The problem of lack of rigor and of sloppiness in current knowledge production about the African past defies a white vs black, African vs foreigner characterization, although that may be an aspect of it. Believe me, I should know. Most of what I have reviewed--at least those that do not require anonymity from the author--are written by Africans. And yet I have seen howlers that are scandalous, inexcusable! And some of these authors live and work in Africa! The problem seems to me to be, as you suggested, generational. The older generation of Africanists--black and white, African and foreigner--privileged rigor, by which I mean thoroughness, depth, self-critique, and analytical circumspection. What you and I have observed is largely a symptom of a larger generational, intellectual, and politico-economic shift. In my opinion, it is indicative of:
1. The increasingly difficult climate of research in African countries. Even I as an African have to wade through a thick logistical maze to get to sources, credible sources. My saving grace in this regard has been productive collaborations with colleagues at home. How much more difficult would be for a foreigner perceived rightly or wrongly as a capitalized intellectual merchant?
2. Because of changes in information and communication technologies and in the technologies of sociability, narration, and the preservation of oral and written historical memory, the old method of simply going to villages (and towns) to interview folks in order to "recover" oral traditions and testimonies about phenomena or events will no longer suffice. The business of tracking down and faithfully documenting African testimonies, African perspectives has become increasingly more complicated and less reliable. The idea of a pristine "African voice"--the fetish of African history for the first few generations of African(ist) historians is now very problematic. That voice is no longer as "African" as it used to be, to put it crudely and reductively. There is nothing wrong with this. I am not lamenting it; simply stating it. You will now increasingly find folks repeating or spinning things they've read from existing texts, some of them written by old white men! You'll now hear folks clearly parsing contemporary, ahistorical oral perspectives as ancient traditions passed down unspoiled from ethnic progenitors. You'll now even hear a lot of claims colored not only by contemporary politics but by what one may call the politics and pressures of modernity. Also, the so-called "African voice," to the extent that it exists, no longer lives exclusively or even largely in oral forms. Over the last two decades, the "African voice" has spread to multiple mediums, many of them written, as Roman and other forms of literacy have expanded. African voices now also inhere in other relatively new forms of expression and self-representation that straddle the oral and the written or combine elements of both--such as the internet, film, etc.
Finally, for the above and other reasons, I tend not to instinctively default to the search for "African voices" as understood in traditional Africanist methodology--that is, oral tradition. I have to admit though that the temptation is always there because of one's training. In my opinion, it shouldn't become a predictable standard of methodological valuation or validation. It should, by all means, be part of a range of criteria for what constitutes good African history, but it should not be a disqualifier. There are projects that lend themselves more to oral sources than to written sources, and vice versa. This reality invites one to make a case-by-case evaluation instead of erecting a default methodological firewall against all Africanist works that do not employ oral sources. African voices are now everywhere, and I see that Africanists--historians increasingly--are creatively capturing them in the multiple mediums and genres in which they are manifesting.
--
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
-- On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 9:55 AM, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena <KAParr@ship.edu> wrote:
Chambi, you piece raises a number questions. Similar problems burden the re/constructions of aspects of Ghanaian history, including slavery and abolition, land tenure and economic change, urbanization and child labor, gender, ethnicity, and "contemporary" politics and social formation! Some foreigners, both grad students and established scholars, visit Ghana, spend two months or so in the archives. I should add that the older generations of non-African historians of Ghana learnt local languages and were able to do field work: gathered rich oral histories and oral traditions to complement "colonial" histories in the archives.
Last year, a top-tier university asked me to examine a Ph. D dissertation. I concluded that the work did not cut muster and hence recommended that the candidate should refurbish his/her conclusions with oral history. The fact of the matter is that the dissertation, which deals with a very contemporary issue on the lips of most Ghanaians, lacked such local voices in the form of oral history and oral traditions. Of course, the powers that be ignored my recommendations and passed the candidate with "awam" flying colors as we used to say long ago in Ghana!
This past summer, I met with two foreign doctoral students in archival settings in Ghana. Interestingly, both are working on aspects of chieftaincy and the postcolonial state. The problem is that they could not use any of the local languages as a research tool. Surely, as in the case of the Danish student, they would return home to cobble their dissertations by rethreading home-grown Eurocentric narratives in the form of "colonial memories" stored in Ghanaian archives.
These examples have always been a part of the cottage industry of African studies. Very soon, Chambi, if you submit a paper to Africa-area journals their all too often non-African editorial teams would ask you to build your historiographical superstructure on the Danish student's arguments and conclusions: his/her masterpiece, as "the" referent point, would define yours!
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Chambi Chachage [chambi78@yahoo.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2012 11:27 PM
To: Wanazuoni - Informal Network of Tanzanian Intellectuals
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Shivji: Have Tanzanians Forgotten Forced Villagization?
--FYI: Read below or access it at http://udadisi.blogspot.com/2012/03/have-tanzanians-forgotten-forced.html----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Blogger <no-reply@blogger.com>
To: chambi78@yahoo.com
Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2012 11:05 PM
Subject: [UDADISI: Rethinking in Action] Have Tanzanians Forgotten Forced Villagization?
The "Danish PhD Candidate researching land rights and land reforms" in the so-called "Sub-Saharan Africa" never ceases to amaze me with his 'revisionist history'. This time he has come up with a blog post entitled 'Nyerere, Operation Vijiji and Violent Land Administration'. There are strange claims that makes me wonder if doing doctoral studies entails concocting a revised history to make one appear as if s/he has something new to say!
Writing in his blog known as 'Land Affairs' the researcher makes this claim: "Most Tanzanians prefer to forget operation vijiji?" But which Tanzanians is he really talking about? Virtually everywhere I have done research on land conflicts in the last seven years or so the year 1974 keeps coming up because it still has implications on the Tanzanians in the present - how can they then forget? I recall even asking my grandmother what she remembered about Nyerere and her response included 'Operesheni Vijiji'! While in Kilwa in Lindi and Kilolo in Iringa researching 'land grabbing/grabs' that moment was invoked again by villagers in relation to how it continued to add conflictual nuances to the land tenure problems intensified by larg-scale land investments to the extent that the repetition even made me think of writing an article entitled '1974 in the Tanzanian Imagination'!
Yet our new found expert on land affairs goes on to make claims that can hardly be justified:
"The ambivalence most Tanzanians feel towards this grand project of social engineering of his is reflected - involuntarily - in Professor Issa Shivji's article The village in Mwalimu Nyerere's thought. In the article from 2009, Shivji manages, on the one hand, to praise the ruling party, the government and Nyerere for the 'tremendous achievement' in carrying out villagisation and, on the other, to blame an American, capitalist consultancy firm, MacKinsey, for villagisation's failure. Tellingly, Shivji prefers discussing the vision behind Operation Vijiji and ignoring its fatal consequences" - http://land-affairs.typepad.com/tanzania/2012/03/nyerere-operation-vijiji-and-violent-land-administration.html
Coincidentally yesterday I was quoting from this same article/chapter by Issa Shivji in my paper on Mahmood Mamdani's conception of decentralized/centralized despotism as applied to Africa in general and Tanzania in particularly. The article that the traveling researcher dismissively quote from has been of particular interest to me because out of so many texts that Shivji has produced that is the one I and my co-editor, Annar Cassam, chose to include it in the Pambazuka News' Special Issue on Mwalimu Nyerere that was subsequently published as an edited book entitled Africa's Liberation: The Legacy of Nyerere as it did not simply hailed him uncritically. Nowhere does Shivji ignore the obvious fatal consequences of Operation Vijiji as it is claimed. The quote below that the researcher apparently used to make his outrageous claims by no means ignore such consequences that Shivji has also covered agitatingly in many of his publications on land including the 1994 report from the Presidential Commission on Inquiry into Land Matters that he chaired in 1992.
"As we know, the decentralisation programme of the early 1970s, which abolished local government and was planned and implemented at the behest of the American consultancy firm MacKinsey...was a failure of no mean proportions...One of the dubious achievements of the decentralization was the implementation of the forced villagisation of the 1970s, Operation Vijiji" - http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59512/print
Now does the new land explorer want the seasoned land rights activist and lawyer to enumerate all those "dubious achievements" associated with forced villagization to qualify himself as not ignoring its fatal consequences? Or does he want him to recycle the passage below from his 2009 book entitled Where is Uhuru? Reflections on the Struggle for Democracy to show that he has not forgotten what forced villagization did to Tanzanians?
And if that is not enough does he have to recite again this passage in his media articles collected in his 2006 book entitled Let The People Speak: Tanzania Down the Road to Neo-Liberalism to convince the doctoral researcher that villagisation still matters?
Does one need to reproduce over and over again 'violence phonographically' to appear that s/he is not ignoring the suffering that his/her fellow citizens/subjects went through? Is that the way a nation heals - by replaying a tragedy graphically and frenziedly lest they forget? A people need such a reminder about their history that is not ancient but an actual lived reality?
The researcher, alas, seems to have found a new minefield of research to the extent that he makes the shameful claim below about the dearth of literature on forced villagization even though he has never even bothered to ask some of the key researchers and main research institutes/organizations on land rights in Tanzania about such literature - it was even a pity to learn that there can be a land affairs researcher who get to present papers in credible conferences and write working papers on Tanzania in a respected series whilst making sweeping claims about the state of the literature on land without visiting the physical archival library of Land Rights Research and Resources Institute (LARRRI/HAKIARDHI)!
"Operation Vijiji has received surprisingly little academic attention. I have only found a few academic articles analysing aspects of these villagisation processes of the 1960s and 1970s, and, so far, no larger, authoritative account of the whole period. That is a shame. The project shaped the Tanzanian countryside in unforeseen ways. During my research in the rural areas, I have met people whose houses were burnt and who were forced to move during villagisation. Some people still have 'sleeping' claims on the land they, or their parents, lost back then. The effects of Operation Vijiji, in other words, are still felt today" - http://land-affairs.typepad.com/tanzania/2012/03/nyerere-operation-vijiji-and-violent-land-administration.html
Did the researcher ever bother to revisit the archive of the African Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) that is 'littered' with academic articles on - including those written during the context of - villagization? Has he bothered to do a literature review of the books - including those that are out of print yet accessible through various channels - that were published by the then Tanzanian Publishing House (TPH) in the 1970s and 1980s? And does he even try to read Tanzanian novels such as the one that I cited in the quote below from an article I wrote or maybe they are not of an academic genre for doctoral studies? Could it be his ranting is a simple shortcut to get rebuttals that would give him a clue about references?
Howard Stein who, together with Kelly Askew, have been researching land titling in such villages in the last three years or so do not even dare to make such sweeping claim that the doctoral researcher makes as if he has really exhausted the Tanzanian archive. Why? Because Stein is very much aware of the literature on the subject given the fact that he was living and lecturing in Tanzania when it was hotly debate and written about. In fact he co-edited a book in 1992 that has chapters that address the forced villagization problematic. No wonder an article with some of the preliminary results fom their ongoing research has this passage:
"Although Iringa has a reputation for having been a particularly heavy hit area for forced villagization, we had reason to believe that there remained some traditional, pre-Ujamaa Hehe settlements in the more remote areas of the Udzungwa Mountains. To our surprise, we could not locate even one" - http://policydialogue.org/files/events/SteinAskew-Rural_Land_and_Property_Rights_in_Tanzania.pdf
It is actually very difficult to meet any scholar of Tanzania who does not associate, even if it is in passing, Nyerere and forced villagization. Similarly it is very hard to get a book on Tanzania, whether political or historical, that covers 1970s yet does touch, even if it is scantly, on the issue of forced villagization. Now how can such a preoccupation escape our rising Africanist researcher? Maybe the clue is in this introduction of his to another post:
"Some days, I find reports on my desk which are so thick that I'm about to give up before opening them. In particular, scholars and activists working within the land grab business tend to produce this type of reports. It is as if they believe that the multitude of words, the length of the list of abbreviations, and the sheer number of pages can transmit the sufferings experienced by the local communities, whose land has been illegally acquired by investors or expropriated by the state. The Tanzanian policy analyst, Chambi Chachage, has produced a couple of this kind of reports. I have had them on my desk for quite a while, wondering if I would ever get to read them. Over the last couple of weeks I did. It turned out to be rewarding and thought provoking reading" - http://land-affairs.typepad.com/tanzania/2011/06/a-crash-course-in-tanzanian-politics-please.html
In the quest to come up with new findings in a path that is well trodden own can do a lot of injustice to those who have passed before. As much as critical revisionist history is important in debunking conventional historiography it is not an excuse to make dubious claims that masquerade as authoritative scholarship. Maybe the professor who advises his doctoral students not to rush to present/publish before they really have something to say has a point.
--
Posted By Blogger to UDADISI: Rethinking in Action at 3/25/2012 03:03:00 AM
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