting insights about Ottoman interest in the East African Coast, which I touched upon in a paper for an Ottoman History course at Georgetown University. Specifically he discusses the need for Africanists to consult the Seraglio Archives in Istanbul, as well as a collection of Swahili documents at Goa as well as some documents written in Portuguese with an Arabic script. At the time of his writing, no one had consulted the Sultan's Palace in Muscat nor the archives of Pondichery--I am sure that has changed.
Lastly, he has assembled a list of words of Portuguese origin in Swahili. Most of them, unsurprisingly, have to do with nautical topics. I will reproduce a few of them here:

abedari--large pulley (nautical)
amari--anchor cable
bao--plank
barkinya--small boat
bendera--flag
bomba--pump
buli--teapot
bweta--small box
danguro--tavern, brothel
gereza--prison
kandarinya--kettle
karata--playing cards
leso--scarf/cloth
mboleo--manure
nanasi--pineapple (this is also common to Arabic)
parafujo--screw
Ureno--Portugla
upao--roof timber, beam
mvinho--wine, spirits

Read more...

Oman and Zanzibar: Al-Jazeera Special

Read more...

Europe and the People Without History

Of course the title of Eric Wolf's 1982 masterpiece is meant to be ironic, for the whole book is about the history of those 'people' who at one time or another have been alleged not to have it (history). Specifically, Wolf charts how internal changes within European economies reverberated in the form of the 'mode of production' (defined by Wolf as forces which, by changing how 'labor' relates to 'nature', guide the alignment of social groups) Wolf charts the spread of colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism through a unique kind of economic anthropology which is rooted in structuralist thinking but does not succumb to the more teleologically crude varieties of that theory. In other words, Wolf is concerned with larger processes of economic change--specifically the spread of capitalism and its encounter with kin-ordered modes of production and tributary modes of production--and how they influenced what we would label as culture. Wolf sez that material conditions provide one of the main impetus for cultural change, a sort of stage that constrains the cultural choices open to a given society. He is strongly in debt to a certain interpretation of Marx, which I don't view as a bad thing, and he is trying to integrate Marx's ideas into the field of anthropology, which has frequently been criticized for studying cultures, tribes, and rituals as static entities, frozen in the eternal present due to the ancient unchanging nature of their traditions. Intuitively, we know this not to be true, but often anthropologists write as if each practice they observe has a lineage unaffected by the shock-therapy of 'invasion capitalism' (my term for Europe's conquest and integration of the world).

For me, this is a helpful insight. I have read an abundance of historical studies lately who, no doubt with the best of intentions, read into every action of the subaltern some rebellion against the established system, and tried to show how at every stage 'actors' resisted the 'hegemony' of (insert favored term here for invasive state policies).

Now, I am all for subaltern history, but let us be clear. As me and a friend once discoursed on this topic, she reminded me that the very definition of 'subaltern' involves the submersion of this history. There are some things, because of the nature of European erasure of pre-capitalist modes and traditions, that we will likely never know. Furthermore, I have noticed a tendency to overinvest moments in subaltern history with radical potential with the term 'resistance'. I have a problem with extending this term too far until resistance is virtually indistinguishable from accomodation. And often enough, the unstated goal behind these sorts of attempts is to 'rescue' a group from posterity by showing that they were not mere helpless victims of a given process.

Yet throughout the last 500 years, various social groups had a variety of strategies for dealing with the social and economic facts of their marginalization/ oppression--I would venture to say that most of them involve simply trying to cope and survive. This doesn't mean they were helpless or didn't try to shape the vast changes for their own benefit. Just because you attempt to make the best of a new, unfamiliar situation doesn't change the fundamental fact that most non-European societies were indeed victims of a relentlessly expansive European bourgeios. The changes this class set in motion were much more vast than anyone, including the boureious themselves, could comprehend at the time.

In short, just because people act in autonomous ways in an oppressive system does not mean they are resisting it. Indeed, what has often been neglected lately in the contemporary historical theory I read is a realization of the aforementioned point by Wolf about economic change and its impact on culture. Its no secret that questions of identity, autonomy, and more 'cultural' concerns have supplanted older questions of political economy, class, and labor. Now at this point, maybe you are asking: "so what, Nate? Why does it matter?"

This is why it matters: in going too far to stress the 'autonomy' of actors, historians can potentially neglect important questions about how profoundly capitalism has shaped the way we see the world. It literally has reordered livelihoods, families, cultures, ethnicities, set in motion huge movements of money and people, and basically altered the very structure of human existence on a previously unprecedented global scale. So I think it is necessary to ask ourselves, to what degree has capitalism shaped the alleged 'resistance' of the subaltern; i.e. the very nature and questions put forth by their discourse? Put another way, we need to appreciate the profoundly dislocating influence of capitalism and European expansion before we can look at modes of resistance/accomodation and the character they assume. Peace to Nat P for some insights on this discussion.

Read more...

Revolution, Nostalgia, and Heroism

Today, the phrase African socialism seems to espouse the view that the traditional African society was a classless society. imbued with the spirit of humanism and to express a nostalgia for that spirit. such a conception of socialism makes a fetish of the communal African society.
-Kwame Nkrumah

I like this quote for many reasons. First, because it shuns that unfortunate tendency of some writers to make pre-colonial Africa a place of perfect equality, a virtual paradise before the injection of evil which inevitably came from outside the unspoiled African envirornment.
The truth is this: Africa is the place of humankind's most ancient habitation, and as such we expect to find and do, the remains of the earliest civilizations as well as evidence of their decline and fall. This is the natural cycle of all human accomplishment throughout recorded history, and we place Africa outside history if we look to its past as if all Africans were kings and queens.
This also relates to a tendency I've noticed to deify revolutionary leaders, as if they possessed the truth for all times and places. Yet to make them heroes is to rob them of their relevance; they and thousands of others rose to prominence by making the powerful uneasy, by offering the stark unvarnished truth forged by their experience. They offered no claims to universalism and for the most part no ideologically ‘correct’ analysis applicable across time and space. They spoke from the specificity of their historical community and experience. They were usually hated by liberals. And yet, in each of them, one finds a current of humanism (and I mean that term in the best sense of faith in human capacity) and a generosity of spirit appropriate to the true revolutionary. One is reminded that Che once famously said, “a true revolutionary is inspired by feelings of love.” Unfortunately, in their haste to recycle the various arguments of these legends, some of their admirers have forgotten this basis.
For radicals, especially in America, there is a crucial gap between ideology and practice. While the great writings of Fanon, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, and Steve Biko (to name a few) emerge from the crucible of the struggle, the radicalism of our generation is often simply recycled analysis, offered by pseudo-academics who have spent their whole life in school up till now, and who possess virtually no experience in the kind of political organizing or guerilla warfare of the previously mentioned writers. They are all theory, no practice.
My point is that borrowed ideologies, even from such luminaries as Malcolm X, rarely can respond flexibly to the challenges of actual lived experience. This will help prevent rhetorical hypocricy. For example, not long ago, I listened to a local DC filmmaker stir a crowd up by emphasizing how whites were trying to prevent his films being made, and how blacks needed to support each other. He went on to sharply criticize those Africans living in America who did nothing for Africa. Later, a friend related to me how this same filmmaker uses mostly white production companies! He brought to mind Fanon’s observation that there are many (mostly among the so-called ‘conscious’ crowd) who are “violent in their words and reformist in their attitudes.” Me, I am unabashedly a reformist. Reform should not be understood as a theoretical ideal rooted in a particular ideology (i.e. Western liberalism) but as the will to change certain aspects of society without destroying the whole society itself. Just because you favor reform doesn't mean you share the intellectual foundations of everyone else who wants reform. To be a revolutionary requires immense courage, indeed, I think it requires one to possess an incredible intensity bordering on the fanatical. This is not to discount revolutionaries, but to underscore Sekou Sundiata's words: "Revolution. You wouldn't use that word if you knew what it means/its dirty, its bloody, it overturns things."
Sadly, those who claim to be revolutionaries often use this ideology as the barest cover for their own personal ambitions. I've been utterly amazed at the childish posturing and exaggeration that passes for historical analysis at some of the 'revolutionary' meetings and gatherings I've attended; I'm even more incredulous that those who go around pumping up 'revolution' are actually arrogant about it. Sorry, this is unrelated to travel, but I had to rant for a second.

Read more...