This edited book comes along as a kind of “surprise gift”. In the first pages of their introductory chapter (pp. 1–3), the editors—Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Moritz Mihatsch, and Michelle Sikes—refer to the current waves of mobilisation against the imperial remainders in monuments and memory, making readers expect that the chapters might discuss colonial legacy and challenges against them. In truth, the editors deliver something more pioneering: a book on how memory issues are dealt with in postcolonial African societies and networks, and the consequences of doing so.
Natacha Filippi’s chapter builds on a critical engagement with her role as an oral historian researching the experiences of prisoners and of inmates of a psychiatric ward in Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa (pp. 24f.). She first maps the limits and constraints on contact with the interviewees (p. 32), including fears of talking about violence (p. 37). The author then points to the complexity of memory regarding common-law prisoners in Apartheid prisons during the transition phase and under the heated conditions of prisoner strikes especially in 1994: while the new elites refused to include such prisoners within the memory of imprisonment, those demanded their inclusion into the narrative of Apartheid repression (pp. 38–43). According to Filippi, substantial questions remain unanswered, namely the role of prison museums in conveying a version of the past (p. 44).
Casper Andersen’s discussion of the memory politics within the “UNESCO’s General History of Africa” plunges readers into the logics of decolonising knowledge and “africanising” the study of the past within African academia (pp. 50, 56). He identifies the unifying role of Islam, of anticolonial resistance, and of African unity in general as consensus outcomes of the academic network behind the volumes, and holds that even internal conflicts, such as regarding the work of Cheikh Anta Diop, could be contained within a frank and open debate (pp. 58f.). This was less the case in the controversy between Adu Boahen and Terence Ranger, in which the latter was compelled to renounce writing of African “collaboration” when discussing colonial rule (pp. 65f.). While interpreting, and indirectly endorsing, the integration of public intellectuals into the production of the General History’s volumes such as for Wole Soyinka (p. 62), Andersen could have profited from explaining the difference of his results from those of Larissa Schulte Nordholt, whose work now constitutes the standard of analysis of the collection’s creation.
Edward Goodman scrutinises the internal use of a specific memory in the case of independent Kenya. He points out that the arrest of party leader Jomo Kenyatta on 20 October 1952 for his alleged collusion with insurgents of the Mau Mau movement and during the brutal repression of those rebels (p. 77) was aptly reinvented as a ritual to celebrate the nation’s leader from 1963 onwards (pp. 81–83). The author shows how the significance of Kenyatta Day as a symbol of loyalty and sacrifice (p. 91) was only challenged under the effects of multi-party democracy turning it against Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi (p. 93). Frustrated by the lack of electoral success, intellectuals and leaders close to the opposition took the battle into the field of memory politics, demanding a redefinition of the celebrations to focus on a wider range of anticolonial leaders, namely the other five of the Kapenguria Six (pp. 97f.). The successful reorganisation of the past therefore led to “[t]he ability of Kenya’s people to affect change in the present” as one element of regime change (p. 99).
For the case of Somaliland, Mohamed Haji Ingiriis demonstrates how the traumatic memory of violence, even in a recent past, can create deep fissures in a society, which contribute to the durable secession of Somaliland society from the former Somalian nation-state project (pp. 106, 108). Although not really questioning the popular idea of clan logic in Somali society (p. 111), Ingiriis posits the violence exerted by the Siad Barre regime against members of the Isaaq clan, which integrating the rebel Somali National Movement in the 1980s, as starting point for memory discussions (pp. 116–118). While the south of Somalia was characterised by the absence of any “orderly myth” (p. 124) after the disintegration of the Somalian state in the early 1990s, let alone an admission of guilt (pp. 122–124), the elites and populations of the Isaaq clan used the memory of drastic violence to construct a group identification through grievance (p. 133). However, the regional interpretation was not homogeneous, as parts of Somaliland society—seen as sub-clans or non-Isaaq groups—did not adhere to this interpretation, and increasingly became victims of repression in the new country (pp. 126–128, 130–132).
The importance of constructed memory within families and in devotion for ancestors, paired with new options of using media such as the press under colonial rule and after colonialism, is another challenging theme (pp. 144–147). Rouven Kunstmann and Cassandra Mark-Thiesen discuss this question in an impressive, comparative setting between Nigerian Yoruba and Americano-Liberian elites. While links with precolonial practices are obvious from these observations (p. 149), new forms, including the recourse to photographs, quickly gained prominence (p. 150). The authors show up to which point ancestors became a means of defining their descendants’ social identity: the successful life of an ancestor could thereby serve as display for individual prestige (pp. 152–155). Thanks to the comparison, crucial differences also become clear. In the Liberian case, closeness to the presidency of the independent state was a principal factor, and women were rather absent from the scenario (p. 162), while other groups in society, outside of Monrovia, belonging to the social context of ‘traditional chiefs’, also became acquainted with the use of obituaries (p. 164). Reliance on African languages, such as Yoruba, within textual commemoration is another relevant question (p. 157).
Nina Studer’s chapter on consumption of alcohol in colonial Algeria stands out from the ensemble of analyses. While certainly belonging to the analysis of using images of the past (and invented memory) linked to social behaviour, this chapter is about social practices and ideas of French settlers, and not about the use of memory connected to postcolonial situations (pp. 170–172). Studer demonstrates that massive consumption of alcohol was constitutive for a discourse of good settlement and civilisation, which was projected into the conquest past of colonial Algeria through the image of Arabic wheat agriculture being replaced by French vineyards (pp. 175f., 178f.). However, Algerian Muslims also started to drink alcohol (p. 183), which was subsequently seen as a menace and a pathology in a settler society that precluded ideas of “assimilation” (pp. 184f.). This complicated the use of the general idea.
While all these chapters open new pathways, Ruramisai Charumbira’s final epilogue chapter is the most conventional one in view of current debates. Insisting on racist tropes and the refusal both in settler-descendant societies and in Europe to accept the memory of a violent past (pp. 195–200), this author first defines legitimacy in the field of history and memory as linked to speaking local languages (pp. 201–203). She then highlights the role of individuals such as Wangari Maathai, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, or Robin Wall Kimmerer (pp. 208–213). Through knowledge of local practices and their own memoirs, avoiding “research methodologies [that] are a poisoned inheritance from ‘explorers’ and colonizers’” (p. 211), they are supposed to be memory practitioners—in a far more important role than “guild historians” (p. 205) as “our discipline and its historiography cannot be about piecing fragments together, its future may lie in the telling of the whole anew” (p. 213). Late historian Jan-Georg Deutsch, to whom the edited book is dedicated, would certainly have endorsed the question of language proficiency, but readers would have liked to know what Deutsch, as diligent academic historian, would have made of the final chapter and the current trends it embodies.
Whereas many of these observations are doubtlessly right, they have also become common tropes within the discipline of history. And yet the chapters of this book demonstrate, perhaps in a counterintuitive manner, the importance of (international) “guild historians” for the analysis of memory policies. To understand how grievances are transformed into memory and become the root of secession (like in Somaliland), how the memory of a historical process is manipulated and used by a postcolonial regime (like in Kenya), how individual and family biographies profit from the crafting of obituaries (like in Liberia and Nigeria), and how common-law prisoners in South Africa attempt to be included in the anti-Apartheid narrative, sound academic historical scholarship remains very necessary.
If there is one element of historical engagement which should definitely not be challenged or “decolonised”, it is the distanced critical analysis of tensions and traumas that are painful for communities and nation-state projects. Storytelling cannot deliver that, and the critical historian need not become a memory practitioner but should above all remain a critical inquirer. This is why local and international “guild historians” are jointly called upon to continue their analytical craft—and Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Moritz Mihatsch, and Michelle Sikes have shown the way.
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