CAS and CGHR Event - 'Decolonising African Studies?' - Prof Christopher Clapham, University of Cambridge

This event was jointly hosted by the Centre of African Studies and the Centre of Governance and Human Rights on November 6th 2019. The discussant was Dr Adam Branch. Insistent calls to 'decolonise' African studies beg the question of what this quest actually involves. If it refers to an attempt to understand the continent's diverse and complex societies that builds on their indigenous structures and values, this was a task initiated during the decolonisation era of the 1950s and early 1960s. Led by historians and drawing heavily on insights from anthropology, it led to a revolution in the understanding of Africa, which nonetheless failed to maintain its impetus as a result of the political authoritarianism and economic decay of the post-independence period, which had a particularly damaging impact on Africa's universities. Of late, however, the phrase has come to refer to developments notably in North America and Europe, which in subordinating the study of Africa to agendas in the global north may appropriately be described not as decolonisation but as recolonisation.