Prof. Dr. Stefan Ouma and Dr. Faisal Garba Muhammed on mobility and the need for a macrosociology in/of Africa
Media records
Abstract
- Abstract
- In this latest episode of the Cluster Conversations fellow Dr. Faisal Garba Muhammed talks with his fellowship host Prof. Dr. Stefan Ouma about his research project in which he scrutzinizes datasets on mobility in Africa that he collected for almost 20 years. They also explore the need for a macrosociology in/of Africa.
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- Prof. Dr. Stefan Ouma and Dr. Faisal Garba Muhammed on mobility and the need for a macrosociology in/of Africa
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
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Cluster Conversations
- Date
- June 13, 2023
Rights & access
- Extent
- 39 minutes, 23 seconds
Identifiers & sources
Further details
- Episode number
- 8
Full text
- Transcript
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[music]
Speaker 1: Yes, hello everyone. Thank you for tuning in to our Cluster Conversations at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth. I am Professor Stefan Ouma and I'm a PI in the cluster and I'm very, very happy to welcome Doctor Faisal Garba Mohammed here in our podcast series. Faisal is a sociologist at the University of Cape Town. He's also directing the South-South Migration Inequality and Development Hub at the university. And to give you a very good dive into his work, I really recommend the recent issue of Sangi, the Journal of Critical Global South Studies on migration and inequality in the global south that he co-edited with Francis Nyamnjoh and Heaven Crawley. So Faisal, really a warm welcome to this podcast and we want to talk a little bit more about your project here while you're with us. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you've planned for the seven months that you are staying with us here and how past work informs this project?
Speaker 2: Okay, thank you very much Stefan for the welcome and for the opportunity to share my work with the cluster and a larger audience. And I have to begin by saying thank you for being my host, for being a really great host and made my landing in Bayreuth soft. So what I intend to do over the next seven months is to really spend time thinking through a fairly large data set that we have gathered since twenty nineteen, but also some disparate data that I have gathered since two thousand and five as an undergraduate student. And what I intend to do with it is to see what these different data sets tell us about mobility in Africa in the present but in the past, in an attempt to come up with some conceptual tools that would enable us to move beyond a descriptive empiricist instinct towards a deep kind of theoretical reflection about mobility on the African continent, but how it also relates to other parts of the world. I will also be doing a little bit of work around some of the African students that had to leave Ukraine and the difficulties that they are facing trying to find access to education or just to find ways of rebuilding their lives in Germany. And in a sense, this really links up to my ongoing work around the question of inequality and production. So that therefore takes me to how value is produced, how it is distributed, but in particular by populations on the move, mobile populations. So really this has been the thread of my work and I hope to continue that here and I hope to be able to spend time with students, with colleagues and hopefully do some guest lectures. I just finished doing a talk at a conference on infrastructuring mobility which happened twenty second, twenty third in Nairobi as part of the cluster.
Speaker 1: Great, thanks Faisal. So you mentioned a few things I'd like to return to later. One is your interest in longitudinal research. One is your interest in collaborative research across geographies, but also outside the discipline of sociology. I mean, from your writings, I know that part of your project is also to rewrite sociology in a certain way. You call for a new macro sociology of Africa. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this project and what role mobility plays in there on the one hand, but also give us a little bit of further background information on why sociology had such a hard time across...
Speaker 1: Africa. Okay, so I'll begin from the latter point and come to the first point that you made. So often when people talk about the disciplines that produce Africa as an object, the default discipline is anthropology, alright? And I think in the German-speaking world, anthropology was very complicit in that. But anthropology did not do that alone, right? It did that with some kind of a division of labour with sociology. So anthropology was the disciplining of the traditional, the pre-modern, read backward. Sociology, as you know, is the arch-discipline of modernity. To the extent that Africa is pre-modern, you cannot have sociology. So sociology gave Africa to anthropology. But then, I think over time, sociology then realised the reality of settler colonialism and said, well, there is some modernity there. So places like South Africa, Kenya, you know, had interests initially of sociologies not based there, and then later emergence of disciplines of sociology. Now these sociology disciplines in terms of departmental disciplines that emerged completely ignored, you know, really great work that was happening outside of the discipline but actually uses sociological tools, right? And, you know, think of Menelik Sabba's work Ethiopia Unbound. Later you think of Cabral's work, you know, on agrarian relations and class formation. And even some disciplined sociologists like Achima Fejja, like Berhad Magubane were completely ignored in the academy because sociology basically was a modern discipline, right? And if you wanted to study Africa, you had to do anthropology. Now the other part of the problem of sociology in Africa was one of disconnection, right? So you had, you know, clusters of sociologists in Ibadan, in Dar es Salaam, but because of the way in which studies were framed, you know, those people were in conversation with whoever taught them in Cambridge and hardly in conversation with a trend in the other parts of the continent. And so, basically what sociology did was to emphasise this idea that Africa was modernising, right? So now you explain the presence of sociology because it is modernising. So I remember as an undergraduate student, I did two courses. One was Traditional Africa, okay? One was African Cultures and Institutions. And it was really unbelievable the kinds of material we read, right? Evans Pritchard, you know, Witchcraft Azande, right? So really that has been the baggage that sociology carries. And what I have tried to do is to say, if we think of these works that were developed outside of the academy using sociological tools, and we bring them into the academy both in terms of what we teach in a classroom, but also we say, okay, we refuse to proceed from this binary of traditional and modern. We want to begin from social process. But because Africa was never isolated from itself or from the rest of the world, we want to look at the vectors of continuity and connection, right? So mobility here, the mobility of capital, the mobility of labour, right? So in a sense, what I try to do is to say, okay, I want to trace these vectors of connection through how labour moves, how people move, the contradictions that that give rise to within the continent, but also different parts of the global south. And as you know, I have had a long-standing interest in migrant labour in Germany. So in a sense, really, that is where my training, the kinds of deficiencies of that kind of outlook, you know, gave rise to an attempt to seriously engage the continent not as a byproduct, not kind of as an offshoot of, but as a site of reset integrity on its own.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's macro because you embed mobility, labour into these larger systems and processes.
Speaker 1: Precisely. Also because you see, so one can work on...
Speaker 1: family relations and social reproduction. You can look at surrogacy, transnational surrogacy and how it affects gender relations. But you see, I am based in a South African university. I have to teach students who have a particular history and a particular relationship to Africa. And so really this began through my teaching, that I had to construct from scratch a course on an introduction to African sociology, mindful of the reality of these students, who really see Africa as that place beyond a river called Limpopo. It's like that place. And so therefore you had to say okay, but if we think of, if we trace connections, what is this Africa? And so the macro here is a certain level of abstraction, to say are there, and this is, are there certain regularities about a social structure with unbelievable diversity on a continent called Africa and its diasporas. Because this is important. It's not just Africa as this bounded space, right? But as a site of thinking, as a historical process.
Speaker 2: I think this is a really important remark. So your macro take is not a traditional Durkheimian one where you have bounded national societies and you try to study them at the systems level, but it's rethinking these processes in a larger African context and how Africa is connected to the larger world. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 1: Precisely. I think that's an appropriate description because, you see, part of the move is a methodological move, is to move away from the routine of a defined kind of national zone or a civilizational zone, but really to say look, yes, one begins from Africa, but then what kinds of connections, contradictions, experiences that Africa has spawned and where do we trace them? And that is why I made this point about its diasporas, but also its multiple connections, right? So if you think of, say, movement of people, the decolonial moment and imagination of freedom, then you also have to think of setting ideas of third worldism, right? Which is not necessarily African, but a certain vision of world-making, a different idea of world-making. Yeah. So really it's also, beyond understanding conceptual shift, it's also a methodological shift because one of the things I try to do with my students, both the undergraduate and postgraduate students, when they're defining their research projects, to say yes, it's good that you're doing this, but let's move beyond your village or the province that you come from. What does this tell us? Because that's the default. It's good to study your village, but beyond that, right?
Speaker 2: I mean, the cluster here that invited you has this umbrella term 'reconfiguring African studies' and we had these conversations before, both of us are skeptical of the notion of African studies. Let's call it maybe, you know, the study of economies, environment, society in Africa, always in a larger global context. But there's reconfiguration in the title. And I want to connect it to mobility and how do you feel that notion of reconfiguring sociology, let's put it that way, in Africa via mobility? How do you feel exactly that notion of reconfiguration?
Speaker 1: Okay. So as I was saying, I spoke at this workshop twenty second to twenty third February on infrastructures of mobility in Africa. And actually about five or seven minutes of my talk was around this thing of reconfiguration because that was the theme I was asked to think about that. Now...
Speaker 1: I think the idea of reconfiguration, right, uh, if one proceeds from mobility, has to take up some foundational questions, okay. And for me, this foundational question is inequality. That's really a starting point because the thing about mobility in the present moment in Africa is you have people who can move, people who cannot move, people who are forced to move, right. So you think of all these huge infrastructural projects, right, airports and so on that displace, right. And you think of people who cannot go to the next place because they don't have a visa, because they don't have a passport. You think of people who can just fly to wherever they want to fly. So for me, when I think of reconfiguration within the context of that kind of work that I do, is to say where are people positioned in the world, right. How are resources distributed. And in this case, questions of knowledge production. Who is visible, who is not visible, how did we come to that. So so it's one thing to attempt to reconfigure, but one has to take account of how we got to what we want to reconfigure. If not, what we're doing is like you're just peppering over a crack, you know, by really not taking seriously the foundational questions. And and and this means for example, taking concepts seriously, right. Because uh you know, concepts come up to try and apprehend a reality. Now this reality is differentiated. This reality is a product of inequality. This reality reproduces inequality, okay. So how do we try to rethink the existing ones as a basis to think new ones, but really starting. And and and here, from my own kind of work, right, because I work on mobility. Then when I think of this reconfiguring within say Germany, you know, my work with African migrants, uh yeah African students. I ask myself, is it possible to do this outside of the place of Afro-Germans in this society, right. Because one has to face the reality that this is a highly racialized world. This is a highly racialized society where this reconfiguring is happening is highly, cannot happen outside of the larger society. And I think that's the thing, that at times academics we think we can distance ourselves from the broader social process. But we are product of it and we reproduce it, right. So thinking mobility therefore, is it possible for me to understand the reality of an African student who left Ukraine, outside of the value of black life in this society historically, even those who have citizenship. And what is interesting here now and here is that part of the way that I'm doing is with a colleague called Isabel Eiring at the Evangelische Hochschule Freiburg, you know. Now her involvement is also an attempt to deal with what it means to be an Afro-German in this society and a commitment to think these experiences collectively instead of, and this is the thing about African studies, because African studies therefore is this thing, is this thing called Africa. You study this thing called Africa, right, outside of its various meanings, even here where you're studying it from, right. So so for me really, this is how I think of it practically, especially in my work here in Germany in terms of the African diaspora and and and and and rethinking concepts beginning with concrete realities of inequality.
Speaker 2: Great, thank you Faisal. I mean this this question of how does a discipline look like if reconstructed from elsewhere, elsewhere meaning intellectual or geographical sites outside the West, elsewhere meaning adopting a view that transcends a kind of Western white gaze, outside that means you take historical moments that are sitting outside of key moments of Western historiography. Uh this has been a project of of several scholars before, CLR James with his Black Jacobins, WEB Du Bois with his Black Reconstruction or Claude Ake and Social Science and Imperialism would be good examples. In how far has this archive shaped your own work and and your intellectual thinking?
Speaker 1: No, those are those are really important works in my own formation, Stefan, because I...
Speaker 1: I remember as an undergraduate student, second year, I read a piece by Achima Fede called 'The Ideology of Tribalism'. And I remember a quote from that, that, that text since then. And I think it goes like this: if tribe is thought of as being particularly African, then the ideology in itself is peculiarly European. Now, he was not just throwing barbs. He was trying to show that you cannot understand identity formation and identity markers as kind of conceptual categories outside of imperialism. Okay. So if one wants to rethink sociology, is to really start from what exactly is the experience of identity formation? Say in Kenya, in South Africa. Okay. As opposed to say, oh no, let's just add this to a Weberian understanding. Or let's just add this to a Durkheimian understanding. And the works of Du Bois, and I used this Mafeje thing to say, after having read that, I was asking myself, but where is this coming from? And then I went to read his, the references. And then I, as a second-year student, started to look for things. And that was when I came across Du Bois' work. You know, there's two important works. You know, one which is looking at the place of Africa in the world, which was a fascinating account of not African societies but global social processes. And the fact that this was seen as marginal is scandalous. Right. Because what he attempted to do, right, was really to go at the main concern of sociology. And foreground this thing of commitment, social transformation. So Du Bois was not trying to add. Okay. Du Bois was giving us a new way of thinking. Taking seriously experiences of black people in the US, taking seriously the place of Africa. And if I transpose that to what I try to do, I'll just cite one example. You know, one thing that has really been going through my mind is relationship of people to place. And I've been thinking about that for some time and have had conversations about it. That this idea of this bounded territory, right, came out of a particular historical process, right? Sociologists were dealing with the reality of that as human beings and therefore thinking about it, right? And I thought it was good sociology, thinking from where they were. But when you encounter the unknown, it calls for rethinking. But unfortunately, what was happening was the unknown became a footnote. Okay. So what I am trying to do is to say, if we take seriously an understanding of space, which was not produced by this particular historical experience, and then we try to think about it in relation to this historical experience and other historical experiences, what kind of sociology would we come up with? Not to tweak it, but to rethink it fundamentally. Because the main problem, one of the major problems is this Stefan, that this thing about the industrial revolution. This thing about modernity, enlightenment, right? They are key moments in the history of sociological thought and input. But you see what they did, if you think of, if for example, you think of the industrial revolution as a particular event that happened in a constellation of a space, you wipe out a certain segment of humanity completely. They're out of that. You see. But if you say no, but you want to seriously think about processes of accumulation and production, and how this moment and process, the industrial revolution came to be, and all the vectors, the connectors, the sites of accumulation, the prior sites of trade, then you really have a different key moment. And here isn't my idea is not to rejig the industrial revolution and make it more all-encompassing. No. Is to actually have new ways of having some key moments that really are open to the entirety of human experience.
Speaker 1: Thanks for this. I mean, you're really contributing to this larger project of rethinking disciplines from the margins. And of course, we don't want them to remain margins, but it is a particular geographical and epistemic position from which you're rethinking sociology. Maybe to come towards the end of our interview, can you tell us a little bit more about labour and labour movements and what role they play in your project of writing a new macrosociology for Africa or from Africa?
Speaker 2: So, I'll say that at the beginning, right? I came to my work through processes of production, accumulation and the distribution of the product of that, and the place of labour, right? And people move for various reasons, but labour is a major reason why people move or are made to move. And I think labour also enables one to see contradiction both in terms of solidarity and the production of hostility, divisions within the context of migration. Now, the other thing that makes labour important for me is because I am also involved in popular struggles of working class people, not just as working class people, as people who work, but people who basically either sell their labour or don't even have the opportunity to sell their labour, right? They are people who are marginalised in various ways. So I think I see that one as a site of thinking, but also as a site of imagining an alternative, okay? As a site of building alliances. You know, so in South Africa, part of the work that I do is we do some popular education in townships in an attempt to fuse struggles for housing, healthcare, access to education, anti-GPV and the question of migrancy. Okay, to say, okay, but what are the challenges that we face here? What is the reality of these migrant workers? Are there points of convergence? And what is it that produces this tension? It's not easy, it's difficult because the state, powerful sections of society, the media would always speak about how the migrant has done this. You do not have jobs because migrants have taken all the jobs away. There are no houses because migrants have taken the houses away. So I think it gives one the opportunity to actually engage in real life struggles and also shape the kinds of questions that one asks, right? So this dialectical relationship. So it's really, really important.
Speaker 1: I mean, let's invoke African studies for once because it's such a powerful umbrella. How do you break with this type of research? How do you break with traditional ways of relating in the field of African studies, in the field?
Speaker 2: So I think again, I will pick up from where I left off in the last answer, which is the commitment to a project, not an intellectual project, but to a social project. To say that this is a very unequal world. The global political economy marginalises certain sections of the world, certain classes in those sections of the world. And to say that if this is the reality, how do we properly understand this? But also how do we build communities of practice where we try to live alternative visions together, where we try to co-think. And I'll give you one example. As part of the project Migration and Inequality, we have this dimension of the work which is about interventions. So a certain portion of the research fund was set aside to basically do something in communities. And then we do this by having meetings with the community and say, okay, what are your priorities? Some people say, no, we want some basic ICT information. Some people say, no, what we want is a resource corner where you kind of bring books from different parts of the continent and then you have local and migrant children just spend time together reading about Sankara, reading about Gaby, just reading about Biko, but also reading about their grandparents, so that this relationship is one which makes the research...
Speaker 1: The output, in a sense, taking up, it should be the output is taken up by community members in the way that they want to take it and what they want to do with it. You see, and the final thing I want to say about this African studies thing is I want to go back to a very old text. So when Nkrumah established the African Studies Institute at the University of Ghana, he delivered a speech and the speech is called 'The African Genius'. And in that speech, he spoke about how Africa was studied in the US and African studies. And he said, no, what I envisage happening here is a different relationship to Africa. And that's why this point about the relationship. It's not just as an object. You come, you study, write great articles, you're the experts. But it's a commitment to something new. It's a relationship to people as knowing subjects, not in an instrumental way, but in a deep serious way of engaging. So that is how I will end there.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's really important that you bring in the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana also because the founding context was one that in a way had a Du Boisian spirit involved because that is where his life ended in sixty-three, I think, in Ghana. So I think I would take this as an opportunity to reflect this more general problem that you have many scholars in African studies until today who make this distinction between objective research and activism on the other side. And to take it further, who would call themselves friends of Africa, but they show no concerns for the plight of African and African diaspora people at their own doorstep of these institutions in the US, in the UK, in Germany. So I think we need more this original Nkrumahist spirit that you just mentioned. Maybe to close with a very short biographical note. I mean, you yourself have been highly mobile. You did your PhD in Freiburg. You had some postdocs at the University of Jena. You moved to UCT. You went to many other places. How has this mobility itself shaped your intellectual thinking and what you focus on as research topics?
Speaker 1: So my PhD was actually linked with Freiburg and UCT. So yeah. So my journey began and it's really funny in a sense. So I was an undergraduate student at the University of Ghana and I have family in Frankfurt and I fell in love with critical theory. Belonged to a small left-wing group. We call ourselves Students Workers Solidarity Society. We were trying to organize the janitors on campus, you know, to kind of push back against management and all those horrible working conditions. And you know, reading the Frankfurt School, of course, reading your classical kind of Marxist works. And I was like, I have to come to Frankfurt for my postgraduate study. But I'll tell you the other part of the story. Now, some of the people that I know, family friends who were living in Frankfurt, would spend time in Accra and they were always complaining about how, you know, there was a time of terrible power outage. Electricity was just going off all the time. Dumsor, you know. And then they were really complaining about, you know, how it was horrible. And then I came to Germany in two thousand and five, you know, met the same people and they were always complaining about how these people are cold, you know, at home. And I was trying to understand what was this about. So I wrote, we have something called a long essay, like mini thesis when you're finishing your bachelor. So I wrote it on the social participation of Ghanaians in Frankfurt. And of course, after my undergraduate degree, I thought I would come to Frankfurt. But I came to Frankfurt fifty years late because there was no critical theory by the time I got to Frankfurt. And the business school was the Frankfurt School. So then I moved to Freiburg. I was like, no, I'm certainly not staying here. I moved to Freiburg. Then I had the opportunity to spend a semester in Cape Town. And then I went to Cape Town. This was the moment of the new social movements, Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack dwellers movement, you know, the Treatment Action Campaign had just won the victory for antiretrovirals. And you know, this whole idea of like on the continent, you could see people mobilized from the ground up, you know. Then of course, I finished my PhD, then spent time in Jena. So in a sense, and then of course, I spent four months at the Nehru University in Delhi, you know, really active left-wing campus doing some serious work. So I think this...
Speaker 1: And I always joked with my friends that maybe one of my great grandmothers was a Fulani. You know, the Fulanis are the equivalent of Maasai in West Africa, in the Sahel. So like, I am just very mobile, something that may be a great grandmother. Just a joke. So I think what this has done really is, one, I have been able to make some... I've learned a lot from different contexts. And I have to say an important marker in my intellectual development was a time in India. This is, you know, this ideas network, Jayati Ghosh, Prabhat Patnaik, you know, people who were really seriously thinking about the agrarian question. Thinking of economy from the position of, say, a woman who is an informal worker. If you begin to think of the economy from her position, you know, how would you analyse the budget? You know, so I think this ability to realise that no, there are sites of knowing outside of the Auguste Comte, the Durkheim, the Weber, you know, that were the staple of my training, that I could actually read Ambedkar, you know, Babasaheb Ambedkar, and actually did sociology in Colombia, you know, and was in conversation with some Afro-Americans, you know, who were trying to think about racism and he was thinking about castes, right? So is it, are there some other forms of othering, of dehumanisation that capital and accumulation have spawned outside of racism and class? You know, so I think these things, in a sense, I feel privileged enough, you know, to be able to draw on these intellectual groundings, you know, and therefore not be a prisoner to my discipline as beginning, you know, from Comte, from the industrial revolution, from modernity, but really thinking about the world as more than that.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Faisal. I think this was a great closing sentence. Listeners, I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. I also learned a lot during this brief conversation and looking forward to learn more from Faisal, who will be with us for a few more months. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Stefan. Thank you.
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