Laura Royer: "Scholarly Institutions and the Post-Colonial World of Knowledge: The International Congress of Africanists (1962-1991)", Halftime seminar

Abstract:

In December 1962, the first session of the International Congress of Africanists session took place in Accra, Ghana. About 600 participants attended the event, travelling from Nigeria, Ivory Coast, the United States, France, Kenya, the Soviet Union, or China. The initiative was financed primarily by the Ford Foundation, the governments of Nigeria and Ghana, and UNESCO, while sources suggest that the idea for the event originated at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. The organising committee, led by the Nigerian historian Kenneth Onwuka Dike, brought together representatives from several African universities alongside British, Soviet, American, and French learned institutions.

The Accra conference led to the establishment of an academic association – the International Congress of Africanists – endowed with formal statutes, a Permanent Council composed of national delegations, and a Bureau. The Congress convened five further times: in Dakar (1967), Addis Ababa (1973), Kinshasa (1978), Ibadan (1985), and Khartoum (1991). Over these decades, it became a key site of critique and contestation over the meaning of ‘African studies’ in the post-colonial world; a forum where modern and postmodern conceptions of scholarship met; and an assembly in which institutions shaped by colonialism sat alongside those emerging from newly independent states.

This dissertation is a historical study on the International Congress of Africanists, circa 1960-1990. It is concerned with the historical relation between decolonisation and scholarly institutions and asks: how did the learned societies established during the colonial period transform, when African states gained independence? And how did the new institutes and universities established after 1960 materialise the ambitions and the tensions of the post-colonial period? Overall, how – and to what extent – were scholarly institutions remodelled through decolonisation?

Opponent: Emma Lundin, Malmö University.