It has been a great pleasure this week to welcome to the University of Portsmouth a number of guest speakers, who have contributed to our research and teaching programmes on Francophone Africa here in the Centre of European and International Studies Research (CEISR).
On Tuesday 11 November, we welcomed back a familiar face, Dr. Alexander Keese, who is a lecturer at the University of Humboldt in Berlin as well as a Visiting Scholar in CEISR and has subsequently visited Portsmouth on several occasions over the past few years to present his research on Africa. On this occasion, Alex came to present a guest lecture on our second year undergraduate unit, “Guns, glory hunters and greed: European colonisation in Africa”, which is open to students in both the School of Languages and Area Studies and the School of Historical, Social and Literary Studies. Alex’s lecture explored Portuguese colonial rule in Africa, focusing particularly on the merits of studying Portuguese Africa alongside more commonly studied African colonial empires, namely the British and the French. His lecture sought to challenge some of the ‘colonial legends’ surrounding the Portuguese presence in Africa, notably the myth that Portugal had a long-term territorial presence in Africa, as well as the imagined conception of “Lusotropicalism”: the idea that the Portuguese empire in Africa was blind to questions of race. In his lecture, Alex also explained some of the fundamental features of Portuguese rule in Africa, emphasising that, in spite of the situation often being more extreme in the context of Lusophone Africa, many parallels existed with the other European colonial powers’ experiences of conquest and colonisation. Alex’s lecture, therefore, was a wonderful opportunity for our students to learn more about a less familiar colonial empire, from an expert in the field, whilst also giving them an opportunity to think about empires in a comparative perspective.
Alex was not the only guest with us on Tuesday. We were also delighted to welcome Dr. Anna Konieczna (Sciences Po), whose research into France and South Africa has a particular resonance with the aims of the Francophone African strategic research cluster, notably the desire to reassess the legacies of French colonialism and challenge the binaries of colonial/ post-colonial, metropole/ periphery and Anglophone/ Francophone that dominate existing histories of France and its African Empire. Anna presented her research at the CEISR seminar on Tuesday evening, a regular research seminar open to both staff and students from inside and outside of the university. Anna’s paper sought to provide an overview of her PhD thesis, which she completed at Sciences Po in 2013. Anna began by providing a chronology of the Franco-South African relationship, tracing the shift from the relatively weak, and economic focused, interaction of the 1950s, to an intensification of contacts from the 1960s onwards. She then set out both French and South Africa motivations for engaging with one another, focusing particularly on the position of this relationship within the wider international strategies of these two states. Anna concluded her paper by situating relations between Paris and Pretoria within a broader context, probing in particular the ways in which the French role in South Africa both shaped, and was shaped by, France’s wider African policies. Anna’s paper was followed by a short question and answer session, leading to some interesting discussion between Anna and members of the audience, at what was the best attended CEISR seminar of the year (evidenced by the fact that, for the first time since the summer, we ran out of hot water for tea and there wasn’t even a crumb of homemade cake left at the end of the session!)
Our final visitor to Portsmouth this week was Gaia Lott, a PhD student at the University of Florence, who on Wednesday 12 November presented her research project on French relations with Rwanda and Burundi in the 1970s and 1980s to members of the Francophone African strategic research cluster. In her paper, Gaia provided a detailed overview of French relations with these two former Belgian colonies, offering an insight into the motivations that underpinned the French, Rwandan and Burundi interest in developing a relationship that transcends traditional colonial borders. Gaia then developed this theme further, presenting her thoughts on the extent to which Rwanda and Burundi can be viewed as part of the French pré carré in Africa.
It has been, therefore, an exciting week of research and teaching Francophone Africa at the University of Portsmouth. And there’s more still to come as we head off to London today, to participate in a two-day workshop on “Connected histories of decolonisation”, jointly organised with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and King’s College London. If you can’t join us, please follow our twitter feed and blog over the coming days for updates!