The relationship between African studies and world/global history has long been debated. In some accounts, area studies (and hence African studies) has provided a launching pad for world history and the two enjoy a symbiotic interaction.Footnote 1 In other accounts, the relationship is more fraught, with world history accused of neutralizing the specificity of area studies; or area studies cast as an intellectual relic of the Cold War past that acts as a drag on global studies.Footnote 2
In terms of geographical distribution, anglophone African studies has taken shape across the United States, Europe, and Africa (especially in the 1960s, in places like Ibadan, Dar-es-Salaam, and South Africa with the latter continuing as a centre of scholarship). By contrast, world history as practiced today has largely been a Euro-American invention with little work on this theme emerging from within Africa itself. Africanists in the United States and Europe have certainly inserted African studies into debates on world history whether via world systems theory, studies of Atlantic slavery and imperialisms, or via comparative and thematic methods. However, within the continent itself, it has been business as usual with African studies being pursued via local social history frameworks or nationally- and regionally-oriented models.
Potentially, this scenario could be depressing, yet further evidence of the growing divide between the metropolitan academy and universities within Africa itself. This article presents a more optimistic picture by considering the view from South Africa. It argues that twenty years of post-apartheid life has opened the previously isolated regime to the rest of the continent. This shift has not only impacted on academic agendas within the country, it has also enabled graduates and scholars from elsewhere to travel to South Africa, creating a new academic hub on the continent. These developments in turn coincide with the ‘rise of the south’ signaled by the prominence of India and China and present an opportunity for new styles of world history, which take the global south as their matrix. While the agenda for this work will be set in many different parts of the world, the mutually-shaping developments between South Africa and the rest of the continent hold out the possibility that the continent can once again participate in shaping international academic debate in visible ways.
SOUTHERN AFRICAN STUDIES, TRANSNATIONALISM, AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH
Like analyses of other areas of the continent, southern African studies has encompassed longstanding traditions of transnational work whether on slavery; black transnationalism and the transatlantic connection; indentured labour; diasporic studies; European imperialisms; migration; medicine and healing; crime; radical international movements (communism, anarchism, etc.); world religions; and flows of media, music, style, and fashion.Footnote 3 These strands of scholarship have often been overshadowed by nationalist anti-apartheid historiographies and a long tradition of social history that has been determinedly local. However, with the recent transnational and oceanic turn across the academy, these transnational modes of research have been able to re-emerge from the shadows.Footnote 4
While there are larger global factors and international academic trends encouraging such shifts towards transnational forms of analysis, there are equally developments within the continent and southern Africa itself that are encouraging new styles of cross-border research. One important context has been the compacted nature of South Africa's 1994 transition with its multiple entailments: belated ‘decolonization’, the end of the Cold War, the emergence of an intensified globalization, and the demise of South Africa's own miniature empire with the independence of Namibia in 1989. The transition was further complicated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, crime, rampant consumerism, mounting inequality, and patronage politics.
This configuration revealed the brittleness of a heroic anti-apartheid narrative, especially as the new state itself adopted this story as the official account of its arrival and hence devalued it further. These changing circumstances have encouraged a rich vein of work on the transnational, Cold War entanglements of the anti-apartheid movement itself (and southern African liberation movements more generally).Footnote 5 Another strand of work examines the post-apartheid period via the lens of ruins, remains, and the wreckages of utopias. This approach recognizes South Africa as a long-standing laboratory for grand schemes (segregation, Milnerism, socialism, the Cold War, apartheid, anti-apartheid, etc.) whose fall-out and debris accumulates and compacts, creating an ideological rubbish dump in which citizens must make their lives.Footnote 6
A further post-1994 development is that South Africa has become a major destination for migrants from the continent and Johannesburg now houses communities drawn from across Africa. While precariously poised in a society given to xenophobia, these migrant groups have created the precondition for a greater awareness of the rest of the continent. This growing emphasis on continental and oceanic connections, in turn, forms part of an expanding interest in the idea of the global south. As South Africa joins various multilateral organizations such as India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) and Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS), the question of its relationship to India and China and its possible futures in the Indian Ocean and the global south more generally becomes more prominent.
Since 1994, South African scholars have moved more freely in the continent while the country has become a major destination for postgraduates from the rest of Africa. These flows have sparked work that explores inter-regional exchanges and circuits within the continent and beyond. These developments provide new themes and possibilities for thinking about transnational histories in the global south. We will explore these ideas under two rubrics: textual and literary circuits, and political imaginaries between empire and nation.
TEXTUAL AND LITERARY CIRCUITS
Across a number of domains, literary and textual scholars are tracing new pathways in and beyond the continent or revisiting old transnational vectors in new ways. The Tombouctou Manuscripts Project (TMP) has pioneered understandings of new textual routes in the continent while also inserting debates on Muslim textualities more prominently into research on southern African literatures. Chimurenga, a literary magazine, revisits older ideas of pan-Africanism and non-alignment in new idioms. Scholars of East and southern African literatures are tracking comparisons and connections between these two regions.
The Tombouctou Manuscripts Project
The TMP emerged from a 2001 trip by then president Thabo Mbeki to the Ahmad Baba Institute in Timbuktu. Inspired by the manuscripts he saw at the Institute, Mbeki pushed for a South Africa-Mali project that drew together academics from South Africa and West Africa as well as archivists, librarians, and preservation experts from South Africa and elsewhere. Under the leadership of Shamil Jeppie at the University of Cape Town, the project has focused on preserving, digitizing, and interpreting the manuscripts. Importantly, as Jeppie points out, this project is not mediated by northern institutions.Footnote 7
The TMP has expanded rapidly and supports an active program of publication, workshops, public events, exhibitions, postgraduate training, and instruction in preservation and digitization (with obvious setbacks given the recent upheaval in Mali). The project has broadened beyond Timbuktu to other parts of the continent. These include manuscript traditions in Ethiopia, Madagascar, and the East African littoral and Cape Town covering work in Arabic, Amharic, and ajami (African languages in Arabic scripts).Footnote 8
Taken together, the work from this project has opened up new vistas in African history and its global connections. In terms of interregional interactions, the TMP work has made little-known intellectual circuits visible: for example, Anne Bang's work on manuscript collections in Zanzibar reveals Ibadi links to Algeria as well as a Sufi ‘corridor’ down the East African littoral and its islands reaching as far as Cape Town.Footnote 9 These networks have important analytical consequences for understanding the histories of Islam in different parts of the continent.
This work on manuscripts has gone alongside a consideration of print trajectories and has contributed towards new global histories of print that emerge from considering Muslim Africa and its textual networks in the Indian Ocean world. Here print takes a secondary place to the prestige of manuscript production. Furthermore where printed texts were used, they were seldom commodities for profit and instead formed part of religious and philanthropic projects. If one embeds these textual cultures in the broader networks of Muslim print emanating mostly from Cairo and Bombay, a different world of print culture emerges from those extrapolated on the basis of Euro-American models. These latter models of global print history are perhaps best apparent in Andersonian views of print capitalism that are extrapolated from a European print industry, in turn amongst the earliest instances of capitalist enterprise in the world. Textual objects are consequently one of the first full commodity forms and these are assumed to underlie the global spread of print cultures and the vast monoglot publics that these supposedly inaugurate. By contrast, printing across much of Africa and the Indian Ocean world was not driven by profit and large-scale commodity production. Instead it was generally small-scale, artisanal, philanthropic, multilingual, and took little heed of the copyright regimes that dominated European print culture.Footnote 10 Karin Barber's term ‘printing culture’ captures the artisanal qualities of these presses better than the term ‘print culture’ with its implication of vast, anonymous, monoglot, and secular address.Footnote 11 Typical of printing in much of Africa and the Indian Ocean world, such textual cultures point to a world system of printing somewhat different from the Euro-American model.
Chimurenga: experiments in literary pan-Africanism and the global south
Chimurenga is an innovative literary magazine, edited by Ntone Edjabe, a Cameroonian who studied in Lagos and now lives in Cape Town. The magazine started in 2002 and has since grown into an important intellectual forum for expression across the global south. Recently, Edjabe won the 2011 Prince Claus award for outstanding achievement in the field of culture and development for his work in editing the magazine.Footnote 12
Like many small literary magazines across the continent (Black Orpheus, Transition), Chimurenga is an experimental space, drawing together different regions and traditions from across Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, South Asia, and China. Co-editors are also drawn from these regions: Achal Prabhala, a writer and scholar from Bangalore has acted as co-editor on several issues. In setting writings from different regions in relation to each other, the magazine creates a space in which the idea of the global south can start to assume intellectual, aesthetic, and affective form.
With regard to the African connections it draws, these are diverse and unusual. Across various issues, one encounters pieces on Nigerian comics in the 1970s; 419 scams; an ethnography of Calabar fish stew; Faustin Linyekula, a Kinshasa choreographer; Omoseye Bolaji, a Nigerian now producing detective fiction in Bloemfontein, South Africa; and an interview with Peter Abrahams, a writer born in South Africa but long resident in Jamaica. In collating these pieces, the magazine requires us to think about the connections between them. The journal creates a miniature experimental bookshelf showcasing cutting-edge work produced in Africa itself and hence highlights patterns between on-the-ground cultural formations rather than focusing on those texts produced in the metropolitan capitals. Chimurenga consequently offers models of world literature that differ from those currently in vogue, which normally focus on those books that circulate conspicuously and pass through London or Paris at some point.Footnote 13 By joining the dots within the continent and by pointing outwards from there to other areas of the global south, the magazine posits a world literary system outside the north.
Connected literary geographies: East Africa and southern Africa
A further literary experiment has been work that weaves East Africa and southern Africa together into connective comparisons – in part prompted by a strong representation of East African scholars and postgraduates in South Africa. Dan Ojwang provides an exemplary discussion of the South African intellectual and writer Es'kia Mphahlele and his impact on East African arts and culture during his exile period in Kenya in the 1960s.Footnote 14 In terms of tracking circulation, Tom Odhiambo has explored the presence of the South African-based Drum magazine in East Africa and other parts of the anglophone continent. By and large Drum has either been analyzed from a South African perspective or in rarer cases, as part of the black Atlantic world. In view of the magazine's circulation in other parts of the continent as well as its considerable coverage of major developments in Africa, it is a so far under-explored site of continental connections. As Odhiambo indicates, the magazine provides an important popular forum for creating non-elite ideas of pan-Africanism.Footnote 15 Related to Odhiambo's work (although not dealing with East Africa) is a recent collection by Riason Naidoo called The Indian in Drum that demonstrates the wide range of South African Indian intellectuals, musicians, political figures, and sports people that the magazine featured. As Naidoo demonstrates, the magazine focused attention on Indian popular culture and modernities and challenges ideas of ‘traditional’ Indian communities. The volume revises our understanding of Drum that has thus far largely been understood as a black African forum.Footnote 16
BETWEEN EMPIRE AND NATION: PARA-NATIONAL POLITICAL IMAGINARIES
As a field, imperial historiographies have increasingly shifted ‘sideways’, examining ‘horizontal’ colony-to-colony linkages alongside an earlier focus on ‘vertical’ links between metropole and colony. This shift has prompted a growing interest in the manifold forms of ‘horizontal’ community that took shape in an age of empire and decolonization. Rejecting any simple trajectory of empire to nation, this scholarship excavates a range of deterritorialized political imaginings shaped against a background of the mass migrations occasioned by European imperialisms. Whether through notions of imperial citizenship, Sikh nationalism, Greater India, pan-Islam, pan-Buddhism, Hindu reformism, African nationalism, or non-alignment, these imagined transnational communities have been studied both in their own right and as precursors to broader anti-colonial ideas of the third world and the global south, enabling these latter categories to emerge as richer and more contested than previously supposed.Footnote 17
The burgeoning field of Indian Ocean studies has provided one avenue for pursuing a study of these deterritorialized imaginings.Footnote 18 As the world's oldest transoceanic, long-distance trading arena, the Indian Ocean has long been criss-crossed by slaves, sailors, merchants, pirates, pilgrims, and scholars. The age of European imperialism intensified this movement especially through the forced migration of slaves, prisoners, indentured labourers, and political exiles, turning the Indian Ocean world into a zone of penal experiment.Footnote 19
Southern Africa was one destination for both forced and free migrants from across the Indian Ocean world. Whereas the study of these groups was previously corralled into separate, minoritized historiographies (Indian, Chinese, Cape slavery, etc.), the transnational turn and a post-apartheid interest in South Africa's multiple inheritances has inaugurated a rich vein of post-area studies work. This scholarship considers these diasporic groups (each from a different ‘area’) in relation to each other and inserts them more prominently into the dominant South African historiography of black and white. This post-area studies scholarship has opened up productive transnational vectors, one example being an awareness of the mutually shaping imagination of ‘Africa’ and ‘India’. While African and Indian nationalists drew on each others’ ideas and provided mutual support, they also used ‘Africa’ and ‘India’ as frontiers of definition for each other.Footnote 20
A further development has been scholarship on southern Africans who have travelled out into the Indian Ocean world. Whether African exiles in India, itinerant Mozambican Goans, African Christians travelling on transnational Protestant networks, or African travellers, such analyses correct what Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie calls the ‘one-way problem’, namely the tendency to examine only movements into southern Africa.Footnote 21 While the numbers of travellers involved is small, this work does help to balance the impression that it was only Europeans, Indians, and Chinese who undertook transnational migrations during the age of European empires.
Mobility, borders, states, and sovereignty
This literature on Indian Ocean migrations has gone hand-in-hand with research into questions of sovereignty, nation states, and borders. There is a rich historical literature on these themes as they play out in southern Africa, drawing together older traditions of work on migrancy with a larger Indian Ocean framework. Migration has of course been a central theme in southern African historiographies and much of this work has highlighted the regional sub-continental character of such movement.Footnote 22 More recent work has highlighted transnational migration as a significant factor in shaping ideas about insiders and outsiders. Jonathan Klaaren's work has demonstrated that definitions of South African citizenship first emerged in relation to laws of immigration and practices of administration formulated in relation to ‘Asians’ (Indians and Chinese). A South African citizen was initially defined in the 1920s as a person who is not a prohibited immigrant. Keith Breckenridge has long been researching identity systems, fingerprinting, and biometric regimes. Andrew Macdonald's work on the social histories of borders demonstrates the range of Atlantic and Indian Ocean migrant pathways leading into and out of southern Africa and how these undermined hopes of impermeable borders, a process aided by practices of ‘strategic permissiveness and chaotic incapacity’ on the part of immigration officials.Footnote 23
This historical work resonates with a burgeoning scholarship on contemporary intra-African migration, the governance of mobility, and issues of migration, xenophobia and exclusion in South Africa – as Loren Landau points out, in 2007, the South African state expelled 300,000 people making it ‘among the world's leaders in deportations’. As Landau's analysis of migration in South Africa demonstrates, the logic of the apartheid state based on ‘privileged insiders and demonic outsiders’ has carried over into post-apartheid immigration control creating ‘cognitive and spatial divides between deserving citizenry and outsiders who can be denied legal identities’.Footnote 24
CONCLUSION
The idea of the global south has gained considerable traction as a focus of theoretical and empirical discussion. Jean and John Comaroff's Theory from the South posits ‘Africa’ as an experimental space that prefigures the possible futures of the West dogged by debt crisis and structural adjustment.
Latin American-inspired models propose the global south as a way of theorizing paths towards ‘decolonial’, and ‘non-imperial democracy’. Yet other traditions of work map out the institutional, multilateral forms that are giving political shape to the global south.Footnote 25 This article has suggested a range of themes that a transnational African studies can contribute to these debates – new global histories of print and world literature; tracking circulation between different regions and linking them through connective comparison; tracing deterritorialized imaginaries that prefigure the idea of the global south; following African travellers into the Indian Ocean world (rather than just the Atlantic); and linking the rich historiographies on migrancy in the continent to oceanic patterns of mobility. While transnational histories of the global south will certainly be shaped from many places, southern Africa appears as an important hub in setting these agendas.
