̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Centre of African Studies

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� launches inquiry into historical links to slavery

Anonymous — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 23:01:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��two-year inquiry will explore ̽��ֱ�� archives and a wide range of records elsewhere to uncover how the institution may have gained from slavery and the exploitation of labour, through financial and other bequests to departments, libraries and museums.

It will also investigate the extent to which scholarship at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, an established and flourishing seat of learning before and during the period of Empire, might have reinforced and validated race-based thinking between the 18th and early 20th Century.

A specially commissioned Advisory Group appointed by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stephen J Toope, has been asked to recommend appropriate ways to publicly acknowledge past links to slavery and to address its impact.

̽��ֱ��eight-member Advisory Group overseeing the work is being chaired by Professor Martin Millett, the Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology, and draws its membership from relevant academic departments across the ̽��ֱ��. ̽��ֱ��panel will call on further external expertise as necessary.

̽��ֱ��inquiry will be conducted by two full-time postdoctoral researchers, based in the Centre of African Studies, part of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. ̽��ֱ��research will examine specific gifts, bequests and historical connections with the slave trade. Researchers will also look into the ̽��ֱ��’s contribution to scholarship and learning that underpinned slavery and other forms of coerced labour.

Professor Millett said: “This will be an evidence-led and thorough piece of research into the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s historical relationship with the slave trade and other forms of coerced labour. We cannot know at this stage what exactly it will find but it is reasonable to assume that, like many large British institutions during the colonial era, the ̽��ֱ�� will have benefited directly or indirectly from, and contributed to, the practices of the time.

“ ̽��ֱ��benefits may have been financial or through other gifts. But the panel is just as interested in the way scholars at the ̽��ֱ�� helped shape public and political opinion, supporting, reinforcing and sometimes contesting racial attitudes which are repugnant in the 21st Century.”

Professor Toope, the Vice-Chancellor, said: “There is growing public and academic interest in the links between the older British universities and the slave trade, and it is only right that Cambridge should look into its own exposure to the profits of coerced labour during the colonial period.

“We cannot change the past, but nor should we seek to hide from it. I hope this process will help the ̽��ֱ�� understand and acknowledge its role during that dark phase of human history.”

̽��ֱ��Advisory Group’s work comes amid a wider reflection taking place in the United States and Britain on the links between universities and slavery. It is among a number of race equality initiatives currently being pursued at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. In February, the Centre of African Studies hosted a round table on 'Slavery and its Legacies at Cambridge'.

̽��ֱ��Advisory Group is expected to deliver its final report to the Vice-Chancellor in summer 2022. Alongside its findings on historical links to the slave trade, the report will recommend appropriate ways for the ̽��ֱ�� to publicly acknowledge such links and their modern impact.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will conduct an in-depth academic study into ways in which it contributed to, benefited from or challenged the Atlantic slave trade and other forms of coerced labour during the colonial era.

Emancipation Badge (1787), commissioned by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade from Josiah Wedgwood, in the Fitzwilliam Museum collection.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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When ideas of peace meet politics of conflict

fpjl2 — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 12:00:36 +0000

Burundi has experienced cycles of violence, civil war and even genocide since achieving independence from Belgium in 1962. So, when this small central African country finally held democratic multiparty elections in 2005 following a lengthy peace process, the international community cheered.

Here, perhaps, was a nation set to become a model for post-conflict inclusive governance. A model for building peace.

Now, Burundi once again teeters on the brink. In 2015, President Nkurunziza refused to step down at the end of his term, violating the new constitution and leading to a failed coup attempt – the aftermath of which has seen violent repression of the population.

Hundreds of thousands have fled, including much of civil society and a once-flourishing media. Torture, rape, imprisonment and extrajudicial killings are now commonplace, and in July 2016 the United Nations (UN) Security Council strongly urged all parties to cease and reject violence. ̽��ֱ��language of ethnic difference and the politics of ethnic scapegoating are once again coming to the fore, and tensions are extremely high.

For regional and international actors, such as the African Union (AU) and UN, which played key roles in the peace initiatives that paved the way for the 2005 elections, come familiar questions: what went wrong, and what to do now?

Through hundreds of interviews with everyone from government officials to local activists, AU and UN representatives, ex-combatants and aid workers, Dr Devon Curtis from Cambridge's Centre of African Studies (see panel below) is exploring what happens when the lofty ambitions of peace programmes – the language of security and democracy – encounter, as she says, “African realities and politics on the ground”.

“Before I became an academic I worked with government and the UN and it was almost easier then to provide policy recommendations in broad bullet points. It’s not so easy now that I have a real sense of the complexities of a country like Burundi, based on extensive research,” says Curtis.

Her research, in collaboration with UK and African-based scholars, is revealing the myriad ways international peacebuilding is reinterpreted and distorted by the politics of post-conflict African countries.

“Various local groups attract attention, funds or delegitimise opponents by manipulating – or ‘instrumentalising’ – the simplistic categories set by international donor organisations,” she says. “This can lead to unintended consequences for international agencies.”

For instance, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of ex-combatants has become an integral part of international peace operations over the past 20 years and a key area of programmatic activity, yet even the very category of ‘combatant’ in DDR programmes is problematic.

“ ̽��ֱ��international distinction between combatant and civilian doesn’t make much sense in Burundi, where many people have been both at different times. In fact, armed movements used DDR programmes as the basis for recruitment drives – promising potential recruits ‘attractive demobilisation packages’ from international donors.”

In other cases, international actors keen to see regional stability and cessation of overt violence can be “instrumentalised” by a country’s ruling elites, such as in Burundi and its neighbour Rwanda, where funds and support were funnelled to the security services to increase the control and repression of populations.

“Grand ideas of democracy and empowerment can get lost in conversions towards militarisation that, on a short-term and basic level, meet with the international donors’ initial desire for security,” says Curtis.

International agencies have typically understood Burundi’s conflict to be along the same ethnic lines as Rwanda’s: the majority Hutu against the minority Tutsi.

These basic ethnic categories were deployed by internationals during peace talks, and ethnic power-sharing was promoted as the “anchor of the peace agreement”, says Curtis. “For a time, this succeeded in bridging ethnic divisions, as all political parties had to include representatives from each perceived ethnicity. However, it did not address other divisions in Burundi.”

“Also, at the time of the peace negotiations, inclusive power-sharing provided a perverse incentive to keep fighting if an individual or group didn’t get what they wanted. Violence continued to be a way to get a seat at the table.” Armed groups would continue to splinter – creating more and more subgroups that would then demand representation in the peace negotiations. “As soon as someone was brought in, another movement would break away, forming a new faction.”

This was in part an effort to gain power, but there were also tactics to keep the peace talks going indefinitely, for financial gain. “Burundian representatives were flown to the city of Arusha in Tanzania for talks, and paid per diem rates.” There is a well-to-do neighbourhood in Burundi’s capital city nicknamed ‘Arushaville’, which is said to be built on the earnings of these protracted negotiations.

While the peace negotiations meant one thing for international and regional mediators and donors, they were viewed in different ways by Burundians. In fact, the very language of the international donor community can be coopted and reinterpreted for local gain.

For instance, networks of traditional elders, called the Bashingantahe, were considered a thorn in the side of the current regime in Burundi. “ ̽��ֱ��regime implemented a ‘democratic decentralisation’ programme – something designed to appeal to donors – which established an elected government at the local level. It led to fierce competition between these newly elected local officials and the Bashingantahe elders, so the elders formed their own ‘NGO’ to appeal to international donors and to be able to attend donor-financed civil society forums.

“Everybody’s manoeuvering,” says Curtis. “These international ideas and labels are not imposed on a blank slate, but are forced to interact with existing political and economic agendas.

“I wanted to focus on Burundi partly because there are few strategic and economic considerations for the international donor community – so one would assume that they are going in with relatively unbiased good intentions. Yet, even in this case, peacebuilding programmes do not bring about their intended effects. What does this mean for the even more ‘difficult’ cases such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Somalia?”

With funding from the British Academy, Curtis recently co-edited a book on peacebuilding ideas in different African contexts. She continues to consult with and advise the peacebuilding commission at the UN and the UK’s Foreign and International Development offices on a number of issues related to African peace and security.

Recently, in discussion with a network of African scholars, she has turned her attention to possible new approaches and ideas of peacebuilding: “International packages for peace tend to focus first and foremost on stability and electoral democracy, both of which are important, but which don’t affect the entrenched self-interest of ruling elites.

“Questions of social justice and equality are expected to come later – but what if it was flipped so they were prioritised? There are very few success stories in international peacebuilding, and I’m concerned we’re in danger of learning the wrong lessons: that peace is too problematic, and that we should focus on narrower goals of counter-insurgency.

“I’d like to try and shift the debate towards questions of social justice and international solidarity. If we changed the notion of what is important in peacebuilding, I wonder what peace might look like then?”

Inset images: Voluntary disarmament and demobilisation of combatants as part of the UN Operation in Burundi in 2004-2005; credit: United Nations Photo.

To keep up to date with the latest stories about Cambridge’s engagement with Africa, follow #CamAfrica on Twitter.

Research by an expert in peacebuilding shows how international ideas, practices and language of conflict resolution are transformed when they meet African “realities and politics on the ground”.

Everybody’s manoeuvering. These international ideas and labels are not imposed on a blank slate, but are forced to interact with existing political and economic agendas.

Devon Curtis

United Nations Photo

United Nations Operation in Burundi (crop)

Centre of African Studies

For half-a-century, the Centre of African Studies has served as the hub of research in the humanities and social sciences at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Collaboration with research institutes and individual researchers in Africa has long been key to its work, from its founding director Audrey Richards’s contribution to the establishment of social sciences in Uganda to a range of more recent forms of collaboration. In a scheme that is unique to Cambridge among African Studies Centres in the UK, the Centre hosts each year visiting research fellows from Africa, who spend six months in Cambridge unencumbered by duties in their home institutions.

Although the Centre does not have permanent academic staff, at present it hosts postdoctoral researchers whose interests range from heritage in Southern Africa to religion and popular culture in Rwanda. ̽��ֱ��Centre also monitors the provision of Africa-related teaching and research across the ̽��ֱ��. Cambridge’s well-established strengths in history and social anthropology have recently been complemented by growth in African politics – in both student demand and staff numbers.

̽��ֱ��Centre has the only specialist African Studies library in Cambridge. Its archival collections are also significant. Academics across faculties and schools take part in teaching the interdisciplinary MPhil in African Studies. ̽��ֱ��Centre also hosts weekly research seminars and organises academic conferences in Cambridge and Africa. Some of the outcomes of these activities are published in its book series with Ohio ̽��ֱ�� Press, a leading publisher in African Studies.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Cambridge and Africa

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 15:05:00 +0000

Collaboration with Africa is embedded in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s DNA. I am paraphrasing our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, but there is no better way to describe the scale and vitality of Cambridge’s partnership with the continent. This month, here and in our research magazine, we celebrate some of these partnerships that have made Cambridge one of the world’s leading universities for engaging with and supporting African research.

Many of our researchers have long worked with African colleagues on issues that matter not just to the continent but to the world. Our Centre of African Studies, a hub for Africa-based scholarship, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2015. And our Cambridge-Africa Programme provides a framework that makes the mentorship and personal commitment of our researchers available to African researchers working in Africa on African priorities.

Africa is a region of rapid economic, demographic and population growth, with unresolved challenges in areas such as health, education, governance, poverty and nutrition. It has excellent researchers, but too few to train and mentor the millions it needs to accelerate its progress. It has good universities but many are too under-resourced to be internationally competitive. This is where global, research-driven universities across the world can help.

Engagement through research partnership and capacity building is embodied in the Cambridge-Africa Programme. Today, the Programme supports African researchers in 58 institutions in 26 African countries; its various schemes link PhD, postdoctoral and group leaders with a network of over 200 Cambridge-based researchers working in over 30 fields of research across the ̽��ֱ�� and affiliated institutions.

And in a scheme that is unique to Cambridge among African Studies centres in the UK, the Centre of African Studies hosts each year visiting research fellows from Africa, who spend six months in Cambridge unencumbered by duties in their home institutions. Collaboration with research institutes and individual researchers in Africa has long been key to the Centre’s work.

Other partnerships across the ̽��ֱ��, which include business, executive education, social entrepreneurship and technology transfer, take our engagement with Africa to 36 countries, and the list continues to expand.

Interactions with Africa enrich the intellectual and cultural environment of our academics and students, helping us to be a truly global university. Being a global university means understanding that what we do at home can positively affect lives, and livelihoods, on the far side of the world. It requires us all to take full responsibility for that knowledge – and to act on it, together.

It means knowing, for instance, that collaboration between viral experts in Cambridge and plant scientists in Africa can help make crops in Ghana more resilient. It means understanding that the knowledge developed by clinicians in a Ugandan maternity ward supported by Cambridge researchers can save lives everywhere.

And it means recognising that evidence collected through collaborations with NGOs, peacebuilders and research institutes working on the ground can make a difference in areas as diverse as education, post-conflict resolution and nutrition.

Last year, I was invited to attend a meeting of the International Alliance of Research Universities at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cape Town in South Africa. ̽��ֱ��theme of the meeting was ‘Global transformation’. My participation prompted me to wonder: what if every one of the world’s leading research universities could do something similar to the Cambridge-Africa Programme? Imagine the effect that the commitment, and the concerted efforts, of the world’s top research-intensive institutions might have on Africa’s capacity to produce knowledge. That would be global transformation indeed.

Professor Eilís Ferran is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional and International Relations.

To keep up to date with the latest stories about Cambridge’s engagement with Africa, follow #CamAfrica on Twitter.

Cambridge is one of the world’s leading universities in its engagement with, and support for, African research. This month we begin a month-long focus on some of these partnerships, introduced here by Professor Eilís Ferran, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional and International Relations.

Being a global university means understanding that what we do at home can positively affect lives, and livelihoods, on the far side of the world

Eilís Ferran

Nick Saffell

Cambridge-Africa postdoctoral researchers

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Opinion: Mozambique's unexpected truce still hangs in the balance

ljm67 — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 15:03:52 +0000

Christmas tidings of peace and goodwill in Mozambique seemed almost too good to be true after four years of sporadic but escalating civil conflict.

On December 26, Afonso Dhlakama, leader of the Renamo opposition movement, told the media that he and President Felipe Nyusi had spoken by phone and agreed to a provisional ceasefire.

A week later they agreed to extend the truce by a further 60 days. ̽��ֱ��good news was unexpected given that international mediators had recently packed up and left Mozambique after six months of stop-start talks that made almost no progress.

A further oddity of the conflict is that the Renamo guerrillas as well as its parliamentarians are under one man’s leadership – Dhlakama. This means he leads a guerrilla force as well as parliamentarians who debate against the Frelimo government in the National Assembly.

Dhlakama was brought into electoral politics as a result of the 1992 peace accord. But by 2009 he was disillusioned with his party’s declining performance at the polls and relocated to the northern city of Nampula, a place where Renamo has long had solid support.

It was there that his bodyguards – a force he was allowed to retain in the terms of the peace accord – exchanged fire with the police. Following the shootout, Dhlakama moved again, this time to Satungira, his old wartime redoubt in the Gorongosa National Park in Sofala Province of central Mozambique.

Renamo soldiers, mostly ageing civil war veterans who had not received the demobilisation benefits they expected in 1992, began to gather and form encampments at locations across central and northern Mozambique.

Talking peace

Renamo ambushes on the main roads and exchanges of fire with government forces became more frequent through 2013 and 2014.

Elections in October 2014 brought a truce. But from late 2015 government forces started attacking Renamo positions and targeting civilians suspected of supporting Renamo. During 2016 at least eight Renamo officials were assassinated. Renamo in turn became less restrained in attacking civilian targets, including local government officials.

Dialogue mediated by Mozambican civil society groups secured the truce before the 2014 elections, but failed to find a more enduring settlement. Renamo had been pushing for international mediators and foreign teams arrived in Mozambique in July 2016.

̽��ֱ��government and Renamo each got to pick members of the mediation team. ̽��ֱ��government called on the Southern African Development Community and on Jonathan Powell, a former chief-of-staff to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Renamo got the Catholic Church and the European Union on board. When the mediators left in December after half-a-year of stop-start talks, they made it clear that there was little point in them being there when little progress had been made towards common ground.

̽��ֱ��main sticking point involved a political demand put on the table by Renamo: that it be granted the power to appoint provincial governors in the provinces where it claims to have won an electoral majority. Which provinces Renamo won is a further matter of dispute.

This solution would involve a shift away from today’s centralised politics, whereby Frelimo, as the winner of the elections at national level, gets to appoint all the provincial governors.

But it’s also not exactly a gain for democracy: the proposal is not for the provinces to choose their own leaders, but for Renamo, rather than Frelimo, to appoint governors in certain provinces on the basis of previous election results.

At one point during the negotiations, it looked as though the government might be about to make concessions on the crucial issue of decentralisation, only to backtrack. This apparent dithering reflects differing opinions within the party.

On the one hand, a centralised state is an article of faith for party hawks, who also fear that Renamo appointments to provincial governorships would create centres of patronage for Renamo and represent cracks in Frelimo’s dominance of state power.

But another tendency within the party, likely including Nyusi himself, believes Frelimo has little to fear from decentralisation. This more flexible position on Nyusi’s side could explain why a couple of ad-hoc phone chats between him and Dhlakama have managed to keep alive the idea of a peace just weeks after the mediation process fizzled out.

A question of sovereignty

Yet the terms of the ceasefire remain unresolved, and this poses an immediate threat to the truce. Renamo has promised to continue operating patrols within a 3km radius of its bases. ̽��ֱ��government refuses to keep its distance from Renamo bases, which Renamo sees as provocation.

This is not a trivial issue, but goes to the heart of a question about sovereignty and political legitimacy. ̽��ֱ��same disagreement over where government forces can and cannot go derailed the peace talks in August 2016 when the mediators tried to negotiate a security corridor for them to visit Dhlakama at Satungira.

̽��ֱ��government has maintained the position that its sovereign prerogatives allow it to deploy its forces wherever it will, and that there is no such thing as Renamo territory.

Renamo, on the other hand, portrays the war as a conflict between equals and insists that it has the right to defend its positions against what it speaks of as government aggression. As things stand now, a skirmish between soldiers of the two sides could easily be seized upon by Dhlakama or by a Frelimo hawk as a reason to declare the truce null and void.

Whether or not the ceasefire holds, Mozambique’s leaders are only starting to face up to the consequence of the country’s financial crisis. In October, Mozambique acknowledged it could not pay its debts.

This is the outcome of a mounting scandal that broke earlier in 2016, when Mozambique revealed that it had US$1 billion in undeclared debt: the result of government bailouts for two part state-owned companies.

Major lenders promptly halted loans. ̽��ֱ��government also continues to be haunted by the disappearance of $600 million in bonds issued by the state fishing company supposedly to buy new boats. There are suspicions that the missing money was channelled into the war effort.

This squandering of state resources has had consequences for Mozambique’s development indicators: half of rural people live below the poverty line, a figure barely reduced since 2003. Although Renamo is in no position to give farmers a better deal, it has won some sympathy for its cause by exploiting a sense of resentment in the largely rural provinces of the centre and north.

Justin Pearce, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Politics and International Studies & Research Associate of St John's College Cambridge, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

After four years of escalating civil conflict, a truce has unexpectedly arisen in Mozambique. But what are the chances of this ceasefire lasting, asks Justin Pearce, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Politics and International Studies & Research Associate of St John's College.

Adrien Barbier

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Four decades after Haile Selassie’s death, Ethiopia is an African success story

cjb250 — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 08:28:41 +0000

Ethiopia has changed beyond all recognition since the death of its last emperor, Haile Selassie, 40 years ago. Haile Selassie was surreptitiously murdered at the age of 83 by the military revolutionaries who had overthrown him a year earlier. Though t-shirts bearing his familiar features are to be seen on the streets of Addis Ababa, the days of the empire have gone and there is no move to restore it.

Gone too is the Derg, as the military regime was called. It attempted to build a communist state on the ruins of the empire, like its backers in the then USSR. Though it built what initially seemed to be an effective dictatorship, it was unable to cope with the economic incompetence of state socialism – symbolised for the outside world by the great famine of 1984 – or the resistance aroused by brutal top-down central rule.

This resistance was led by the movement for the independence of the northern province of Eritrea. One of the most effective insurgencies the world has ever seen, it brought down the Derg in the province in 1991. Eritrea has since tragically degenerated into an African North Korea, which has succeeded only in providing a massively disproportionate number of the refugees now besieging Fortress Europe. ̽��ֱ��government of the rest of Ethiopia – by far the largest part of the country – fell to an allied guerrilla movement, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

̽��ֱ��Tigray People’s Liberation Front initially alarmed the international community by proclaiming Enver Hoxha’s socialist Albania as the example which it wished to emulate. It was saved not least by its leader, Meles Zenawi, who emerged as perhaps the most original and intelligent African ruler of the last 50 years.

̽��ֱ��Meles years

Meles rapidly recognised that crude authoritarianism offered no formula for governing a country as diverse as Ethiopia, and introduced a system that promised each of its “nations, nationalities and peoples” a high degree of internal self-government, extending to a right of self-determination, “up to and including independence”.

̽��ֱ��actual level of autonomy has fallen well short, and opposition is subverted or suppressed, but there is nonetheless a measure of federalism in which the peoples of each region are at least governed by members of the same group as themselves. Together with a senseless war in 1998-2000, launched by newly independent Eritrea, this has helped to promote a revived sense of Ethiopian nationalism.

Most remarkable of all, however, Meles' economic development programme has turned the country into one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, with levels of GDP growth over the last decade at or close to 10% – without the oil or mineral wealth that have largely powered growth in other parts of the continent.

Ethiopian real GDP growth

Investment in infrastructure and especially roads, which are vital to development in Ethiopia’s mountainous terrain, has been the key. Education has also received a boost, together with public health, where the country’s efficient and generally honest (though undoubtedly bossy) administration has helped to encourage foreign aid donors.

Yet the centrepiece is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, currently under construction on the Blue Nile close to the Sudanese border. Due to complete in 2017, it promises ample power for Ethiopia and much of northeast Africa. Smaller hydroelectric schemes on the Gibe river in the south of the country are already coming on stream.

Landlocked since Eritrean independence, and denied use of Eritrean ports since the 1998-2000 war, Ethiopia’s external trade is highly dependent on the microstate of Djibouti. It is constantly looking for alternative outlets, one of which may be the projected LAPSSET corridor to Kenya. Most remarkable of all, Ethiopia has secured Sudanese and even Egyptian acquiescence over the intensely sensitive issue of the management of the Nile waters.

Ethiopia has likewise established its position as the regional diplomatic centre, and in some eyes even as the regional hegemon. Swift alliance with the United States and its allies in the “global war on terror” made it the key in Western eyes to regional stability in a conflict-ridden part of the world, and helped to avert sanctions for undemocratic governance.

When opposition parties threatened to win an election in 2005, the results were reversed, and subsequent elections most recently in 2015 have been closely controlled. As the headquarters of the African Union, Addis Ababa is the diplomatic capital of the continent, and the government has played an active and responsible role in attempting to resolve conflicts in neighbouring Somalia and South Sudan. Friendly relations are also maintained with China, which serves as the model for Ethiopia’s market-friendly but state-controlled development programme.

̽��ֱ��way ahead

Undoubted dangers remain. One major hazard was skilfully managed in 2012, when Meles died and was peacefully replaced by Hailemariam Desalegn, a technocrat from a region of southern Ethiopia historically excluded from positions of power. Yet inevitably he does not command the same authority as Meles, and domestic government turns on complex behind-the-scenes negotiation between political stakeholders. What appears to be a smoothly running operation may risk fragmentation.

And though the regime is formally committed to equal participation in government of the country’s diverse groups, both the largest and most centrally placed group, the Oromo, and also the country’s Muslims feel relatively disadvantaged and may cause instability. Earlier in August, the mainly Coptic Christian country gave long jail sentences to 18 Muslim nationals for acts of terrorism.

̽��ֱ��border between a historically dominant state and the private sector meanwhile remains uncertain, with control of telecoms a key prize. Ethiopia has yet to develop the productive export-oriented enterprises that its growth plans demand, and has tended to favour foreign firms over encouraging a potentially threatening domestic business sector.

Ambitious development schemes have also understandably aroused environmental concerns. Nonetheless, from the perspective of the revolution that overthrew Haile Selassie in 1974, and still more the disastrous famine a decade later, Ethiopia’s progress has been spectacular.

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Christopher Clapham, Professor Emeritus at the Centre of African Studies, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge looks at the changes that Ethiopia has undergone since the assassination 40 years ago of its last emperor, Haile Selassie.

digboston

Haile Selassie by Lucien Aigner

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

For image use please see separate credits above.

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Africa: the coming revolution

sjr81 — Wed, 21 May 2014 08:38:57 +0000

Professor Keith Hart, a former Director of Cambridge’s Centre of African Studies, returns to the university tomorrow (Thursday) to deliver the annual Audrey Richards lecture – a showpiece of the Centre’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Hart will use the lecture to contend that conflict, poverty and extremism on the African continent should not divert attention from the long-standing strengths of the informal economy in Africa’s cities and the continent’s new embrace of the digital revolution in communications. Professor Hart will show how such social dynamics may have surprising lessons to give to the troubled market economy in the 21st century.

“In the present decade, seven out of the ten fastest-growing economies are African,” said Hart. “It was never the case that a national framework for development made sense in Africa and it makes even less sense today. ̽��ֱ��coming African revolution could leapfrog many of the obstacles in its path, but it will not do so by remaining tied to the national straitjacket worn by African societies since they won independence from colonial rule.

“ ̽��ֱ��world economy is precarious in the extreme, but Africans have less to lose. Africa’s advantage in the current crisis is its weak attachment to the status quo.”

During the lecture, Hart will also consider the role played by free trade and protection in the revolutions that made modern France, the United States, Italy and Germany, as well as examining the organization of international trade in Southern Africa and reviewing the prospect for greater integration of trade regimes on the continent as a whole.

Professor Hart’s original research in Ghana in the 1970s is renowned for coining the notion of the informal economy. It has been widely applied to account for economic activities that are not recorded by conventional measurements such as the gross domestic product. He has more recently published influential studies on how new forms of money may entail more emancipatory possibilities than has been the case in capitalism’s historical forms.

Professor Hart is currently the co-director of the Human Economy Programme in Pretoria ̽��ֱ�� and Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His lecture is given as the Audrey Richards Annual Lecture in African Studies. It pays tribute to Richards (1889-1984), a Cambridge social anthropologist, who founded the Centre of African Studies in 1965.

Hart’s lecture today inaugurates the Centre’s 50th anniversary events that will highlight half a century of excellence in African Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s new Africa initiative builds on this legacy of African Studies.

̽��ֱ��lecture, Waiting for Emancipation: ̽��ֱ��Prospects for Liberal Revolution and a Human Economy in Africa, takes place in room SG1 & SG2 in the Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, at 5pm Thursday. All are welcome to attend.

Africa’s fastest-growing economies could offer a radical alternative to the West’s current reliance on national capitalism according to an academic who helped coin the term the ‘informal economy’.

̽��ֱ��world economy is precarious in the extreme, but Africans have less to lose.

Keith Hart

Globe by Hans Olofsson

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Until lions write their own history…

amb94 — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 09:47:35 +0000

Through kimonos, wall hangings, mats, soft sculptures and paintings, artist Deanna Tyson tells her political tales and weaves her social comments through stitched and painted works.

“Textiles, their application, their colours, their very threads and stitches reveal a great deal about the social history of differing cultures,” says Tyson. “Like a spider, I hope to lure the spectator in through a pretty and frivolous web of threads towards a political punch. Many of the pieces employ African wax cloth, the lineage of which is steeped in meaning and metaphor, legacies of colonialism, trade routes and exploitation.”

̽��ֱ��exhibition space in the atrium of the Alison Richard Building (ARB) nestled among the Faculties of English, History, Divinity and Music is creating a reputation as one of Cambridge’s best-kept secrets, and a leading venue for contemporary international art.

Since the building’s opening last year, the ARB’s Public Art Committee has welcomed a series of exhibitions as part of its ‘ART at the ARB’ initiative, including installation, photography, ceramic and textile work. ̽��ֱ��bright open space of the building’s atrium, arranged over three floors, lends itself to large and colourful pieces and offers a flexible approach to displaying three-dimensional works.

̽��ֱ��ARB, home to the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) is not just an elegant space, but also has art running through its veins. Last year award-winning contemporary ceramicist Edmund de Waal embedded his porcelain works into the very ground on which the building stands for his piece, A Local History. ̽��ֱ��three glass-covered, underfoot cabinets, or vitrines, that contain his collections of ceramic fragments echo the meticulous work of archivists at the Centre of African Studies, the Centre of South Asian Studies and Centre of Latin American Studies. ̽��ֱ��thrill of walking over these unmarked cabinets for the first time is well worth a visit.

Deanna Tyson’s exhibition of textile work, ‘Until lions write their own history the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter’, will be open until 3 January 2014. Entry is free.

To find out more about ‘ART at the ARB’, and to propose a new exhibition, visit: https://arbart.crassh.cam.ac.uk/

An exhibition of contemporary textile art by Deanna Tyson has opened at the Alison Richard Building in response to the unique materials held there collected from all corners of the globe.

Deanna Tyson

Karnu Warrior

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More than the stuff of legend

bjb42 — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 09:11:04 +0000

In the Western world he is barely known, but on the east coast of Africa, he is a folk icon equal to Robin Hood, and a name capable of arousing the interests and passions of any true Swahili.

Though shrouded in myth, Fumo Liyongo was a Swahili Chieftain who lived at some point between the 9^th and 13^th centuries. He was a hero, warrior and poet, whose life and undertakings have become the stuff of legend, and are celebrated in numerous traditional poems, stories and songs, which remain deeply embedded in the cultural imagination of the Swahili people.

Now, however, it is emerging that Fumo Liyongo may be more than a simple myth. After a six-month project at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Dr. Kenneth Simala, an expert in Kiswahili literature and linguistics, has begun to see the Liyongo narrative – and in particular a 232-stanza, epic poem, that bears his name – as a symbolic, coded message from the past, that also marks the birth of pan-Swahili identity.

His paper, which is being published following an academic exchange programme at Cambridge’s Centre of African Studies, argues that the “Fumo Liyongo” epic is not just a representation of life as it was, but a sprawling metaphor about what happens when civilisations collide, and a warning about the “future history” of the world.

“Liyongo is one of the most remarkable figures in Swahili culture,” Dr. Simala said. “His works have dominated Swahili life and went on to inspire generations of Swahili poets and writers.”

“But what this attests to is something we also tend to overlook: Liyongo is not just a romantic legend with a historical basis. He is a representation of the depth, achievement and ambience of Swahili culture. From his mythology, we are supposed to make deductions both about times that have passed, and about a modern day message on the need for civilisations to engage in dialogue.”

Liyongo himself is believed to have written many of the poems and songs about his life, including the great epic itself. Passed down for centuries as an oral tradition, it describes his adventures along the Swahili coast (now occupied by parts of modern-day Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique), and in particular his interactions with other peoples who came to explore, trade with, convert or conquer the African territories he ruled over.

Although it is unclear when exactly Liyongo lived, as a local chieftain he would have ruled the northern part of the coast of East Africa at a time when it was a major cultural crossroads. During the Middle Ages, the region had flourishing links with China, India, South-East Asia, Persia and Arabia. Against that backdrop, the narrative describes his adventures as he struggled to resist and contest the external forces with which the region was coming into contact.

Some of the stories have strong parallels with western folklore. In one, Liyongo is lured to an archery tournament by a rival king who intended to capture him, but thanks to his skill he both won the tournament and escaped. It is clearly reminiscent of the “silver arrow” incident in the Robin Hood legend, and suggests a deeper origin myth behind both.

Other episodes have a more distinctively African flavour. In one, Liyongo finds himself imprisoned after a war of succession. He begins to sing coded messages, which prove so captivating that the people begin to dance. Amid the confusion, he is able to escape.

Researchers have been perusing the Liyongo legend, albeit spasmodically, for years, but few have viewed it as more than a beautiful and well-constructed myth. Simala sees it differently, arguing that it represents the Swahili search for identity during subsequent phases of colonisation. He believes the epic in particular is almost a template for how to handle such challenges not through conflict, but dialogue, rendered in metaphorical form.

His paper argues that much of the poem is implicitly concerned with modernity, and the modernising influence of foreign invaders. ̽��ֱ��epic bestrides indigenous ideas about modernity – those of the Bantu African civilisations – and earlier, Arabic and Islamic modernising influences that had come from overseas.

“Liyongo breaks the silence of the subordination Swahili people experienced and begins to challenge the consequences of that latter modernity,” he said. “His activities represent the fight for integrity, dignity and security that continued for generations. This was the beginning of a pan-Swahili national consciousness.”

As a result, the poem deals with themes such as inclusion and exclusion, identity and multicultural justice. Centuries ahead of the concepts underpinning that of a United Nations, Liyongo sees the resolution as being one of collective identity and common justice. This laid the basis for a Swahili experience of “nation-becoming”, Simala argues, but more broadly it has a deeper message about the formation of a collective identity and a cultural code in the face of inequalities that might otherwise prevail.

Because the Liyongo epic was passed on as an oral tradition it has constantly had to be presented afresh and revitalised for new audiences. In many ways this has aided its longevity, giving it relevance to Swahili communities ever since as they faced similar problems and later waves of colonisation, which were political, cultural and economic.

Yet its message goes further still: “ ̽��ֱ��poem is both inside and outside time,” Simala writes. “It is in time because it evokes a time, place and people. It is outside time because it goes beyond that and speaks about our common humanity. It is fresh inspiration for modern society that dialogue and reconciliation are possible, so long as all parties are willing and open to engage with each other with respect and trust.”

Research into the epic chronicling the adventures of the legendary Swahili ruler, Fumo Liyongo, has revealed messages that reach far beyond myth-history.

Liyongo breaks the silence of the subordination Swahili people experienced. This was the beginning of a pan-Swahili national consciousness.

Dr. Kenneth Simala

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Masai bush landscape

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