Table Of ContentEdited by
Marta Iñiguez de Heredia and Zubairu Wai
R e c e n t e r i n g A f r i c a
i n I n t e r n a t i o n a l
R e l a t i o n s
Beyond Lack, Peripherality, and Failure
Foreword by Robbie Shilliam
Recentering Africa in International Relations
Marta Iñiguez de Heredia
Zubairu Wai
Editors
Recentering Africa in
International Relations
Beyond Lack, Peripherality, and Failure
Foreword by Robbie Shilliam
Editors
Marta Iñiguez de Heredia Zubairu Wai
Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Department of Political Science
Internacionals Lakehead University
Pompeu Fabra University Thunder Bay, ON, Canada
Barcelona, Spain
ISBN 978-3-319-67509-1 ISBN 978-3-319-67510-7 (eBook)
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F
oreword
There is little to add to Zubairu Wai’s comprehensive introduction to this
wonderful collection of essays. Wai amply sketches out the double task of
deconstruction and reconstruction which the volume attends to. As Wai
argues, this task is made all the more difficult because Africa is a parallax—
exemplifying at the same time the very best and very worst of the human
condition. Indeed, to think of Africa with nuance, with complexity, with
opacity, with humanity, would be to dis-orient the basic episteme of
International Relations (IR) scholarship.
Considering the daunting nature of this challenge, I would like to pref-
ace the chapters that follow with four stories. Two are from contemporary
Ghana. One from historical Geneva. One from the contemporary Pacific.
Together, I hope that they will provide an “underlabour”, that is, help the
reader to apprehend the depth of the critique and breadth of the retrieval
undertaken in the following pages.
First, a visit to Cape Coast Castle. The guide takes us into the dungeon,
comprising three or so chambers. The largest is supposed to hold a hun-
dred men. It is small. Two slits in the wall let in the faintest of breezes, and
the spray of rain that enters partly washes away the faeces, urine and vomit
down two drains chiselled into the floor. Immediately above the dungeon
entrance stands the chapel. The floor of the chapel is the roof of the dun-
geon. Praises to a white Christ above; cries, arguments, chants, moans of
the damned below. It is an intentional design.
The European traders, soldiers and adventurers of this slaving fort are
surrounded by Africans who they trade with, sleep with, pass by, converse
v
vi FOREWORD
with, who serve them, who sometimes praise with them (at one time, one
of the pastors of the chapel was an African). And so, it takes an effort—a
soul-deep effort—to consign a part of the humanity that surrounds you to
hell: to desanctify them, to make of them things, to turn living, breathing,
thinking peoples into a colour that represents nothingness. Negre, black.
A colour that ultimately returns to represent a whole continent.
Meanwhile, the women captives are placed in a separate prison space
away from the chapel. The rite of damnation that the men suffer is hor-
rendous; women are not even considered deserving of that. They are
instantly made dehuman. No drains are cut into their prison. Faeces, urine,
vomit and menses mix on the floor.
A subterranean passage leads from the men’s dungeon to emerge just
before the door-of-no-return. Walking through, the kidnapped are depos-
ited on the rocks, by the surf outside of the fort walls, waiting for the
boats. After 1833 the dungeon entrance to the passage is bricked up on
orders of the governor. The passage behind remains. Abolition plasters
over the horror, and that is supposed to be sufficient. In any case, because
the women are held captive right by the door-of-no-return there is no pas-
sage to block.
The Ghanaian guide must have given this tour countless times. But this
time—each time?—he relives the enslavement and trafficking of Africans
as a personal affront, a lesson for humanity, a primer for international eth-
ics. Standing outside the fort, he proudly reveals the other side of the
once-final exit. From this position, the door acts as an entrance to the
continent. It has a label on this side too: “the door-of-return”. Heretically,
the time of Africa switches, and the world with it. No longer regressing to
black emptiness, now full of redemptive potentialities.
The second story is of a visit to the Legon campus of the University of
Ghana. Beside the entrance to the Philosophy and Classics building is
affixed a large plaque, donated by the German Democratic Republic, an
artefact of Cold War politics that saw Ghana fete both West and East. The
plaque is dedicated to Anton Wilhelm Amo, born in the early 1700s in
Axim (within Ghana’s present-day territory) and at the age of four taken
to Amsterdam and then Lower Saxony.
Amo studied law at the University of Halle, writing, in the age of
enslavement, a now lost dissertation on the rights of Moors (Africans) in
Europe. Gaining his doctorate in philosophy at the University of
Wittenberg, Amo then taught at Halle and Jena. He made significant
FOREWOR D vii
contributions to materialist conceptions of the mind, body and soul rela-
tionship, as well as to empiricist epistemologies. When attitudes towards
the Black presence hardened, the African-born was compelled to return to
his birthplace. Amo was forgotten by—erased from?—the intellectual
genealogies that subsequently spun forth Kant, with his racist anthropolo-
gies and speculative treatises on perpetual peace. But Amo is remembered,
in Ghana, in the Legon School of Philosophy.
Still … an “African” philosopher? Did Amo not, after all, spend his
formative intellectual years in the Germanic milieu? And was he not influ-
enced by Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff? Surely, he is better con-
sidered a practitioner of European philosophy.
The problem, of course, is the colonial imposition of the choice itself:
European (thought) or African (colour). Charitably, we might consider
making the colour an adjective that qualifies the purity of thought: African
philosopher (in Europe). Heretically, none of this seems to be an intrac-
table problem for the leaders of the Legon School of Philosophy. And why
should it? Empiricism, materialism et al are not un-African vectors of
inquiry. As if “traditional” systems of knowledge and cosmologies are
ignorant of such vectors until European enlightenment. One can think
empiricism and materialism through multiple knowledge constellations.
Consequently, within the geographical entity now known as Europe lie
provinces of thought, no more no less.
Reportedly, Amo’s motto was: “he that accommodates himself to
necessity is a wise man, and he has an inkling of things divine”. Here, we
encounter the cosmological roots of realism long before they were
expressed by Niebuhr Reinhold.
With this in mind, I want to turn to the third story, set in historical
Geneva, June 1936. It is the moment when Haile Selassie I, the Emperor
of Ethiopia, confronts the League of Nations with its own duplicities in
allowing one member (fascist Italy) to brutally invade another member
(sovereign Ethiopia). The Emperor suggests that the fate suffered by
Ethiopia will soon be the fate suffered by all “small states”. If Africa has
always been part of the world, then World War Two begins on 3rd October
1935 in the East African highlands.
Selassie I’s speech has historical acuity, rhetorical force, and is theoreti-
cally rich in its utilization of two concepts that will become key to IR
scholarship: “collective security” and “international morality”. Who,
though, do students read for this pivotal moment in the inter-war period,
viii FOREWORD
purportedly sparking IR’s “first great debate”? Invariably it is the English
historian of Russia, E.H. Carr.
In the Twenty Years Crisis, written only a few years after the Geneva
showdown, Carr ventriloquizes his philosophical critique of realism and
idealism through the voices of white European male thinkers. The histori-
cal context that these voices emerge from and respond to is rendered as a
European world mostly shorn of its colonial and imperial coordinates. The
few encounters that Carr makes with these coordinates are, in the main, by
way of examples rather than contributions of substance.
World-historical figures, especially Selassie I, are usually received with
equal praise and damnation, and their thoughts and actions are evaluated
in a multitude of ways and through a wide normative arc. That is all as it
must be. The point, though, is that an English historian and expert on
Russia, using abstract European thought, has been made a preferable
entry point into IR over an African emperor and scholar who expertly
explains the African epicentre of the inter-war crisis. Could Carr and
Selassie I be required readings in the first week of semester? Would that be
too disorienting?
The fourth story takes us to Oceania, also known as the Pacific. Dumont
d’Urville, a French naval officer, botanist and cartographer, returns from
a voyage across this sea of islands in 1829 and subsequently divides its
peoples into racial zones that are organized into a hierarchy of savage incli-
nations. Melanesia is damned; Polynesia might be saved; Micronesia is
between.
Melanesia pertains to Blackness, and d’Urville associates the label with
Kaffirs, an Islamic term meaning “one who covers the truth”, but that
colonial sojourners distil into “African heathen”. Teresia Teaiwa, a beloved
cultural theorist of Oceania, criticizes the way in which, by the end of the
20th century, scholars began to describe corruption, violence and state
failure in Pacific islands as the “Africanization” of the region.
I am presenting my book, The Black Pacific, at the University of
Hawai’i. In the book I argue that, through the Māori prophetic tradi-
tions, the indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand had claimed
Blackness as a liberating force against colonialism, despite being ostensibly
classified by colonisers as Polynesians. I am rightfully reminded by Pacific
scholars in attendance that similar dispositions exist across Oceania and
perhaps with more force amongst those peoples historically classified as
Melanesian.
FOREWOR D ix
Te Pō can be glossed as the night (or nights). It is the Blackness that we
emerge from and to which we return. By colonial mandate, Black is a
colour, while Africa is its (non-)space. But besides that mandate, Black is a
cosmological constant. Oceanic teachings confirm that Africa has always
created; and it awaits its creators.
London, UK Robbie Shilliam
November 9, 2017 Queen Mary University of London
C
ontents
1 Africa in/and International Relations: An Introduction 1
Zubairu Wai
2 International Relations and the Discourse of State Failure
in Africa 31
Zubairu Wai
3 Re-engaging History and Global Politics in the Accounts
of the Contemporary Conflict in the DRC 59
Marta Iñiguez de Heredia
4 Images of Africa in World Press Photo 87
Kate Manzo
5 Rehistoricizing the Sovereignty Principle: Stature, Decline,
and Anxieties About a Foundational Norm 121
Amy Niang
6 Archiving Trauma and Amnesia: The Racialized Political
Theologies of Reconciliation in South Africa 145
Zahir Kolia
xi
