A (Re)turn to Older Conversations in African Studies

Abstract

In an interdisciplinary journal such as the African Studies Review, we are all enriched by the unique perspectives that writers from different disciplines bring to the table. Historians, political scientists, economists, literary scholars, and sociologists can draw on their disciplinary perspectives as well as on the perspectives of other disciplines to gain insights into the continent, and we all are better off for it. What do we do, though, with disciplines that are considered ill-fitting for a study of Africa? Fifty years ago, the South African anthropologist Archie Mafeje remarked about how historically, on the continent, sociology had been viewed as a discipline best suited to making sense of the civilized European settler communities in the eastern and southern parts of the continent, while the rest of Africa could be left to anthropologists to study. He expressed the belief that these African sites, conceptualized as static and non-modernizing, lent themselves better to a discipline that had been developed to study the Other than one developed to study the metropole. Concepts such as modernity, civilization, and knowledge, as developed by sociologists, were perceived at the time as inappropriate for describing Africa, hence the decision to leave the study of the continent to those who worked with concepts such as kinship, “tribes,” and witchcraft beliefs. No wonder, then, that the early academics in many departments of sociology on the continent such as Kofi Abrefa Busia, Godwin Nukunya, and Max Assimeng, all of whom taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Ghana in its early years, were trained primarily in the United Kingdom as social anthropologists. Even today, there are many more African and Africanist anthropologists than there are sociol ogists.