Universities as gatekeepers of African History and Culture

Recently, two of the three contested streets in Berlin’s infamous African Quarter have been renamed to honor anti-colonial resistance. King Rudolf Duala Manga Bell and his wife Queen Emily Duala Manga Bell in Cameroon, and Cornelius Fredericks, leader of the ǃAman people of today’s Namibia in a protracted guerrilla war, did their best to fend off Germany’s colonial ambitions. Their names will be held in remembrance now. Yet, other structures resist the process of change. In German academia, there are still too many obstacles for Black scholars and scholars from the Global South especially, to gain foot in an institute or faculty. Occasional positions for visiting lecturers and guest professorships make sure that universities can claim to be true to diversity and an international profile, while opportunities for long-term employment are still scarce. Tenure track positions are of course rare for everyone, but for some they don’t even appear to exist.

In an open letter, students from the Free University of Berlin’s Art History program write that they ‘are strongly dissatisfied with the past and current situation in the “African Art” department. Registrations for the course have been declining for years. Numerous students have dropped out of the programme or have switched to other degree programmes or universities.’¹

The problems they describe are manyfold. As is the case in many institutions of higher learning, there seems to be a prevalence of eurocentrist scholarship and teaching as well as inadequacies in recruitment procedures resulting in the tiring observation that ‘BIPoC lecturers, if at all, are only employed as guest lecturers or in temporary W2 professorships.’² Furthermore, not only are they not represented as part of the staff with permanent positions, ‘[s]cholars and authors from the African continent or with an Afro-diasporic background are strongly underrepresented in reading lists and the literature cited.’³ This omission is further intensified by ‘the systematic abdication of responsibility by lecturers to exemplify and teach sensitive approaches to discriminatory content, terminology, and sources’ and ‘the repeated ignoring, trivializing, and denying of the lived realities, experiences, and agency of people who experience racism and other forms of discrimination.’ This scholarly questionable ignorance of situated knowledge enables proponents arguing from a eurocentrist standpoint to pursue ‘the denial and disqualification of anti-racist and decolonial aspirations and struggles’ to the point where they can even label any intent to critically question the status quo as ‘postcolonial populism.’ Now one could at least try to think whether someone who seemingly is so engaged in defending colonial heritage couldn’t at the same time conveniently be labeled a revisionist if not neocolonial populist, given that the whitewashing of Germany’s colonial past is a fundamental endeavor of conservative and right wing historiography.⁴

Students of various disciplines and departments are regularly criticizing the ongoing use of outdated texts of a supposed canon, that ought to represent the most foundational or important scholars and thinkers of a given discipline or field of study. Very often though it is really not much more than the collected opinions of people whose position of definitive authority has not been and could not be legitimized by merits of their scholarship, but their privileged position in a socially stratified society. While of course not all of their findings should be dismissed without intensive scrutiny, more often than not their political views aligned with those of the ruling classes and thus, ideologies of the time. They were actors in and profiteers of the expansion of empires and thus tried to justify their actions.

Acts of collecting and classifying that were part and parcel of ‘exploration’ and conquest were instrumental in constructing differences in terms of superiority and inferiority. On one side knowledge, reason and history, on the other emotion, intuition and mysticism: the ever stagnant limbo of non-history. In addition, the museum and the knowledge it was seen to either represent or produce also played a crucial part in the endeavor to portray the mostly fictional history of nineteenth century nation states, which projected their imagined coherence into a past they never had.

Australian museum professional John Neville Shipp asked ‘How can educational institutions prepare students for this brave new world where a broad range of skills and knowledge will be necessary, along with an ability to update them continually?’ He concluded that this ‘involves ensuring that curricula emphasize the ability to think, reason and discover knowledge, rather than the intense acquisition of specific skills.’⁵ The FU students’ open letter would suggest that the authors already possess those qualifications, albeit sadly without any major contributions from their university. The faculty’s boundaries of where knowledge might be found or even looked for seem to be very narrow and thus limiting to further intellectual journeys. This omission might in future times replicate itself or not, for students often have to search for crucial insights in and a comprehensive understanding of what they are studying outside of their curriculum and beyond their discipline. But as with other disciplines and programs it definitely leads to growing numbers of students becoming more and more frustrated with academia, eventually losing hope that there might be a space for them in the professional field they hope to dive into.

As some disciplines have come into question in the past decades and have since then begun thorough interrogations of their origins, the complicity of many of the scholars represented in their canon, and the significance of positionality. This is very much relevant for all social sciences, but especially for Anthropology⁶, Geography, Art History and via the Global History⁷ approach for most historical sciences and by extent also for the Museum Studies. Widely regarded as its own discipline it takes impulses from other sciences but investigates the museum and everything in connection with it as a dedicated phenomenon and poses questions that couldn’t be adequately answered before.

The sociology of knowledge helps us to understand that the humanities and the natural sciences that postulated theories of biological and cultural racism, did so, not because the existence of race is a fact they could scientifically prove, but because they were applied in order to legitimize slavery, colonial dominion and the ambitions of expansion of empire and capital. What they claimed to be objective truth was really just sham knowledge that under closer investigation quickly betrayed their class interest. Black scholars and abolitionists – not only in the US, but worldwide – debunked most of the theories about Black inferiority and the infantility of African and Indigenous peoples in general already shortly after they started circulating.⁸ What they were lacking were the means to spread their arguments in the same way as scholars and universities backed with funding by trading companies or colonial enterprises and large audiences that would ascribe credibility to their words.

That some patterns of colonial thought about the hovering contour of the other still seem to dominate theory and practice might best be illustrated with the advertisement and book cover of a current exhibition titled ‘Adventures at the Nile’ on ‘Prussia and Egyptology 1842-1845’ and the images that it invokes.⁹ The cover shows a suitcase with an imprint saying ‘Nil-Delta’, while there’s a map depicted on the inside. The suitcase seems to (physically) capture a scene that shows two miniaturized ‘Egyptians’ staring in awe at a gigantic statue.

At best, all of this could be a tragically failed attempt to view the excavations and the following transfer of much of the cultural heritage to German museums with a critical lens. But given the history of Orientalism in Germany and the fact that in 1896 next to the Colonial Exhibition at Treptower Park there was also an Egyptian themed exhibition called ‘Cairo’ that reenacted all kinds of colonial tropes, this kind of historically insensible faux pas is symbolic for everything that still undergirds not only racial, but also epistemic and scholarly inequalities.

To prevent this kind of colonial imagery, innovations in the way of museum practice and by the same token of museum and art history teaching are of great necessity.

The same critical approach that an art historian should employ to investigate the social, economic and the broader political and ideological circumstances that formed and influenced not only single pieces of art, but artists and art movements, or the way a scholar of museum studies would investigate use and function of museums, should also always be employed to examine current paradigms and methods in art history and teaching.