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RESEARCH FOCUS GROUP TALK: BEYOND BOKO HARAM: WRITING THE HISTORY OF BORNO

6056 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

  Hiribarren addresses the issue of presentism in historical writing in an African context. The region of Borno in Nigeria is well known for being the cradle of Boko Haram and many analysts have tried to understand the reasons behind the numerous terrorist attacks since 2009, the kidnapping of the Chibok girls in 2014, or the renewed jihad in West Africa. Writing the history of the northeastern corner of Nigeria remains difficult because of the ...

African Studies Exploding the Khoi and San Colonial Stereotypes, Reclaiming African Histories Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Exploding the Khoi and San Colonial Stereotypes, Reclaiming African Histories

Zoom

Academic historians have largely represented the Khoi and the San people of Southern Africa as marginal to the production of the region’s history, deleting their place in the emergence and development of African civilization and self-liberation. As a public historian, intellectual, activist and healer, Attaqua’s voice has intervened to forcefully reframe the history of the indigenous people of Southern Africa. In this talk, she will speak about the Khoi and San’s long struggle against the ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Reclaiming Confiscated African Histories

Zoom

Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/s/81168927411 How do histories of a people get confiscated? And what is the significance of indigenous epistemologies in reclaiming stolen, silent, and distorted histories? These are some of the fundamental questions that underlie Professor Shadreck Chirikure's research on Great Zimbabwe, a prominent symbol of African civilizations of Southern Africa that colonial historiography tried very hard to wrest away from Africans over the last two centuries. Professor Chirikure has produced several publications from ...

James Siguru Wahutu - The Place of Africa: Erasure, Elision, and the Task of Self-Writing

Research Focus Group Talk: The Place of Africa: Erasure, Elision, and the Task of Self-Writing

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Narratives of "connectivity" typically rely on discourses about Africa as a blank space devoid of social networks that are unique, vibrant, and continually being modified. While this takes agency away from Africans, it rests on the colonial assumption that "connectivity," just as "civilization" before it, is inherently exogenous, white, and male. This talk begins with the Rhodesian fantasy of connecting Africa from the Cape to Cairo and traces this logic through the contemporary discourse of ...