Revolt and Resistance in African History. Reinterpreting their Significance in Africa's Past and Present

Africa's past and present could, without exaggeration, be pictured as a continuous struggle between social, economic, cultural and political forces, competing with each other for positions of dominance and hegemony. A major theme in African history is, therefore, the contentious nature of its numerous hegemonic forces, systems and ventures. Attempts to establish and maintain forms of political, economic and military domination, cultural hegemony or religious supremacy, invariably triggered responses by dominated groups. Their responses could range from acceptance, adaptation, accommodation and acquiscence to outright resistance to the forces attempting to impose their will, their governance or their discursive models. Such resistance could take violent forms but also assume non-violent manifestations involving, among others, rituals of domination, of violence, and of rejection of hegemony.

These forms of resistance will be the subject of a two-day seminar, organized by the African Studies Centre in Leiden. The conference will focus, in particular, on violent expressions of resistance, although attention will also be paid to linkages between violent and non-violent manifestations of resistance and revolt, and the continuities or discontinuities involved. Forms of such resistance were varied and could involve resistance to exploitative structures as slavery; opposition to political rule by African, pre-colonial, forces and polities, their economic exploitation, cultural hegemony or religious supremacy; resistance to the imposition and maintenance of European colonial dominance; and confrontation of the structures and conduits of decolonization, and of the ruling elites emerging from that process.

Adopting an explicitly historical focus, the conference discusses the long-term continuities and discontinuities in manifestations of resistance. Why and how did historical instances of resistance occur and develop? What was their meaning during the period in which they erupted? Did such meanings adjust and transform? Did instances of revolt have significance for later manifestations of resistance to hegemonic dispensations and, if so, how did they inform later (historical or even contemporary) discourses of resistance to perceived forms of hegemony? While the conference aims especially at empirical, historical, studies, it also focuses on a rethinking of the analysis of resistance cases, involving a re-ordering of data and fresh interpretations that also tie in with the many conceptual and theoretical problematics encountered in resistance studies. In this respect, it will try to tackle some of the contested terminology and conceptual fluidity involved in such studies, the problem of anachronism in reinterpretations of resistance phenomena, the attribution of intentions to the agents involved, and the issue of shifting meanings of resistance cases through time.

While the conference aims at encouraging a new debate among scholars working on this topic, it will also be of interest to anyone with a general interest in resistance studies or African history.

Provisional Programme
Thursday, 11 October
10.00 Opening
10.15 Resistance and Fulbe Hegemony (Mirjam de Bruijn & Han van Dijk)
10.35 Discussion
10.50 Ambiguities of Resistance and Collaboration on the Eastern Cape Frontier: The Kat River Settlement 1829-1856 (Robert Ross)

11.10 Discussion
11.25 Coffee
11.40 The African Mutiny on Sumatra, 1837 (Ineke van Kessel)
12.00 Discussion
12.15 Revisiting the Menalamba Rising in Madagascar (Stephen Ellis)
12.35 Discussion
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Continuity and Change in Patterns of Revolt in Somalia 1900-2000 (Jan Abbink)
14.20 Discussion
14.35 Presenting the Past to Conquer the Future: The Political Use of the Herero Genocide in the Course of the Twentieth Century (Jan-Bart Gewald)

14.55 Discussion
15.15 Tea
15.30 Absence of Evidence is no Proof: Slave Resistance in German East Africa (Jan-Georg Deutsch)
15.50 Discussion
16.05 Yakin Kawousan: la guerre de Kawousan au Niger 1917-1920 (Kimba Idrissa)
16.25 Discussion
16.40 Plenary Discussion
17.15 Drinks
18.30 Diner

Friday, 12 October 2001
10.00 The Touareg Revolt in Mali in the 1960s (Baz Lecocq)
10.20 Discussion
10.35 Sawaba's Rebels and Niger 1964-1965 (Klaas van Walraven)
10.55 Discussion
11.10 Coffee
11.30 Resistance, Violence and War in Post-Colonial Mozambique (Gerhard Seibert)
11.50 Discussion
12.05 Limits to Liberation: Post-Colonial Political Culture in Namibia (Henning Melber)
12.25 Discussion
12.40 Plenary Discussion and Closing
13.15 Lunch