DEBATES & REJOINDERS Conversations and Confrontations with my Reviewers

Archie Mafeje Department of Sociology American University in Cairo Egypt

Point of Departure

It is important for my readers to know that my monograph, as its title – Anthropology and Independent Africans – signifies, is directed to contemporary African anthropologists. This was in response to their representations in the 1991 anthropological seminar held in Dakar under the auspices of CODESRIA. It became apparent during the deliberations in the seminar that ‘African anthropology’ was an aspiration or wish rather than a reality. The attendant African anthropologists failed to provide a clear definition of ‘African anthropology’ as against colonial anthropology.

Secondly, unlike colonial anthropology, they exhibited no theoretical framework, which guided their discourse, nor were they able to say what their designating categories and units of analysis were. All this can be verified by reading Anthropology in which is an edited volume of the seminar papers (in press, Codesria Publications). This particular experience confirmed what I had suspected all along, namely the incorrigibility of colonial anthropology and, therefore, its likely atrophy in independent Africa.

Then, the nagging question was: if an epistemological break from colonial anthropology had eluded African anthropologists due to certain objective conditions such as the transformation of actual or imagined ‘tribes’ and ideological/political imperatives of decolonisation, could somebody else do the job for them by rehabilitating colonial anthropology or by producing a new agenda for anthropology, without encountering, the traditional or proverbial Achille's heel of anthropology, namely, ‘alterity’? This was a pertinent concern, given the fact that ‘Anthropology in Africa’ could not necessarily be construed as ‘African anthropology’, irrespective of my immediate preoccupation, i.e., ‘anthropology by Africans’. Therefore, I had to satisfy myself that the epistemological problem facing, anthropology is not only a problem of Africans. It is an ontological problem in that it derives not simply from colonialism or imperialism, as Kathleen Gough believed, but from historically- determined white racism. This is the essence of ‘alterity’ and goes far beyond mere

95 Eurocentrism. To test the validity of this supposition, I made a strategic selection of texts which I thought had succeeded in confronting Eurocentrism in anthropology but failed to deracialise anthropology.

The mistake I made in my monograph was not to make the above point explicit. It is apparent that while liberal Euro-American anthropologists and their kith and kin in the ex-colonies can consciously deconstruct colonial anthropology, it is doubtful if they can deracialise the original idea of anthropology as the study of the ‘other’. The authoritative remark by none other than Sally Falk Moore herself that: ‘From the start, the anthropological project was defined as the study of “others”, of non-European peoples with other ways of life’ (Moore 1994:9) confirms this supposition. Whether inspired by the lofty ideas of the Enlightenment (Firth 1972) or not, the search for exotica led to a situation wherein anthropology became a ‘scientific’ justification for drawing invidious distinction between Europeans and peoples of other continents. Under colonialism and white racial domination this had the most pernicious effects, as will be shown with reference to the intellectual role of white anthropologists in fostering ‘alterity’ in southern African settler-societies. Irrespective of whatever excuses individuals might make for themselves, the generic question is whether any anthropology founded on ‘alterity’ can escape being racist? Frequent references to ‘post-colonial’ research or ‘post-apartheid’ liberal reformism have not helped to clarify this issue. This need not concern Africans as victims of white racism about which they are still screaming, as the volume on Anthropology in Africa will testify. As the same volume will show, the problem facing contemporary African anthropologists is how to make an epistemological break from colonial anthropology, if at all.

Points of Return

I believe that my reviewers trivialised the problematique I wanted investigated and clarified for their own reasons – some predictable and some not so predictable. For instance, it is obvious that Sally Moore has too many axes to grind. I was actually puzzled by the fact that she found it necessary to re-introduce the specifics of our previous debate into the present one which is largely inspired by rejectionist texts or what she chooses to characterise as the ‘colonial period mentality’ critiques. However, it is possible that the earlier exchange left her with certain grievances which she found convenient to ventilate in the present context. Although my personal belief is that initiators of controversial debates should not reserve the right to be the final arbiters as well, I recognise the cathartic effect of unabated polemics. In her anger, indignation, and outrage she has revealed things which otherwise would have never known. One of these is to discover that she is capable of descending from her Olympian tower and engage in the rough and tumble of our kind of world. To make sure that this is for real, she takes leave of her genteel style of writing and becomes visceral to the point of being vitriolic and not disdaining use of exclamation marks to derive extra emotive impact where words prove inadequate. Not only this but she found it necessary to clear herself by declaring her political credentials, namely, that she was supportive of

96 African ‘independence’ and that she took an academic interest in ’s ‘socialist, planned-economy path’.

Regarding the former, her reference is her encounters with African students in the African Studies Centre at UCLA in the 1960s. It so happens that in the summer of 1965 I was guest lecturer in the Centre at the invitation of James Coleman (the Africanist king-maker). It was an opportune moment for me because it coincided with the climax of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In my lectures African- American and African students lost no opportunity to air their grievances against racism in democratic America where slaves had been emancipated long ago about how African Studies were being taught in the USA. Worse still, the Watts riots exploded while I was still in Los Angeles and I had the fortune of being escorted by Mrs. Nat King Cole to see the disparity between white and black Los Angeles. As if this was not enough, during my lengthy discussions with Dan Kunene, an African linguist who had been recruited from the University of , I learnt that a number of faculty members in the African Studies Centre were advisers to the State Department and that some of the Chairs in African languages were funded by the same Department and even by the American Navy – something, which led to the early departure of A. C. Jordan from UCLA in protest. Could all this have been unknown to somebody who became ‘closely involved with the activities of the African Studies Centre at UCLA’? Is Sally Moore after all these years deluding herself or trying to delude us?

Whatever is the answer, it is significant that thirty years hence Mahmood Mamdani could allude to the same underlying contradictions in his stirring critique, ‘A Glimpse at African Studies, Made in USA’ (1990).

Moore’s second claim to legitimacy is her field trip to Tanzania. She mentions the advice she got front the two historians, Ranger and Kimambo, but fails to report on the unnamed professor of anthropology who warned her that people in Kilimanjaro ‘wore trousers’, meaning that they were not suitable objects for an anthropological study. This as it may, what is important to bear in mind is that even if her book became famous in America, it remained obscure in East Africa. Interestingly enough, what emerged as relevant and often-quoted texts on customary tenure laws in East Africa in the last 20 years is the work of our former students from the University of Dar-es- Salaam, notably, Okot Ogendo, Pale Acholi, and more recently Issa Shivji. This is of more than academic import and might contradict her claim to legitimacy in the same way that her association with the African Studies Centre in UCLA did not transform her commitment to ‘alterity’, if not imperialism.

As far as access to literature is concerned, I am sure, I am as privileged as any professor at Harvard simply because I am a regular visitor to all centres of western civilisation. In addition, I receive frequent review copies from publishers on Africa. Above all, the CODESRIA secretariat and other members of the network bring to my attention whatever they consider to be interesting/relevant latest publications on Africa,

97 irrespective of discipline. However, like Sally Moore, I have to ‘make choices’ in dealing with literature. She made the foregoing remark in response to the charge that she wrote her book, Anthropology and Africa (1994), without referring, to any of the writings by African anthropologists. This was a serious but deliberate omission on Sally Moore’s part. As she made it known to one of her colleagues who queried the omission, in her view certain things are understood, without having to be said. Sally Moore has no respect for or faith in African scholarship thus far. Naturally, she would deny this but, unfortunately, I cannot reveal the identity of her white colleagues with whom she feels free to express such prejudices. Therefore, her having discovered all of a sudden that there are African scholars such as Thandika Mkandawire who are capable of writing ‘subtle’ texts is open to suspicion. I am sure, she is not at all familiar with Thandika Mkandawire’s work since he joined CODESRIA about 20 years ago. Consequently, she might have used his name in vain, as the brewing debate between him and some of his African colleagues such as Kwesi Prah will show. In the meantime, surprises await Sally Moore.

Concerning use of literature, it is apparent that Sally Moore’s ‘choices’ and mine are determined by different perceptions. My recognition of Northern scholars is not in doubt. Indeed, my critique proceeded from the work of those I could identify with and whose deconstructionist efforts I appreciate, even if they fall short of the stated goals. In addition, I know who my intellectual partners in Europe and America are and I feel a certain resonance in dealing with them and vice versa. Secondly, while I cannot claim to have read all the books that Sally Moore recommends, I can assure her that not only had I read James Ferguson’s book, The Anti-Politics Machine, but also had cited his more relevant but unpublished paper, ‘Anthropology and its Evil Twin’, something which apparently escaped her. His represents a dissenting voice and one wonders if Sally Moore would risk echoing it, instead of using it as a justification for something else. But more importantly, what is anthropological about Ferguson’s book? Would it not easily pass as Development or African Studies? Once again, for her information I am thoroughly familiar with Jane Guyer’s work on African agriculture. Since 1994 I have been having a continuing dialogue with her and she had been kind enough to send me some of her latest publications for information or comments. Similarly placed in relation to me, professionally-speaking, is her colleague, Sara Berry whose work on small-scale agriculture in Nigeria bears the same hallmark. But then, Sara Berry is an economist by training and Jane Guyer has collaborated with economists, geographers, and sociologists. Therefore, the question is: what is anthropological about her work, except techniques and methods. As far as one can tell, her work is not informed by any identifiable anthropological theory. Similar work has been done by Ethiopian, Sudanese, and Zimbabwean economists. What is the fuss about?

Finally, I wish to point out that Sally Moore completely betrayed herself in her remarks about CODESRIA as ‘the very organisation which so generously publishes so many of Mafeje’s pronouncements’. This insinuation is uncalled for because it is not a

98 matter of ‘generosity’ but of conviction. Most of the time I write for CODESRIA at their invitation and all proposals are subject to peer reviews. This is something the former Executive Secretary of CODESRIA, Thandika Mkandawire, whom I have known for 25 years in exile and worked with intensively for the last 15 years, can vouch for. The same is true of other African journals such as the Southern African Political and Economic Monthly (SAPEM), and the African Sociological Review in which this rejoinder is likely to appear. There is nothing sinister about this since all comers are given a chance to respond.

What it means, if Sally Moore did not know, is that I have a highly conscious African intellectual constituency in the same way that none of those in academia writes for herself/himself. Even more objectionable is her association between the autonomy of CODESRIA and the fact that it is funded by agencies or foundations from the same countries which we criticise or attack. Here, I detect an imperial voice that is not at all unfamiliar but overlooks the fact Africa contributes more value to the West than it receives according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Under the circumstances we can hardly think of charity but of inequity. Foreign aid is part of the system and as different regions come to their own, it is going to be increasingly difficult to use it as an instrument for control. Despite their impecunious state, engaged African scholars in organisations such as CADASTRE, SAPEM, AAPS, and OSSREA are not likely to heed any patronising utterances from the North. Social Democrats in Europe (who are the biggest donors to organisations such as CADASTRE) are acutely aware of this. Using perhaps the best Anglo-Saxon anthropological traditions, Sally Moore might be interested to find out how and why.

As far as white South African anthropologists are concerned, it would be futile to deny that, unlike Sally Moore, they were party to ‘internal colonialism’, if by that awkward term is meant those who neither came from ‘elsewhere’ nor were they identified with the indigenous peoples. Instead, they contributed in no mean way to the evolution of the conceptual, perceptual, and social alterity of the latter. Whether intended or not, they succeeded eminently in the establishment and refinement of racial stereotypes, with the Afrikaner volkekundiges taking the cap. Therefore, within anthropology the South African white anthropologists are the epitome of alterity and white racism. It is this problematique which confronts them as representatives of a discipline and not as free-floating individuals. I believe they evade this issue by indulging in liberal sentimentalism and special pleading. These are harsh words but are not unjustified, as will be shown by reference to the intellectual praxis of the white South African liberal anthropologists.

In her response Rosabelle Laville makes a fairly innocuous but essentially apologetic statement. First, like those (among them Sally Moore (1994) and Hendrietta Moore (1996) who advocate eclecticism out of expedience), she is inclined to suggest that anthropology is everything ‘from forensic to community development work’, which are all very practical and mundane. But then to affirm what she believes to be

99 significant theoretical transformations in anthropology, she invokes postmodernism which is abstract, and ultimately nihilistic because it has no sense of social antithesis and reconstruction. Its claim to universalism is untenable because it is subjectivistic and has no sense of historicity. I cannot imagine what could be ‘post-modern’ about this hot piece of land on which I stand, a structurally denied land, if you wish. Sally Moore is right in doubting my commitment to postmodernism, apart front its concept of ‘deconstruction’ and infections language, as I clearly stated in my monograph. For this reason, I would not confuse Rigby’s (also a very close friend for more than 30 years) flirtation with phenomenology whilst rooted in dialectical materialism with Rosaldo’s reflexive subjectivity which generates meanings (feelings) at the individual level. No matter how genuine these feelings are, in the modern world we shall have no headhunters of any sort.

The above would indicate that anthropology as is seen and practised by people like Rosabelle Laville lacks any theoretical coherence. Despite depicting me as an anthropological dinosaur of some sort, like Sally Moore, she is not able to provide synthetic theoretical deposits which distinguish her new anthropology from all else. Nor is she able to identify its designating categories, apart from the banal attestation that it studies ‘human societies’. The what, and wherefore of this enterprise is not made apparent. Instead, she returns to the elementary question which I thought I had answered, namely, ‘Does technique alone define a discipline or can a discipline be defined with regard to the kinds of questions it asks and the assumptions it makes?’. This was my precise point that anthropological methods and techniques are transferable and that, without a distinct and coherent theory, anthropology ceases to exist as a discipline. As is known, methods and techniques are given to theory in the same way that semantics are given to syntax and that at the level of vocabulary or facts there are no necessary connections. What about Laville’s postmodernist anthropology which by definition should be against epistemology? One thing certain is that it is different from that of black South African anthropologists whom she does not even allude to, as will be shown later.

On a personal note, Rosabelle Laville accuses me of committing sacrilege by attacking such anthropological demi-gods as Audrey Richards and Victor Turner. In this case her liberal sentimentalism is ‘misplaced’ because I lived with these people and they became personal friends. In Uganda I lived in the same staff quarters as Victor Turner. We used to have furious arguments. Yet, we used to break bread together and enjoy perfect social conviviality. Audrey Richards was not only my supervisor and Director at the African Studies Centre in Cambridge but also became a second Monica Wilson to me. Even though I often challenged her to justify her colonial role in Uganda in collaboration with Sir Andrew Cohen, she never doubted my intellectual integrity. This is so much so that when white South Africa was busy vetoing my appointment at the University of Cape Town in 1968 she and Edmund Leach quickly established a lectureship between Newnham College and King’s College to which I was invited to apply but declined the invitation and went to the University of Dar-es-Salaam instead. I

100 did not want to be compromised, something which Victor Turner appreciated but not Audrey Richards.

Concerning John Sharp’s intervention, I would say, his remarks are most pertinent and give me an opportunity to clarify my own position and to interrogate his as a white South African anthropologist. Contrary to what he, Sally Moore, and Rosabelle Laville might think, I have no vested interest in anthropology as an academic discipline and as such I am the last person to be expected to put new proposals to anthropology. However, I reserve the right to put theoretical/intellectual questions to the practitioners of the craft. This is done in the belief that anthropology as a discipline is founded on alterity which historically has issued into racism, which is not true of other social sciences such as economics and sociology. In fact, if anthropology were to dispense with alterity, it would be indistinguishable from peasant/community/small group studies conducted by early sociologists in Europe and America. The nearest thing, to anthropology is Orientalism which was so successfully debunked by Edward Said (1974) and yet Arab scholarship did not get any poorer by it. Thus, the issue is not social sciences in general and their positivism but rather the dissolution of the racist anthropological paradigm. The white anthropologists in Africa and in South Africa in particular have yet to prove that they have been able to transcend this racist paradigm. In South Africa this applies with equal force to the so-called African studies and the lingering imperial historiography, despite the rise of revisionist historiography in the country.

John Sharp speaks eloquently on abstract issues and admits to being liberal, democratic, and non-racist. Indeed, in their contribution to the volume Anthropology in Africa (forthcoming,) he is the only white South African anthropologist to whom James Ellis and Rhoda Kadalie refer approvingly. Yet, I remember being struck not so long ago by the irony of Emile Boonzaier, Peter Skalnik, Robert Thorton, Martin West, Robert Gordon, and Michael Whisson getting obsessed in a symposium which was later published in Truth Be in the Field edited by Pierre Hugo (1990) with a lone case where whites had been used as the ‘other’ by Vincent Crapanzano in his book Waiting: the whites of South Africa (1985). I wondered how often that had happened to blacks, without even a murmur from ‘liberal’ anthropologists, and how often they themselves might have committed the same crime with impunity. My purpose in making these remarks is not to draw invidious distinctions between human beings but to insist that such distinctions persist and that they are socially and historically determined. The point is not to deny them but to negate them in practice.

Thus, it is self-evident to me that nothing is going to change until Africans/blacks make their own authentic representations against all-comers. In this regard, there might be significance in Sharp’s title, ‘Who speaks for whom?’ While Sharp might deny the problem of alterity in anthropology, it is evident that the three books by northern scholars I used as the starting point for my critique were aimed at transcending the exact problem. It seemed to me that in spite of their efforts, short of dissolving the

101 quintessential anthropological paradigm, they were not likely to achieve their goal. The authors of Writing Culture must have been aware of this because they tried to obviate the problem of alterity by sublimating anthropology into cultural and literary criticism in the name of The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (used reflexively). In Ethnography and the Historical Imagination the Comaroffs tried to do something similar by attempting to universalise the concept of ‘ethnography’ but relativise its instances by situating it in specific socio-historical contexts, i.e., in social history. But, I believe, their use of the concept of ‘ethnography’ betrayed them precisely because it retained what I see as the source of alterity in anthropology. As is shown by one of their latest works, “Visceral Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony” (1997), this has proved to be in contradiction with their fascination with postmodernist constructs. In contrast Bettina Schmidt in her book, Creating Order (1996), raised explicitly the question of alterity in South African anthropology and quietly buried anthropology by assimilating it into South African social history under the guise of ‘Culture as Politics’. This is reminiscent of the ‘Poetics and Politics of Ethnography’ in Writing Culture.

In the light of some of these deconstructionist discourses from elsewhere, one wonders what Southern African white anthropologists are actually doing to deracialise anthropology and themselves, instead of justifying themselves by referring to texts from Europe and America. Truth Be in the Field, which was produced supposedly by South African avant-garde social scientists in anticipation of the demise of apartheid, turned out to be a reproduction of the same old paradigm, white subjects and black objects.

John Sharp or Rosabelle Laville might try to explain away this manifest truth by referring to the two anomalous cases of a gay club and Marondera boeren which appeared in the same volume. But the fact remains that Truth Be in the Field was a bewildering medley, with no deconstructionist pretensions. It confined itself to methods and techniques in a taken-for-granted universe. It is as if its authors had presumed that ideological concordance guaranteed unity of theory. Yet, interdisciplinarity leads to theoretical hiatus. It will require a major epistemological break-through as good as positivism which instigated the rise of the disciplines and led to the fragmentation of social theory to achieve any coalescence.

Thus, on both the question of alterity and of interdisciplinarity, liberal white South African anthropologists and those engaged in the so-called African studies display a greater lack of intellectual self-consciousness than their counterparts in Europe and America – which is their main world of reference. They seem not to accept the fact that for historical reasons, which are impersonal, they are also objects of the on-going African revolution inside and outside South Africa. As such, the authenticity of their intellectual representations is always in question. Instead of confronting this historically-determined fact, they try to maintain the illusion that they are necessarily subjects of their own negation by referring to compliant blacks and not to those who

102 want to explode this illusion.

For instance, as will be seen in Anthropology in Africa, black anthropologists such as Rhoda Kadalie, James Ellis, and Kwesi Prah from the University of the Western Cape question the authenticity of the representations of even liberal anthropologists from the English-speaking South African universities. Accordingly, while not advocating an end of anthropology, they propose to inaugurate an anthropology with an authentic voice, i.e., free of alterity and imperial imposition. While Kadalie and Ellis project what comes over as ‘development anthropology’ with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, Prah sees ‘development studies’ as a poor substitute for development of indigenous knowledge, i.e., knowledge ‘founded on African cultural and historical roots’. Although white liberals might object to Prah’s quest as essentialist, on very good authority I do not believe that he confuses authenticity with ‘essentialist’ for, despite his frequent but contradictory reference to interdisciplinarity, his actual inclination is towards Marxism which does not use ontological categories.

Even a cursory reading of Prah’s recent writings would prove this interpretation correct. If in doubt, Prah’s most recent writings are available to all in South Africa to find out for themselves.

But to clinch my point, I refer to his yet unpublished response to Mkandawire’s article cited by Sally Moore. He emphatically states that: ‘The task for us is to construct our understanding of African realities for ourselves in the first instance; speak to ourselves. If our discourse has any cognitive value it will speak to them (non-African subjects)’. Echoing Mao Tse Tung, he declares: ‘If what we say and do has relevance for our humanity, its international relevance is guaranteed’. Furthermore, while strongly opposed to my end of anthropology thesis, Prah acknowledges that: ‘Anthropology as the science of culture, has, as has rightly been pointed out by a wide variety of minds, historical baggage which needs to be thoroughly scrutinized for both methodological flaws and thematic Eurocentric exotica which hinder its scientific march forward’. To my question, where is African anthropology by Africans, he is honest enough to acknowledge the absence: ‘My view is that we are in the darkness before dawn, and indeed, Mafeje’s articulation of doom and gloom is a sociological attestation of this’ (Prah, 1997; pp 442 and 444). It is against this background that I wish to address my other two African reviewers, Herbert Vilakazi and Paul Nkwi.

To my surprise and delight, there does not seem to be any substantive differences between me and Herbert Vilikazi, except perhaps at the conceptual level. It is well to admit that I had become sceptical of his general orientation because of his persistent use of the tradition/modernity modality, which in most minds is associated with American theories of modernisation, plus his association with Bantustans and now with high places in KwaZulu. His present intervention makes it clear that he uses the term modernity in the central European historicist sense. In many ways his position comes closest to that of Kwesi Prah who shows a preference for the same intellectual

103 traditions in affirming the need to develop indigenous knowledge. As Prah, he sees the study of culture as one of the virtues of anthropology. The extent to which this positive attribute can be generalised, given our historical experience with structural functionalism and its instrumentalism in Anglophone Africa, is in doubt. Theoretically, it is also worth pointing out that Marxism does not have analytical categories for studying culture in the anthropological sense. Therefore, there is a danger of conflating idealist with materialist conceptions, as is already apparent in Vilikazi’s upholding both the Hegelian and the Marxist dialectic. It might be worthwhile to pursue this with Prah and Vilakazi in a separate dialogue. For the time being, suffice it to say that both are adamant that anthropology should not be jettisoned in favour of other disciplines.

Nevertheless, despite their historicist approach, there is a certain ahistoricism in their defence of anthropology. Anthropology arose from the loins of classical sociology whose best known representatives are Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim. Even German classical sociologists who were not necessarily associated with anthropology were anthropological, if we recall the work of the gemeinschaft-gesellschaft theorists such as Ferdinand Tonnies. Max Weber’s cultural relativity allowed him to encompass other societies such as India, China, and the Middle East. As is known, it was the debates between neo-Idealists (e.g. Dilthey) and neo-Kantians (e.g. Rickert) which inspired the juxtaposition between science of culture and social history in German classical sociology. All this would suggest that sociology, as was originally conceived, is not incompatible with the study of ‘culture’ and local ‘social history’ as is envisaged by Prah and Vilakazi (in fact both of them vacillate between the two). This is definitely a felicitous predisposition towards integration of knowledge and is precisely what is being discussed in the 1990s. My only argument is that anthropology lost out by becoming a science of the ‘primitive’ or objectified ‘other’. This is not true of the other bourgeois social science disciplines, even though they have been used as instruments of class oppression e.g. neo-classical economics or instrumental sociology made in the United States. Therefore, I should have made it clear in my critique that though they often coincide in multi-racial societies, racial and class oppression do not connote the same thing and are subject to different forms of self-liberation, as both Prah and Vilakazi are aware.

Concerning the distinction I seek to make between ‘culture’ and ‘ethnography’, it may not be a great advance but it is not insignificant. I still maintain that ‘culture’ is too broad a concept to be analytically useful and can easily lead to arbitrary categorisations and invidious distinctions among people. I believe that the assertion by the Comaroffs that ‘culture’ is a contested terrain is very sound. To apprehend and comprehend the dynamics of social life and the meanings given to them, one has to get inside culture. Otherwise, we would not be able to grasp the social historical significance of, say, the pitched battles between UDF and the Inkatha in KwaZulu-Natal, the fratricidal wars between the so-called Huhu and Tutsi in Rwanda, or the internecine combats among the Somali. It is all very well for Vilakazi to uphold Zulu culture but he has to say where he draws a line between this and Gatsha Buthelezi’s interpretation of the same,

104 including the passing of murderous weapons as ‘cultural weapons’. Kwesi Prah eschews this particular problem by referring to a universal ‘African culture’ in a manner which is reminiscent of ’s history of African civilisation. Although I have some reservations about the feasibility of Prah’s project, I feel compromised because I accept the fact that all cultural identities are invented and, therefore, there is not reason to suppose that Africans cannot invent their own pan- African cultural identity. Even so, we cannot with equanimity rule out contestation with African culture so universalised.

It is the background to such contestations and their articulation which I referred to as ‘ethnography’. This could in turn create new cultural identities. It is quite possible that in formulating this problematique I got caught up between context and agency, i.e. between authors of specific texts (e.g. the interpretation of Zulu culture by the Inkatha) and the perceived universe of discourse (e.g. the ‘Zulu nation’). The ethnographic set is not only a datum but more importantly a voice to which one has to respond, positively or negatively. Sally Moore is right in accusing me of doing the same thing as traditional anthropologists in my monograph by casting myself in the role of simply an empathetic interlocutor. Looking back at my own experience as a field-worker, I was never a neutral interpreter of ethnographic messages. When I was in the field in the Transkei (where Hammond-Tooke, former professor of anthropology at Rhodes University, made a mess of things as government ethnographer) in the 1960s, I heard two voices – one representing the Bantu Authorities/Bantustans and the other its antithesis. Although for obvious reasons I did not write about it in my thesis for the University of Cape Town, I got arrested because my own subjective commitment took me to clandestine meetings on top of the Baziya mountains and the forest hills of Eastern Pondoland. Something similar happened when I was in Uganda. I interacted vigorously with the mailo landlords/chiefs in Uganda as well as the Uganda nationalists. I was sympathetic to the voice of the latter. But this time I was not arrested but, instead, was offered Ugandan citizenship (seeing that I had none in my native South Africa) by the Minister of the Interior.

It is perhaps this inter-subjective communication which I should have emphasised because it is contrary to suppositions about a ‘value-free’, neutral positivist social science. In anthropology it is a refutation of the idea of a unprejudiced narrator of native life, the ethnographer. Everybody comes with their own ethnographic baggage and is keen to make apparent certain ethnographic ‘truths’. Therefore, it becomes incumbent upon Sharp and Laville to say what dangerous games they had been or are playing with the ‘natives’, without reducing them to the proverbial anthropological objects, ‘my people’. Until then, the issue of alterity and authorship of ethnographic texts cannot be clarified nor would it be possible to judge whether my strictures against anthropology constitute a theoretical advance or not.

It is interesting that in his largely platitudinous review Paul Nkwi presents anthropology as a study of ‘ethnography’ universally but is careless enough not to give

105 examples to prove his case. While the latter is regrettable, what is germane to our current debate is that his proposition is contrary both to my thesis about alterity being the cardinal sin of anthropology and to Prah’s and Vilakazi’s contention that the study of culture is what is uniquely anthropological. This would confirm my charge that even revivalist anthropologists such as the Comaroffs have not been able to define the relationship between these two concepts. Nkwi treats ‘ethnography’ as an object of appropriation by professional anthropologists, whereas Vilakazi is sceptical about my preference for a re-defined concept of ‘ethnography’ over the concept of ‘culture’ and wants to know if that is justifiable in our circumstances.

Of course, faced with continuing western imperialism, Africans cannot but assert their identity by recourse to their culture roots. In my view, this could be subsumed under African social history. However, if ‘culture’ were to be treated as the subject matter of anthropology then anthropologists would have to identify unambiguously the analytical categories they proposed to use for its study. The same would not be asked of social historians since they would not be using the term analytically but descriptively. Therefore, as far as I am concerned, it is not a matter of ignoring ‘culture’ but of not treating it as a critical concept in the same way that I propose to treat ‘ethnography’. This is not to deny the fact that ethnographic texts are actually a self-motivated way of manipulating cultural symbols in a given society. Once again, here I am using ‘society’ as a term of reference and not as a technical term. Thus, I can easily talk of the southern African ‘social formation’ while allowing for cultural diversity, whereas this would not normally apply to society.

All these difficulties and inconsistencies notwithstanding, I believe that Nkwi did himself and his organisation a great disservice by simply rehashing what has already been said, instead of making good his claim that new departures are being made by African anthropologists. On the contrary, in his response he succeeds only in showing that African anthropologists are at sixes and sevens. To compensate for the inadequacies of the discipline, he, like everyone else, takes refuge in ‘multidisciplinarity’. Shiferaw Bekele from the University of Addis Ababa might beg to differ because he believes that anthropologists are making strides in his country. It transpires that they are doing so because they have ‘now gone into development studies’. Secondly, he is excided about ideas based on extensive and microscopic field work (CADASTRE Bulletin, 1, 1998; pp. 24-24). As in other cases mentioned earlier, here the emphasis is on methods and techniques and participation in development studies, which are by definition interdisciplinary. But then some Ethiopian economists who are interested in peasant economies have been at it for quite some time, using the same intensive field methods. It is conceivable that OSSREA in collaboration with the University of Addis Ababa could create an opportunity to have this clarified by bringing the two sides together in a pan-African forum.

For the time being, the question still stands: what is the field of reference of post- independence anthropology; is there an identifiable body of theory which informs its

106 discourse; and are there any new concepts it has been able to generate which could instigate an epistemological breakthrough? Asking awkward questions is the surest way of forcing African anthropologists to come up to scratch or quit. Nkwi is mistaken in thinking that I did not take any interest in the members of the PAAA. The initial idea to find out what African anthropologists were doing was mine and subsequently I worked hardest with CADASTRE to have their papers published. I continue to read their publications, as is shown by my references which, ironically enough, are more than his. But, I must confess, I have not found the answers I was seeking and this is what prompted me to embark on what somebody has described as a ‘scorching critique’ of anthropology. This cannot last forever and I will be very pleased if African anthropologists such as Nkwi, Vilakazi, Prah, and others can relieve me of the anguish.

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