EDITED VOLUME SERIES Andreas Exenberger, Ulrich Pallua (Eds.) Africa Research in Austria Approaches and Perspectives innsbruck university press EDITED VOLUME SERIES innsbruck university press Andreas Exenberger, Ulrich Pallua (Eds.) Africa Research in Austria Approaches and Perspectives Andreas Exenberger Department of Economic Theory, Policy and History, Universität Innsbruck Ulrich Pallua Department of English, Universität Innsbruck This book was published with financial support by the Faculty of Economics and Statistics and the Faculty of Language and Literature of the University of Innsbruck. Cover pictures: © Wikimedia Creative Commons: Africa (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Africa_satellite_plane. jpg/800px-Africa_satellite_plane.jpg), Youssou N‘Dour (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:YoussouNdour20090913.jpg), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ms._magazine_Cover_-_Summer_2014.jpg), © translocalculture.com: Creating Comoria (https://translocalculture.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/afropa_at_brickcity01.jpg), © Public Domain: Tanzania-Germany (Deutsches Bundesarchiv: http://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de/archives/barchpic/search/_ 1471596884/?search%5Bform%5D%5BSIGNATUR%5D=Bild+183-U0302-0012), Congo Crisis (Wikimedia: https://commons.wikime- dia.org/wiki/File:J-29_Tunnan_in_UN_service.jpg), © Andreas Exenberger: Figure Limited Access Orders © Arno Sonderegger: Figure Africa All pictures used are under public domain or creative commons license or provided with permission by the authors. © innsbruck university press, 2016 Universität Innsbruck 1st edition All rights reserved. Cover designed by Grosslercher Stephanie www.uibk.ac.at/iup ISBN 978-3-903122-59-8 Table of Contents 7 Preface Ulrich Pallua & Andreas Exenberger (Innsbruck) 13 The Modernity of Pan-Africanism: From History and Politics to Popular Culture Arno Sonderegger (Vienna) 43 Reflections on the Role and Production of Research Films in African Studies Birgit Englert (Vienna) 65 “Teach Them Our History”: Nigerian Identity Formation in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun Maximilian Feldner (Graz) 89 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Storyteller and Activist Silvia Lercher (Innsbruck) 101 African Manpower Development during the Cold War: The Case of Tanzanian Students in the Two German States Eric Burton (Vienna) 135 The United Nations – Disguise of Colonial Interests? A Case Study of the Congo Crisis 1960/61 Thomas Lechner (Graz) 153 African “Limited Access Orders” and Post-colonial Conflicts Andreas Exenberger (Innsbruck) 171 Outlook Thomas Spielbüchler (Linz) 175 List of Authors Preface: African Studies at Austrian Universities Ulrich Pallua & Andreas Exenberger The first workshop of the group of researchers called African Studies at Austrian Universities was organised by the African Studies Department in Vienna in 2014. It brought together most of the researchers in Austria working on African issues inclu- ding linguistic, historical, literary, sociological, economic and political approaches. After this particularly successful workshop the follow-up “Afrikaforschung in Öster- reich: Zugänge und Einordnungen” was held at the University of Innsbruck in March 2015. The overall aim was to invite not only the participants from the first workshop to present their projects and papers, but at the same time to expand the existing network by also reaching out to young post-doctoral students in Austria to contribute to this Austrian network of scholars whose main research field is African Studies, the study of African societies, their history, economy, language, and literature. It featured topics as diverse as “The African Diaspora”, “Barbary Coast Captivity Narratives”, “The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”, “The History of Political Ideas in Africa”, “The Tension between Developmentalism and Democracy in Ethiopia”, “Climate Change, Conflicts, and Development: Problems for Africa’s ‘Limited Access Orders’“, “Science Under Nazism: Recent Biographical Research On Wilhelm Czer- mak”, “The UN: Under the Guise of colonial-political Interests During the Cold War”, “Manpower Development: CVs and Interactions in the German-Tanzanian Triangular Relationship, 1970-1990“, and “Higher Education in Eastern Africa: A Comparison of Public and Private Universities in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda“. The workshop was rounded off by an exhibition entitled “Bitter Oranges: African Migrant workers in Calabria” showcasing the inhumane conditions African workers suffer from on the orange plantations in in southern Italy, a cooperation between the University of 8 Preface Innsbruck (namely the research area “Cultural Encounters – Cultural Conflicts”) and the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen.1 These workshops of different scholars working in African studies on a yearly basis are unique because they provide a forum for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and perspectives and a fruitful dialogue with possible collaborations between the different universities in Austria. The challenge of bringing together so many disci- plines dealing with heterogeneous approaches consists in identifying what Stuart Hall calls the “recovery of lost histories. The histories that have never been told about our- selves that we could not learn in schools, that were not in any books, and that we had to recover […]. That is how and where the margins begin to speak. The margins begin to contest, the locals begin to come to representation.”2 The term representation is thus an integral part of the various approaches the different scholars adopt in this volume including issues such as identity, self- and other-representation, collective memory, the past and its effect on the present. Re- presentation as such is inextricably linked with telling stories, stories about Africa. According to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a third-generation Nigerian writer, we have to be aware of the danger of the “single story” as a single story changes the way we see history: that is why we have to be aware of the responsibility we have as tellers of “stories”. Adichie claims that the single story her roommate in America had about her was “a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.”3 Telling stories about Africa is thus of particular relevance because we have to be aware of who tells these “stories”, how, when, and why, and of the fact that the perspectives we adopt to a great extent also pertain to power relations: 1 In the context of this research area (respectively one of its predecessors), already in 2012 the collective volume Afrika: Kontinent der Extreme (with contributions in German and English) was published with innsbruck uni- versity press. It is interdisciplinary in nature and assembling several contributions from different methodological and theoretical perspectives and aimed at questioning the usual narrative of African societies. See Exenberger (2012). 2 Hall (1997), 48. 3 Adichie (2009). Ulrich Pallua & Andreas Exenberger 9 “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, ’secondly’. Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely dif- ferent story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.“4 What Adichie means here is that in order to tell a “different” story about Africa, many stories have to be told and taken into account as only then will we be able to gauge how the single story has been misinterpreted and misused by power-related discourses and to start talking about how “stories can also be used to empower and to humanise. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”5 The articles in this volume all tell different “stories” from literary, historical, sociological, and socio-political perspectives and focus on various aspects of African identity in order to counteract prejudices and refute stereotypical and biased representations – that is, a “single story” of Africa. This collection of essays starts with Arno Sonderegger’s article The Modernity of Pan- Africanism: From History and Politics to Popular Culture. It deals with the history of modernity in Africa, how the concept of modern Africa is inextricably bound up with the colonial past, and how nineteenth-century colonial domination impacted on the development of the “new states” in Africa. After drawing a phenomenological sketch of Pan-Africanism including aspects of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and anti- racism in the development of a “modern” Africa he introduces the different approa- ches to Pan-Africanism of Youssou N’Dour, Kwame Nkrumah, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Bantu Stephen Biko. A similar approach in even closer connection to the arts is also adopted by Birgit Englert. Her article Reflections on the Role and Production of Research Films in African Studies analyzes the role and production of research films in African Studies, including not only the relevance of audio-visual work in general but also reflections on how to work with film in research processes. Moreover,