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cross-posted from: H-Net List on the History of Southern Africa <H-SAFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU> Date: 2 Dec 1998 From: Bruce Fetter, Univ. of Western Milwaukee <bruf@csd.uwm.edu> The questions which Catherine Coquery raises are by no means new ones to North American Africanists. Like her, I was present at the 1969 meeting of the ASA, whose English-speaking sessions (but not the French language ones) were disrupted by militant people of color. My concern is that Coquery's position throws the baby out with the bath water. No doubt African researchers are closer to African sources than foreigners and Africanists of color abroad have special motivitations to study Africa because of their own experience as minorities who have experienced discrimination. That does not make either group automatic experts on all aspects of African history. Surely foreigners also have their areas of expertise: the hard sciences, quantitative studies, the analysis of texts in languages not spoken in the countries described. I would argue that the real problem is an Africanist particularism from which many disciplines have suffered for a number of years. Are Africans a special order of creation whose experience cannot be compared with that of peoples from the rest of the world? Do not the canons of scholarship (criticism of sources, falsifiability of hypotheses, inclusion of all of the relevant evidence) apply to scholarship about Africa as they do to the rest of the world? Indeed, should scholars not be making more comparisons between regions? As a Central Africanist, I was always astounded at the ignorance which the bulk of southern Africanists displayed toward other mineral-producing areas of the continent. Perhaps some of us owe our colleagues a mea culpa: the systematizers who have tried to fit Africa into a procrustean bed. You know who you are: former Marxists, world system analysts, monocausalists of all sorts. But surely there must be a place for those of us who study the evidence to the best of our abilities, independent of the melanin content of our skins.
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