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Appropriating Africa: An Essay on New Africanist Schools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2019

Olufemi Taiwo
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Extract

In recent times Africa has been a favourite quarry of American social scientists and humanities scholars. It has served Africanist scholars, mostly white, as a springboard for their eminently successful careers, as objects of study, and as cartographic points to which some of them could lay claim as theirs, trespass on which is often the equivalent of a capital offence in African Studies. Many of us have often been lectured, harangued, sometimes nearly insulted, because we dared to suggest that a subject on which a particular Africanist is “expert,” or one that happens to excite her or him has little relevance to the scholarly concerns of African scholars or the lives of Africans! There are variations on this theme: it wasn't so long ago that feminists of different persuasions kept looking to Africa for primal, originary matriarchies.

Type
Pan-African and Transcontinental Perspectives
Information
African Issues , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Spring 1995 , pp. 39 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1995

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References

Notes

1 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., Figures in Black, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.Google Scholar

2 Ibid, p. 48.

3 Ibid, p. 48-9.

4 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar

5 Ibid, p. 4.

6 Ibid, p.6.

7 For example, the entire description of the relationship between Babaláwo and Èsù, and that between Èsù and Ifá

8 See, for instance, the unfortunate attempt to affirm connections between Yorùbá, Efik, Kikongo, and Kiswahili, all mediated by survivals in Cuban culture, in Signifying Monkey, pp. 18-20.

9 See Olatunde Olatunji, Features of Yoruba Oral Poetry, Ibadan: University Press Ltd., 1984.

10 Gates, op. cit., p. 11.

11 Ibid, p. 22.

12 See Oladele Awobuluyi, ed., Yoruba Metalanguage: (Èdè-Íperί Yorùbá), vol. 2, Ibadan: University Press Ltd., 1990; Ayo Bamgbose, ed., Yoruba Metalanguage: (Èdè-Íperί Yorùbá), vol. 1, Ibadan: University Press PLC, 1992.

13 Gates, op. cit., p. 15.

14 Ibid, pp.15-16.

15 Moedun is not a possible Yorùbá sentence/phrase since only the independent pronoun èmi “I” can be used in the subject position before edun to mean “I am a monkey,” and the shortened form should be miedun. I would like to thank Yetunde Laniran for this insight.

16 There are other points that could be made on this issue. Even with the diacritical mark supplied, until we know the tone mark on “o”, we will not know what it stands for. It could mean “mo” (build, mould) or “mò” (know), or “mó” (to be clean), all verbs.

17 Appiah, Anthony, In My Father's House, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar

18 Ibid, p. 5.

19 Ibid, p. 13.

20 Ibid, p. 13.

21 Ibid, p. 14.

22 Ibid, p. 17.

23 Ibid, p. 25.

24 Ibid, pp. 30-46.

25 Ibid, p. 45.

26 “Africa's Many Mansions,” West Africa, 20-26 July 1992, pp. 1231-32.

27 Appiah wrote a short and, in my opinion, dismissive rejoinder to Ofeimun's piece in the same journal; see his “Ofeimun's ‘Misconception,’” West Africa, 10-16 August 1992, p. 1336.

28 Ibid, P.

29 Langley, J. Ayodele, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa: 1900-1945, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973 p. 79.Google Scholar

30 Langley, J. Ayodele, Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa 1856-1970, London: Rex Collins, 1979.Google Scholar