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cross-posted from: H-Net List on the History of Southern Africa
<H-SAFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Date: 2 Dec 1998
From: Bruce Fetter, Univ. of Western Milwaukee
<bruf@csd.uwm.edu>
The questions which Catherine Coquery raises are by no means new
ones to North American Africanists. Like her, I was present at the 1969
meeting of the ASA, whose English-speaking sessions (but not the French
language ones) were disrupted by militant people of color.
My concern is that Coquery's position throws the baby out with the
bath water. No doubt African researchers are closer to African sources
than foreigners and Africanists of color abroad have special motivitations
to study Africa because of their own experience as minorities who have
experienced discrimination. That does not make either group automatic
experts on all aspects of African history. Surely foreigners also have
their areas of expertise: the hard sciences, quantitative studies, the
analysis of texts in languages not spoken in the countries described.
I would argue that the real problem is an Africanist particularism
from which many disciplines have suffered for a number of years. Are
Africans a special order of creation whose experience cannot be compared
with that of peoples from the rest of the world? Do not the canons of
scholarship (criticism of sources, falsifiability of hypotheses, inclusion
of all of the relevant evidence) apply to scholarship about Africa as they
do to the rest of the world? Indeed, should scholars not be making more
comparisons between regions? As a Central Africanist, I was always
astounded at the ignorance which the bulk of southern Africanists
displayed toward other mineral-producing areas of the continent.
Perhaps some of us owe our colleagues a mea culpa: the
systematizers who have tried to fit Africa into a procrustean bed. You
know who you are: former Marxists, world system analysts, monocausalists
of all sorts. But surely there must be a place for those of us who study
the evidence to the best of our abilities, independent of the melanin
content of our skins.
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