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Situating Africa

An Alter-geopolitics of Knowledge,
or Chapungu Rises

Ruth Simbao

Only when universities on the continent fully
recover and take their rightful—and leading—
role in the production of African scholarly
knowledge will African studies in the rest of
the world become a truly strong field (Pablo
Tiyambe Zeleza 2009:133).

This journal issue marks the beginning
of a new partnership with African Arts as
Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South
África, joins the editorial consortium. As the
National Research Foundation Chair in Geo-
politics and the Arts of Africa,1 I will work
with collaborators based largely on the Afri-
can continent to produce one issue of African
Arts per year. This first issue has grown out of
conversations with artists, curators, and writ-
ers based in Uganda, Zimbabwe, and South
Africa at a publishing workshop organized by
Rhodes University, as well as an institutional
collaboration with Makerere University in
Uganda. It also includes a dialogue with col-
leagues in Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Egypt,
South Africa, Benin, the Democratic Republic
of Congo, Zimbabwe, the US, Uganda, y
Angola/Portugal. A core goal of our work is
to significantly increase the participation of
authors based on the African continent as
a way of strengthening our discipline with
a scholarly approach that takes seriously an
alter-geopolitics of knowledge as a decolonial
concepto (Koopman 2011; Mignolo 2002).2

At the time of writing and compiling the
articles for this African Arts issue, Rodas
Universidad, or UCKAR—the University
Currently Known as Rhodes (a name that
registers the lobby for an official name
cambiar)—was disrupted by heavy-handed
police presence and the intermittent sound
of rubber bullets being shot at students.

Ruth Simbao is the National Research
Foundation Chair in Geopolitics and the
Arts of Africa at Rhodes University, South
África. She heads the Arts of Africa and the
Global South research team, and recently
founded the PROSPA publishing program
and the Art POWA network. www.ru.ac.
za/artsofafrica/, www.ru.ac.za/ruthsimbao,
r.simbao@ru.ac.za.

1 Lee-Roy Jason. Documentation of
the police response to the Fees Must
Fall protests on the University of
Witwatersrand campus. 2016.
Photo: Lee-Roy Jason

Along with other campuses across South
África, this place of knowledge-production
became, for many students and staff, a site of
intense trauma and violence (Higo. 1). Shortly
after the nationwide higher education pro-
tests peaked and the militaristic response of
the police severely deepened the crisis, estu-
dents and colleagues at Makerere University
in Kampala, Uganda, similarly experienced a
lockdown accompanied by violence and state
control when President Yoweri Museveni
officially shut down the university (Marks
2016; Niwamanya 2016). How do we grapple
with knowledge-production when the people
producing knowledge—students, lecturers
and researchers—are being faced with phys-
ical harm in response to the fact that they
son, en parte, challenging epistemic violence?
How do we write about the arts of Africa in a
global academy that still privileges Western
epistemological traditions when questions
that are being asked on the African conti-
nent about ways of situating Africa, African
conocimiento, and African universities3 result,
at times, in the spilling of blood? How do we
teach from this body of knowledge that we
and others in our discipline produce when
the people we teach and learn from are not
safe in our places of learning?

In this First Word and in the dialogue
“Reaching Sideways, Writing Our Ways,” I
reflect on the current status of the scholarly
field of the visual and performing arts of
Africa at this particular time of revived calls

on the African continent for the decoloni-
zation of knowledge (Heleta 2016; Mbembe
2016). It is significant to recognize that the
recent protests in South African higher edu-
catión, which incorporate a critique of cur-
ricula and pedagogical approaches in South
African universities, were historically pre-
ceded by the call in the late 1960s by Ngũgĩ
wa Thiongo, Henry Owuor-Anyumba, y
Taban Lo Liyong at the University of Nairobi
to decenter Western modernity and British
literature, to prioritize African literature by
abolishing inherited structures, and to place
Kenya, East Africa, and Africa at the core of
the curriculum in order to focus, first and
foremost, on the situation of Kenyans and
Africans (Garuba 2015; Ngũgĩ 2012; Gates
1984:10–13).4

Refusing both a universalist defense of
post-place constructions of knowledge and
a continentalist defense of reductionistic
notions of knowledge, I contemplate how
Africa is situated in our discourse. My use
of the word “situating” refers to a position-
ing that is physical and metaphorical, y
draws from lived experiences guided by
specific situations.5 Viewing all geographies
as situational—that is, deeply embedded
and simultaneously contingent, constitutive
and process-based—I argue for a geopolit-
ical approach that displaces the typically
conservative and masculinist framework of
geopolitics in international relations. Menos
chauvinistic, top-down forms of geopolitics
might extend into areas such as critical geo-
politics that draws on poststructuralist ideas
of discourse and representation (Jones and
Sage 2010), feminist geopolitics that includes
a politics of social justice (Dowler and
Sharp 2001), anti-geopolitics that registers
challenge and resistance to state-centered

VOL. 50, NO. 2 SUMMER 2017 african arts | 1

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2 Sethembile Msezane, Chapungu–The Return to Great
Zimbabwe, 2015.
Photo: courtesy of the artist

3 Kiluanji Kia Henda. Redefining The Power II (con
Shunnuz Fiel), from the series Homem Novo, 2011.
Photo: © Kiluanji Kia Henda, courtesy of the artist and
Galleria Fonti

Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall.

South African journalist Fikile-Ntsikelelo

Moya (2016) stresses that the Fallists—as
the student protesters are known in South
Africa—ought to be clear about “what it is
they want to see rise” once what they desire
to see fall has fallen. Playing with the anal-
ogy of the fall of Rhodes’s and other statues
in order to symbolize the need to break
down systemic injustices and inequalities
more broadly, a number of relatively young
artists have powerfully stepped up to portray
new figures that embody alternative artic-
ulations of power. Youthful figures either
rise upon repurposed pedestals, as seen in
Kiluanji Kia Henda’s photographic series
Homem Novo (2011), or they insert their own
ad hoc plinths into the urban landscape,
as is evident in Msezane’s Public Holiday
series (2013–2014) that recalls particular
historical events and forms of national
commemoration.

In the Homem Novo series, Kiluanji Kia
Henda photographs contemporary figures
well known in Luanda such as the fashion
designer Shunnoz Fiel dos Santos, who pose
on empty pedestals (Higo. 3) as the artist
“invents new worlds and composes new
realities” (Cobb 2014:63). In Msezane’s Public

veil sometimes
worn at a coming-
of-age ceremony,
this figure—con-
ceptualized and
performed by the
artist Sethembile
Msezane—signals
a new coming-of-
edad: a generation
of students and activists who demand free
and decolonized education, as well as a new
wave of artists who are transforming the way
artistic knowledge is being produced and
consumed in the contemporary art world.
Titled Chapungu—The Day Rhodes Fell
(2015), the performance makes reference to
the soapstone sculpture of a chapungu—the
Zimbabwe Bird that is a national emblem—
that was looted from the ancient city of
Great Zimbabwe by European hunter Willi
Posselt and sold to Cecil John Rhodes. Este
stolen chapungu was the only sculpture of
the bird owned by a private individual and
was placed in his Groote Schuur home in
Ciudad del Cabo, South Africa. “The Zimbabwe
Bird and the house together became an
extension of his political ego” (Matenga
2011:209), revealing Rhodes’s “obsessive
desire for immortality,” which he
attempted to purchase (Maylam
2005:159).

Despite appeals for the bird to
be returned to its rightful home
in present-day Zimbabwe, este
particular sculpture remains at
Groote Schuur.6 Msezane’s per-
formance Chapungu—The Return
to Great Zimbabwe (2015) (Higo. 2),
serves as a form of protest as she
uses her own body to symbolize
the power of the chapungu that
many view as an able protec-
colina, a guiding spirit, or a divine
messenger whose absence from
Zimbabwe thwarts positive socio-
political change. By corporeally
enacting the return of this leg-
endary protector and by demon-
strating the potential efficacy of
protest, this figure denotes the
agency asserted by a new genera-
tion of protesters, many of whom
have put their bodies on the line
in protest movements such as

geopolitics (Routledge 2003), subaltern
geopolitics that emphasizes nonhierarchical
entangled ways of relating (Sharp 2013), y
alter-geopolitics that is collective, intercon-
nected and nonbinary (Koopman 2011).

At this time of revived activism on the
African continent concerning the “politics of
knowing” (Ngũgĩ 2012), a number of Africa-
based contemporary artists are producing
works that assert the need for further and
more radical forms of change in society and
in the art world. A lack of social justice—at
times evident in ongoing epistemologies
of violence (Heleta 2016:2)—is actively
challenged by artists Sethembile Msezane,
Kiluanji Kia Henda, Thania Petersen,
Masimba Hwati, Xenson Znja, Mbali Khoza,
Eria Nsubuga SANE, Sikhumbuzo Makan-
dula and Rehema Chachage discussed in this
African Arts issue. The works of these artists
engage with critical questions with regards
to categories that are devised in the act of
naming the world (Freire 2005:87), decisiones
that are made—periodically on behalf of
others—and voices that problematically fall
on ears already tuned out.

CHAPUNGU RISES
On April 9, 2015, the statue of the imperi-
alist mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes was
removed from the campus of the University
of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. Este
followed the ignition of the Rhodes Must
Fall movement a month earlier by UCT
student Chumani Maxwele when he flung
human excrement at the Rhodes statue as a
form of protest against the lack of transfor-
mation at the university.

While the enormous bronze statue was

lifted down from its pedestal eighty-one
years after it had been unveiled, a new figure
rose upon her own plinth as she spread her
wings and stood her ground for the duration
of the colonialist’s fall (Cover). Wearing a

2 | african arts SUMMER 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 2

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Holiday series, a veiled female character
boldly writes women into contemporary
interpretations of history in the perfor-
mance-based photographic works Untitled
(Heritage Day) (2013) (Higo. 4), Untitled (Youth
Day) (2014) (Higo. 5), Untitled (Worker’s Day)
(2014) (Higo. 6), and Untitled (Day of Reconcil-
iation) (2014) (Higo. 7).

En febrero 2016 I cocurated a selection

of eight artists7 for the Tomorrows Today
competition at the Cape Town Art Fair
with Azu Nwagbogu. We titled the exhibi-
tion “Consuming Us,” inviting thoughtful
contemplation of our ways of consuming
and being consumed as a human species, como
a society, as art lovers, and as individuals.
We attempted to turn the lens around in
the context of a commercial art fair and at a
time when an “Afrifad” (Simbao 2008) dominación-
inates the Africa focus of many international
art fairs.8 One of the participating artists,
Thania Petersen, reflects in her artwork on
the ability to move inwards rather than be
consumed by exterior forces that label and
stereotype groups of people—particularly, en
her context, Muslim people.

In Belongings of Adulthood (2015) (Higo.
8) Petersen grapples with her inner conflict
as a Muslim person brought up in a secular
and consumerist society. As a child she felt
guilty for loving her Barbie doll as much as
her prayer bag. Reflecting on this as an adult,
Petersen unpacked the bag she was using at
the time and photographed the contents—a

bank card, makeup, and a copy of Sayyid
Mujtaba Musavi Lari’s text Western Civiliza-
tion Through Muslim Eyes. While this book
turns around the Western gaze in order
to evaluate and critique the materialism
and anti-Islamic propaganda of modern
Occidental civilization, the spilling of the
contents of her bag reveals, for Petersen, el
same conflict, discontent, and confusion that
she experienced as a child.

Masimba Hwati—the winner of the art
fair competition—similarly questions ways
of delineating and constricting knowledge
particularly in relation to outside views of
África. As he discusses in the dialogue (ver
pag. 16), the analogy of pushing and steering
the wheelbarrow is used to critique the
external forces that can rob people of their
agency. In the installation Don’t Worry,
Be Happy (Higo. 9), Hwati contemplates the
world’s typical positioning of Africa through
his wheelbarrow-table. This object, he says,
suggests “the absurdity of definition, estafa-
tainment and homogenization of the African
continent” and reflects “the most common
approach towards ‘Africa’” (Hwati cited in
Simbao 2016a:9–10).

Kampala-based artist Xenson Znja
similarly plays with interpretations of the
wheelbarrow in his outdoor installation
Ndiboota Exporters (Higo. 10) en el 2016
Kampala Biennale. Perched in a tree, Znja’s
wheelbarrow carries unknown cargo that is
wrapped up for export, possibly facilitated

by the African Growth and Opportunity Act
(AGOA).9 Even though the wheelbarrow is
airborne, alluding to a Utopian dream,10 él
has been steered into an ineffectual position.
The ambiguous cargo is carefully wrapped

in barkcloth, which is recognized by
UNESCO as an important form of Baganda
cultural heritage and alludes to the Luganda
saying “okuuma lubugo nga lubaale mubbe,"
suggesting that one is jealously guarding
an empty shell while the real value or the
substance of the object is gone or has already
been stolen.11 The evocation that the export
of the cargo might be associated with the
AGOA reveals the criticism directed at this
act, which argues it was drawn up without
sufficient consultation with African actors
and that it does little to benefit Africans
(Sisay 2013). In light of this interpretation,
what might this work reveal about the way
the arts of Africa are desired, packaged,
circulated, emocionado, or controlled?

While Petersen’s work questions the
implications of her culture and religion
being viewed as a spectacle through Western
ojos, and Hwati and Znja play with the form
of the wheelbarrow in order to question the
room left for agency in the global circulation
of culture, capital, and power, Mbali Khoza
asks whether or not it matters who the
knowing subject (Pechey 2011) or speaking
subject is. In her site-collaborative12 perfor-
mance What Difference Does It Make Who Is
Speaking? (Higo. 11) at the Eastern Star Press

african arts consortium
• UCLA
• Rhodes University
• University of Florida
• University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill

consortium editors

UCLA

Marla C. Berns
Patrick A. Polk
Allen F. Roberts
Mary Nooter Roberts

RHODES UNIVERSITY
Ruth Simbao

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

Susan Cooksey
Rebecca M. Nagy
Fiona Mc Laughlin
Robin Poynor
MacKenzie Moon Ryan

departmental editors
Dialogue Editor

Sidney Littleﬁeld Kasﬁr

Book Review Editor

Shannen Hill

Exhibition Review Editor, North America

Elizabeth Perrill

Exhibition Review Editor, Global

Dunja Hersak
Film/Video Editor
Robert Cancel
Photo Essay Editor

Christraud M. Geary

consulting editors

Rowland Abiodun
Mary Jo Arnoldi
Kathleen Bickford Berzock
Suzanne Preston Blier
Elisabeth L. Cameron
Christa Clarke
Henry John Drewal
William Hart
Bennetta Jules-Rosette
Christine Mullen Kreamer
Alisa LaGamma
Constantine Petridis
John Picton
Doran H. ross
Dana Rush
Raymond A. Silverman
Robert Farris Thompson
Kenji Yoshida

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL

Carol Magee
David G. Pier
Victoria L. Rovine
Lisa Homann

executive editor and art director

Leslie Ellen Jones

operations manager

Eva P. Howard

African Arts (ISSN 0001-9933 print, 1937-2108 en línea) es
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4 | african arts SUMMER 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 2

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Museum in Grahamstown,13 Khoza was
surrounded by galley proof presses, wooden
printers’ trays, and printing blocks used in
the production of the nineteenth century
Eastern Star newspaper, as well as the words
“Should everyone have a voice? Who gets to
decide? Who speaks for you, and what are
they saying?” that were part of the museum’s
permanent display.14

Khoza methodically pierced a long scroll

of blank paper with a threadless needle,
scarring the surface with seemingly mean-
ingless perforated holes. The sound of the
metal needle penetrating the thick paper
was amplified through a microphone, as a
sound recording of a man speaking Soninke
was “translated” by the artist and “stitched”
into the paper using isiZulu phonetics as a
guide.15 This performance was inspired by
the work of Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo
Marechera who, in his novella House of

Sethembile Msezane, Perfor-

4–7
mances from the Public Holiday series.
Clockwise from top left: Untitled (Heritage
Day), 2013; Untitled (Youth Day), 2014; Y-
titled (Worker’s Day), 2014; Untitled (Day
of Reconciliation), 2014.
Photos: courtesy of the artist

Hambre (1978), compares the act of writing to
a violent stitching of a wound.

In this work Khoza questions the impor-
tance of the speaking subject being able to
speak and write in her or his mother tongue,
as well as the role of placing words on paper.
Using her work as a springboard, I pose the
following questions: Does it matter that in
the field of the arts of Africa the majority of
authors publishing in globally visible schol-
arly platforms are based in the global North?
Is it a problem that not many scholars based
in the North publish in scholarly arts jour-
nals produced on the African continent? Es
it a concern that relatively few authors based
in Africa publish in African Arts? To what
degree does it matter that the majority of
Africa-based authors publishing in African
Arts work at academic or arts institutions
in South Africa, and that the majority of
these authors are white? As Mbali Khoza
asks: What difference does it make who is
speaking?

SCHOLARSHIP AND THE CENTER OF
GRAVITY
While this new wave of artists accom-
panied by a new wave of curators active on
the African continent indicates a significant
rising in terms of art production and agency
on international platforms, it is critical that
scholarly writing produced by scholars based
in Africa matches this rising and plays a
more important role in shifting the center
of gravity in the global academy. I probe the
current disjuncture between the relatively
high global visibility of a select group of
artists working on the African continent16
and the relatively low international visibility
of scholarly writers based on the continent.17
I consider this in light of a “geography of

reason” that critiques the fallacy that some
people theorize and other people “experi-
ence” (gordon 2006:37)18 or are “reservoirs
of raw fact … from which Euromodernity
might fashion its … axioms and certitudes,
its premises, postulates, and principles”
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2011:1). In particu-
lar, I question what this disjuncture reveals
about the ways in which academic knowl-
edge is controlled within a global academy
that still “claims theory as thoroughly
Western” (Tuhiwai Smith 1999:29).

I recently conducted a survey of three
journals—African Arts, Critical Interven-
ciones, and NKA: Journal of Contemporary
African Art—as a way of considering the
weighting of authors based in the global
South and on the African continent.19 I view
the South as a loose conceptual framework

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8 Thania Petersen. Belongings of Adulthood (2015) from the Barbie and Me
series. Diasec print. 100 X 70 cm.
Photo: courtesy of the artist and Everard Read Gallery, Ciudad del Cabo

9 Masimba Hwati. Detail of the installation Don’t Worry, Be Happy (2016),
for the “Consuming Us” exhibition and Special Project competition at the
Cape Town Art Fair curated by Azu Nwagbogu and Ruth Simbao.
Photo: Ruth Simbao

and thousands of African academics
moved to institutions in the North,
playing a significant role in estab-
lishing “flows of influence [eso] son
multiple in directions and levels.”
dicho eso, many scholars in African
universities are of the opinion that
the valorization of “ambivalence and
hybridity” in contemporary critical
theory, produced largely (pero no
exclusively) in the North, largely
ignores the “specificities of African
subjectification” that continue to be
“written in pain and suffering, sweat
and blood” (Zeleza 2009:130). Com-
piling this African Arts issue during
the Fees Must Fall protests indicates
to me how pressing recognition of
this disjuncture between theoretical
approaches and lived experiences is.
The survey that I conducted does

not make definitive claims about
particular journals, institutions, autores,
or places, but aims to generate a wider dis-
cussion about the production, control, y
reception of knowledge. I do not suggest that
authors based in the North can’t produce
excellent knowledge about the arts of Africa,
or that authors based in the South necessar-
ily produce better scholarship in this and
campos relacionados. Sin embargo, I do submit that
African Arts and other publications in the
field will be significantly stronger and richer
once we shift the center of gravity to include
considerably more scholarship from the
African continent and the African diaspora.

studies in Ghana, Labi (2015:103) argues
that an increase in “critical local voices”
would play a significant role in diversifying
conocimiento, and Abiodun (2014) puntos a
the value of deep understanding of indig-
enous African languages. Teasing out the
distinctions between research on, para, con,
en, and of Africa, Badat (2016:7) proposes
that research of Africa can play an important
role in “institutional transformation, y
building new academic and institutional
cultures that genuinely respect and appreci-
ate social and epistemological difference and
diversity, and social justice in the domain of
knowledge making.”

There are a number of issues to think
through in the goal to increase participa-
tion from the African continent. En primer lugar, él
is important that articles by scholars based
on the continent are not perceived as being
ghettoized in these particular African Arts
issues that Rhodes University edits, de este modo
perpetuating rather than challenging a
“territorial epistemology, [cual es] a deri-
vation of the ontology of essences” (Mignolo
2012:xvii). Scholars based in Africa can, de
curso, publish in any African Arts issue,
and while the issues that Rhodes edits will
stress scholarship of the South they will not
exclude scholars from Europe and North
America.

En segundo lugar, it is critical that an increase of
articles by scholars working on the continent
is not viewed as a mere addition to a stable
core of knowledge, but rather as an exciting

Comparable
arguments have
been made in
our field by
Rowland Abio-
dun (2014) y
Kwame Amoah
Labi (2015), y
in the Human-
ities and Social
Sciences more
broadly by Paul
Zeleza (2009),
Mahmood
Mamdani
(2011), y
Saleem Badat
(2016). Writing
específicamente
about art

that links to situational geographies of
exclusion and geographies of resistance
based on shared histories of colonialism
and ongoing processes of decolonization.
While there are various ways that one could
formulate such a survey, due to my current
interest in geopolitics and the production of
knowledge at higher education institutions, I
chose to consider where authors are situated
as knowledge-producers.20 On average, acerca de
13.5% of authors publishing in these three
journals are based in the global South and
acerca de 86.5% are based in the global North.
If one were to break down the global South
further, acerca de 12% of these authors are based
on the African continent, leaving 1.5% de
authors based in other parts of the global
South. Además, if one considered the
tendency for the South African academy and
art world to dominate the African continent
pendiente, en parte, to the myth of South African
exceptionalism (Lazarus 2004) that was
perpetuated by the international art world in
the 1990s and early 2000s (nelson 2004:12),
then only about 1.5% of authors are based on
the rest of the African continent.

While the global South and the global
North are not areas constrained by physical
coordinates, their embedded situatedness
is far from irrelevant. As Zeleza (2009:111)
points out, the “social composition and
intellectual terrain” of African Studies
changed significantly when African univer-
sities were in crisis in the 1980s and 1990s
6 | african arts SUMMER 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 2

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opportunity for all of us to see the core of
our field of study strengthened and poten-
tially reframed. As Walter Mignolo (2002:85)
writes, it is not enough to merely open up a
field of study to more scholars or to export
it to other places, but the “starting point of
knowledge and thinking must be the colonial
difference ….”21 In other words, the goal is not
just to add new content, but also to question
the control of knowledge and change the
terms of the conversation (Mignolo 2011:122–
23). How do we all—as contributors to and
readers of African Arts—engage with these
issues and facilitate these goals?

Thirdly, it is important to consider that
an editorial partnership based at a South
African university could be viewed as a
perpetuation of South African exception-
alism in the same way that in the 1990s and
early 2000s South African artists sometimes
found themselves in the position of unwit-
tingly standing in for the whole African con-
tinent in large “global identity exhibitions”
(Simbao 2015b:263). It is critical that, as we
move forward with this task, meaningful
collaboration with Africa-based colleagues
is prioritized, and that a good portion of
this collaboration reaches beyond South
África, possibly resulting in another African
university joining or succeeding Rhodes as a
consortium partner.

Fourthly, it is important that the goal
to redress “un-located assumptions about
knowing and knowledge-making” (Mignolo
2011:118) is not misinterpreted as an attempt
to overdetermine links between locatedness
and knowledge-production. (Certainly the
goal to increase the participation of scholars
on the continent does not assume that all
art historians in Africa focus on the arts of
Africa or aspire to publish in African Arts.)
The drive to delink essentialist associations
of the identity or location of knowers and the
knowledge they produce is a critical part of
not treating scholars and artists as tokens of
their culture or location (Mignolo 2011:118;
Magdy 2003).22 This does not, sin embargo,
erase the need for an embodied politics of
knowing. All scholars need to grapple with
their locatedness as knowledge-producers,
recognizing that unlocated, universalist,
or globalist thought is a blind spot in the
decolonial concept of an alter-geopolitics
of knowledge. The need to “focus on the
knower, rather than on the known” in non-
essentializing ways in order to “question the
modern/colonial foundation of the control of
knowledge” (Mignolo cited in Badat 2016:6)
must not be confused with the need to free
the knower from essentializing and overde-
termined locatedness.

En tono rimbombante, this goal to increase the par-

ticipation of scholars based on the African
continent in international scholarly forums
such as African Arts starts neither from a

position of mere com-
plaint about exclusion,
nor from a suggestion
that participation is
nonexistent. Bastante,
this goal builds on the
desire of a number of
African Arts readers,
and responds to what
I recognize as a very
positive shift that is
already beginning to
take place in our field
and more broadly.
While this shift in
our field is, in my
observación, stronger
in art production and
in curating than in
scholarly writing, there is value in acknowl-
edging this broader climate of change.

Progress in changing “epistemic depen-

dency” that often remains “parallel to
economic dependency” (Mignolo 2011:119)
can be seen, Por ejemplo, in the African
Humanities Program (AHP) of the Amer-
ican Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
Desde 2009 this program has enabled a
number of Africa-based scholars (incluir-
ing scholars in heritage and the visual and
performing arts23) to pursue predoctoral
and postdoctoral fellowships at African
universities rather than at universities in
the privileged North, thus playing a role in
strengthening academic institutions on the
African continent. While the funding comes
from the US, Africans on the continent have
played a significant role in driving, shaping,
and running this program.

Más, this shift can be seen in the ways
that African Studies organizations globally
are rethinking their relationship to the
African continent and in the rise of “home-
grown” (Spooner 2015) organizations on the
continent. The African Studies Association
of Africa (ASAA) was founded in 2013, y
the ASAA president, Lungisile Ntsebeza,
explains that the organization’s goal is to
“promote Africa’s own specific contributions
to the advancement of knowledge about the
peoples and cultures of Africa and the Dias-
pora” in order to “ensure that the continent
of Africa becomes the main world seat/site/
home/center of the study of Africa and its
peoples of African descent.”24 Rather than
claim in simplistic terms that an African
Studies organization on the continent will
differ essentially from organizations beyond
the continent, ASAA openly questions to
what degree African Studies “practiced by
Africans especially based on the continent
will be different from that which is pursued
outside the African continent.” Importantly,
scholars on the continent are playing a lead-
ing role in these discussions.

10 Xenson Znja, 2016. Ndiboota
Exporters. Mixed media installation
(consisting of a wheelbarrow made
from wooden planks, barkcloth
and rope) in the gardens of the
Uganda Museum. Kampala Art
Biennale, Septiembre 2016.
Photo: Fiona Siegenthaler

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En 2007 the Council for the Develop-
ment of Social Sciences Research in Africa
(CODESRIA) called for the Africanization
of the Social Sciences and Humanities on
the African continent, identifying as a key
problem the fact that “the global North and
West tends to tie African researchers to
the agendas set by those organizations and
agencias, making them instruments and
accomplices of their own marginalization”
(Kistner 2008:94). Addressing this concern,
the African Research Universities Alliance
(ARUA) was launched at a Higher Educa-
tion Summit in Senegal in 2015, aiming to
strengthen research across the continent
through collaborative effort in order to “cat-
apult Africa to the cutting edge of research
on global challenges” (Habib in Spooner
2015). Emphasizing self-reliance and collab-
oration, the alliance—made up of sixteen
universities in Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Broncearse-
zania, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda,
and South Africa—aims to “increase Africa’s
contribution to global cutting edge research
output to 5% de 1% over a 10-year period.”25

AN OPEN CALL
It is evident that valuable systems are

already being put in place to support a
new rising26 of scholarship on the African
continent in the twenty-first century, y
importantly this impetus is coming from
proponents on the continent. New alliances
and programs such as ARUA and AHP are
foregrounding the need to collaborate, trabajar
as peer institutions, and pool resources in

VOL. 50, NO. 2 SUMMER 2017 african arts | 7

center of gravity of our
campo, and to contrib-
ute to the building of
the next generation of
scholars in the arts on
the African continent.

The goals of PROSPA

and Art POWA form
part of what I call a
“strategic southern-
ness,” which addresses
a particular need at
a particular time (a
strategy that is relevant
today might not be—
and ideally will not
need to be—relevant

11 Mbali Khoza, 2014. What Difference
Does It Make Who Is Speaking? Perfor-
mance at the Eastern Star Press Museum
as part of the Blind Spot performance art
program curated by Ruth Simbao. National
Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa.
Photo: Ruth Simbao

a context that can ill afford the multipli-
cation of research expenses often seen in
individualistic and territorial academic
entornos.

I take this opportunity to invite colleagues

to participate in a new program: Publish-
ing and Research of the South: Positioning
África (PROSPA) and a related network, Arte
POWA (Producing Our Words in Africa).
PROSPA is a residency and publishing
program that falls under the Arts of Africa
and the Global South research team that I
run in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes
Universidad. Annual artists’ and writers’
residencies that are at times explicitly linked
to each other aim to strengthen the relation-
ship between art production and scholarly
writing within the global South. Annual
publishing workshops hosted at various
African universities aim to cosupport (en el
sense of supporting each other in reciprocal
maneras) Africa-based scholars in the process
of preparing manuscripts for publication. A
modest number of fellowships and bursa-
ries are available, and meaningful research
collaborations are sought.

The Art POWA network will be an online

community of scholars specific to our field
and will focus on scholars based on the
African continent. Scholars will be profiled,
their works will be featured with links to
publications where applicable, and informa-
tion about writing and publishing processes
will be shared. The goal of Art POWA is to
link relevant scholars on the continent with
each other in order to strengthen research
through collaboration and knowledge-shar-
En g, to increase the international visibility of
Africa-based scholars as a way of shifting the
8 | african arts SUMMER 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 2

in the future) and is adopted by scholars who
are driven by approach rather than simply
their locatedness. While the current need
es, I submit, to increase the momentum and
the international visibility of scholarship
produced on the African continent, this is
the responsibility of all scholars and should
be done in a collective, interconnected, y
nonbinary way.

Notas

Thank you to all the participants of the publishing
taller (Rhodes University, Junio 2016) who contrib-
uted in various ways to the development of this Afri-
can Arts issue: Aidah Nalubowa, Fadzai Muchemwa,
Pauline Bullen, Eria Nsubuga, Andrew Mulenga,
Angelo Kakande, and George Kyeyune. Postgraduate
students Thando Mama, Tshilu Mukendi, Sikhum-
buzo Makandula, and Gladys Kalichini offered
valuable feedback to all the presenters. Special thanks
goes to Alexandra Dodd for reading papers and
providing insightful comments, and to Susan Blair for
her text editing services. Thanks to Rachel Baasch for
assistance with all the images in this issue.

1 This Chair was awarded to Rhodes Univer-
sity in 2015 by the National Research Foundation
and the Department of Science and Technology,
and is part of the South African Research Chairs
Initiative (SARChI). It is run by the Research Chair,
Ruth Simbao, and includes a group of Postdoctoral
Fellows, Research Fellows, Research Associates,
and PhD, Maestros, and Honors candidates known
as the Arts of Africa and the Global South research
equipo. For a full list of participants see www.ru.ac.za/
artsofafrica/.

2 An alter-geopolitics of knowledge draws
from Koopman’s (2011) notion of alter-geopolitics
and Mignolo’s (2002) notion of the geopolitics of
conocimiento.

3 During his tenure as the Vice-Chancellor at
Rhodes University (2006 a 2014), Dr. Saleem Badat
regularly encouraged staff to consider how a “Uni-
versity on the African continent” might differ from
an “African University” in relation to curriculum
transformation and institutional culture.

4 Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo, Henry Owuor-Anyumba,
and Taban Lo Liyong called for the abolition of the
English Department at the University of Nairobi,
questioning why British literature was at the heart of
the curriculum in independent Kenya. They asserted
that such an approach was colonial and chauvinistic,
and their challenge resulted in the English Depart-
ment being turned into a Language Department and
a Literature Department (Gates 1984:11).

See my article “Infecting the City: Situational
Performance and Ambulatory Hermeneutics” for a
more in-depth analysis of situational performance
and situational relationships to place. En este trabajo
I draw from the creation of situations proposed
by the Situationist International group that called
for “something new, creative, and transformative
that entailed agency, participatory subjectivity, y
self-determination that broke with passive engage-
ment with the environment” (Simbao 2016b:6).

En 1981, shortly after Zimbabwe’s Indepen-

dencia, South Africa returned four of the chapungu
carvings that it had possessed, and the pedestal of
another bird held in the Ethnological Museum in
Berlin was returned to Zimbabwe in 2003 (Ebrahim
2016).

7 The selected artists were Gresham Tapiwa
Nyaude, Kyle Morland, Lady Skollie, Masimba
Hwati, Mathias Chirombo, Rehema Chachage, Ruby
Onyinyechi Amanze, and Thania Petersen.

8 Examples of contemporary art fairs that focus

on Africa are 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair
in London and New York, el 2016 Armory Show
in New York, and the AKAA (Also Known As
África) art and design fair in Paris. Given that the
international discourse of “contemporary African
art” developed concurrently with the curatorial turn,
biennialization, and the rise of global art fairs, es
important to acknowledge that commercial art fairs
play a significant role in the production of knowledge
and that various forms of consumption are thus at
the heart of the dominant discourse. While I do not
suggest that we should (or could) completely reject
the commercial aspect of the discourse of “contem-
porary African art,” it is essential to consider the
ways in which capitalist-driven systems play a role
in shaping knowledge, and to ask how this relates to
issues of privilege and geopolitics (see Simbao 2015b).
9 Personal correspondence with Xenson Znja,

Enero 2, 2017.

10 Ibídem.
11 Thanks to Xenson Znja, Eria Nsubuga, Angelo

Kakande, and Kiriggwajjo Anatole for assistance
with this Luganda saying.

I use the term “site-collaborative” or “site-situ-

ational” instead of the term “site-specific.”

13 My description of this performance is based on
my analysis of this work in “Blind Spots: Trickery and
the ‘Opaque Stickiness’ of Seeing” (Simbao 2015a).

14 This wall text provided information about the
South African journalist Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
(1876–1932), known as Sol Plaatje, who played a role
in founding the South African Native National
Congreso (SANNC) that later became the African
National Congress (ANC).

15 Personal correspondence with the artist, Abril

2014.

16 The fact that only a select group of artists enjoy
this high visibility raises important questions around
issues of value and the control of “standards.”

17 While art criticism from the continent is gain-
ing international visibility due to the recent increase
of various online platforms, I refer here specifically
to scholarly writing and academic publishing.

18 Using the term “aesthetic feudalism,” Ngũgĩ wa

Thiango (2012:X) similarly critiques the hierarchy in
which text lords over orality or doing.

19 This survey was conducted with the help of

Tinika Nuen in 2015 and only took into consideration
artículos, leaving out exhibition reviews and book
reviews. Articles taken into consideration dated
back to the early 2000s and, if one were to use these
statistics in a more conclusive way than I do here,
then it would be important to break down the dates
in a more detailed way, keeping in mind that Critical
Interventions was founded in 2007.

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20 If one were to reformulate this survey to con-
sider the demographics of contributing authors, entonces
it would probably be evident that African Arts is a lot
“whiter” than, Por ejemplo, NKA: Journal of Contem-
porary African Art. Por supuesto, a higher proportion
of authors in the North who are of African descent
contributes to a complex and nuanced understanding
of the global North and the global South.

21 Emphasis added. In this assertion Mignolo
draws from the work of Anibal Quijano and Enrique
Dussel.

22 As Mignolo (2011:118) writes, we can’t assume
that “if you come from Latin America or Algeria, tú
have to ‘talk about’ Latin America or Algeria,” and
similar critiques of tokenism are discussed in the
visual arts.

23 Fellows of the ACLS African Humanities Pro-
gram who work in our field include Elinaza Mjema,
Abubakar Sani Sule, Eyitayo Ijisakin, Edwinus Chri-
santus Lyaya, Nomusa Makhubu, Abdullah Moham-
med, Harrie Uvietobor Bazunu, Okechukwu Charles
Nwafor, Amanda Tumusiime, Angelo Kakande,
Ngusekela Mona Mwakalinga, Kylie Thomas, Rotimi
Omoyele Fasan, Jill Frances Weintroub, Ozioma
Onuzulike, Freeborn Odiboh, Ruth Simbao, Mun-
yaradzi Manyanga, and Imani Sanga.

24 The African Studies Association of Africa
(ASAA) website, http://www.as-aa.org/. Accedido
Agosto 2016.

25 ARUA concept notes, Enero 2017.
26 To talk about a rising in Africa-based research

does not imply that Africa does not have a history
of strong knowledge-production traditions whether
articulated in writing or speech. Bastante, it points to
a contemporary “waking up from the long dossis of
Westernization” that challenges the fallacy that there
are some places of “non-thought” (Mignolo 2011:119).
It also points to new commitments post the crisis
period in African universities a few decades after
Independence—a period which South Africa now
appears to be entering.

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