Edited Volume on Euro-African shared history of artifacts and commemorations
Iconographies of oppression? Revisiting Europe and Africa’s shared history through artifacts and commemorations is the proposed title for an interdisciplinary, multi-contributed volume examining material artefacts and immaterial (practices of) commemorations of personalities, places and events that represent a tangible evidence of encounters between Africa and Europe.
The Atlantic slave trade and the imposition of European colonialism in Africa have impacted significantly on the modern relations between the two continents, and have left behind also many forms of memorialization that today are contested and interpreted differently than in the past. The volume intends focusing especially on the links between such historical legacy and current disputes, protests, or revisionist attempts occurring on both sides, in order to contribute to the overall understanding of contemporary Europe-Africa relations.
The “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign and the “Black Lives Matter” movement have recently shed light on the continued racial oppression of black people as well as on issues of discrimination and social justice in contemporary European/Western and African societies. With their protests, these and other movements have rightly called against inequalities and discrimination and, among other things, have denounced vehemently the celebration and the preservation of the memory of personalities connected to white suprematism, colonialism, imperialism. In most cases, they have demanded the removal of the contested statues from public spaces. In several countries, among which Belgium, Cameroon, Italy, Senegal, the United Kingdom, monuments that bear witness to the legacy of Europe-Africa encounters have been vandalized, destroyed and removed. Besides the case of the statue of Cecil Rhodes (which was removed at the University of Cape Town but not at the University of Oxford), statues of British slave trader Edward Colston and Belgium King Leopold II especially have also been the focus of protests in the past few years. Other examples include the memorials of Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, Louis Faidherbe.
In some cases, public authorities have agreed to remove controversial statues; in other situations, they have refused to do so or have proposed alternative solutions. It should be also underlined that especially in Europe, different and often opposed views on the matter were expressed by historians, intellectuals, political parties, activists and rightwing groups. In presenting their position, some have touched on race and ethnicity argumentations in order to offer their own interpretation of the past.
The main implications of the global wave of protests have been the expansion of the “public appetite for reconsidering the past” (Mark-Thiesen, Mihatsch e Sikes 2022, 3), as well as vibrant public debates and divisions in European and African societies.
However, such delicate questions should not be answered emotionally, or without a serious pondering and a community agreement on how to “handle” the past represented by monuments, statues and other forms of material and immaterial commemoration that are found in contemporary African and European states. In light of the above, academia is best equipped to provide relevant, innovative and qualified perspectives that are currently missing and needed in public debates.