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I have been monitoring this conversation with some interest, but I must say I am concerned by M. Loutzenhiser's accusations that some of Marty Klein's statements are not "legitimate". Marty could not, in a short post, mobilize large amounts of evidence to back up his arguments... although he has done so ably in a number of books. Even if one disagrees with him on a few points, to deligitimize someone's contributions to professional scholarship is very serious indeed. Moreover, since M. Loutzenhiser makes claims (about Chinese maps and exploration in Africa, for example) that are so far unsubstantiated by the evidence (although possible), I think his claims to ownership of 'legitimite' African history to be problematic.But the action of doing so reveals what I think are the problems of M. Loutzenhiser's approach. Specifically, he constructs African history in terms of binary opposites ("traditional" vs. "Christian/Muslim") and decomplexified rigid categories ("tribe"). Please allow me to make a limited contribution in terms of outlining why this approach seems problematic from my perspective, if briefly and perhaps not as cogently as others have done: 1) Notions of a 'traditional' pre-Christian/Muslim Africa are so encoded as to suggested that Africa stagnated in sameness until outside influences came along. 2) Arguing that Christianity and Islam are not endemic to Africa misses a few key points: (1) That Christianity at important points of its evolution was indeed centered upon Egypt and Syria (if you want to be strictly 'continental' the latter isn't Africa, but to make a rigid divide somewhere is ahistorical), (2) that Africans remade Christianity and Islam at times to suit them. 3) Tribe doesn't suit pre-colonial regions of Africa I study... for example, the multi-ethnic confederations of the Gold Coast... But it is not merely an inaccurate term, but also one tinged with colonial meaning. But then this has been debated again and again on this listserve (most recently in August 2005 in great extent). 4) M. Loutzenhiser himself ackowledges that African interaction with the world is of long-standing, so suggesting a 'traditional' period before inter-continental interaction is ahistorical, although levels did undoubtedly shift over time. More troubling is Mr. Loutzenhiser's unproblematized understanding of 'slave'. Admittedly, he may not have taken the time yet to read Kopytoff or other theorists of slavery in Africa, to unproblematically accept the signifier 'slave' as having one signification --one unchanged meaning over time --reveals a lack of complexity that reduces History to levels of crudity unseen since the colonial era. The perspective M. Loutzenhiser is trying to put forward, I think, has to do with the idea that Africans didn't ever independently invent slavery, but rather that it was a peculiar evil of non-Africans, and that it diffused to Africans from outside. In some ways I'm interested in this assertion (even if I don't think it's accurate), since diffusion usually trumps invention in the history of humans. But I think the evidence suggests that that's not the case here. What is the evidence? Some of it is written (as in Sudan and Egypt), some is oral (Martin Klein has a great article on this as well), some is archaeological, but it all converges on a conclusion that some African societies did make use of unfree labor, did deny social presence to members of society even before Islam, Christianity, etc. Is this slavery? It depends on the use of the word you prefer. Probably slave modes of production were rare, and systems that mirrored those in the plantations of the Americas or parts of Asia even more rare if they even existed in Africa. But Africans are like humans elsewhere - they struggle to survive and thrive, they are rarely heroes or villains but more often something in between, at times they help their fellow humans and at times take advantage of them, and sometimes do both at the same time.
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