Unusual connections
On the last day of the conference ‘Africa-Asia: a New Axis of Knowledge 2’, Dr Kojo Aidoo (Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana) and I left our hotel early to explore a Hindu neighbourhood in Dar es Salaam. Eventually we were unable to navigate the neighbourhood because of road constructions. Disappointed, we proceeded to the conference by taxi and during the drive Kojo decided to cheer me up with his lecture on Pan Africanism and recent political developments in Ghana. One of my questions to him was why we Asians do not have as strong a unifying version such as Pan Africanism, which to me is more than an ideology. It is a very practical way of finding solutions for historical and current problems of the continent mostly created by imperialism. It is also an empowering tool utilized by governments such as Tanzania’s by making it visible, even as a trademark of the country and the region, in many public places including airports. The youth of African countries, from Senegal to Tanzania, can imagine their place within the connected land through economic, educational, and cultural opportunities created within this framework.
My conversation with Kojo was a micro version of the whole conference, connecting scholars who would otherwise not meet each other and have meaningful and even transformative conversations about subjects they know and live. Pan Africanism is not just a topic Kojo learns through books; he lives it as if his and his country’s future depends on it. A belief originating in the Global South, by scholars and educators such as Paulo Freire, that only through praxis can we transform ourselves, is reflected in the way Kojo theorizes, engages, and practises Pan Africanism.
During the conference, I had many conversations like the one with Kojo. In one of the workshops, Dr Malami Buba (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea/Sokoto State University, Nigeria) enlightened us how languages were the site of epistemic violence committed by colonialists crippling many communities to express their ideas, thoughts, and to pass down their heritage across generations. I started reading his works after the conference and they are empowering. Giants in their own fields, African (and Asian) scholars working outside the European and Northern American institutions are lesser-knowns than those working in those two regions. Geographical privilege is not afforded to them. But conferences such as this one are the means to circumvent many challenges scholars from outside these two regions face.
In another panel, Dr Abdourahmane Seck (University Gaston Berger, Senegal) and I surprised each other with the many parallels between his ‘street food project’ in Senegal and mine on ‘history through food teaching methods’ at Yangon University. Our research questions, methodologies and approaches, particularly the triangulation of interests among communities, students and universities in our projects, share many similarities. Through our choice of intervention, i.e., ‘food’, we want to investigate broader historical, anthropological and political landscapes of Myanmar and Senegalese communities. Realizing these parallels beautifully makes unusual or not-often-thought-of collaborations possible. A joint book project on Myanmar and Senegalese food (studies) was hatched impromptu.
Cross connections between Asia and Africa, and between Asian and African scholars, are valuable because they help us learn new things, and learn new ways of knowing the old things. What binds us together is our implicit desire and self-imposed undertaking to transcend through coloniality of knowledge. How do we reclaim and make relevant our indigenous traditions in knowing things and producing knowledge? Asia and Africa, particularly the latter because of an even longer burden and deeper scars of imperialism, can empower each other through co-conceptualizing ways to see ourselves and each other without Orientalism or hegemonic (Western) constructions of ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’. The journey ahead is long and, as we discussed during the conference, there exist many barriers – such as established and accepted ways of teaching, researching, publishing, and even organizing conferences in particular locations. But a new axis of knowledge is possible, and the conference in Dar showed us how.
Tharaphi Than, Associate Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Northern Illinois University