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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.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available by KU 2024 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
List of contents
Introduction: Monuments and Memory in Africa: Reflections on Coloniality and Decoloniality 1. The Ideology of Epistemicide 2. Genophilia - Genosites in Cape Town 3. Monuments and Invisibility Reclaiming Spaces of Colonial Transcendence 4. Irreconcilable Differences: The Statue Debate and Transitional Justice Discourse 5. Monumental Transformations and the Re-Membering of Meaning 6. (Im)possible monuments? Gukurahundi and the politics of memorialization in Zimbabwe 7. Colonial and Apartheid Legacy: Social, Economic and Political Inequality in South Africa 8. The Destruction of Historical Monuments and the Danger of Sanitising History
About the author
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.
Summary
This book investigates how monuments have been used in Africa as tools of oppression and domination, from the colonial period up to the present day.
