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Item The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism(2018-02-28) Baptist, E.E.Nationalist histories of the US downplay the role of slavery in the development of the world’s capitalist superpower. Obscuring slavery, these mythologies present US hegemony as a fact innocent of origins in the extraction of wealth from enslaved people. Building on historical evidence accumulated by African-American survivors of slavery, plus scholarship on African American and other elements of the African diaspora, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a historical narrative that focuses on slavery’s central role in US history. Placing enslaved people’s experiences and exploitation at the center of the story, the book endeavors to show how the extraction of wealth from enslaved African Americans has shaped the US and modern capitalism itself.Item Epistemological Questions in the Study of the Pan-African Movement(2017-04-26) Campbell, H.G.Faced with pressures from below and the wave of new energies from the African peoples, the Executive Council of the African Union (AU) in May 2013 declared an ambitious agenda for a people centered Union to achieve the agenda of full unity by 2063. This goal of the unification and the emancipation of African peoples in all parts of the world had been articulated by the Pan African Movement from the outset. Social movements such as the Garvey movement had given coherence to the concept of the full unification and thinkers such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, Wangaari Mathai and Kwame Nkrumah had refined the conceptions of Pan Africanism. Emancipation, unification and dignity had been key aspects of the Pan African movement from its inception. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana had been a crucial link between the Pan African movements of the Fifth Pan African Congress up to the formation of the OAU in 1963. Kwame Nkrumah had maintained that the independence of Ghana would be “incomplete without the independence of all of Africa.” It was this spirit that informed the OAU liberation Committee and this Committee was the driving force behind the OAU up to the formal end of apartheid in 1994.The presentation will examine five approaches to the study of the movement: Positivism, Marxism, Feminism, Constructivism and the emancipatory approach. The renewed confidence of Africans is emerging in the midst of an economic depression in Europe and at a moment when Africans are stating clearly that there must be new values for African unity, for healing ourselves and the world (Maathai 2010). The urgency for planning across borders has been reinforced by the ravages of Global Warming and the multiple disasters that face the ordinary producers. These pressures from the structural conditions of exploitation are reinforced by the changes in the international financial architecture. Temporarily, the ordinary people have created their own cross border monetary transactions with the traders, especially women, establishing innovative methods for freedom of movement. Even at the moment of planning for full unification there was recognition that the full tasks of the Pan African Project were incomplete. There are still outstanding colonial outposts where African peoples live in Western Sahara, Comoros and Diego Garcia, Guadeloupe Martinique, Puerto Rico, Cayenne (among others). It was this recognition that ensured the clarity that the tasks of Pan African liberation are incomplete. In the effort to embrace a new thinking about the relationship between people’s unity and economic transformation, new conceptions of Pan Africanism are being refined within the conception of Ubuntu. Intellectuals are caught between the growing neo-liberal and state centered approaches to Pan Africanism and the voices from below demanding full emancipation.Item Creating the Nation in Early Post-Colonial West Africa(2016-11-30) Keese, A.Although recent years have seen an increased engagement of historians in attempting to write the history of post-independence societies, the number of more profound studies, which would try to unearth and to use empirical material is still very limited. Even more, there is no real consensus what questions should be asked for such new “national” histories (and I put “na-tional” in inverted commas because for the historian, it cannot be the goal to simply endorse the trajectory of a so-called national community, as it has been done in many cases). Should we seek a path of political history, or of social history? How local should these post-independence histories be in the end? And how much should they be concerned with national sentiment, or its creation or invention, in a perspective spanning over the late colonial period and, at least, the first two decades of the postcolonial states and communities? Regarding the source base for such new interpretations, the last years have not brought too much progress. It is frequently argued that post-independence histories of West African societies cannot rely on “classical”, i.e. written documents, or at least not much. Various historians opine that these sources are rare, or impossible to access. Proof is rarely offered on that point – and the whole debate impresses through a lack of explanations. This paper intends to give a comparative reflection on the creation of national sentiment in two pioneer West African societies – Ghana and Senegal – which are characterized by especially vocal intellectual activity in the decades before and those after independence (also, both coun-tries have nowadays academic communities that are amongst the most vibrant in the African continent). It takes as point of departure two debates on the nation: the “citizenship and assim-ilation” debate in Senegal between 1963 and 1965, and Ghanaian debates on the Aliens’ Com-pliance Order and its effects in 1970/71. The idea is to discuss, through a comparative view, how “nation” as an inclusive and exclusive concept was appropriated both by officials who had to decide on administrative processes involving citizenship and its absence, and by individuals who tried to position themselves to the exclusion of “foreigners” from national citizenship. The paper also hopes to give some arguments for the importance, or renewed importance, of the regional archives. I am fully aware that the interpretation of written post-independence ar-chives is only one of a mix of methods to approach the social history of the societies in question. But regional archives in Ghana and Senegal constitute treasure chests that should be more ag-gressively taken into account: while the future interpretation of the big political-historical pic-tures can perhaps not be carried out on the basis of these archives, they are most important for a successful interpretation of social processes.Item Usa and africa during the cold war(2016-11-02) Beko, E.O.This paper evaluates the United States’ effort to win the hearts and minds of Africa ideologically and how it tried to counter socialist-communist ideological incursions on the continent. It would be evident that the United States engaged in most of the African governments with the aim to prevent these newly independent polities from turning to the socialist-communist orbit as a governing philosophy. The United States subsequently deployed a full toolkit of several containment arsenals for this purpose. These tools would include propaganda, development aid, military pacts, and supporting restive presidents, among others. The paper will also seek to find other factors, if available, that motivated the U.S. government in its dealings with African countries outside of the bloodless Cold War in the same era understudy. One such factor, for example, would be the cooperation with colonial authorities for American markets.Item Cooperatives as an Institution and Movement - Missing Link in South Asian Historiography.(2016-10-26) Kamenov, N.Despite the immense significance of the various cooperatives in India – from agricultural produce cooperatives through cooperative banking to consumer organizations – the movement has received little historiographic attention. The paper aims at addressing the reasons for this lacuna. It gives a broad sketch of the movement in the period, tracing the coop project from its roots in late 19th century debates on famine and debt to the colonial inauguration of co-operative credit societies and into the period of independence, in which cooperatives played a central role in the five year plans of rural development. The paper then draws on existing historiography on rural India and cooperatives in particular and touches on a) tropes of failure and, b) what might be dubbed ‘court histories,’ that is histories produced by the cooperative movement for the cooperative movement. Finally, the paper lays down possible avenues for research, proposes a more rigorous academic attention to cooperatives and suggests what the added value of such approach could be. Item Decolonizing African Universities: The Case of South Africa. Lessons ‘FromAfrica’and the African Diaspora.(2017-03-01) Ramoupi, N.L.L.The past twenty years of our liberation have disappointed and failed African research and scholarship in South African higher education institutions. In this article, I provide examples of how we have failed to transform the higher education sector. The first example is drawn from two fieldwork studies I conducted at the Universities of Ghana, Legon and of Dar es Salaam on the subject of curriculum and content in higher education in Africa. At liberation, Kwame Nkrumah and Mwalimu Nyerere, founding Presidents of Ghana and Tanzania, respectively, were clear about what they wanted the role of the university and education to be in their independent countries. Nkrumah asked if the university would be permitted to proceed in its established pattern. And the answer for Nkrumah was a confident “No.” A radical shift away from the courses and degree structure already established at the University of Ghana, Legon was required. The President of Ghana knew that the function of the university in the postcolonial period was to study the history, culture and institutions, languages, arts, and heritage of Ghana and of Africa in new African-centred ways, free from the proportions of the colonial era. For Tanzania, “our first step,” said Nyerere, “must be to re-educate ourselves; to regain our former attitude of mind”; he spoke “of the need for an African university to provide an “African-orientated education,” an education aimed to meet “the present needs of Africa.”11 The point I make with Ghana and Tanzania is that there was a bold commitment to radically change the direction of their education systems that was absent in South Africa at the time of our liberation in 1994 (p.1).Item Philosophical Appraisal of World War 1 and Pan-Africanism in the 20th Century: A Food for Thought(2017-03-29) Eregare, E.O.War is a rational instrument of national policy or a blight on humanity which may cause drastic change on the society or a final conflict which will, someday, resolve the path followed by all wars. Pan-Africanism is a philosophy and movement that promotes the globalization and solidarity of Africans. Pan-Africanism is based on the belief that unity is vital to economic, social and political progress hence aims to ‘unify and uplift’ the people of African descent. This study tries to analyze the philosophical definition and classifications of War, World War I and Pan-Africanism. The study, further, examines comparatively the relationship that exists among war, World War 1and Pan-Africanism motifs. Would the War motif phenomenon be a perpetual means to an end? This study used a comparative analysis methodology, and concludes by inspiring the Blacks at home and in diaspora on ways to give hope or avert any form of intentional or assumed wars or derogatory ideas found in any indigenous or western historical writings from present or future occurrencesItem The Contribution of Academic Migration to Timbuktu’s Arabic-Islamic Scholarship and Manuscripts Culture in the Golden Era(2019-02-21) Hafiz, M.Academic migration is increasingly emerging as a distinctive field of pursuit in migration studies, however it has a longstanding history in Arabic and Islamic culture. This has been attributed to the Quranic and Hadith injunctions that encourage Muslims to travel in quest of Knowledge. This study examines the impact of academic migration on Arabic and Islamic scholarship in Timbuktu in the Golden era in order to demonstrate how that consolidated Arabic and Islamic education in West Africa. The paper contends that of all the factors that brought home fame and recognition to Timbuktu, and earned her the accolade "the pearl of the desert", the movement of people into and out of Timbuktu has been unsurpassed, and that Academic migration was instrumental in the transformation of Timbuktu into a center of academic excellence, and the utimate destination of scholars and teachers. The study seeks to enrich our understanding of this critical issue, which has so far received only minimal attention, especially in languages other than Arabic.Item Applying the Ancient Afrakan Foundation of Ma’at and Symptomatic Thinking with Mdw Ntchr(2019-02-28) Salim, M.J.K.H.; Kambon, O.Our present day educational systems in America and throughout the entire western world, including all of Afraka and the diaspora are based on symbolic thought, Religious mythology, white supremacy and racism which is steeped in unrealistic allegory and superstition. And this symbolic cancerous thinking is at the heart of our educational intuitions and dysfunctional families. It is set up to retard, enslave, impoverish, imprison, completely destroy and devastate our positive self esteem, dignity, consciousness and creativity. As a result, the masses are upside down inside out and backwards! I am proposing a new but ancient revolutionary way of thinking called Symptomatic thought developed by Brother Edgar Ridley, also using the Mdw Ntchr, and Ma’at, an ancient Kash and Kemety Spiritual System of the Hapy Eteru Valley as a liberating tool, which develops good character that will change the way we think making a major paradigm shift to pro Pan-Afrakan and pro nature! Through the power of Symptomatic thought and the writing of the Mdw Ntchr with its sacred science, mathematics, astrology, astronomy and Architectural structures will lead us to a reservoir of unlimited Knowledge and wisdom based upon Ma’at. This Ma’atian center teaches balance, love, peace of mind, reciprocity and right order, so that we as Afrakan people can become the leaders of our glorious destiny in the 21st century as world leaders! Ankh Udja Snb Nb Hem Sem Tpy of Jhuty Heru Nb-HuItem What was Israel in Relation to Black People? The Danger of a Single Story(2019-03-14) Kambon, O.; Gavua, K.The aim of this study is to present historical sources that provide Afrikan-centered perspectives on what Israel was in relationship to kmtyw ‘Black people/Ancient Egyptians.” This study draws from ancient and classical historical texts that 1) identify the expulsion of the Hyksos with the Exodus story 2) document the manner in which that expulsion took place. We find that there are significant differences in narratives regarding the nature of the Exodus/Expulsion, however, many people are only familiar with a single biblical story. In conclusion, as students and as scholars, it behooves us to research into primary historical sources to transcend the danger of a single story.Item Capital, Class, and Belonging in Africa(University of Ghana, 2019-03-21) Garba, F.Beginning in the late 1950’s, independent African states like other ex-colonized societies in the rest of the Third World, embarked on state-led social provisioning to mitigate the systematic deprivation wrought by colonialism and to meet what Paul Zeleza calls the triple promise of independence – decolonization, democracy and development. With varying degree, the immediate post-colonial state in Africa took on the provision of education, healthcare, water, public transportation and employment through the establishment of import substitution industries (ISIs). The ISIs were established and or capitalized with loans from International Finance institutions (IFIs) - principally the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A host of structural inequalities - from unequal terms of trade to lopsided international and local power arrangements meant that many of the ISIs were in crisis by the middle of the 1970’s. Having incurred large amounts of debt and larger debt servicing costs, many African states again turned to the IFIs for further loans. In return, they were forced to undergo severe cuts to crucial public services like education and healthcare and privatize strategic state owned enterprises and parastatals. The cumulative social outcome was mass impoverishment and the reversals of gains against preventable diseases and illiteracy. Consequently, the informal sector experienced a boom as a source of livelihood. Migration to neighbouring countries and those far afield became commonplace. In the context of state withdrawal from social provisioning, those in power increasingly adopted a posture of help relative to ordinary people. Prior-existing and new lines of social demarcations were heightened in order to entrench the new power relations. Traditions of eternal difference were invented to gain and consolidate (in the case of the powerful), and cope with the effect of power (on the part of ordinary people). Drawing on instances from Nigeria and South Africa this paper traces the role of capital in social differentiation in Nigeria and South Africa and the implications of such demarcations on class formation and class relations and the instrumentalization of identity and belonging in contestations over resources. The paper is situated at the intersection of the movement of global capital and the ordering of society, polity and culture. It identifies potentials for counter movement in formations solidarity of ordinary people involved in contradictory struggles for livelihood, security and cultural integrity.Item Focus Marking in Kusaal(University of Ghana, 2019-03-27) Musah, A.In this paper, we highlight the strategies that are used to mark focus or place emphasis on elements in the Kusaal clausal construct. Following Dakubu (2005:18-21), we make a distinction between "broad" and "narrow" focus. As a result, we also make a formal distinction between Foc (initial cap only) and FOC (all caps) and relate the former form to broad focus and the latter to narrow focus. We thus differentiate between nɛ/-nɛ Foc and the -i clitic focus marker as opposed to the narrow focus marker, ka, and show that these are used almost always in exclusion of the other.