Guest Lecture: Family history and the politics of memory in Africa; Speaker: Prof. Carola Lentz (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)

Abstract:

What keeps a family together? Over the course of the past decades, lifestyles and ideas about family have become more and more different. In Africa, as elsewhere, urbanites and villagers, educated elites and modest folks, men and women, older and younger generations have developed diverging visions of a desirable future for themselves and their kin. In my presentation, I will discuss the case of one extended family from Northern Ghana (and Burkina Faso) whose currently over five hundred members find themselves living increasingly farther apart and working in diverse occupations, ranging from farming and handicrafts to religious clergy and civil service. I argue that it is the quest for belonging, expressed in and strengthened by shared memories, rather than material interests which holds this family together. However, neither the family members’ remembrance of the past nor their practices of commemoration have remained static. I therefore ask how, in an increasingly globalized, postcolonial world, family memories have been, and still are, shaped by both changing current concerns and imagined futures.

After briefly introducing the Ghanaian extended family—into which I have been “adopted” 1987 and whose history I have examined together with Isidore Lobnibe, fellow anthropologist and also a family member—I will discuss three cross-cutting themes: (1) the divisive and unifying forces at work in family memory; (2) family histories as a window to African experiences of colonialism (and decolonization), Christianity, and Western education; and (3) the potential and limits of long-term and engaged collaborative research.

Carola Lentz is a social anthropologist and senior research professor Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. Since the late 1980s, her research has focussed on West Africa, and she is particularly interested in land rights, ethnicity and nationalism, colonialism, the politics of memory, and the emergence of a middle class. Her book Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa (2013) received the Melville Herskovits Prize by the African Studies Association. Together with David Lowe, she published Remembering Independence (2018), and togetherwith Isidore Lobnibe Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family (2022). She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. From 2020 to 2024, she served as president of the Goethe-Institut.

This lecture is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/66960817326?pwd=WoIVzBPThR5qC2kgNfuMEEi4gStzcW.1

Meeting-ID: 669 6081 7326
Code: 6HNGk7S2c