The Poverty of Oxford's African Thought: A Review
Posted June 10th, 2010 by PTZeleza

Having worked on two encyclopedia projects, the one-volume Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century African History, as Editor-in-Chief, and the six-volume The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, as an Associate Editor, I am quite familiar with the challenges of encyclopedia writing. Careful choices have to be made in selecting topics and authors; coverage can never be comprehensive, gaps are unavoidable. For that very reason, it helps to provide a clear rationale behind the choices, the project's underlying scholarly purpose, and even justification for the varied lengths of the different categories of essays. So I am sympathetic to the editors of the newly released two-volume, The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought. As an intellectual historian, I ordered the encyclopedia with great anticipation, hopeful that it would both synthesize our current knowledge on African thought and point us in exciting new directions. Unfortunately, the more I read it the more my expectations w ere dashed. The encyclopedia is poorly conceived and too many of the essays lack analytical rigor and seem rather dated and fail to reflect the vigorous debates in African studies within and outside the continent.

The first problem lies in the encyclopedia's very conception of Africa. Its Africa is largely confined to that tired Eurocentric cartographic contraption called sub-Saharan Africa. "Arabs in Africa" and a few North Africans such as Augustine of Hippo, Ibn Battuta, and Ibn Khaldun are sneaked in, but this is a paean to so-called sub-Saharan African thought and its black diasporic extensions. This is an intellectual step backwards when you compare this encyclopedia to trends in the writing of encyclopedias and general histories of Africa. In terms of the latter, one can mention the Cambridge History of Africa and the Unesco General History of Africa both in eight volumes that amply cover the entire continent. As for encyclopedias, there is the striking example of John Middleton and Joseph C. Miller's 2nd edition of their five-volume Encyclopedia of Africa. Unlike the first edition which focused almost exclusively on sub-Saharan Africa, the second edition published in 2007, entitled New Encyclopedia of Africa, explicitly abandons that historically myopic perspective and embraces the history of the entire continent in all its bewildering diversities and complexities.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought is not even about sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. It is essentially a celebration of West African thought, for a disproportionate number of the topics and biographies focus on West Africa and West Africans. This is evident in all categories from philosophy to the biographies. In the entries on "Philosophy", for example, five out of the six specific indigenous concepts examined (ase, chi, imo, nokware, ori) five are from West Africa. Now, it could be that other Africans besides the Yoruba, Akan, Igbo, and in East Africa the Swahili (there is an entry on 'sasa and zamani') don't have much thought worthy of philosophical discourse in such an erudite tome. But this is unlikely. Maybe it's willful ignorance or indifference. Whatever the case, an explanation would have helped, or better still, the editors, both of whom are prominent scholars, should have made more effort to see beyond their native Nigeria, fidelity to West Africa, and location in the U.S..

The same skewed coverage can be seen in the entries on "ethnic and regional groups." Nearly half of the twenty entries refer to West African groups or empires. For some mysterious reason, the Afikpo, a small subgroup of the Igbo (according to the author they `account for around 672,000 of the approximately 25 million Igbo in Nigeria') merit an entry, but not the Igbo as a whole, or the Hausa, the Zulu, one could list many more major African nationalities. So do the Ghana and Mali empires, but not Great Zimbabwe. Even more troubling for an encyclopedia on African thought, the entries do not tell us much about either the changing ideas and their contexts, or the development of knowledge producing institutions in these societies; nor are the truncated accounts of the histories of these societies particularly edifying. You wait in vain to read what ideas were developed in the Ghana and Mali empires, in Egypt, Meroe, and Timbuktu.

The entries on `religion' continue this slipshod discursive journey into the history of African intellectual thought. We are exposed to thirteen deities and religious concepts and movements from West Africa, seven of them Yoruba, and only one from elsewhere in Africa ('mangu' from the Azande). The Atlantic diaspora gets its `candomble', `santeria', `rastafarians' and `Black Moslems and the Nation of Islam'. Yet, Islam in Africa, Africa's largest religion according to some estimates, is not even discussed! This egregious oversight is indefensible especially as there are entries on `Christianity in Africa' and `Churches, African'. What intellectual and ideological blindspots led the editors not to allocate a single entry on Islam in Africa, one of the continent's oldest religious traditions, out of 43 entries on religion? This oversight alone severely devalues the encyclopedia and makes a mockery of the editors' claim that they `have paid full and careful attention to the phen omenon of African thought in all its complexity and variability.' If one were to provide a historiographical categorization of African thought, following V.Y. Mudimbe's notion of the `colonial library', the centrality of the Islamic library in African intellectual history cannot be overemphasized.

The less said about the perfunctory entries on `language', `education', `music', `art', and `science' the better. I was mystified by the exclusion of `Arabophone Africa' in the historical linguistic groupings of `Anglophone', `Francophone' and Lusophone' Africa, and the inclusion of `Bantu languages and peoples' to the exclusion of other African languages and peoples from the continent's four major language families and sub-groups (Bantu is a sub-group of the Niger-Congo language phylum, the world's largest). Two of the `education' articles--`African studies' and `education'--are remarkably uninformed (the one on `universities and centers of learning' is a lot better). The choices behind the `art' entries are equally baffling; the `Haitian Renaissance' merits an entry, not the `Harlem Renaissance', and so do `adinkra' and `mbari', not any other equally or even more important artistic expressions. Music is reduced to five entries on `blues', `dance', `griot', `jazz', and `rap and hip hop'. This desultory coverage could have been ameliorated by entries on `African musics' and `African diaspora musics', subjects on which they is now vast scholarship.

The entries on `politics and history' and `social sciences and social issues' are glaringly uneven. The bad ones among them are embarrassingly mediocre. A few examples will suffice. The entries on the `Atlantic slave trade', `autocracy and authoritarianism,' `democracy', `politics', `power', `state', and women's movement' (but not `African feminisms') read like they were written by enthusiastic undergraduate students encountering African studies for the first time. They lack clear and sustained engagement and critique of African discourses and debates on these concepts. The same could be said about the entries on `acculturation', `caste' (but not `class' on which as far I know there is a lot more literature in African studies), `clan', `environmentalism', and `ethnicity'.

As an economic historian, I was astonished by the theoretical naivety displayed in the entries on `feudalism' and `peasants', on which there is considerable sophisticated scholarly work. As someone who has written extensively on human rights and development, I found several entries on these subjects, such as the one on `human rights', staggering in their simplicity. It is also unclear why some regional development arrangements and plans (e.g., the Lagos Plan of Action and the Lome Convention and Cotonou Agreement) were chosen over others with an equal claim to Africa's postcolonial development ambitions. 

And as a historian in general, I fail to see the rationale behind splitting African historiographies in linguistic terms--Anglophone historiography and Anglophone historiography (but no Lusophone historiography and of course no Arabophone historiography let alone what the distinguished Nigerian historian, J.F. Ade Ajayi once called 'traditional historiography')--and the inclusion of `African American historiography' and `Caribbean historiography', but nothing on `Afro-Latin historiography' or the historiographies of such countries as Brazil and Colombia with large African-descended populations, or even Canada. It is a demographic fact that the vast majority of the African diaspora is in Latin America, not the United States, and North America also includes Mexico and Canada which have African diaspora populations on which there are quite distinctive historiographies. 

The West-Africa and U.S. centric nature of The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought is most glaring when it comes to the biographies. West Africans are accorded 42 entries, followed by the United States with 32. Next come Southern Africa (predominantly South Africa) with 20, the Caribbean 16, Europe 11, East Africa 10, North Africa 9, Central Africa 5, Asia 2, and South America 1. This is a travesty. Surely, Afro-Latin America with its more than 100 million people of African descent has a lot more thinkers and activists than the lone and indefatigable artist-activist Abdias dos Nascimento included in this encyclopedia. The Southern African countries outside of South Africa have produced more figures deserving of inclusion than Malawi's John Chilembwe.

For North Africa, what would possibly explain the inclusion of only one modern figure, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the fiery Pan-Arab and Pan-African president of revolutionary Egypt before the country descended into a quiescent neo-colony. Have North Africans largely stopped thinking since the middle ages? At the very least I would have expected an encyclopedia edited by two leading literary scholars to include the renowned Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the second African to win the Nobel Prize in 1988 for literature after Wole Soyinka in 1986 (who is of course included as is the white South African the third African winner of the prize who won it in 1991).

When it comes to Europe, intellectuals, artists and activists of African descent do not seem to qualify for inclusion, not Alexander Pushkin from the 19th century, the great Afro-Russian poet, nor in contemporary times figures like Stuart Hall, the Black British academic who popularized cultural studies. Paul Gilroy, another renowned Black British scholar, is buried in the entry on the `Black Atlantic'. As for Asia, the editors appear not to have heard of such prominent African diasporans as Malik Ambar, the Ethiopian-born general who pioneered guerrilla warfare in India and became a ferocious foe of the Mughals and ruler of one of the numerous African kingdoms that littered the Deccan valley and other parts of India, nor of al-Jahiz, the eighth century Afro-Iraq author of the remarkable book, The Glory of Blacks Over Whites.

The encyclopedia wears its androcentricism loudly. Gender analysis is notable by its absence in most of the entries. As for the biographies, there are only 9 women out of the 148 illustrious individuals selected to represent the pantheon of African thinkers of all time; five from the U.S. (Angela Davis, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Ida Wells-Barnett), three from South Africa (Ruth First, Nadine Gordimer and Bessie Head) and one from the Caribbean (Sylvia Wynter). This is shameful. 

Reading The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought shows that despite the enormous growth of African studies in all its multifaceted disciplinary and interdisciplinary dimensions, we still lack general studies of African thought that give proportionate weight to Africa's various intellectual traditions, periods, regions, diasporas, and genders. It is a pity that this encyclopedia promised so much, but delivers so little. We still await an encyclopedia of African thought worthy of its name.

First Written June 10, 2010

http://www.zeleza.com/blogging/u-s-affairs/poverty-african-thought-review



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