MIDTERM ID TERMS

Question 1

Berlin Conference (date)

Answer 1

November 15th, 1884 - February 22th, 1885

Question 2

Publication of “L’Étudiant noir, no. 3” (date)

Answer 2

May-June 1935

Question 3

State of Emergency declared in Kenya (date)

Answer 3

October 20th, 1952

Question 4

Assassination of Patrice Lumumba (date)

Answer 4

January 17th, 1961

Question 5

Ayi Kwei Armah publishes “The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born” (date)

Answer 5

1968

Question 6

Fela Kuti releases “Zombie” (date)

Answer 6

1976

Question 7

White Saviour Industrial Complex

Answer 7

(White Saviour Complex, Teju Cole / week 1 lecture)
It is the need to frame Africa by spectacular whiteness, as in the film the Last King of Scotland, where the white protagonist frames the story and embodies both the victim and the protagonist. It is the framing of Africa as the child, which needs to be parented, corrected, and governed, and protected - especially from itself => African history is thus denied, it exists outside of history in a perpetual childhood. It is the depiction of the colonized bringing colonization upon themselves through some fault of their own => it is the pathology of African culture that calls for Western intervention => and this naturalizes colonialism in the body of the colonized

Question 8

What are the five rules of Modern African History?

Answer 8

1) Africa is not a country
2) “Tribe” / Tradition is never the answer
3) History did not begin with colonialism
4) African History IS world history
5) Africa does not need to be saved

Question 9

Berlin Conference

Answer 9

(lecture from week 2)
(November 1884 - February 1885)

The Berlin Conference was the high point of New Imperialism. In response to mounting pressures of territorial acquisition in Africa between England and France, Portugal summoned the Conference and Chancellor Bismarck hosted it in Berlin, in order to “restrain expansion”. It set up the terms for the “Scramble for Africa”, which ended in the South Africa War at the turn of the century. The Conference and the subsequent “Scramble” were sold to the European public as an effort to save Africa from slavery, and also was justified as an effort to restrain colonial expansion and thus prevent war within Europe. Notable decided outcomes of the Conference are: the “end of slavery” in Africa, incarnated by Britain’s missionary efforts, free navigation of the Niger and Congo rivers, preservation of free trade in equatorial Africa, and recognition of the Congo Free State. The African colonies also came to be portrayed as a playground for Europeans.

Question 10

South Africa War

Answer 10

(lecture from week 2)
(1899-1902) formerly known as the Anglo-Boer War, it marked the end of the “Scramble for Africa”. This war is significant in that it was a setting for development of new technologies of violence, namely the concentration camp, which would later reappear on the Continent during the wars of the 20th century

Question 11

King Leopold II of Belgium

Answer 11

(lecture from week 2)
Ruler of the Congo “Free State”, dubbed during the Berlin Conference. He used the threat of encroaching Arab slave traders to justify having a colony for Belgium. In turn, he created 60 million francs worth of infrastructure in Belgium using revenues from the Congolese rubber trade. The Congo got nothing in the form of reparations.

Question 12

L’Étudiant noir

Answer 12

(lecture 3)
A student newspaper published in 1935 at the Sorbonne written by three leading black intellectuals of the francophone black diaspora: Aimé Césaire and Léon Gontran Damas of Martinique and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal. It is a written manifestation of the meeting of the three scholars in Paris, which they called the meeting of Africa and its’ diaspora. Also was influenced by their encounters with intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance in the salons of the Nardal sisters.

Question 13

Négritude

Answer 13

(lecture from week 3)
A phenomenon which carried differing meanings for Césaire and Senghor. For Senghor, négritude was a philosophy of life, grounded in the following values from pre-colonial African society: community, an intimate relationship with nature, and a collective emotional connection. For Senghor, the greatest crime of colonialism is the distortion of the concept of humanity via the utility value attributed to humans. For Césaire, négritude represented a history of struggle, and he argued that the cure for racism wasn’t the universalization of whiteness, but the universalization of blackness. Césaire believed that the nation-state was not the best model of modern political unity, and advocated for assimilation with, and citizenship into, mainstream French society over independence, and successfully gained status as a département of France for Martinique.

Question 14

Week 1 Readings

Answer 14

“White Saviour Industrial Complex” - Teju Cole

Question 15

Week 2 Readings

Answer 15

“Africa Since 1940” - Frederick Cooper

“Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the political legacy of colonialism” - Mahmood Mamdani

Question 16

Week 3 Readings

Answer 16

“Discourse on Colonialism” - Aimé Césaire

Question 17

Week 4 Readings

Answer 17

“The Trial of Dedan Kimathi” - Micere Githae Mugo & Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

“Uncovering the Brutal Truth about the British Empire” - Mark Parry

Question 18

Week 5 Readings

Answer 18

“Africa since 1940” - Frederick Cooper

“The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” - Frantz Fanon

Question 19

Week 6 Readings

Answer 19

“The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born” - Ayi Kwei Armah

Question 20

Hitler

Answer 20

Adolf Hitler represented the decay in Europe of universal ideas of civilization. Césaire argues that Europe could not forgive Hitler

Question 21

Hitler

Answer 21

(in Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism)
Adolf Hitler represented the decay in Europe of universal ideas of civilization. Césaire argues that Europe could not forgive Hitler not because the atrocities he carried out were crimes against man, or humiliation of man as such, but because they were humiliating, colonialist procedures inflicted upon the white man, which had previously been reserved for inferior races.

Question 22

Boomerang Effect

Answer 22

(in Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism)
Very rarely discussed, the boomerang effect is the effect that colonialism had on the colonizer. In conditioning themselves to see the natives as animals, and treating them as such, this distortion of their view of humanity also decayed their sense of humanity and in turn turned them into animals as well.

Question 23

Gatekeeper State

Answer 23

(in Frederick Cooper’s Chapter 1 of Africa Since 1940)

Gatekeeper state is a term Cooper uses to describe the post-colonial states inherited by the newly independent African leaders. The Gatekeeper state wielded control of revenues from resources entering and leaving its ports from outside (channels of access to and from the outside) but had weak access to the internal social and cultural realms of their new states. The Gatekeeper states were weak states, because the stakes of guarding the gate were very high and they lacked the external capacities of their predecessors.

Question 24

Kwame Nkrumah

Answer 24

Ghana’s independence leader and first Head of State. He put together the 5th Pan-African Congress in 1945 in Manchester, which for the first time was organized by all Africans, rather than by the diaspora, and they all call for African independence. He was quoted as having said “Seek ye first the political kingdom” => thought that Césaire and Senghor were naive for wanting federation with the French, and believed that political power (independence) was key, and economic power would come after.

Question 25

Patrice Lumumba

Answer 25

first prime minister of Congo - his assassination marks the end of neutrality of post-colonial African states during the Cold War, and also where the limits of independence are fixed, as the CIA has asserted their dominance across the globe.

Question 26

Customary Law

Answer 26

ethnicities only were subjected to customary law (which could not enforce a rule of law), and chiefs were their main instrument) the chiefs were endowed with decentralized despotism - meaning they were given concentrated, unspecific powers, as opposed to many ministers and checks and balances in civil law for the “races”. the chiefs were also prone to employ corporal punishment, at their own discretion

Question 27

Big Man

Answer 27

Chiefs, which Mamdani argues are a colonially-constructed institution, are given individual access to resources they never could have privatized otherwise (under colonial govt) and can now attract followers that are dependent on these resources

politiques du ventre => in Beautyful, they are literally living in the excrement of the politiques du venture => drowning in the shit of the person whom you revere

Big Men eat alone => associated with witch craft

*Witchcraft serves as a moral language to talk about destructive individuality and its effects on society”

Question 28

political identities

Answer 28

mamdani says the big crime of colonialism is that they politicized indigeneity, and that race and ethnicity need to be seen as politically-crafted identities, not cultural identities