Response | Ato Quayson

To interpret Paul Zeleza's personal and intellectual trajectory as representative of the African scholar's condition would be to retreat behind a comforting but ultimately sterile cliché. For the account he gives of his life and work is much more than that. In part it tells of contexts and factors that he could not have chosen, yet in others the exercise of extraordinary enlightenment in what we all must acknowledge to be an exemplary career.

Let us look for example at the central themes that have shaped this career: national consciousness, pan-Africanism, and diasporic consciousness. Of the three shaping themes, only the first can be said to be exclusively shared with African scholars of his generation. For what he says about the enthusiasm he felt in going to university in a newly independent Malawi mirrors is essentially correct. In the heady days immediately after independence the African intellectual elites were trained to assume the mantle of leadership at all levels of culture and society. They went to university with a supreme confidence in their destiny as molders of their respective nations. The era from the early 60s to the mid-70s was largely one of the African's unrestrained capacity to fashion him/herself in what seemed then like endless possibilities. It was a confidence that was to be seen even in the period of the collapse of the nation-state project in much of Africa. Everywhere in Africa, particularly south of the Sahara, those that stood up to criticize their corrupt governments did so with tones of absolute certainty about what the nation-state project should look like. There was an epic inflection to the critique of the nation-state from people such as Soyinka, Ngugi, and others that was only matched by the epic myopia of the politicians they were ranged against. And this same epic sensibility was to inform the critique of neocolonialism and the place of Africa in any potential New World Order. In addition to the work of Walter Rodney, who Zeleza says he admired, we can name the writings of Samir Amin, Ali Mazrui, and Chinweizu among this first vanguard of epic public intellectuals and critics. It is clear that Zeleza was shaped by this tendency and it is this that gives him the irrepressible confidence to make things happen (for this is what the tendency translates into as a form of social as opposed to merely personal impulse).

After this initial theme, what follows is really shaped by the choices that Zeleza makes. The decision for example to go to Kenya for his doctoral research was as he notes to have significant consequences for the rest of his career. It is not at all idle to note that one of the reasons he cites for this choice was the opportunity it gave him to study Swahili, an unofficial lingua franca of the East African region spoken by several million people. The impulse towards transcending the parameters set by his own Malawian nation-state was in evidence in this choice, even taking into account the fact that he could not have safely returned to his own country if he had wanted to. The sojourn in Kenya did wonders for him, not just in terms of exposing him to the intellectual ferment of one of the most exciting environments on the continent, but also in generating what I would like to label as the form of an inescapable Africanist alienation. This alienation is al the more unsettling because it grows from the shock of familiarity. After all is Kenya, like Malawi, not an African country? This shock of familiarity is all unsettling because it nurses itself precisely within the cultural impedimenta of African everyday life: the serendipitous friendship and comfort of strangers; matatus festooned with legends and wise sayings in all languages; passengers sharing the daily newspaper on the commute; hairdressing salons and tailoring shops nourishing the dreams of restless youth; and the rhythmic and sometimes rowdy nightlife. Everywhere one goes in Africa seems to produce the same vectors of identity. Malawi being a much smaller country than Kenya will have suffered a provincial complex in comparison to its larger and more cosmopolitan neighbour. And, Nairobi, being the transport hub of East Africa will also have generated a complex mix of cosmopolitanisms to give even the redoubtable Zeleza pause for wonder and bewilderment. It should also not be forgotten that like other African countries, Kenya in the late 80s was sliding down the path of stringent economic reforms imposed by the international monetary agencies. And, in common with many African countries in the period, the bitter economic reforms were augmented by the bitterness of the political totalitarianism without which the reforms could not have been contemplated in the first place. (Is it not an irony that in places like Ghana and Nigeria, the World Bank and the IMF worked via what can only be described as necessary totalitarianisms, sometimes benign but often quite brutal? This should be left aside for another exploration). The decision to take up his first job in Jamaica and be exposed to the incessant questions about what was the meaning of Africa also meant that the alienating familiarity that he had encountered in Kenya was now to be converted into the currency of a continental knowledge. And this continental knowledge was to be turned towards a larger project of englightenment for the diaspora about their roots and routes from Africa.

Which brings us to the third theme in the tripartite cluster I mentioned at the beginning. Is it not the case that Zeleza's entry into diaspora studies marks not merely the expansion of the ambit of his considerable intellectual resources, but that in fact, this move traces the lineaments of a truly post-Africanist (not pan-Africanist) sensibility? For do the many African diasporas he has studied in his current project, from Brazil, the United States, France, and even Russia, not speak to him of something that is both African and quite not-African? Does the rediscovery of the familiar in a diaporic context not produce something of the uncanny with it? Do all the vestiges and reminders of what it is to be African not just on the continent but so far afield not threaten to efface what is Africa for such a complex world? And given all that he has seen thus far, what projections might we make about how Africa and its diasporas will look like in fifty to a hundred years' time?

Zeleza gives us more than the cliché of a life well lived and a career well performed. It is for that we have to take him seriously.