Gender history has become a vibrant, critical stream within African historical writing, with many scholars embracing gender relations and meanings, women's experiences, masculinity, and sexuality as aspects of their work. Once we lamented that histories of African women were insufficiently conceptual, while still crying out for more and more of this feminist genre. Yet gender has become a common and nuanced analytic category in African history. New ways of layering scale and perspectives are emerging, and some historians are connecting gender with the global, the transnational, and the queer. Alongside growing attention to subjectivities has emerged a relatively recent language of interpretation: the affective. While histories of the emotions and the senses are important to track, attention should also be paid to the emergence of another major phenomenon in our field, new kinds of intellectual history. Indeed, an important challenge before us lies in how to interweave the affective and the intellectual. Gender historians are unusually well situated to lead the way.
First, let's consider where matters roughly stand. Some of the former urgency to multiply gender histories has subsided. The integration of gender within our field as a concept, analytic, method, and sensibility suggests, in fact, a remarkable success story. Historians of Africa of all intellectual and political hues, working on a wide range of subjects, regions, and time periods, trained in all kinds of institutional locations, have added some combination of gender, masculinity, femininity, feminism, and sexuality to the work they do. The same mixtures have gone with greater attention to bodies, illness, population, and health; violence, suffering, the everyday, and the phenomenological; age, generation, girlhood, sexual identification, and youth; and forms of exchange, as in gift-giving, monetary transactions, and other kinds of human and economic interaction.Footnote 1 Some have made one of these domains a central focus, while others have made gender an angle within a wider subject or frame.
Whatever the case, African gender history is no longer something that only female historians undertake. From Jan Vansina to John Iliffe, some of the most senior, distinguished men in our field have been asking questions about gender relations, meanings, hierarchies, and sentiments.Footnote 2 One may also argue that some male historians have long done so, since it only takes rereading Shambaa Kingdom or Womanafu's Bunafu to see that some of finest, earliest anthropological histories in our field subtly and importantly posed gendered questions – even if the word itself was not yet there.Footnote 3 Monographs that announce themselves as histories of women and girls still continue to appear, yet calling for a stronger gendering to historical analysis no longer seems as necessary as it once did. If not everyone is doing gender history, many scholars are, and a few have been doing so exquisitely well. The question is rather what kind of gender history is at play, and with what kinds of politics, methods, and vocabularies.
Gender has been transformative for African history. If many gesture toward women and girls, others have been seriously engaging with issues of masculinity, sexuality, generation, and matters queer, or in terms of moral imaginations, selves, communities, and exclusions.Footnote 4 Whether done in terms of wealth in persons, knowledge, and things, institutions of health, healing, and care, or honor, much work is shot through with dynamics of gender, sexuality, performance, and identification.Footnote 5 Many connect processes at large or medium scales to small and intimate ones of households and associations, including issues of reproduction and sexuality. Sometimes romanticization or brittle formulations have snuck their way in, often with a thrust keen to counter negative stereotypes about Africans. The once elaborate effort to demonstrate African persons, worlds, and imaginations as moral now suggests blinders or at least limitations worth challenging. The unethical and the transgressive, the criminal and the violent, the strange, the quirky, and non-normative have received less attention than they might have, while this observation has its own gender implications.Footnote 6
MODES AND EDGES
Are sharper edges needed? Historians of Africa have long used a variety of modes to push their research and writing in innovative directions, whether through locating and mining special source material, attending to contradictions and gradations in their implications or forms, or drawing from present political urgencies to think through a past as counterpoint. Terence Ranger's words on a ‘usable African past’ from 1976 still resonate well with what many of us try to achieve. His questions were about scale, reading publics for African histories, and politics, while he signaled the importance of asking about usefulness, value, and for whom.Footnote 7
If many clever, fascinating moves have since emerged as gender history, some curious omissions remain. It is surprising how little we still know about children in African history or speak to issues of the life cycle. Historians of slavery and pawnship, who have done important work along these lines, perhaps have had more copious evidence to work from than historians of colonial and postcolonial Africa.Footnote 8 Lynn M. Thomas and Elisha Renne signaled the importance of female youth.Footnote 9 Emily Osborne has pushed importantly for deeper pasts.Footnote 10 A new historiographical wave on gender, warfare, and masculinity has begun, with Paul Landau, John Iliffe, and Richard Reid perhaps leading the way.Footnote 11 Stephanie Newell's The Forger's Tale will frustrate those who wish to learn much about how Nigerians once read this palm trader of Onitsha, but her bold cultural history of this queer – homosexual – British imperial life in Africa is most welcome.Footnote 12 Mark Hunter, Deborah Posel, and Catherine Burns, among others have focused on South Africa's more recent past and have been doing immensely important work by showing how to write subtle histories of sexuality and intimacy.Footnote 13
Today, gender seems ubiquitous. Yet it is worth recalling earlier questions and categories of analysis. The avoidance of the reproductive within African history, a phenomenon still strong in the 1970s and 1980s, has largely disappeared.Footnote 14 The body has arrived with a vengeance, and it seems here to stay within histories now marked with concrete and metaphorical bodies of all kinds – some soaped, baptized, medicalized, scarified, circumcised, or possessed, others flogged, war-ravaged, dismembered, emaciated, fattened, bloated, or scatological. African bodies, whether in our historical narratives or in pasts as they unfolded, have never been so plotted, problematized, and analogized.Footnote 15 It sometimes seems that two kinds of bodies are present, though rarely entwined in recent gender histories. The first is more a practical, expressive, phenomenological body, often dissenting in relation to religious, political, or domestic matters; it often embraces spirit possession.Footnote 16 The second is less embodied and sometimes starkly Foucauldian. It invokes the body as a site for colonizing processes, sometimes biopolitical, sometimes more intimate, twisted, or voyeuristic.Footnote 17 Janice Boddy's history of colonizing processes in colonial Sudan is an important exception since it entwines these two kinds of body, and poetically so with interjections from spirits possessed who interrupt her analysis of colonial power and processes.Footnote 18 Her history is fresh, innovative, and highly unusual in how it creates counterpoints between genres, rather than blurring the historical and the anthropological.
Boddy's work follows several now canonical works in African gender history that set a high standard for historians in all fields. Works like Landeg White's Magomero, Megan Vaughan's Story of an African Famine, and Thomas McCaskie's Asante Identities are among these.Footnote 19 Much else emerged during the late twentieth century, with Luise White's first book on prostitution remaining essential reading for those working on sexuality and the everyday in an African metropolis.Footnote 20 Histories on such themes as reproduction, health, embodiment, maternity, childbearing, and puberty rituals also have emerged. These range from Renne's Population and Progress to Thomas's Politics of the Womb, as well as a growing body of work by demographically skilled and poetically inclined anthropologists.Footnote 21 Also of significance are studies of marriage, labor, and masculinity among other thematics.Footnote 22
What else? The former proclivity to conclude our African histories at decolonization has finally come to an end. And, if our field was once lopsided toward orality, tape recorders, and ‘authentic voices’, orality-textuality and voice-silence binaries have come in for deconstruction, as scholars, especially those based in South Africa, have moved on to subtleties like ‘genealogies of voice’ and ‘sounding lines’.Footnote 23 The new materialisms of African gender history are to be welcomed, too. In addition to human bodies, historians of Africa have turned to concrete histories of material objects and value, with much attention to transactions, infrastructure, and practice. Still, there is room left to more fully engage with the emergence of individual, collective, and generational subjectivities in relation to material processes or mediated things, and not only clothes, soap, or roads, but also hoes, photograph albums, graveyards, cinema, sexual economies, and ecological ruination.Footnote 24
INTIMACIES AND THE AFFECTIVE
I have suggested that two registers regarding the body have been at play, one more Foucauldian and disciplining, the other more intimate, embodied, and wrapped up in individuation. It is also worth noting that there is now an immense corpus of literature that moves between intimate and discursive registers, with a felicitous flickering of the sort that we perhaps first saw with Not Either an Experimental Doll. With this stunning book, Shula Marks in many senses was the first to write an African history of the emotional and the affective.Footnote 25 Its success originated with an extraordinary archival find and then the superb good sense to publish the complete correspondence alongside her nuanced interpretation.
Not all archival finds may be published in full. Nor do all deserve to be. Trevor Getz has since taken a few slender legal documents about one nineteenth-century Gold Coast woman's search for freedom and turned them into a startling, accessible graphic novel.Footnote 26 I appreciate his interpretive effort within the history of law, marriage, and slavery, especially for its pedagogical value and visual originality. Yet as a teaching device, I would still rather challenge my undergraduates with the more intricate archive of original letters found in Not Either. Surely more epistolary finds are on their way within our field, and hopefully more excellent work in gender history scholarship and teaching will be done on the basis of them. Additional primary sources, whether letters or a partially fictional comic book, could enable the interrogation of the fragilities, yearnings, and intimate struggles found within marriages, relationships, and households.
Since Not Either first appeared in 1987, an important new dimension to African historical writing has developed, much of it engaging anthropological questions. Let us call this strand ‘affective’, even if in many ways it began with emotions. Most scholars distinguish between affect and emotions.Footnote 27 Affect tends to be the wider term, embracing feelings, moods, and sensations.Footnote 28 An early example of the approach came with Megan Vaughan's study of Indian Ocean slavery, notably its striking chapter on ‘Love in the Torrid Zone’. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas's 2009 collection on the history and anthropology of love brought together strong and fascinating essays, if all confined to the long twentieth century.Footnote 29 Others have been circling around similar issues. Before Love in Africa appeared, James Brennan was examining Tanzania's ‘private sphere’. Likewise, Kelly Bryant considered what it felt like to be a member of the early nineteenth-century francophone black diaspora, Egodi Uchendu examined the painful memories of being children during the Nigerian Civil War, and Heran Sereke-Brhan considered affective dimensions of nineteenth-century Ethiopian marriages and politics.Footnote 30
Friendship has become a significant theme, particularly in southern African studies.Footnote 31 Mohamed Adhikari has observed an array of emotions – hope, fear, and shame – among South Africa's Coloureds from 1910.Footnote 32 Iliffe powerfully suggested the importance of honor as an affective complex, one not at all divorced of ideas.Footnote 33 Precolonial history is being taken in vital new directions as well by Kathryn de Luna who first considered hunting reputations in South-Central Africa, before writing a major programmatic review on affect in precolonial Africa.Footnote 34 Others have focused on a singular emotion – not only love, but revulsion. In a volume on German colonialism, Thomas Schwarz looks at disgust as an emotion of colonial superiority, while Julie Livingston examined disgust in relation to bodily aesthetics,Footnote 35 as well as the ways in which ‘toxic’ situations shaped experiences of debility in twentieth-century Botswana.Footnote 36
Studies that explicitly engage affect remain relatively new across all fields of history, though it seems that the theme will expand as an analytic in African history over the years to come. A search for ‘affect’ and ‘affective’ in three of our core journals – The Journal of African History, Africa, and Journal of Southern African Studies – confirms the substantial growth in the scholarly use of these words since about 2004. As a register, the affective has been morphing in novel ways as well. Some have carried it into fresh kinds of places and milieus, from churches and faith healing to worlds of prophecy, labor, and possession, even the dynamics of colonial anthropological fieldwork.Footnote 37 Many have begun crossing temporalities or memory with affect, often from an anthropological perspective. Stephan Miescher's history of masculinity in Ghana pointed to complex evidentiary issues involved in working across life histories and memory work.Footnote 38
That much scholarship on Africa has become ‘presentist’ is an issue that historians would do well to critically explore. Historical anthropology across fields has long worked in relation to a ‘breach’ between registers of time, a past and present. In African studies particularly, the recent vogue for memory, heritage, and archives has coincided with attention to temporalities, but also to catastrophe. Whether ‘the category of the present dominates’ in scholarly interpretations or not, the ubiquitous framing of crisis or disaster suggests our ‘presentist world’ within which ethnographic historians or anthropologists now work.Footnote 39 Their scholarship often appears in the pages of Africa or the Journal of Southern African Studies, rather than in the The Journal of African History.
Engaging a contemporary present and often using the ethnographic as well, such work embraces topics like memory, friendship, sexuality, and health, as well as money, speed, boredom, joy, mourning, fantasy, print culture, and spatial tactics. Some have been asking what persons do with emotions, like Michelle Gilbert showing how some in Akwapim disguise the pain of remembering.Footnote 40 In an essay on hope in post-apartheid communities, Fiona Ross demonstrates ‘sense-scapes’, with people drawing on sensibilities of decency and aspiration as they make new homes and shape housing and the everyday.Footnote 41 Sean Field does something parallel for Coloureds in Windemere through a rubric of ‘fragile identities’, balancing memories, emotions, oral history, and remembering among those awkwardly caught between community and displacement.Footnote 42 Finally, in a piece on African history and global studies, Isabel Hofmeyer suggests how affective, intellectual, and aesthetic impulses are married within contemporary Africa-based networks and publications.Footnote 43 Such work may seem temporally shallow. Yet it remains vital for the historical imagination, and some of it may stir important scholarship excavating deeper, more autonomous, and less instrumentalized pasts.Footnote 44
A NEW MASCULINITY?
Simultaneously, amid all the ferment over the body, gender, catastrophe, and affect, one of the oldest thematics in historiography has been undergoing a resurgence in the African field: intellectual history. Gender historians would do well to take note. Many other historians of Africa have been preoccupied with producing new histories of thought and thinking and this revitalization raises matters of masculinity, though rarely acknowledged as such.
There is a need to unpack these new intellectual histories, a substantial undertaking, well beyond my remit here. Yet let's at least pose a key question: how and where might this new scholarly strand best engage or even reshape gender history? A cursory examination suggests several robust strands among those who espouse the term ‘intellectual’. Although many do not use this word to describe their work, they labor with ways of knowing and kinds of thought, vocabularies, visions, and the like. Some historians consider a particular social category and their modes of thinking, such as the West African intelligentsia's take on abolitionism.Footnote 45 Others broach ransoming ideas in nineteenth-century Sokoto, or Qur'anic learning.Footnote 46
Some recent histories concern nationalist politics, racial thought, or political consciousness, though few explore the gender dimensions of intellectuals’ biographies or thought formation.Footnote 47 An idea of decolonizing intellectual history is sometimes present, but rarely is attention given to women's contributions or gender inequity.Footnote 48 Bruce Hall's A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 is self-consciously intellectual. It considers the development of ideas about race, racial categories, and difference along the Niger Bend, from a deep time when blackness mixed with notions about slavery and banditry, through to the ways such thinking has oriented forms of racism in the region ever since.Footnote 49 Jonathan Glassman's War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar powerfully and elegantly combines intellectual and social history, as it traces the emergence of ‘racial thought’ in modern East Africa and its historical eruption into forms of popular violence.Footnote 50
Other historians have been working with more conventional kinds of intellectual history, considering for example Africa's intelligentsia and their pan-African and activist networks. Rarely gendered, such work focuses on men and is implicitly about masculinity. From Garveyism to Black Consciousness, it privileges ideas.Footnote 51 At the same time, impressive across this realm of new intellectual histories are deep cross-sections of time, and also many fresh questions asked about knowledge, transmission, and sensibilities.Footnote 52 But gender seems rare as even a partial aim of analysis, while the exceptions seem like throwbacks to the 1980s with their narrow focus on women subjects.Footnote 53
FUSIONS
It is time to ask how these two interpretive strands are making marks or crossing paths. Are the affective and the intellectual irremediably at odds with each other? Or, how might they be productively combined? Such questions need to be resolved, not only theoretically or empirically but methodologically.
A few scholars have been crossing the intellectual, the affective, and the gendered in interesting if unannounced ways. Emily Callaci beautifully shows how racial thought and politics may be combined with matters of sexuality and forms of distraction in an article on colonial dancehall politics.Footnote 54 The major corpus of work drawing on legal documents has long had important gender dimensions, surely because issues of affect and materiality are striking within court cases relating to divorce, domestic violence, adultery, and the like.Footnote 55 The historiography on religious practice and imaginations, whether concerning Christian missions, prophetic movements, Islamic communities, or conversion, has often bridged ideas, and embodied practice and sentiments like love, honor, shame, self-worth, purity, and ambivalence.Footnote 56 Both of these substantial bodies of work exhibit important, quiet crossings among gender, emotions, and thinking, while often they have been sites for interaction among historians and anthropologists and their methodologies as well.
Consider, too, the work of Ciraj Rasool. He treats life histories ‘as productions’, while asking theoretical and methodological questions related to ‘processes of biographic production’ and their ‘mediation’.Footnote 57 By demonstrating the intellectual and emotional work that went into the biography of prominent South African political activist, Isaac Bangani Tabata, this figure's relationship with Dora Taylor emerges as significant. The two intertwined ideas, convictions, and the intimate, joined forces in forging Tabata's political writing and career, and shared interests in music, literature, as well as their ‘love relationship’.Footnote 58 While exposing this ‘biographical production’, Tabata is kept in ‘a decentred or displaced position’ that allows pressing questions to emerge about narration and self-narration, privileging ‘the career of biography’, and avoiding ‘seamlessness’ in historical narrative.Footnote 59
While African history remains lopsided toward the twentieth century and the present, and some new intellectual histories seem part of a move to correct this imbalance, the relative presentism of our field still carries distinct rewards. No continent or topography has achieved more interesting fusions of history and anthropology than Africa. Ethnographic history has become a vital genre, one that may move in more intellectual or affective directions. Discussion of memory is usually not far away, less as social fact than as mediation or performance. What constitutes this mixed craft, how to nurture attentive listening and unusual composition – such methodological dimensions are worthy of much further thought and fostering. We will surely see new experiments that mix scales and media in the years to come, only in part through using the digital as methodology. But it is not only through questions of technique that the methodological deserves careful scrutiny and fresh conferences. Heidi Gengenbach's highly original electronic history opened up vital issues about knowledge and feminist field methodology as they relate to modes of researching and narrating an academic history. Her work, which grapples with vernacular memory forms, is worthy of careful reconsideration.Footnote 60 A visual turn also has emerged, with Patricia Hayes brilliantly leading the way.Footnote 61 The practitioners of two recent moves – toward vernacular textuality and toward visuality – have only partially been talking with each other, however. We still seem to have more on Africans producing and consuming texts than we do on their creating and receiving pictures and photographs. Yet there are some important exceptions in the new literature on visual culture, while art historians are at risk of losing their once tight grip over this domain.Footnote 62
Many historians engage their sources, first and foremost. Some are using letters, newspapers, and songs to read gendered discourses and emotions.Footnote 63 Love letters remain a key source for mining textualities.Footnote 64 Relatively novel still, are questions about audiences and translation, often within two domains – vernacular spaces and medical cultures. Sometimes, these two blur. Indeed, Luise White has shown how the two have fused in fantasy.Footnote 65 Objects are often involved, as are mobilities and the therapeutic in ideas and practice.Footnote 66 There has been much turning toward the semiotic and performative, toward reading objects, figures, and symbols as meaning-making apparatuses in their own right, whether in studies of Dear Abby-like newspaper columns, of dress, cinema, and museum exhibits, or soap as adornment.Footnote 67 Others have used the epistolary to consider colonial situations, ideas, and sentiments, while glossing the mixture as ‘intellectual lives’.Footnote 68
The torrent of new work on letter writing and letter writers has enabled the affective to thrive. Yet texts – whether epistolary or not, whether private, public, or print-based – need not offer up the affective alone.Footnote 69 Working with letters, editorials, and fictional texts may enable new histories of thinking and ideas, of subjectivities and the senses as well.Footnote 70 To suggest the importance of affect is critical, but it needs to be balanced with other dimensions, not only ‘the intellectual’, but also images, aspirations, sounds, words, materialities, mediations, and registers.Footnote 71
Our most important challenge as a field remains less with new themes, topics, or labels than with how we investigate pasts, with kinds of experimentality with method, sources, media, and mixtures, parallel to the methodological experimentation that has marked African history and anthropology since the late 1950s. Concepts matter and enable. Yet it is through refining questions about medium and perception, orality, textuality, and memory, the acoustic, visual, and vernacular, and in relation to spaces, fields, and counterpoints, as well as gradients of depth and presentism that historians of Africa have long been shaping the strikingly unusual histories that keep our field special and unique.
A greater awareness of the mediation of things and technologies has had young (and not-so-young) researchers heading to ethnographic fields in new kinds of ways, armed with archival images and texts that they keenly seek to share with informants – and this methodological issue has been sorely undertheorized and debated.Footnote 72 It is a reminder that African history has long been methodologically inventive, sometimes naively so. Our field was born in the late 1950s in part out of the idea that the historian should listen, observe, record, and sense pasts in relation to a present. It grew from the notion that vernacular language and metaphors matter. Greater complexity has come from deeper attention to craft and theory, an explosion in the diversity of sources used, and an anthropological commitment to intricately linking – or attending to a ‘breach’ between – pasts to presents.Footnote 73 Poststructuralist sensibilities have surely not hurt our field's originality. Nor has creative attention to the concrete, the ethnographic, and the visual, with many historians specializing in a region, city, village, hospital, set of shrines, workplace, or web of institutions. Much fine work has long emerged as microhistories that visit in upon one locality or space in a thick way, forming richly layered readings and representations, while attending to process and mediation in complex ways.
CONCLUSION
At this juncture, therefore, we should be careful not to let African historical writing bifurcate into intellectual histories of men and affective histories of women and gender. It is important to engage critically with the newly self-conscious ‘intellectual history’ and its impressive temporal and thematic range, stretching from racial thinking, political theorizing, and religious ideas – yet still of men foremost. Recent scholarship on love, friendship, and sexuality, by contrast, explores gender in crucial intimate dimensions, though sometimes still speaks too narrowly and explicitly of a singular emotion.
Historians, like anthropologists, would do well to interweave and cross these two rich registers or strands. The rise of the affective, just like the risk of it being separated out from the intellectual, is not unrelated to the ‘ontology’ rage currently on the move across the humanities and the human sciences. The latter tends to starkly divide the epistemological from ‘the ontological’, ways of knowing from embodied being, while privileging ‘ontology’ as superior. Many align ‘ontology’ with affect. Yet relatively few historians, as we have seen, are explicitly crossing knowing and feeling. While debates over the grandiose new ontology word and its polysemous range seem unlikely to calm down soon,Footnote 74 some feminist theorists have been offering up sharp and cogent critique. Clare Hemmings suggests that a preference for subject formation and the interpersonal turned quickly into the hyperbolic celebration of affect and ontology as a ‘new cutting edge’. They arrived as a new way to understand worlds and objects, the unexpected and the body, as well as to express dissatisfaction with structural, institutional (read: Foucauldian) approaches to power. Yet many feminists, under the rubric of standpoint epistemology, have long encouraged knowing about knowing, while also tackling emotional investments, political networks, and possibilities for transformation.Footnote 75 Similarly, postcolonial scholars have shown how inhabiting colonial margins went with feelings of ambivalence, with not being caught in racialized binaries (as in: colonizer-colonized), but rather privy to subaltern forms of belonging. This nuanced way of looking at colonial difference as imparting knowing and feeling, use and inflection, allows for disclosing historical situations ‘crosscut with fissures’, where violence signified but also enabled thinking, sensing, and belonging.Footnote 76
Thus, it is fascinating to think about why affect has emerged now, just when gender studies seem less assured across the disciplines, when ‘representations’ lie dormant as if flat and untenable, and when many are weary of Foucault and that earlier flaunting word, epistemology. It is also worth wondering about where the recent new thrust toward the intellectual – toward knowing and thinking – has come from in our field. That a social history orientation has long advanced ‘agency’ as the best way to write balanced histories, with Africans present and doing something, this should not be forgotten. In many a sense, both the affective and the intellectual are anchoring themselves in new conceptual ways – and often without agency – in these times.
My point is to tether and cross these registers. Dividing or ranking will only distort. In refusing to split apart the intellectual and the affective, Africa's historians may write of the everyday in ways that convey exuberance, politics, and ressentiment. Moving beyond singular emotions may well go with rendering the moods that suffused a location or motivated an event.Footnote 77 Often we sense affect in words verbalized or penned, while ideas also enter through sound, script, or print. Splicing together visceral and perceptive bits of evidence may enrich the portrayal of a location or the events through which once coursed power and its tonalities. Such suturing might begin by attending to the lexicon, perceptions, tempers, images, and dreams of a generation, a social category, or even a milieu.Footnote 78 By combining sustained attention to moods and vocabularies, with alert gender sensibilities abetting at every turn, more may even forsake catastrophe as a frame.
