Response | Sanya Osha

Africa as Centre of the World: Reflections on Paul Tiyambe Zeleza's Inaugural Lecture

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza's biographical and intellectual itinerary has been most interesting for one central reason: it subverts the myth concerning the African continent as an irredeemable ghetto. It also deftly bypasses a common assumption regarding Africa and the African as being inextricably tied to death, disease, decay and even madness. My brief intervention dwells on how Zeleza addresses the deterritorialization as well as the re-affirmation of the politics of identity. In other words, I am interested in the transnationalization of cultural subjectivity. My submission also addresses the connections- contained in Zeleza's project- between the imperatives of diasporan existence and continental Africa in a way that brings to the fore, a new socio-cultural symbiosis, a new configuration of cultural synergies.

Instead of viewing Africa as a site devoid of hope, from Zeleza's account, we see an Africa that is effortlessly transnational and transcultural. And in being so, the African subject in effect assumes the same effortless transnationality and transculturality. Zeleza's cosmopolitan sensibilities are not a denial of his African roots. Indeed Africa remains a central and an abiding preoccupation. For him, Africa remains the beginning of his journey and the site to which he continually returns to find all kinds of meaning: cultural, aesthetic, political, and epistemological. In the exploration of these diverse meanings, Zeleza also refuses to essentialize the persistent nativism that confronts all of us that are compelled to subscribe to the politics of African identities and various ideologies of blackness. Zeleza affirms a politics of identity that recognises the fluidity of all kinds of boundaries. It is also a stance that says, in subscribing to a particular cultural subjectivity we do not reject or denounce other cultural realities and boundaries. These are some of the directions to which Zeleza's ideological and cultural leanings attest.

The other lesson one gets from Zeleza's intellectual journey is the transdisciplinarity of his research projects. He begins his experience with writing as a creative writer and then moves on to formalized research. But his attitude has not been one that separates these various discursive domains. Rather he is interested in exploring the connections between them. In other words, the distances that separate universes of discourse are to be traversed and not avoided. What connects one textual universe to another is usually more important than what separates them. Similarly what unities a continental African and a diasporic African is more important than the nature of geographical distance between them. Zeleza's current focus on issues and peoples of the diaspora ought to be read in this light. It is all part of the same transnationality, transculturality and cosmopolitanism which are all rooted in a particular site: Africa.

However, Zeleza's project can be made even more incisive by demonstrating how personal intellectual gains translate into wider African dividends. In other words, it is necessary to explore the broader social dimensions of the project as they relate to collective gain. Of course this particular dimension requires even greater time and research resources, nonetheless, it is a possible objective to accomplish.