Geschichte Afrikas (Professur Tischler)

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

In the early 1910s, Adelaide Casely-Hayford became a leading activist in Sierra Leone, advocating for feminism and racial pride in Freetown. In 1919, Esther Fahmi Wisa participated in a women’s march that played a momentous role in the revolt against British rule in Egypt. In 1953, Evelyn Amarteifio established the influential National Federation of Gold Coast Women in Ghana. These cosmopolitan and literate African women shared common ground: they all shaped radical nationalist, anticolonial, and feminist movements that changed the African political landscape in the 20th century. But they also shared an unexpected feature. They were all involved in the World–Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), an international organisation more famous for its imperial and conservative legacy than its radical views. How can we reconcile these two contradictory stories? How does the history of the YWCA—at the crossroads of women-led British missionary work, American philanthropy, and Geneva-based liberal world order—align with that of African anticolonial feminist activists?

From its British overseas committees set up in 1878 to its first African-based conference held in Accra in 1971, the YWCA was used by bourgeois women to oversee the sexual behaviour and welfare of young single women living in urban settings, and to advance conservative ideas about gender, sexuality, class, and race. However, the literature on women’s rights movements argued that local African activists relied on the YWCA to build alliances between women, beyond class or race, in a common fight against colonial or local authorities, paving the way for the internationalisation of African women’s rights movements. As this prolific body of scholarship discussed whether Western women-led structures supported imperialism or African women’s emancipation—and sought to define this ‘Global Sisterhood’—the YWCA became central to academic conversations about international philanthropy, women’s activism, and youth movements. Yet, scholars did not delve into the history of the YWCA at global scale, let alone in Africa, nor illuminated what the organisation meant for African women. This project will be the first in-depth historical inquiry to chart what aspects of the gender and colonial orders were challenged by the YWCA and its African members, and how their embrace of conservative views affected their activism and alliances. It will explore how African women positioned themselves with regards to the two primary targets of the YWCA: sexuality and social welfare. Through this, the project will assess how the original YWCA’s class-based and gendered focus on sexuality and welfare was transformed by the racialised colonial setting, eventually informing policies and positions laid down at global scale.

The project will take place at the University of Basel department of history, and will be aided by international partnerships with France, United Kingdom, and Germany. Claire Nicolas will conduct research in archival centres across the world and use innovative digital humanities tools to analyse the Africa-related YWCA network. The project will use a cross-scale approach: from global history to in-depth focus on international meetings, transnational actors’ trajectories, and two key African associations (South Africa and Ghana). This will inform how changing ideas about women’s rights and Global Sisterhood intertwined and converged at global scale, thus challenging the analytical distinction between radical emancipatory politics and conservative transimperial faith-based movements. Overall, this project offers a unique perspective on the history of international organisations, from the vantage point of African women. This shift in focus will illuminate the history of faith-based international movements, the history of African women’s rights activists, and that of the contested politics of Global Sisterhood.

Picture: “Rose Petal Carpet for the Queen at YWCA Hostel,” Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, November 12, 1961. (World-YWCA Archives, Box Ghana II).

PhD Project  | 2 Project Members

folgt

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

The nature of the historical relationship between Africa and Europe, and the consequences of these two continents’ long-standing entanglement, has in recent years been the subject of fierce scientific and public debate. Those who advocate the ‘decolonisation’ of institutions, epistemologies, and subjectivities reference the racialised inequalities in wealth and power produced by the transatlantic slave trade and by colonial conquest. But these debates have, to date, overlooked a key and much more recent historical moment: the European scramble for African resources after the Second World War. Instead, established scholarship on the late-colonial era is preoccupied with European-directed development initiatives, the dissolution of empire, and the attainment of African independence. Narratives of European postwar reconstruction, meanwhile, pay no attention to the imperial angle.

Inspired by global history approaches, this project will connect the historiographies of late-colonial Africa and postwar Europe to provide the first comprehensive account of the role of African resources in the reconstruction of Europe after WWII. The project’s key innovative move is its broad conceptualisation of resource extraction. It will investigate the extraction of financial and material, but also human and intellectual resources from the African territories ruled by Britain and France, the two main imperial powers at the time, in the period 1945 to 1951. This will be examined through a series of case studies focusing on the role of African commodities and reserves in European economic reconstruction (financial resources); the role of African minerals and materials in the physical reconstruction of European cities, industry and infrastructure (material resources); the role of colonial labour in strategic European industries (human resources); and the role of African knowledge production in the postwar recovery of European societies (intellectual resources). Despite their different foci, the case studies are bound together through their common focus on issues of coloniality and processes of transfer.

 

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Die Art der historischen Beziehungen zwischen Afrika und Europa und die Folgen der langjährigen Verflechtung der beiden Kontinente sind in den letzten Jahren Gegenstand heftiger wissenschaftlicher und öffentlicher Debatten gewesen. Die Befürworter einer "Entkolonialisierung" von Institutionen, Epistemologien und Subjektivitäten verweisen auf die durch den transatlantischen Sklavenhandel und die koloniale Eroberung entstandenen rassifizierten Ungleichheiten in Bezug auf Wohlstand und Macht. Diese Debatten haben jedoch bisher einen wichtigen und viel jüngeren historischen Moment übersehen: die europäische Nachfrage nach den Ressourcen Afrikas nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Stattdessen befasst sich die etablierte Forschung zur spätkolonialen Ära mit europäisch gelenkten Entwicklungsinitiativen, der Auflösung der Kolonialreiche und der Erlangung der Unabhängigkeit afrikanischer Staaten. Narrative über den europäischen Wiederaufbau in der Nachkriegszeit wiederrum schenken dem imperialen Blickwinkel keine Beachtung.

Inspiriert von Ansätzen der Globalgeschichte wird dieses Projekt die Historiographien des spätkolonialen Afrikas und des Nachkriegseuropas miteinander verbinden, um die Rolle afrikanischer Ressourcen beim Wiederaufbau Europas nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg erstmals umfassend darzustellen. Die wichtigste Neuerung des Projekts besteht in der umfassenden Konzeptualisierung von Ressourcengewinnung. Es wird die Extraktion finanzieller und materieller, aber auch menschlicher und intellektueller Ressourcen aus jenen afrikanischen Territorien untersuchen, die zwischen 1945 und 1951 von den beiden wichtigsten imperialen Mächten jener Zeit, Großbritannien und Frankreich, beherrscht wurden. Diese Analyse wird anhand einer Reihe von Fallstudien vorgenommen, die sich auf die Rolle afrikanischer Rohstoffe und Reserven beim wirtschaftlichen Wiederaufbau Europas (finanzielle Ressourcen), die Rolle afrikanischer Mineralien und Materialien beim physischen Wiederaufbau europäischer Städte, Industrie und Infrastruktur (materielle Ressourcen), die Rolle kolonialer Arbeitskräfte in strategischen europäischen Industrien (Humanressourcen) und die Rolle afrikanischer Wissensproduktion beim Wiederaufbau europäischer Gesellschaften nach dem Krieg (intellektuelle Ressourcen) konzentrieren. Trotz ihrer unterschiedlichen Schwerpunkte sind die Fallstudien durch ihren gemeinsamen Fokus auf Fragen der Kolonialität und Transferprozesse miteinander verbunden.

PhD Project  | 2 Project Members

The project investigates inheritance laws and practices concerning Shona-speaking women in colonial Zimbabwe from 1896 to 1953. Focusing on the complex and dynamic interplay between precolonial conventions, the emergence of “customary law” under colonial rule, and European legal traditions, it seeks to shed light on Shona women’s position and maneuverings in their attempts to protect, distribute, enjoy, and acquire belongings and rights. The projects aim is to analyze understandings of inheritance among Shona communities and the extent to which these were reshaped by colonial interventions while investigating Shona and colonial forms of patriarchy and the ways in which women navigated these two patriarchal settings. 

Based on extensive archival research in Zimbabwean and British archives, as well as oral history, the project will offer fresh approaches to scholarship on legal history and inheritance. This case of Shona communities under colonial rule allows the research to challenge the dominant notions of “property,” which have often been taken for granted in the existing literature. It also enables us to draw out the importance of spiritual agency, the agency of the deceased, and the significance of not only material, but also immaterial inheritance. Thereby, it nuances and historicizes current debates on women’s unequal access to property in Africa and elsewhere. The perspectives and findings of this project will be made productive beyond academia by collaborating with women’s-rights-focused NGOs and traditional healers’ associations.

Imported from Grants Tool 4699700

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

As the consequences of the Anthropocene become one of the most pressing political issues of our time, humans are beginning to grapple with their destructive relationship to nonhuman life. What does it mean, for example, to kill animals in order to study them? A historical exploration of violent humanistic knowledge practices in the age of Empire.

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

Namibia's complex colonial history casts a long shadow on the present. In the endeavour to grapple with the legacies of 30 years of German colonial rule and more than 70 years of South African colonial occupation, the archive remains an important and yet complicated resource for contemporary authors and artists. This PhD dissertation explores the traction that continues to draw creative practitioners to archival repositories, with a particular focus on the role of photographic archives. By analysing auto/biographical accounts by Trudie Tshiwa Amulungu and Ulla Dentlinger as well as artworks by Tuli Mekondjo, Imke Rust, Vitjitua Ndjiharine and Nicola Brandt, this thesis examines how they creatively respond to the troubling resonances of historical material, archival power dynamics and, more importantly, archival omissions and silences. The authors and artists turn to inherited traumas and postmemories, interfere with found and passed-on photographs and scrutinise one-dimensional narratives of the past to trouble archival logics and create alternative Namibian archives in the process. By exploring different strategies to intervene with archives and produce counter-archives, this thesis interrogates the interconnections of archival research, narrativisation and fiction by cross-examining André Brink's novel The Other Side of Silence (2001) with findings of my own archival research on a family estate by the German settler woman Lisbeth Dömski. The variety of case studies from literature and art thus presented expand and diversify conceptual understandings of archives, contest hegemonic modes of commemorating the past and prise open the view to the divergent experiences that make up Namibian social fabrics and diverse mnemonic cultures.

PhD Project  | 2 Project Members

Der Völkermord in Ruanda 1994 hat mehr als 1 Million Menschenleben gekostet und die internationale Gemeinschaft zutiefst erschüttert. Das Ausmaß des Verbrechens kann ohne Berücksichtigung der globalen Dimension nicht verstanden werden. Um der Komplexität des Verbrechens gegen die Menschlichkeit gerecht zu werden, untersucht dieses Promotionsprojekt die transnationalen Verflechtungen, internationale Rahmenbedingungen und geopolitische Interessenbeziehungen zu Ruanda, welche den Konflikt entscheidend geprägt und ermöglicht haben. Mit dem theoretischen Ansatz aus mikrogeschichtlicher Perspektive eine Globalgeschichte zu schreiben, untersucht die Promotion drei zentrale Entscheidungsmomente des Konflikts, die von nicht-ruandischen Akteuren und Strukturen signifikant geprägt wurden. Daraus resultieren folgende, konkreten Forschungsfragen. Welche Rolle spielten die Weltbank und der Internationale Währungsfond, die seit 1990 strukturelle Anpassungsmaßnahmen in Ruanda durchführten und trotz des Bürgerkrieges die Regierung mit hohen finanziellen Summen unterstützen? Wie kam es 15 Tage nach Ausbruch des Völkermordes zum Rückzug der Friedensmission UNAMIR aus Ruanda und welchen Einfluss hatte diese Entscheidung des UN-Sicherheitsrates auf die Täter und Opfer des Völkermordes? Wie ist Frankreichs Opération Turquoise während des Verbrechens im Licht französischer Interessenpolitik zu verstehen und welchen Zusammenhang hatte die Operation mit den Tätern? Anhand dieser Forschungsfragen soll die globale Dimension des Völkermordes erläutert und das dominante Narrativ eines lokalen, tribalen und unzivilisierten Konfliktes hinterfragt werden.

PhD Project  | 2 Project Members

My dissertational research covers the images of the entire Soviet intelligentsia, precisely - the European part of the Soviet Union in the period from 1922 to 1991: the Byelorussian, Russian, Ukrainian and Estonian SSR. A caricature is a rather complex construct that, by ridiculing certain shortcomings, creates a special reality. Its main goal is to broadcast a certain idea, and not to display the existing reality. Therefore, in this sense, we can call a caricature a simulacrum. Based on this idea, the "special" world of caricature requires a special "reading". The uniqueness of the pictorial language of caricature is due to the close combination of iconic elements (signs-images) with phraseological units. The latter are based on the deep cultural codes of a particular society. That is, the graphic and verbal components of cartoons are closely related to socio-cultural, ideological and other codes, which include iconic, conventional, "mimic-graphic" signs (marked gestures and movements of the character). Since a caricature is an image of ideas, there are special channels for transmitting information that broadcast certain figurative, subject and spatio-temporal situational contexts. These contexts or "worlds" form as a result an idea that is read by the recipient and perceived as something integral. "The world of the image/work" is a multidimensional, artistically reproduced reality. The most significant elements of this world are characters, which, in combination with situational contexts, form plots and/or images. The macrocosm includes what is called the "components of representation (artistic objectivity)": "the world of ideas", "the world of things", "artistic space", "portrait of characters". An artist-cartoonist can either use both one channel of information or combine them with each other. Despite the fact that the intelligentsia, according to the well-known formula "2+1", was not attributed to a separate class of Soviet society, however, in the cartoons we can talk about the allocatåion of a special place for this "stratum", where those who worked in intellectual professions are opposed to workers and peasants. During the period under study, caricature art was aimed at creating the image of a single Soviet people without national, and in some periods, class differences (an attempt to blur the boundaries between workers, peasants and intelligentsia). Despite the above-mentioned dominant accents of the Soviet metanarrative, we can detect many cultural and value differences in various images of the Soviet intelligentsia.

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

In the interior of southern Africa, on the Highveld, human societies thrived for millennia. They lived on the high plains, lush with summer rains, amidts the broken mountain massifs, covered in snow, in the dry wooded savanna, and in the vast void of the desert. Of them, we know very little. This project finally brings their history in the last five centuries into light. It does so with an approach that is based on an innovative take on African sources and African historians, integrated with archaeology, travel accounts, geography, linguistics, other 'traditional' sources, and a critical understanding of colonial and ethnographic archives. The societies of the Highveld left faint traces of their existence. They had no writing. Only few lived in houses made of durable materials. They painted caves, engraved rocks, worked metals, sculpted wood and stone, shaped clay, hunted, harvested, and reared cattle. They travelled and traded, both locally and with regions far away, bringing foreign goods with them. They lived in small roaming bands or large states, and many different organisations in between. They praised their ancestors, spoke about them, remembered them. Yet, even something as simple as naming these societies now appears to scholars as a shaky illusion. Previous denominations are insufficient and misleading. Periodisation is difficult. Chronology is impossible. This project aims at changing that. After decades of exquisite scholarly deconstruction of the colonial understanding of African history, it is time to look anew at those traces and to write a history for Africa's 21st century. It is impossible to understand and write African history without reading African historians. The project is based on a series of important archival discoveries of transcribed 'oral traditions', among which were located a number of little-known African historians, writing between the 1850s and the 1960s. They were all descendants of several ruling families of various precolonial states of the Highveld. They were trained authors that dedicated themselves and their intellect to the acts of looking back, carrying over, making sense, looking forward, combining orality and writing. The collection and analysis of their papers allow for a much richer, thicker, and deeper reading of current archaeological research and of older travel accounts and colonial sources. The archives and papers of these African historians include manuscripts in Sesotho, Setswana, in several scarcely known vernacular dialects, in English, and French, by themselves and by colonial officers and missionaries. These archival collections are in Lesotho, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. In addition to conventional scientific production, the research project aims at reconnecting with the families and communities of these African historians, cooperating and sharing with them the results of the research. This should include the edition of the unpublished manuscripts of their ancestors.

PhD Project  | 2 Project Members

Interest in the history of diseases has burgeoned in recent years, both in research and among the public. However, so-called neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), which together affect more than one billion people in tropical and sub-tropical regions, are often absent from both academic and popular considerations. This dissertation project addresses this desideratum by investigating the historical construction and reconstruction of NTDs in local and global contexts, enquiring into the meaning of 'neglected' and the process through which certain diseases become designated as such. It does so through a focus on responses to the parasitic worm disease bilharzia in Madagascar from the 1950s to the present. The thesis proposes that the history of bilharzia in this setting serves as a telling example of how a disease came to be constructed as an NTD through (re)definition by various external actors - missionaries, international organisations, development aid workers, scientists, policy makers and pharmaceutical companies - during the late colonial and postcolonial periods. Through their plans and interventions, these actors have not only drastically increased the prevalence of a disease that was previously not very widespread, but also introduced bilharzia as a tangible, serious entity to the Malagasy people. Local auxiliaries also played a crucial role in the success and longevity of the related health interventions - an aspect that has received little attention in scholarship to date. The thesis is a historical epidemiology study that combines African local medical history with global history and analyses the different practices and bodies of knowledge that define NTDs on multiple levels. Through oral history interviews with contemporary witnesses and auxiliaries of international interventions, archival research and the review of biomedical literature, I will be able to examine the perceptions and course of the disease as well as the ways in which local practices, knowledge production, transnational collaboration and the institutionalisation of health care influenced the disease, its spread, and its effects.