Doing Conceptual History in Africa seeks to recover intellectual contributions of non-elite actors as part of various African historical processes. The regional, thematic, and methodological focuses of this book are broad, covering western, eastern, and southern Africa from 1000 ce through present ongoing processes, and addressing poverty, wealth, work, marriage, circumcision, land, ujamaa (African socialism), and decolonization. The volume coalesces around social and economic narratives, and around decidedly linguistic and, specifically, semantic approaches. By treating language as an active intellectual space the authors ‘acknowledge linguistic relativity without essentializing languages and without attempting to corral historical actors into ethnolinguistic boxes’ (6). This is a move that allows contributors to center their narratives on human agency, identify continuity where rupture is usually taken for granted, and account for competing historical perspectives.
Each chapter offers a conceptual historical narrative, as well as insights into the methodological or theoretical aspects of the conceptual approach. Chapter One focuses on wealth and poverty in Uganda from 1000 ce. Rhiannon Stephens uses diachronic semantics to move beyond a narrative focus on material indices of economic practice to consider concepts of wealth and poverty through word histories. This allows her to contextualize ‘Wealth in People’ as a recent phenomenon and one of many categories of wealth. She also identifies notions of social benefit around the presence of wealthy people capable of aiding those in need, and the gendering of wealth.
Chapters Two and Three take on the concept of ‘work’ among Nguni speech communities of South Africa. Axel Fleisch parses the existence of competing terms for ‘work’ in isiXhosa and Southern isiNdebele. He argues that continuities in ideas about work shaped local responses to the colonial labor landscape, and he identifies processes of maintaining distinctions between work based on motivations and setting. Fleisch also raises important points about the linguistic long-term, showing that evidence of continuity can be used to counter the perceived weight of significant events, including colonialism. Anne Kelk Mager focuses on ‘work’ among isiXhosa-speakers, but with an eye to overlapping and intersecting interests of missionaries. Competing efforts to define ‘work’ took on a gendered dimension, as missionaries sought to graft aspects of masculinity onto expectations of labor.
Chapter Four shifts to twentieth-century Afrikaans-speakers. Marné Pienaar explores the ways that multiplicity in governance of marriage implies tension in meaning. She employs a theory of encyclopedic knowledge to demonstrate how words offer access points to networks of knowledge, which she attempts to constitute historically. It is a move that reveals the importance of freedom in defining marriage and the continued influences of marriage practices that originate in conditions of structured racial inequality. Pamela Khanakwa makes a similar move in Chapter Five by illustrating the ways that Bagisu contested and negotiated practices and conceptualizations of male circumcision in Eastern Uganda. She traces competing embodiments of masculine ideals of strength and resilience over time, and the inadequacy of alternatives to spectacular circumcision to show how circumcision became accessible to ethnonationalists as a way of enforcing identity.
Chapters Six and Seven address concepts of ‘land’ within competing notions of ‘property’ and ‘nation’ in colonial Equatorial Guinea and Gold Coast, respectively. Ana Lúcia Sá and Pieter Boele van Hensbroek both demonstrate the capacity of local actors to appropriate legal definitions and regulations regarding land tenure and private property to assert the rights of their communities. Sá treats ‘land’ as a semantic field amenable to changing configurations of autochthony and ownership, while van Hensbroek focuses on discourses and actions of Gold Coast intellectuals around the importance of land in creative improvisations of ‘nation’.
Chapters Eight and Nine tackle the more trying task of historicizing elusive concepts of ujamaa and decolonization. Bo Stråth focuses on ‘condensed moments’ in which Swahili concepts were loaded with new meanings. By focusing on ujamaa as well as Uhuru (freedom) and unyonyaji (freedom from exploitation), Stråth identifies ways that ‘contested key concepts contained a temporal dimension of continuities and discontinuities, of experienced pasts and imagined futures’ (206). These were concepts that could be used to view the present in terms of past idealizations about the future. Pierre-Philippe Fraiture parses decolonization and the ways in which definitions fail to account for the continuous nature of the phenomenon it describes. In his discussion of works by V. Y. Mudimbe, Achille Mbembe and Patrice Nganang, Fraiture highlights trends of invention, translation, rupture and continuity. His analysis of the French term rependre (withdrawal) offers an apt synopsis of the potential contributions of conceptual history. Rependre ‘captures [a] moment of invention in which the original meaning is both taken over … but also submitted to an act of reprisal’ (230). Conceptual history, like decolonization, offers an opportunity to repeat, translate, take over, displace, and ‘retaliate … against’ colonization and colonial narratives of the past (230).
This edited volume offers an interesting example of what can be gained by applying novel methodological and analytical approaches to aspects of African history that are sometimes taken for granted. It will be particularly informative reading for students and scholars concerned with the availability of sources, with the use of language in historical study, and with the task of recovering the intellectual lives of past actors.
