1st Edition
Monuments and Memory in Africa Reflections on Coloniality and Decoloniality
This book investigates how monuments have been used in Africa as tools of oppression and dominance, from the colonial period up to the present day.
The book asks what the decolonisation of historical monuments and geographies might entail and how this could contribute to the creation of a post-imperial world. In recent times, African movements to overthrow the symbols and monuments of the colonial era have gathered pace as a means of renaming, reclassifying, and reimagining colonial identities and spaces. Movements such as #RhodesMustFall in South Africa have sprung up around the world, connected by a history of Black life struggles, erasures, oppression, suppression, and the depression of Black biopolitics. This book provides an important multidisciplinary intervention in the discourse on monuments and memories, asking what they are, what they have been used to represent, and ultimately what they can reveal about past and present forms of pain and oppression.
Drawing on insights from philosophy, historical sociology, politics, museum, and literary studies, this book will be of interest to a range of scholars with an interest in the decolonisation of global African history.
Introduction: Monuments and Memory in Africa: Reflections on Coloniality and Decoloniality
John Sodiq Sanni & Madalito Zililo Phiri
1. The Ideology of Epistemicide
Madalitso Z. Phiri
2. Genophilia - Genosites in Cape Town
Fazil Moradi
3. Monuments and Invisibility: Reclaiming Spaces of Colonial Transcendence
John S. Sanni
4. Irreconcilable Differences: The Statue Debate and Transitional Justice Discourse
Keolebogile Mbebe
5. Monumental Transformations and the Re-Membering of Meaning
Minka Woermann
6. (Im)possible monuments? Gukurahundi and the politics of memorialisation in Zimbabwe
Gibson Ncube
7. Colonial and Apartheid Legacy: Social, Economic and Political Inequality in South Africa
Frank A. Abumere
8. The Destruction of Historical Monuments and the Danger of Sanitising History
John S. Sanni
Biography
John Sodiq Sanni is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Madalitso Zililo Phiri is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand’s South Africa United Kingdom Bilateral Chair in Political Theory (Political Studies), and A.G. Leventis visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre of African Studies, United Kingdom.
