Page 10 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2018

What is Africanness?
Charles Ngwena, Centre for Human Rights
Without the benefit of
a theory to articulate Africanness, we are left only with uncritical dogma and its studied repetition.
Professor Charles Ngwena’s book, What is Africanness? Contesting nativism in race, culture and sexualities (PULP, 2018) was written as an intervention in contemporary debates on the making of the African ‘race’, cultures and sexualities. More particularly, it is a counter-discourse to articulations of Africanness that essentialise – or what he calls ‘nativise’ – African lifeworlds.
Hence the main question the book addresses is: Who/what is African? The book treats this question as
a discourse question; instead of setting out to answer the question,
it develops an interpretive method – the hermeneutics of Africanness – as its theoretical contribution towards deciphering inclusive Africanness.
The book draws its theoretical strands from the work of Stuart Hall and other cultural theorists to argue that
when thinking about Africanness, dichotomous categories do not serve us well. Africannness is extraordinarily diverse precisely because it is situated in a multiplicity of histories, cultures and subjectivities that speak less to African identity in the way it has been espoused in colonial discourses and by ideologues of identity, and more
to African identifications in the sense intended by Hall.
The conceptual framework for Africanness presented in this book is a deconstructive tool that should incline us towards detotalised enunciations in order to register radical historicisation and the constant process of change, transformation and positionality.
It is a concept of identity better understood as identification; a situated constellation made up of multiple subjectivities, and an open, as opposed to closed, category.
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Charles Ngwena with Satang Nabaneh, a doctoral student at the Centre for Human Rights.