The Audrey Richards Lecture in African Studies 2023

The following lecture was given by Professor Toyin Falola, University of Austin, Texas, on Wednesday 7th June 2023 at Emmanuel College. Africa is grounded in diversity, people, and cultures, all three that determine how the continent is evaluated in vari-ous economic and political ways. However, considering the three factors bring about exposure to identities that are largely marginalized, either based on the disposition of a people or cultural subscriptions by which standards affect the status of other persons. These subscriptions and factors have raised questions of identity acceptance and the marginalization of people of various statuses. These marginal identities include LGBTQI+ persons, rural dwellers, slaves, pawns, ethnic marginals, persons with disabilities (PWDs), refugees, displaced and stateless persons, se-cluded women, and albinos. African nations have been formulating and implementing pluralized policies and developed dominant but rigid frameworks in consideration of generalities over specificities. This explains the ripple effects of marginalization and why millions of lives are still being lost despite the seeming solutions from governments. Because of their uniqueness, history, unconventionality, biological composition, and societal differences, marginal identities can be denied agency, persecuted, or killed. The lecture, a collage of the ignored marginals, examines cultural reactions to people of unconventional identities and social standings. It discusses how nations and majoritarian groups respond to these marginal identi-ties and their various issues and challenges. In addition, the lecture expounds on these people's marginalization and its effects on them and offers a viable approach to solving some of the fundamental problems. It is an urgent policy call to minimize the deaths of millions of people in the years ahead. Hence, the lecture provides fresh ap-proaches to identifying the various marginalities within the cultural and historical peculiarities of African communi-ties to arrive at theoretical reformulations that fit each category. It then attempts to give specific solutions outside generalized approaches toward a more meaningful set of proposals, conditioning societal interactions and existing ambiguous frameworks. It canvasses for intentional, deliberate, and focused policies different from extant plural recommendations that manage competing ethnic and religious identities.