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University of Bayreuth
African Studies
WORKING PAPERS
Fieldwork Experiences
and Practices in Africa
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor, Oladapo
Opeyemi Ajayi, Hanza Diman &
Mingqing Yuan
works! 10
27
University of Bayreuth
African Studies
WORKING PAPERS
Fieldwork Experiences and
Practices in Africa
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor, Oladapo Opeyemi Ajayi, Hanza Diman and
Mingqing Yuan, 2021
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Contents
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers
iii
BIGSASworks!
iv
About the Authors of this Issue
v
Foreword
vi
Clarissa Vierke
Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in Africa
Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in Africa: An Introduction
1
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor, Oladapo Opeyemi Ajayi, Hanza Diman and Mingqing Yuan
Using Oral History to Research Fuelwood Energy in Togo: Some Experiences from the Field
5
Hanza Diman
Doing Fieldwork while Parenting: Between Methodological Benefits and Institutional
Constraints
15
Anna Madeleine Ayeh
The Challenges of Fieldwork “at Home” While Doing a PhD in Germany: "Insider" and
"Outsider" Positionalities of a Single Researcher
29
Alhassane A. Najoum
Fieldwork as Decolonising African Literary Studies: Researching Tanzanian Hip-hop and
Spoken Word Poetry as a Ghanaian
40
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor
Literary Fieldwork in Nairobi: Becoming Chinku and the “Third Mankind”
55
Mingqing Yuan
Fùjí Music in Contemporary Yorùbá Urban Spaces in Nigeria: Reflections from the Field
68
Oladapo Opeyemi Ajayi
The Reviewers of this Volume
78
Our latest BIGSASworks! Publications
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Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in Africa
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University of Bayreuth African Studies
Working Papers
The University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers are published by the Institute of African
Studies (IAS), Bayreuth, Germany. The IAS promotes and coordinates African Studies involving
scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines covering almost all faculties at the University
of Bayreuth. The IAS acts as umbrella organization and has three central units: the Iwalewahaus,
the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, and the Africa Research Center (Forschungszentrum
Afrika, which is under construction). The IAS coordinates research and teaching as well as the
training of junior researchers, cooperates with partners worldwide and facilitates the exchange
of information between persons and institutions engaged in research and teaching in or about
Africa.
In the Working Papers series, we present empirical studies and theoretical reflections, put pre-
liminary findings up for discussion and report on ongoing projects and current research. The
Working Papers usually reflect work-in-progress; all contributions relate to African Studies in
general and Bayreuth African Studies in particular and invite discussion and feedback. Submitted
papers are subject to internal review at the University of Bayreuth.
Contributions can be submitted to the editor-in-chief Sabrina Maurus
(sabrina.maurus@uni-bayreuth.de)
The University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers feature on the EPub document server
at the university library:
2005 - 2018
https://epub.uni-bayreuth.de/view/series/Bayreuth_African_Studies_Working_Papers.html
2018 - ongoing
https://epub.uni-
bayreuth.de/view/series/University_of_Bayreuth_African_Studies_Working_Papers.html
Institute of African Studies
Director: Prof. Dr. Cyrus Samimi
Vice Director: Prof. Dr. Eva Spies
University of Bayreuth
Wölfelstr. 2
D-95440 Bayreuth
Phone: +49 (0)921 554511
www.ias.uni-bayreuth.de
IAS@uni-bayreuth.de
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BIGSASworks!
The Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) was founded in 2007 and
funded in the framework of the ‘Excellence Initiative’ by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
and the German Council of Science and Humanities (WR). Since January 2019, BIGSAS is part of
the Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple: Reconfiguring African Studies”. BIGSAS offers a multi-
and interdisciplinary research environment based upon the expertise of more than 40 Senior
Fellows and more than 70 associated members from all over the world. In the focus of this unique
structure of creative and innovative training are approximately 80 Junior Fellows from 26 African,
American, Asian and European countries.
BIGSAS not only provides clearly structured, academic and career-oriented training opportunities
but also contributes to the creation of an African universities’ network. Six African Partner
Universities in Benin, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, South Africa, and Ethiopia cooperate closely
with BIGSAS in recruitment, training and mentoring of doctoral candidates.
With BIGSASworks! we aim at offering Junior Fellows at the Graduate School a platform for
publishing research-related articles. Each issue focuses on a certain thematic field or theoretical
concept and Junior Fellows from any discipline are invited to submit papers. At the same time,
BIGSASworks! opens a space for Junior Fellows to work jointly on articles towards further
publication and to get practical experience of what it means to be an editor.
The name BIGSASworks! has various implications. First, it is an abbreviation of “BIGSAS Working
Papers!” Secondly, it shows the work of our BIGSAS Work Groups. Thirdly, taking “works” as a
verb, it demonstrates the work that BIGSAS Fellows carry out, with BIGSASworks! guaranteeing a
visible output in addition to doctoral theses.
Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies
Dean: Prof. Dr. Martina Drescher
Deputy Head: Prof. Dr. Martin Doevenspeck
University of Bayreuth
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 3
D - 95440 Bayreuth
Phone: +49 (0)921 55 5101
www.bigsas.uni-bayreuth.de
bigsas@uni-bayreuth.de
Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in Africa
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About the Authors of this Issue
Persons marked * were part of the editors’ team.
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor* received her PhD in Literatures in African Languages from the Bayreuth
International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.
Her research interests include digital literature, poetry, Swahili literature and African popular
culture. She is currently a research fellow in the Recalibrating Afrikanistik research project
between the Universities of Leipzig, Bayreuth and Cologne.
Oladapo Opeyemi Ajayi* is a BIGSAS Junior Fellow working at the Department of Literature in
African Languages, University of Bayreuth. He is currently completing his PhD on Fuji music and
everyday life in the contemporary Yoruba/Nigerian urban space. He is fascinated by the aesthetic
experience of popular music. He is also interested in emerging meanings and concepts in Yoruba
popular culture.
Anna Madeleine Ayeh is a BIGSAS Junior Fellow working at the Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Bayreuth. She is currently completing her PhD on women’s practices
of religious knowing in Benin and researching the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on work and
care arrangements of members of University of Bayreuth. She is fascinated by feminist and post-
/de-colonial theories and academic debates on knowledge (production), learning, social
differentiation, and care.
Hanza Diman* is a Junior Fellow at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies
(BIGSAS) at the University of Bayreuth. He holds a BA in Germanistik from the Université Abomey-
Calavi in Benin, an MA in African History and Francophone Studies at the University of Bayreuth.
He is currently finalising his PhD thesis on the history of fuelwood energy in Togo. His research
interest areas include African political history, environmental history and theories and methods
in African history.
Alhassane A. Najoum holds a PhD in Social Anthropology. After his studies and work in sociology
at the University of Niamey in Niger, he did his doctoral studies in social anthropology at the
University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is an alumnus of BIGSAS (Bayreuth International Graduate
School of African Studies) and DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). His current research
focuses on the situations of women and children in Niger.
Mingqing Yuan* is a junior fellow at BIGSAS, University of Bayreuth. She is currently working on
her PhD thesis on the literary contacts between Kenya and China since the decolonizing era. She
is also a fellow at Recalibrating Afrikanistik. Her research interests include decolonization,
postcolonialism, China-Africa and the Global South.
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Foreword
Fieldwork has become an increasingly contested and debated notion in African studies. Fieldwork
has been considered to continue to “other” Africa, perpetuating a die-hard dichotomy between the
“field” from where data is collected through relentless “work”, on the one hand, and the
“processing” of that data in the global north. When I first heard the term “fieldwork” before
starting to study, I immediately thought of agriculture and it also seems to be caught in the same
pattern of economic and scholarly inequality: Africa is the place from where to extract resources,
while the refined production takes place elsewhere. And it is the latter which brings prestige,
money and power. Knowledge production seems to be forever split into a binary process linked
to the south and north respectively. Furthermore, precisely because of this power imbalance,
fieldwork also smacks of colonial, violent categorization of people and cultures, forever
objectifying them, fixing them in time and space according to preconceived categories.
Accordingly, demands for reflecting upon one’s positionality, one’s limiting perspective and one’s
power based on intersecting categories, like gender, race, class, religion, have become louder in
the last decades.
Yet, fieldwork has not only been condemned, but continues to play an important role – and for
good reasons, as the contributions in this special issue show. Fieldwork implies to immerse
oneself into a cultural context which provides an unsettling experience since it questions not only
the researcher but the whole human being. Fieldwork demands from the researcher to give up
certainties, including those considered most intimate or dear as well as the gross and ill-defined
stereotypes. Stripped of all preconceived notions and gradually giving up all expectations, the
researcher can but grabble for understanding by carefully listening in, paying attention to the
nuances, the said and the unsaid. Hence, from that perspective, the field, consists rather of drifting
sand than a firm hermeneutic ground, and is a constant challenge to the researcher’s (and often
also human being’s) categories and positions. How often have I myself carefully planned questions
and already had concepts and frameworks of analysis in my head, which my interlocutors would
not find relevant, would not have an answer to and who would rather refer me to examples that I
did not have a literal and analytical vocabulary for. In my ongoing research on imaginaries of the
Indian Ocean in Swahili poetry on Zanzibar, my aim was to tease out oceanic imaginations of far-
reaching networks (so much praised in Indian Ocean studies), while the poets I worked with,
would rather sing songs in protest against stolen elections, corruption or write love songs. Often
casual remarks rather than interviews have helped me to open up new perspectives, which I
would have never thought of, but more often than not, also chances to ask just pass by and are
never taken. There are rare great moments of also communally shared understanding amidst
many moments of hesitation, doubts, failure and stagnation, which typically do not make it into
the polished writing afterwards. In addition, moments of embarrassment and shame, where one’s
difference becomes so conspicuous that one cannot ignore it do not fit the heroic story of constant
and undisturbed accumulation of knowledge in harmony with the environment: the observer is
also the observed.
Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in Africa
vii
The contributions in this issue of BIGSAS works entitled “Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in
Africa” by junior fellows from different disciplines like history, anthropology, English and African
literature, all experienced in fieldwork, mirror those two aspects, which can ideally enlighten each
other, namely the rigid questioning of one’s own positionality and the moments of astonishment,
surprise and confusion, which characterize the knowledge production in the field. The latter, the
moments of hesitation and newly emerging questions, also holds the promise to correct the
former, the petrified hierarchies and fixed categories: For instance, in her reflection on her
fieldwork on spoken word performances in Dar es Salaam, Nikitta Dede Adjirakor explores the
“vibe,” a fleeting term, captured in casual exclamations by the audience of such performances, as
a way to conceptualize the affective quality of the performance; and Hanza Diman finds references
to coconut shells as domestic burning material and gendered division of labour not in the written
documents of the colonial archive, but in oral narratives in local Togolese languages. Oladapo Ajayi
finds his field shifting: coming back to Nigeria to work on the Yoruba popular music genre of Fújì,
he finds the urban landscape changed and Afro-beat or Naija-pop challenging the dominance and
street-credibility of Fújì, as the genre reflecting Yoruba urban lifeworlds. Fieldwork provides
alternative sources beyond the fixed and written record and text, often ignored in literary studies
but also history. Apart from Hanza Diman, Oladapo Ajayi and Nikitta Dede Adjirakor, also
Mingqing Yuan in her research on representations of China in Kenyan literature and popular
culture explore the boundaries of their respective, text-centered disciplines by conducting
fieldwork, which offered them with new and surprising sources and voices, which even question
the neat definition of disciplines.
Most importantly, while most of the reflections on positionality have (re)produced a dichotomy
of the global north and south, the contributions in this issue think through hitherto rather
marginalized perspective and positions in the field, namely that of the African scholar doing
research at home (see the contribution by Alhassane A. Najoum, Oladapo Ajayi but also Hanza
Diman) or in another African context (Nikitta Dede Adjirakor), the Asian literary scholar in Africa
(Mingqing Yuan) as well as the female scholar exploring her role as a white German mother in an
African context (Anna Madeleine Ayeh), while also taking the German academic context into
consideration. The role of being and becoming an academic as well as one’s relation with the often
stifling and hierarchical academy, often at odds with other social roles, contexts or simply life, is
a topic that runs through all the contributions.
Adopting an intersectional lens, the contributions offer courageously self-critical perspectives,
which highlight the moments of failure but also serendipity, thus, in short, the dynamic and
constantly negotiable quality of roles and identities, which challenge but also reward the
researcher. For Alhassane Najoum, for instance, the return to his home country, Niger, as a
researcher from a foreign German institution, made him suspicious: all of the sudden his identity
as local Muslim cultural “insider”, which often granted him unique access, was also questioned
and put at stake. Far from being merely a form of homecoming, research at home also turns into
an experience of alienation. The institution and the Western affiliation seem paramount, so that
the researcher is sometimes also able to override boundaries of the everyday persona, so that the
man can sit with women or the other way around. And yet, the “private” does not become invisible
behind the scholarly role either. Working on divorce, his status as unmarried single became a
constant issue of debate and ridicule. In a complementary way, Anna Madeleine Ayeh found
herself in a different position returning to the field as a mother with two children, which granted
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her new access and creates moments of shared experiences, and solidarity which help to “undo”
and bridge differences, as she argues. Even blackness, often treated with a strikingly robust
essentialism in new critical literature, becomes flexible: Alhassane Najoum turns “white” in Niger,
and Nikitta Dede Adjirakor, who conducted fieldwork as a Ghanaian in Tanzania, is sometimes
ignored, as she is not the white researcher, but sometimes also praised, as the “sister” from Ghana,
evoking old Panafricanist and socialist bonds of friendship between Ghana and Tanzania. In
Mingqing Yuan’s reflection upon her fieldwork in Nairobi, which she conducted in search of
literary connections between Kenya and China, she highlights how she was constantly and flexibly
categorized in terms of local or Western stereotypes of China as well as Chinese stereotypes with
regards to her own ethnicity. Her contribution questions the overemphasis on the North-South
axis of comparison, while also the simplified picture of China as one country dissolves into the
portray of a diverse country including globally connected diaspora in East Africa, which she also
struggled to be part of.
I want to conclude by congratulating the junior scholars to this issue of BIGSASworks!, which
invites us to more critically engage with the dynamics of relations in and of the field beyond
established and unquestioned dichotomies.
Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke
University of Bayreuth, Germany
Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in
Africa
An Introduction
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor, Oladapo Opeyemi Ajayi, Hanza Diman and Mingqing Yuan
1 Introduction
Since the early 1990s, discussions on the relationship between the researcher’s self and
knowledge production have become prominent in academic discourse, with regular calls to
investigate positionality under a reflexive lens (Haraway 1991; Davies 2008). As Clare Madge
(1993: 269) summarizes, “the role of the (multiple) ‘self’, showing how a researcher’s positionality
(in terms of race, nationality, age, gender, social, economic and intellectual status, sexuality) may
influence the ‘data’ collected and thus the information that becomes coded as knowledge”.
Positionality as often associated with categories imbedded in identity politics, reveals the
intricacies and embeddedness of knowledge production as closely intertwined with power
structures. With most discussions on positionality led by white western scholars from the global
north, there exists a disparate bias in the perspectives that are put forth, leading to a
marginalization of other perspectives. What positions and perspectives might be put forward by
scholars from marginalized and underrepresented identities such as African scholars in their
home countries or abroad, Asian researchers and womxn scholars? These identity categories are
negotiated and dynamically constructed in everyday life and daily practice, visibly highlighted or
underplayed in diverse research settings. As the multiple identities of the researcher encounters
the field, these identities will overlap, clash or complement each other. As Kimberlé Crenshaw
(1991: 1244) reminds us through an intersectional lens, identities are not “essentially separate
categories” but rather “intersect to create particular experiences”. This suggests that the
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researcher is scripted and conceived of in the field through their plural identities. Fieldwork,
rather than being a neutral space is impacted by these positions affecting data, methodology,
theory-making and the research process itself. This lens of positionality when attached to the
viewing and analysis of the research process like with data collection can also result in “pitfalls”
(von Oppen 2003: 53). The researcher then has to capitalize on the learned experience for the
sake of the ongoing and subsequent fieldwork trips and the entire research process. This suggests
that fieldwork is characterized by a quality of improvisation and profoundly produced through
experience which demands an affective involvement of the researcher (Malkki 2007). As Sarah
Pink (2009: 8) advises, fieldwork is “a reflexive and experiential process through which
understanding, knowing and (academic) knowledge are produced”. It remains central to the
process of knowledge production and the experiences produced through fieldwork influence and
inform the research process.
This volume takes as its starting point the assumption that fieldwork offers tremendous insights
into the research process and epistemological production for African Studies as a whole. While
often viewed as a period of data collection, we argue, that fieldwork also provides perspectives
relating to theory-making, methodological considerations and the reconfiguration of boundaries
of disciplines. Relating to the latter, while disciplines like anthropology and history have fieldwork
and ethnography at their core, others like literature often do not. Yet, fieldwork with its focus on
lived experiences and emphasis on place is appealing for literary criticism in orienting a sense of
open-ended yet situated praxis, that roots texts in their lived spaces. All of the contributors in this
volume are or have at one point been based in Germany i.e., in a global northern institution. This
complicates the relationship between researchers in the field and their interlocuters in the global
south, as McDowell (1992: 413) warns, “there are real dangers that are inherent in our own
position within the powerful institutions of knowledge production”. The contributors reflect on
their positions in the global north in relation to their work in the global south, their peculiar
identities and the possibilities and boundaries created through their disciplines. Focusing on
multiple disciplines like anthropology, history, English studies and African literature, the
contributors explore a variety of positions emanating from parenting, marriage, race, motherhood,
nationality, diaspora, language and religion. Employing multidisciplinary perspectives and lenses
that include intersectionality, decolonization and reflexivity, the contributors explore how
fieldwork can question, upend and reconfigure the research experience. The volume brings
together voices from Asia, Africa and Europe to reflect upon their place in African Studies.
The question of methodology and legitimate data when in the field is taken up by Hanza Diman
whose paper contributes to the decentring of Eurocentric methods by joining the methodological
debates in the discipline of history. Diman draws from this own field experience to discuss the
tensions between recordings and note taking in spontaneous interviews, the choice of passive and
active field observation, oral historical accounts and the opportunities and challenges of
triangulating diverse historical sources. His paper asserts the important role of field research in
history and the importance of oral history in helping to compensate for data gaps and critically
engaging with well-established assumptions in current literature on fuelwood in Togo.
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor follows this decolonial perspective to suggest that fieldwork can be a useful
tool in reconfiguring African literary studies. Drawing from the positive reception to her Ghanaian
nationality in Tanzania, she writes that fieldwork can produce possibilities for relocating Africa in
Introduction
3
African studies by centring the lived experiences of interlocutors. Her paper asserts an ethical
responsibility of researchers towards their interlocutors to produce knowledge that is
collaboratively drawn, seeing the field not only as a site of data extraction but also of theorization
and intellectual knowledge production. Her paper also reveals a complicated relationship with
her institution based in the west which was received negatively by her interlocutors as a process
of re-colonisation.
The role of the institution plays a significant role in the field as Anna Madeleine Ayeh suggests in
a different vein through the lens of social anthropology. Ayeh’s paper critically uses the theoretical
concepts of intersectionality and un/doing differences to reflect upon her experience doing field
work with two young children in Benin as well as the structural problems of funding within the
institutions for mothers. From her field experience in Benin, as a white non-Muslim mother
researching on practices of religious learning and knowing among Muslim women and girls, she
finds that shifts in positionings may reinforce or disrupt difference or belonging. For instance,
becoming a mother reconfigured her relationships in the field, some unexpectedly. In addition,
she also points out that both legal and regulatory stipulations in German academic institutions
and current funding schemes do not offer female researchers enough support in mothering and
childcare when doing fieldwork abroad, hindering the researchers’ engagement in the field
accompanied by young children.
Alhassane A. Najoum’s paper from the discipline of anthropology traces the influence of the
institution differently, vividly describing how his positionality and status varied with different
interlocuters and situations with a blurry, delicate and dynamic line between insider and outsider.
As a single unmarried young man affiliated with an institution in the global north doing research
in Niger about divorce, his gender, age, marital status, personality and place of residence impacted
his access to and collection of data and his own living experience. His paper shows the need of
going beyond the insider/outsider dichotomy and rather focusing on the intersecting and complex
dynamics among different factors and labels, which will generate more methodological rigors in
formation of a space of trust.
Mingqing Yuan’s brings a perspective not previously considered in any of the articles, and one that
is severely underrepresented among scholars of Asian descent in African studies. From her
disciplinary background of English literature, she narrates her experience in Nairobi as a Chinese
national interacting with both Kenyans and members of the Chinese diaspora. Through the lenses
of reflexivity and performativity, she interrogates how categories of identity featured and played
out in her relationships with her interlocutors. Her paper recounts regrets, mistakes and missed
opportunities to reflect the tensions within negotiating and constructing positionality.
The fluidity and tensions revealed through the dichotomy of insider/outsider perspectives when
reflecting upon positionality is explored by Oladapo Ajayi in his paper which traces his experience
doing fieldwork on Fuji music in Yoruba and Nigerian urban spaces. Ajayi reflects upon the new
opportunities, ideas and positions that emerge through the field, emphasising fieldwork as a
profitable exercise for a researcher irrespective of the researcher’s disciplinary leanings.
While the decision to publish this issue of BIGSASworks! drew from discussions of Junior Fellows
working on African literature within the BIGSAS Reading Literary Texts Workgroup, further
conversations with Hanza Diman from history prompted the issue’s multidisciplinary focus which
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expanded to include papers from anthropology. This multidisciplinary focus foregrounds the
importance of fieldwork to African Studies as a whole. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it has
become even more essential to reflect upon the nature of fieldwork in the research process as
travel is halted and engagement with the field takes on changing faces such as virtual meetings
with interlocutors. This issue provides original and critical perspectives on fieldwork experiences
in relation to Africa and the authors add their voices to this timely debate.
2 References
Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and
Violence Against Women of Color. In: Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241-1299.
Davies, Charlotte A. (2008). Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others
(2nd ed.). London, Routledge.
Haraway, Donna J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York,
Milton Park, Routledge.
McDowell, Linda (1992). Doing Gender: Feminism, Feminists and Research Methods in Human
Geography. In: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 17(4): 399-416.
Madge, Clare (1993). Boundary Disputes: Comments on Sidaway (1992). In: Area 25(3): 294-299.
Malkki, Liisa H. (2007). Tradition and Improvisation in Ethnographic Field Research. In:
Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork. Cerwonka, Allaine
& Malkki, Liisa H. (eds.). Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 162-187.
Oppen, Achim von (2003). Bounding Villages: The Enclosure of Locality in Central Africa, 1890s
to 1990s. Habilitation Thesis, Humboldt University, Berlin.
Pink, Sarah (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore,
Sage.
Using Oral History to Research
Fuelwood Energy in Togo
Some Experiences from the Field
Hanza Diman
1 Introduction
One of the main aims of the butanisation program, supported by the Togolese state (Barandao et
al. 1992)1 and operationalised by Shell and Total from the 1980s onwards, was to reduce the
centuries-old hegemony of fuelwood (firewood and charcoal), which remains the predominant
domestic cooking fuel, especially in urban areas like Lome. The evidence that less than 5% of
private domestic energy use in Togo is currently met with liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)
represents a failure of the butanisation program, while reinforcing the traditional predominance
of firewood and charcoal as a domestic cooking fuel in Lome that began before Togo’s
independence in 1960 (Système d’Information Energétique du Togo 2009; SOFRECO 2011; M’ba
2014).
This long-established relevance of fuelwood lays the foundation of my ongoing dissertation.2 For
the dissertation, I conducted three fieldworks in the German colonial archives based in Berlin-
Lichterfelde, in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM) located in Aix-en-Provence (France)
and Archives Nationales du Togo in Lome (Togo) in search for written primary sources that would
offer historical insights into the multifarious transformations related to the supply and use of
1 The Togolese state supported this program through tax exemption to Shell and Total in the first half of the 1980s.
2 The thesis is currently entitled “Wood for the Kitchen: Towards a History of the Supply and Use of Fuelwood in Urban Areas of West Africa: The case of Lome (1907-2017)”.
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fuelwood over the last few decades in Lome. These archival fieldworks revealed that fuelwood has
received only marginal attention in the bulk of colonial files. This data paucity substantially limits
the potential insights into the situation of fuelwood as a private domestic fuel for cooking in
colonial Togo, and Lome in particular. However, some post-independence documents (mostly
reports dating back to the 1980s onwards)3 were found scattered across the premises of various
state entities, 4 and non-governmental organisations, which offered some glimpses into the
fuelwood issue for the last four decades in Lome. If these documents, for instance, help to trace
the beginning of the shift from firewood to charcoal back to the early 1980s (see Barbaud 1980;
Bertrand 1987; Thiam 1991), they also generate some narratives that can no longer be taken for
granted. In this article, I draw on the above experiences with both colonial and post-independence
records and the subsequent arguments for and against an oral history approach to showcase how
it has been crucial in helping to compensate for gaps in data, re-adjust and critically engage with
some assumptions that are taken for granted in the current literature on fuelwood in Togo, and
integrate actors’ views into the research project. Triangulating written primary and secondary
sources, oral historical interviews, and active and passive field observations has significantly
contributed to a better understanding of the fuelwood issue, especially in Lome and other relevant
areas of the study, as will be shown with examples throughout the article. The remainder of the
article is structured as follows. The first section takes a cursory glance at oral history by briefly
emphasising how the approach is appreciated within historical scholarship in a broader sense.
The second section presents how the approach has been employed in the field. Some illustrations
selected from the findings legitimise the relevance of oral history in the particular case of my
research on fuelwood.
2 Insights into Oral History as Research Approach
The aim of this section is not to provide an extensive review of what is already known about oral
history given that this task has been admirably performed in the existing works on the subject.5
However, it is useful to note that the second half of the 20th century marked the gradual re-
emergence of oral history as a sophisticated and reliable approach for historical data collection
and analysis (Perks & Thomson 2006). Though champions of oral history may all agree on its main
feature, i.e. (taped or written) interaction between at least two persons on specific historical
happenings, its definition based on the vast existing literature is somewhat more vexing and
challenging than one may expect. This is due to the multiple ways that scholars dealt with the term.
Consequently, different meanings have been given to the term, varying from one scholar to
another (Dillard 2018). With that in mind, Donald Ritchie’s definition is, rightly, acknowledged as
3 For instance, Barbaud, Pierre (1980). Mission d’Évaluation des Projets Forestiers Envisagés par le Gouvernement Togolais. Fonds d’Aide et de la Coopération de la République
Française. Les Problèmes Forestiers de la République Togolaise. Nogent-sur-Marne, Centre Technique Forestier Tropical ; Bertrand, Alain (1987). Marchés Loméens des Produits
Forestiers et Commercialisation des Productions du Projet AFRI, 1ère Partie, Rapport de Synthèse. République du Togo. Office National de Développement et d’Exploitation des
Ressources Forestières (ODEF). Nogent-sur-Marne, Centre Technique Forestier Tropical ; M’ba, Djassah (2014). Étude sur les Méthodes de Consommation du Bois-Énergie et de
l'Utilisation de Foyers Economiques. Ministère de l'Environnement et des Ressources Forestières. Direction des Ressources Forestières. Lome ; Thiam, Alioune T. (1991). Étude de
Marchés des Produits Ligneux au Togo. République Togolaise. Ministère du Développement Rural. Organisation des Nations-Unies pour l’Alimentation et l’Agriculture. Lome.
4 For example, Office de Développement et d’Exploitation des Forêts (ODEF), Direction des Ressources Forestières (DRF) ; Direction Générale de l’Énergie (DGE) Ministere de
l’Environment, du Développement Durable et de la Protection de la Nature (MEDDPN).
5 Important works in this regard include Thompson, Paul (2000). The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3rd ed.). Oxford, Oxford University Press. ; Ritchie, Donald A. (2015). Doing
Oral History (3rd ed.). New York, Oxford University Press.
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Hanza Diman: Using Oral History to Research Fuelwood Energy in Togo
one of the most concise and “expansive” meanings given to the concept (ibid.) He notes that oral
history gathers “memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded
interviews” (Ritchie 2015:1). Further, he clarifies:
An oral history interview generally consists of a well-prepared interviewer
questioning an interviewee in audio or video format. Recordings of the interview are
transcribed, summarized, or indexed and then placed in a library or archives. These
interviews may be used for research or excerpted in a publication, radio or video
documentary, museum exhibition, dramatization, or other form of public
presentation (ibid.).
Scholars continue to debate where the demarcation line between oral history and oral traditions
lies. By framing oral traditions as past accounts orally transmitted from one generation of persons
to another, Vansina (1973), one of the pioneering scholars to use the term, notes a clear
discrepancy between oral traditions and other oral sources (see Dillard 2018) such as oral history.
Vansina’s contention that “not all oral sources are oral traditions, but only those which are
reported statements-that is, statements that have been transmitted from one person to another
through the medium of language” (Vansina 1973: 19) sets the clear boundary between oral history
and oral traditions. However, Bailey’s work on the transatlantic trade and its subsequent social
and economic consequences among Anlo of eastern Ghana reconsiders the tie between both
approaches (Bailey 2005; Dillard 2018). One of the points clearly made in Bailey’s research as
prominently summarised by Dillard (2018: 4) is “the extent to which traumatic events could
reflect oral tradition and oral history.” This view somehow balances the distinction Vansina
claimed between oral history and oral traditions.
Furthermore, following its “renaissance” after the Second World war (Perks & Thomson 2006)
and its relevance as a qualified historical research tool, oral history triggered epistemological
clashes within historical scholarship. On one side, conservative documentary historians of
positivist obedience deny any legitimacy and capacity to oral history as an historical research
approach (Perks & Thomson 2006). These critiques recall the unreliability of memory and lack of
objectivity, among other biases, to delegitimise oral history (Cutler 1970; O’Farrell 1979;
Hobsbawm 1995; Summerfield 2004). On the other side, proponents value its strengths in helping
unearth a wealth of facets of past events as experienced and recalled by witnesses (Portelli 1981;
Thompson 2000; Mbaye 2004). The testimonies from oral historical interactions shed little light
on events while informing about the meanings and hidden facets of those events (Portelli 1981).
Though this article pays particular attention to these divergent positions, it transcends their
epistemic scope by reckoning that the only way to judge the pertinence or illegitimacy of oral
history should lie in decentring the debate on this approach from a theoretical and abstract
epistemological conflict focus to a more practical one. The article does so by testing the capacity
of oral history through two fieldworks conducted from 1 August to 2 October 2015, and 1
February to 1 May 2016 in Togo. The next section sheds light on how I have applied oral history
to generate my research data.
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3 Clearing the Site
As Ritchie (2015: 1) notes, one of the key requirements of an oral historical interview is its “well-
preparation” in advance. This, in fact, merely means that the oral history users should carry out
beforehand an in-depth primary and secondary study which in turn will allow them to reflect on
potential questions for the interview. Following this recommendation, the preparatory work in
this research has consisted of a review of the state of the existing secondary literature on fuelwood
in Togo followed by two major archival investigations. In addition to this, two months of
preliminary fieldwork have been conducted aimed at deepening the archival data collection in the
research area itself and establishing contact with different actors involved in the production,
transformation, marketing, and use of fuelwood at the macro (state) and micro (private) levels.
The role of research assistants was immensely helpful at this preliminary but crucial stage as they
liaised between me and my target groups (namely producers, marketers, and users of fuelwood).
This helped to introduce the objectives of my study, to interact with my research partners on the
subject, to conduct unrecorded and spontaneous interviews, and to take notes of what was said
and could be observed. The unrecorded and spontaneous interviews as deployed in my case
appear to be tantamount to what Dillard (2018: 6) refers to as “pre-interview,” which help to
(re)think about, frame, and reframe the types of questions to pose afterwards. Despite this
similarity, my understanding of and experiences of the “unrecorded and spontaneous interviews”
go a step beyond Dillard’s label. For “pre-interview” as put by Dillard can be construed as a type
of preparation conducted by the oral historical interviewer before meeting the person who is
going to be interviewed. Should or can a “pre-interview” be recorded? Perhaps yes or maybe not.
Dillard does not elaborate further on what she means by “pre-interview” and what it encompasses
in practical terms and concrete settings. In contrast to a “pre-interview”, an “unrecorded and
spontaneous interview” as used and labelled in my case is characterised by its spontaneous nature,
thereby assuring its authenticity. The “unrecorded and spontaneous interview” arises during the
first interaction between the researcher and the research partner, wherein both discuss the
research subject and potential future interviews. In such a condition, recording using any digital
devices is out of question whereas taking notes has to be negotiated. One of the striking examples
of this kind of interaction has been my first and foremost encounter with, Mr. Sossou (Interview,
Lome, 11 September 2015), a former sales manager at the Office de Dévéloppement et
d’Exploitation des Forêts (ODEF).6 The outcomes of the conversation went largely beyond the
original aim of our encounter, which was to inform him about my project and my intentions to
conduct an interview with him during my second fieldwork in Togo. The insights the former
manager gave into ODEFs’ fuelwood commercialisation since the 1970s challenged the written
documents I accessed before the meeting and helped to reframe some of my research aims,
especially the ones related to the state intervention into fuelwood production and
commercialisation. I could not record the interaction but the notes I took from this unplanned
exchange helped to reformulate some of the questions I discussed afterwards in planned
interview settings.
6 ODEF is a Togolese para-statal institution that produces and commercialises wood and related products. The informal
conversation with the former sale manager in question took place on 11 September 2015 in ODEF’s premises.
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Hanza Diman: Using Oral History to Research Fuelwood Energy in Togo
4 The Interviewees and the Interviewer in the Interview Settings
Having clarified the field, my next step consisted of properly collecting the oral historical
testimonies. Using a qualitative approach, a total of 45 semi-structured interviews (three focus
groups and 42 individual interviews, lasting between one and three hours) were conducted with
users, producers, traders, transporters of fuelwood as well as unionists and state officials in Lome,
Notsé and its outskirts, Tsévié, Atakpamé, and Guérin-Kouka. The interviews were both conducted
in Mina, Ewe and French. 7 The group conversations conducted in Bassar have required a
translation provided by my research assistants. With the authorisations of my research partners
a great share of these interviews could be recorded, whereas in some cases my interlocutors only
allowed me to take notes of our discussions.
Besides interviews, field observation (passive and active) is well acknowledged as an important
qualitative tool the researcher can deploy to watch and collect data on how social groups act, react,
and interact regarding a specific social issue in a particular social context (Hennink et al. 2011). It
aims at, as Mays and Pope (1995: 182) note, to “watching and recording what people do and say”.
The types of observation (participant or non-participant), the social settings and the people, the
topic, and the observation tool employed, all may determine the strengths as well as the
constraints of the data that emerge from the observation process (Kawulich 2005; Hennink et al.
2011). Building upon the short insight previously given on this approach, observation in this study
has consisted of sharing some middays with fuelwood traders at markets or some evenings with
users at their courtyards as my interviewees were interested in interacting with me on my
research object. My informal sessions with the traders, on the other hand, aimed at assisting them
and observing how they interacted with their clients and their market mates. With the users this
kind of visit afforded me with first-hand experience of certain practices and allowed me to link
those practices with the oral historical narratives that emerged from our more ‘formal’ interviews.
It was not always a passive observation with a researcher taking notes of what was and could be
observed, or an active observation (Kawulich 2005; Hennink et al. 2011) through which the
researcher participates actively in the observation process. Rather, a combination of the two was
used depending on the contexts and the settings. In some instances, like the market, it happened
very often that a trader allowed me to participate in the marketing of fuelwood by asking me to
serve some clients. In these cases, though my original objective might be to observe the process
and the trader-client interaction, I found myself taking an active part in the process. However,
some other contexts imposed passivity, to observe and report how the relationships between
users and traders, or between traders and traders, were negotiated at markets. Passive and or
active participant observation was also conducted with charcoal producers and the degree of my
involvement depended mainly on the circumstance. In some cases, I was introduced to the process
of charcoal production (see. Photograph 3) whereas in some instances I was asked to experience
the transformation of wood into charcoal myself as illustrated on photographs 1& 2.
7 The two languages are spoken respectively in Lome, Notsé and Tsevié.
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On the one hand, the notes compiled from these experiences completed the narratives generated
from oral historical interviews; on the other hand, they also expanded the scope of the discourses
and shed more light on aspects related to, for instance, the techniques of charcoal production that
could not be sufficiently captured during the interviews. Taken together, these experiences
somehow perfectly epitomise the strengths of oral history advocated by Portelli (1981: 99) when
he contends that oral historical narratives usually illuminate “unknown aspects of known events”.
The gains from some participant observations helped in many ways to add or restructure some of
the questions addressed to my different target groups. This remarkable contribution of field
observation (both passive and active) to this research challenges the lack of attention given to this
research tool – not to say its full exclusion – within the existing literature on oral history.
Therefore, arguing for the inclusion of field observation as a crucial component of oral history
seems to be a necessity.
Photograph 3: Group interview in Guerin Kouka
Photograph taken on 17 April 2016 by research
assistant who wants to remain anonymous
Photographs 1& 2: Researcher participating in charcoal production in Guerin Kouka
Photographs taken on 17 April 2016 by research assistant who wants to remain anonymous
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Hanza Diman: Using Oral History to Research Fuelwood Energy in Togo
5 The Oral Historical Data, and then what?
Finally, the oral historical data that resulted from both fieldworks have been evaluated and
analysed. This, in fact, consisted of (re)reading the field notes as well as listening to the collected
interviews, coding, and transcribing them based on the research questions that guided the whole
process of field data generation. Since oral historical approach used in this research is embedded
in the qualitative approach of collecting data, the analysis of those data needs to follow the existing
tenets of analytically dealing with qualitative materials. However, there are no sharply defined
“rules” of how a qualitative data should be analysed but rather a set of various approaches
available to the researcher (Bryman 2012). These approaches vary from the “grounded theory”,
to the narrative analysis, and the thematic approach to just mention the three. In the particular
case of my research, the wealth of the oral historical data has been analysed using the thematic
approach. The rationale of resorting to this approach resided in the fact that my research
questions and the outcomes of both literature review and the archival research helped beforehand
to organise the semi-structured interviews around some specific themes. While evaluating the
interviews and considering the field notes, additional themes related to the research topic had
been identified. Given that the data collection itself had been structured around the research
questions such as changes regarding the production, marketing, and use for example, the use of
the thematic approach to analyse the generated data helped to easily relate directly the
respondents’ answers to those questions.
Furthermore, using the oral historical approach to generate data and applying the thematic data
analysis approach provided substantial gains to this research. Some of these concerned, for
instance, practices such as the use of coconut shells as domestic burning materials in Lome in the
colonial period and early 1960s as briefly revealed by Mr. Hounfo (Interview, Lome, 15 February
2016) and confirmed by Ms. Avedjignonnou (Interview, Lome, 19 March 2016). The triangulation
of this information – captured from the oral historical discussion – with primary and secondary
sources helped to note the economic relevance of coconut trees in areas such as Lome in the
colonial period and more importantly the usage of dried coconut shells as a crucial
complementary domestic burning material to firewood some decades ago. This revelation allows
me to argue that the first transition operated by fuelwood users was not the shift from firewood
to charcoal but rather from the coconut shells to firewood as the consequence of the decrease of
the copra trade from the end of the 1950s onwards. As such, oral history has significantly provided
the entry point into an important aspect, so far marginalised, within the discourse on fuelwood
transition in Lome. Equally, the use of oral history has also been central to critically explain some
well-established assertions such as the role of women as primary actors in the fuelwood
marketing realm and in the charcoal making domain, as has been largely taken for granted in the
existing documentation on fuelwood in Togo (Thiam 1991; DGE 2007). The oral historical
accounts given by the interview partners have helped to readjust and contextualise the gender
dynamics within both fields by highlighting some changes that are neglected in the body of studies
available on the topic.
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6 Conclusion
The use of oral history as a research approach has received broad acceptance among historians.
The divergent views pertaining to oral history, though abstract, are extremely valuable and thus
deserve as much consideration as possible. However, historians and history students cannot judge
the legitimacy or inaccuracy of this approach without testing oral history in a practical fieldwork
setting. I comply with the previous observation by employing oral history for fieldwork on my
dissertation on fuelwood in Togo, and Lome in particular. Whereas colonial files lack data on
fuelwood in Togo, the oral history has helped, for instance, to determine the importance of
coconut shells as a burning material in Lome from the colonial period until the late 1950s when
there was a significant decline in the copra trade. The use of oral history has also helped generate
narratives that challenge accounts found in written documents addressing, for example, Togolese
state intervention into the production and commercialisation of fuelwood. Equally, oral historical
narratives that emerged from my interactions with charcoal producers, for instance, help nuance
the well-established assertion found in the grey literature on fuelwood in Togo and in which
women are presented as the primary actors involved in charcoal making. Taken together these
few illustrations testify to the capacity and utility of oral history as a valid research approach that
historians can rely on as it can be utilised to open new venues for historical investigation, question
and nuance some well-established assertions, fill gaps in written sources, and provide extensive
explanations for issues that are insufficiently addressed in written documentation. However,
when using this approach in field research, historians will only gain benefit from it if they pay
serious attention to its weaknesses as revealed by those who vehemently deny legitimacy to oral
history.
7 References
Bailey, Anne C. (2005). African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the
Shame. Boston, Beacon Press.
Barandao, Debo-K’mba et al. (1992). Étude sur l’Utilisation d’Énergie Domestique et Artisanales
au Togo et Propositions de Programmes d’Économie d’Énergie d’Origine Ligneuse. Projet
PNUD/FAO/TOG/86/008/ Ministère du Développement Rural, Programme des Nations Unies
pour le Développment, Organisation des Nations Unies pour l’Alimentation et l’Agriculture.
Lome.
Barbaud, Pierre (1980). Mission d’Évaluation des Projets Forestiers Envisagés par le
Gouvernement Togolais. Fonds d’Aide et de la Coopération de la République Française. Les
Problèmes Forestiers de la République Togolaise. Nogent-sur-Marne, Centre Technique
Forestier Tropical.
Bertrand, Alain (1987). Marchés Loméens des Produits Forestiers et Commercialisation des
Productions du Projet AFRI, 1ère Partie, Rapport de Synthèse. République du Togo. Office
National de Développement et d’Exploitation des Ressources Forestières (ODEF). Nogent-sur-
Marne, Centre Technique Forestier Tropical.
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Hanza Diman: Using Oral History to Research Fuelwood Energy in Togo
Bryman, Alan (2012). Social Research Methods (4th ed.). New York, Oxford University Press.
Cutler, William W. (1970). Accuracy in Oral History Interviewing. In: Historical Methods
Newsletter, 3(3): 1-7.
DGE (2007). Enquête Consommation des Énergies Domestiques au Togo, Rapport Général
Provisoire. République du Togo. Direction Générale de l’Énergie. Lome
Dillard, Mary (2018). Oral History and Life History as Sources. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia
of African History.
Hennink, Monique M. et al. (2011). Qualitative Research Methods. Los Angeles, Sage.
Hobsbawm, Eric. (1998). On History. New York, The New Press.
Kawulich, Barbara B. (2005). Participant Observation as a Data Collection Method. In: Forum
Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 6(2), Art 34, http://nbn-
resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0502430 (accessed 19.03.2020).
Mays, Nicholas & Pope, Catherine (1995). Qualitative Research: Observational Methods in Health
Care Settings. In: BMJ 311: 182-184.
M’ba, Djassah (2014). Étude sur les Méthodes de Consommation du Bois-Énergie et de l'Utilisation
de Foyers Economiques. Ministère de l'Environnement et des Ressources Forestières.
Direction des Ressources Forestières. Lome.
Mbaye, Saliou (2004). Sources de l’Histoire Africaine aux XIXe et XXe Siècles. In: Bibliothèque de
l'École des Chartes. 162(2): 483-496.
O’Farrell, Patrick (1979). Oral History: Facts and Fiction. In: Quadrant, 23(148): 4-9.
Perks, Robert & Thomson, Alistair (2015). The Oral History Reader(3rd ed.). London, Routledge.
Portelli, Alessandro (1981). The Peculiarities of Oral History. In: History Workshop Journal 12(1):
96–107.
Ritchie, Donald A. (2015). Doing Oral History (3rd ed.). New York, Oxford University Press.
SOFRECO (2011). Document de Politique de l’Énergie. Rapport Préliminaire. Politique Nationale
de l'Énergie. Republique Togolaise. Ministère de l'Énergie et des Mines. Lome.
Summerfield, Penny (2004). Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in
Oral History Interviews. In: Cultural and Social History 1(1): 65-93.
Système d’Information Energétique du Togo (2009). Ministère des Mines et de L’Energie du Togo.
Lome.
Thiam, Alioune T. (1991). Étude de Marchés des Produits Ligneux au Togo. République Togolaise.
Ministère du Développement Rural. Organisation des Nations-Unies pour l’Alimentation et
l’Agriculture. Lome.
Thompson, Paul (2000). The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3rd ed.). Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
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Vansina, Jan (1973). Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology. Middlesex, Penguin Books.
List of Interviews
Avedjignonnou. Interview, Lome, 19 March 2016.
Hounfo. Interview, Lome, 15 February 2016.
Sossou. Interview, Lome, 11 September 2015.
Doing Fieldwork while Parenting
Between Methodological Benefits and Institutional
Constraints
Anna Madeleine Ayeh
1 With Children in the Field – A Long Her*story
As early as 1987, Joan Cassell helped to deconstruct the iconic image of the lonesome (male)
anthropologist setting off to the unknown in Malinowskian spirit in order to describe life in the
possibly furthest away corner of the world. She published the edited volume “Children in the
Field” (Cassell 1987), a compilation of reflections by anthropologists who had taken their children
along to do fieldwork. Ever since, a host of experiences have been shared by academics doing
research accompanied by their children, 1 ascribing to them the responsibility of conducting
fieldwork while caring for their children (Braukmann et al. 2020). By focusing on accompanied
researcher-parents,2 I explicitly draw the analytical line not between academic parents and non-
parents, but between those who travel together with their children – and in doing so, sharing the
fieldwork experience with them – and those who embark on their field trips alone. While parents
in academia face particular challenges rooted in academic working culture and organizational
structure that has been labelled as intrinsically non-harmonizing with parenting in general (Alber
2005), I here wish to highlight the specific challenges as well as gains that come with doing long-
term research accompanied by one’s children.3 Further, I centre being a parent because my
interlocutors in Benin very often did. Being perceived as a parent had – irrespective of my
1 I am grateful to PD Dr. Jeannett Martin, who conducted fieldwork with her children in Benin two decades before me,
for her insightful comments on this paper. Further, I am indebted to my colleague Sarah Böllinger for sharing her
experiences as a researcher-parent in Kenya and discussing this paper with me throughout its writing process.
2 In the course of this paper, I at times write “accompanied fieldwork” in order to keep things short. In any case,
“accompanied fieldwork” in the context of this paper always refers to researchers who travel together with their
child(ren), while I acknowledge that there are other forms of accompanied fieldwork, e.g., partners or colleagues
travelling together or researchers travelling with assistants or students.
3 Speaking about the specific challenges of accompanied fieldwork, I am fully aware that parents conducting fieldwork
while leaving their children in their home countries a) do not cease to parent while being in the field and b) face
particular difficulties on their own part, one of which being the possibly long-term separation from their kids (Farrelly
et al. 2014). Their experiences shall not be erased in this paper but put aside for analytical reasons.
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interlocutors’ divergent positionalities and social roles – a surprisingly consistent effect on how I
was perceived and how people interacted with me in Benin. This effect played out in a twofold
way. With reference to motherhood status on the one hand, being perceived of as a mother meant
an upwards shift on the scale of social recognition with all its consequences, i.e. being considered
as a full adult (in an age-hierarchical society), as more serious and respectable etc. With regard to
mothering as a practice and a discourse on the other hand, shared experiences of pregnancy,
birthing, and parenting, worries, joys, fears, knowledge etc. that stem from mothering were
enacted to create proximity, belonging, and a space of shared enthusiasm and vulnerability. This
is already hinting at the different levels and scopes – macro-structural and micro-interactional,
public and private – that mothering is salient in and that will occupy us further in this paper.
Joan Cassell describes fieldwork as a “risk of self”,4 a “profound and emotional experience” (1987:
257-258) that leads us to confront our own background, our preconceptions, and eventually our
inner selves. In this view, doing fieldwork is much more than one of many elements of
anthropological work and career-making, much like teaching, grading student papers, and
organizing conference panels. It should be conceptualized as a highly personal, emotional, and
consuming practice of the self, and as any existential situation it comes with reflection,
introspection, and mental labour. Anthropological field research, then, is a field of academic work
that transcends demands, practices, and organizational principles of other aspects of the job: In
the field, there is often no closing time, boundaries between the public and the private are
oftentimes blurred (e.g., between public, familial and private space or between work and family
time), and demands of adaptation and stepping out of one’s comfort zone are high (which is
feasible for an adult but might be difficult to endure for a toddler). Whereas the university back
home in a lot of cases protects the interests of parents through family-friendly policies (e.g.,
“Familiengerechte Hochschule” at the University of Bayreuth), the field does not know any such
schedule. These are just some reasons why the ideal researcher is still imagined single-travelling
and, much like a blank page in their notebook, ever ready to engage 24/7 with the life of the field.
Accompanied researchers disrupt this normalized image of the single-travelling researcher by
moving together with their child(ren) and sometimes co-parents or other family members who
provide care for the children. Besides exploring the field and establishing research relationships,
researcher-parents engage in the day-to-day care of their children. This leads to a juggling of
needs and requires organizational skills and a well-thought-out care arrangement in the field. Yet
still, the model of accompanied research is not one of deficiencies. Instead, many researchers
stress the methodical and epistemic benefits of doing research accompanied by their children.
One’s own parenthood is often described as a status change beneficial to the work – even more by
those who have entered the same field once without and later accompanied by their own kids and
are therefore able to draw comparisons. It seems to be a shared observation that the presence of
children simplifies access to the field – seemingly irrespective of whether the researcher actively
involves their child(ren) in the process of fieldwork or carefully maintaining boundaries between
research and family life. The mere fact of being labelled a parent seems to have a considerable
door-opening effect.
4 Using the term “risk of self”, she follows Rosalie Wax (1971), who initially titled her book on anthropological fieldwork
“The Risk of Self” before changing it to “Doing Fieldwork: Warnings and Advice”.
Anna Madeleine Ayeh: Doing Fieldwork while Parenting
17
Not only with regard to accessing the field, accompanied anthropological researching yields great
potentials. Children tend to make fieldwork more dialogic, as their presence opens up spaces for
exchange about bearing and raising children. Their presence disrupts the binary of observer and
observed, because the anthropologist and their children and/or partner, their mutual
engagement, housing, transportation, and food will be scrutinized by those around them just like
the researcher and their family are getting to know all these aspects about their new, temporal
home. Research with family facilitates a reverse of gaze, as it exposes the observer in a
configuration of intimate sociality – that to partners and children, as part of a family of one’s own.
This comes with normativity: The accompanied researcher is interacting with “the field” with all
their values, norms, and moralities on board – aspects that the lone travelling anthropologist is
imagined to leave at home when embarking on fieldwork in order to manifest a radical openness
towards their interlocutors’ reasoning, towards the normativity of the field, and towards the logic
behind all the practices they travelled to understand. By entering the field with their children,
accompanied researchers lose control about just how much they want to open their inner selves
towards their interlocutors, entering research relationships from a point of authenticity and
assertion of their own social conditioning. The exchange with research partners becomes dialogic
when talking about and observing each other’s experience of parenting, and feelings of solidarity
and a shared political identity as parents may serve as a basis for mutual understanding. Finally,
one aspect becomes clear when reading through the literature: Accompanied field research within
anthropology is a gendered mode of working. The majority of researchers travelling together with
their children are women; fathers conducting research accompanied by their kids are still an
exception (Krämer 2020, Funk 2020). It turns out that the general entanglement of care work and
paid work for women, and the conflicts that come with it, are translating neatly into the fieldwork
context, while men more often than women chose to leave their children in their home countries
while conducting fieldwork. The story of long-term research with children is a her*story, affecting
women at a much larger proportion than their male colleagues.5 The institutional marginalization
of (women) researcher-parents with their particular needs related to long-term fieldwork is
thereby directly pointing to the political question of gender equality – a highly virulent and timely
question in academia. Recent conferences and new publications as well as the experiences made
during the Corona pandemic6 testify for the heightened need to address this issue.
In this paper, I reflect on my research by exploring how my positioning as a mother informed my
work in Benin as well as its institutional framing at the University of Bayreuth, and how it
interacted with other categories of positioning. The paper thereby adds to anthropological
discourses on knowledge production and to political debates on gender equality within academia.
5 In Joan Cassell’s (1987: 259) edited volume, we find four accounts of men taking their children to the field, all
accompanied by their wives to fully take care of the children while even helping their husbands conducting fieldwork
and typing fieldnotes. In contemporary accounts, those configurations are rarely to be found, suggesting a more evenly
distributed responsibility for wage labour between co-parents and care arrangements that accommodate the careers
of both partners.
6 The effects of the Corona pandemic have been labelled as a rollback to old gender roles (Allmendinger 2020). In the
context of academic publishing, the pandemic is described as harmful to women scientists at a large proportion
(Kitchener 2020).
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Theoretically, I am drawing on:
◼ intersectionality theory because it centres the question of structural power with regard to
multiple entwined positionalities and
◼ the un/doing differences approach because it offers a helpful theoretical outlook on the
making and unmaking of differences in micro-interactions.
2 Researching Muslim Women’s Practices of Religious Knowing in Benin
My PhD project focuses on practices of religious learning and knowing among Muslim women and
girls in Benin. I travelled two times to Benin to conduct research on this topic: First in 2017 for
three months with my then 18 months old child and pregnant with my second child. The second
trip of eight months was together with both of them at ages three years and one year. I can
compare this experience of accompanied fieldwork to three months of research in Benin as a
single-travelling student for my MA research in 2013. During the total of eleven months of
fieldwork for the PhD project, I attended classes, group meetings and informal circles of girls’ and
women’s engagement with Islamic knowledge – namely the knowledge of reading and reciting the
Quran, and cognizance of Islamic legal and historic sources such as ḥadīṯ and sunna. Instructed by
male scholar authorities, male youth and fellow women alike, Muslim women in Benin know a
vast array of different contexts in order to acquire named knowledge and textual skills. They
congregate in mosques, school buildings or the yards of their teachers to work in groups ranging
from highly formalized school settings to intimate neighbourhood circles. Some gather early in
the morning, some in the afternoon, some at night. Modes of knowledge transmission, teaching
and learning practices and the atmosphere of the groups differ starkly depending on the age of
the learners: Children and youth are taught in Quranic schools with clearly defined learning goals
and a hierarchical organization. For women past the age of marriage and first childbirth, the
groups are organized more freely and are less hierarchical concerning the relationship between
instructor and learners. Here, interactions between teachers and learners are much more dialogic
and freer than in the children’s groups. Most adult women’s groups fulfil solidary functions as
well, with members supporting each other in times of sickness, marriage, childbirth, and death.
Some organise communal activities during festive seasons, such as joint excursions to villages
during the holy month of Ramaḍān in order to educate other women on questions of religious
ritual.
Interestingly, there seems to be a life-course related gap in terms of religious learning: Girls
normally complete Quranic schools around their age of marriage, resuming their learning some
years later when their children have outgrown toddler age. This holds especially true for highly
formalized learning settings that women with babies rarely attend. Neighbourhood-based groups,
mainly those headed by women, are much more suitable for mothers to visit alongside their small
children. Different aspects may explain this: First, a female-headed group makes a women-only
space that creates ease for women to breastfeed during the sessions – an act that is deemed
inappropriate within a mosque. Also, some groups are more loosely organized in terms of
curriculum, making space for the close and flexible engagement small children demand. Another
factor is space, with neighbourhood-based groups happening in family closures where smaller
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children can easily move around alongside older children in the private realm of the house while
their mothers are reading the Quran. In general, though, the first years after marriage and having
first children appear to be a phase of intense occupation for women, who are often traders,
characterized by high demands in terms of care work and economic activity. Religious learning, I
argue, has a specific timing as well as specific life-course related functions: During youth, it is
understood to prepare for marriage and parenting, endowing the women with an Islamic morality
to make a good wife and mother. After years of procreation, care work and trouver (“finding”
resources) to provide for the children, women return to the field of religious learning in order to
cultivate their own spiritual selves, to attain knowledge to be passed on to one’s children,7 and to
enjoy community with other women in a highly gendered social context.
3 On Being White,8 Woman, Non-Muslim… Mother – Entwined Axes of
Positionality and Ways of Theorizing Them
Generally speaking, (anthropological) research is grounded in multiple axes of positionality in the
field – that is, of positioning oneself as well as being positioned by others. The researcher’s
positionality impacts how they “see” and construct the field, how they process information and
show up in research relationships. It also informs how people “see” the researcher, what they
share with them and where they take them to. Reflecting on positionality, then, is of major
importance in order to contextualize research findings (Chiseri-Strater 1996: 119). I do this by
drawing on two theoretical approaches, namely intersectionality theory established by Crenshaw
(1989), and the un/doing differences approach by West and Fenstermaker (1995) expanded on
by Hirschauer (2014).9 Timely approaches to human differentiation emanate from two shared
conceptions:
◼ that categories of difference are constructed and not given, and that they are made
(ir)relevant by actors/agents, and
◼ that there is multiple membership to various categories of difference that presents as
overlapping or entangled.
A considerable number of works on the second aspect revolve around the question of how to
imagine this multitude of memberships – e.g., as addition or multiplication, as overlapping circles,
road intersections or hybrid new units.10 Further, different approaches focus on different levels
on which differentiation plays out, such as the structural versus the micro-interactional level.
Finally, the approaches differ in the scale of empiricism they demand.
7 This aspect is central to the discourse of the schools’ founders, and the argument is often expanded to the question of
the future of society in a broad sense. In this view, mothers are understood to be the child’s first teacher. Bestowing
mothers with an Islamic morality in the sense of the respective founders, they would educate the children to be good
Muslims and eventually contribute to a better future for society as a whole.
8 Racial categories in this paper are spelt with capital intial letters to highlight their constructedness.
9 While West & Fenstermaker speak of doing, Hirschauer has added the dimension of the undoing – the ignoring and the
making irrelevant – of differences.
10 For an overview on sociological conceptualizations of multiple belongings see Hirschauer (2014: 175-180).
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Intersectional theory focuses on structural positioning, more precisely (and politically) speaking
on structural discrimination and privileging. This is no surprise considering its origin:
Intersectionality theory stems from the analysis of legal discrimination and yields a stance of
political research-activism. In 1989, American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term
intersectionality, inviting us to imagine one’s social positioning as crystallizing at an intersection
of a number of selected “roads” that represent central categories of discrimination. At the
intersection, these categories do not simply add up, but create specific forms of positioning:
Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it
may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars
travelling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly,
if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result
from sex discrimination or race discrimination (Crenshaw1989: 149).
While in early intersectional analyses, a triad of categories – gender, race, class – took centre stage,
its perspective was subsequently expanded in order to include sexual orientation, (dis)ability, age,
and religion. The discussion around which categories to enclose in an intersectional approach is
ongoing and has theoretical as well as political saliency, as Judith Butler suggests:
Theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of colour, sexuality, ethnicity,
class and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed ‘etc.’ at the end of the
list. Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to
encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. This failure, however,
is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from such exasperated ‘etc.’ that
so often occurs at the end of such lines? (Butler 1990: 143).
The discussion around the “etc.” that usually follows the list of categories made explicit for
intersectional theorizing thereby stands for bigger questions: Which categories are relevant for
intersectional theory? Does intersectional theory need a naming (and therefore focusing, or
limiting) of categories of analysis? Or should it serve as an open perspective that helps to grasp
interwoven – intersecting – dimensions of privileging and discrimination that are per se dynamic
and changing? Broadened approaches to intersectionality that circulate today include body,
attractiveness or beauty, nationality, social background/family/social networks, health, income,
and reproduction/generativity (the latter being important for the context of this paper), analysed
as subjugated to a capitalist logic. Degele and Winker (2007: 4-10) suggest to organize an
intersectional approach by analysing three levels while stressing the need to study all three levels
in their interdependences and co-productions: 1) structure – the capitalist economy that
outsources unpaid care and family work in a gendered way and is characterized by unequal
distribution of/access to resources based on the categories race, gender, class, body; 2) symbolic
representations – the norms, ideologies and representations that confirm the hegemonic status
quo by mobilizing various categories of difference, and 3) identities – the creation of difference
and belonging through mobilizing various categories in order to find community in an insecure
context. The third level put forth by Degele and Winker resonates with Hirschauer’s conception
of un/doing differences: While intersectionality focuses on structural differentiation and
hierarchization as a given, Hirschauer (2014: 181) asks which axes of difference are in force
where and when, and which ones are glossed over, ignored, or made irrelevant – by individuals,
in interpersonal relations, but also by groups, societies or in certain temporal phases. He is
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interested in “ephemeral moment[s] of undecidedness and non-differentiation between the
relevance and irrelevance of social differentiations” (ibid.170), on moments of actualization,
neutralization, biographic and/or historic cycles or trends (ibid.182). He takes on a praxeological
stance on difference, highlighting the importance of doing difference and consequently
introducing the possibility of an undoing – that is a situational dissolving, ignoring, irrelevant-
making – of difference in historical, biographical, or interactional moments. Strongly postulating
the necessity of approaching the question of difference empirically, Hirschauer proposes to
imagine multiple differences not as being simultaneously co-produced (as West & Fenstermaker
1995 argued), but as competing. The interesting question resulting from this approach is, then,
whether (and how) people at a particular moment in time tie in with these differences in/through
micro-interactions, discourses, biographies, techniques etc. (Hischauer 2014: 183).
I propose to combine these two perspectives because both seem relevant in the analyses of
different aspects of difference in this paper and, more broadly, in my research: Intersectionality
theory is putting power structures centre stage and therefore presents as indispensable in the
analysis of a research configuration like my own, whereby I as a White researcher sent by a White
academic institution from the Global North is academically benefitting from the knowledge of
Black interlocutors living in a structurally peripherized country in the Global South. Global power
structures heavily inform this relation in many aspects. Further, doing fieldwork as a White
anthropologist in an African context carries a loaded history: Anthropology was, in its formative
period, tightly entwined with the imperial project of colonialism, and – despite ongoing discourses
and practices that aim at its decolonization – the discipline has not yet fully stripped itself from
researching preliminarily poor, indigenous, and marginalized communities – the “others” –,
leading critiques to see it as a way of having the knowledge of disenfranchised people disbursed
on the anthropologist’s payslip (Arndt 2020). Irrespective of my own intentionality or political
aim, this macrostructure remains at the same time underlying and dominant in the context of my
research endeavour. While acknowledging these macrostructural power imbalances, Hirschauer’s
perspective of un/doing differences gives theoretical fodder to many an experience I had with the
women I worked with – namely that of my interlocutors glancing over, condoning, ignoring, or
openly resisting the expression of differences between us. The shared aspects of mothering were
referenced often in everyday interactions that I propose to theoretically frame as moments of
undoing differences.
4 Amira and I: Expressing Difference and Belonging between Mothers
While researching Quranic schooling in 2013 for my MA thesis, I mingled extensively with youth-
aged Quranic teachers, accompanying them through town and to the football court while sharing
their youth status. Returning to Benin as a married PhD student with my first child and pregnant
with my second, I was considered a fully adult woman and mother, now being addressed by
strangers in French as tata, aunty. Reflecting upon my experience with child(ren) in my research
field, my own motherhood obviously played a role in my relationships, also in those with adult
women in the Quranic learning groups. After-lesson conversations among women who shared
experiences of childbearing and -raising would quickly slip to topics related to mothering: How
are the children doing? What impacts their health? How does one get them to take their malaria
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medicine? Many times, I was asked more questions than I asked. A lot of my interlocutor-mothers
found it exciting to hear about childbirth practices in Europe – something they had heard a lot of
or watched documentaries about. Highly intimate aspects of life swiftly became object of casual
talk and joking in the safe space of a shared experience of being woman and mother. I want to
illustrate the implications of a shared positioning as a mother using the example of my
relationship with Amira – a woman whose race, age group, religious and political affiliation,
class/socio-economic situation, and educational background I do not share.
Amira is an elderly woman in her seventies living in the bustling city centre of Parakou in Northern
Benin. Having been a market woman for the past decades, she attends the market mosque’s
women’s group. Due to her high age and religious proficiency, Amira is respected by her fellow
attendees and is consulted on all kinds of questions concerning the lecture of the Quran. The male
teacher at the school regularly draws on her expertise during classes or asks her to speak to the
group about “women’s issues” such as menstruation that he considers shameful to verbalise
himself. She birthed seven children, all of whom are now grown up. During my research, one of
her daughters, Maïmouna, gave birth. In the following weeks, Amira took me to her room on
several occasions, knowing I was a mother myself. There, we would sit together, Maïmouna with
her baby boy curled up on her chest, discussing what to do against sore nipples from
breastfeeding, and how to find the newest fabric to wear as a uniform to an outdooring. During
these conversations, our communication developed a dialogic dynamic of mutual exchange.
Drawing on a shared experience of mothering, the women allowed me into the private space of
the bedroom, Maïmouna being at ease with me seeing her topless, all giving in to her new role as
supplier-on-demand of breastmilk for her new-born baby, just as I was when coming around with
my baby. Momentarily, Amira and her daughter implied my belonging to the in-group of mothers
whom sweet and traumatic aspects of birthing and mothering could be shared with. Difference
was implied when asking me questions about how giving birth works where I came from. They
had heard that all babies came via caesarean “over there” and were keen on hearing my stance on
this.
I vividly remember how Amira got to know I was a mother. We attended an outdooring together
and as I held the newborn baby and congratulated his mother, I engaged in what in the research
area are common patterns of joking11 – claiming to get married to someone’s child or offering
one’s own child for marriage to someone’s child. So, I said: “one day this sweet boy here will marry
my daughter.” Amira, standing right beside me, was quick to reply: “Ah, he is Black! Can your
daughter marry a Black [person]?”, to which I responded: “Why not? Apart from that, she is Black
herself.” From there, the conversation evolved around the question of her father’s origin, and,
getting to know that he was Ghanaian, Amira exclaimed, excitedly: “Waouh! Then you are one of
us!” I was quite surprised about her reaction. Later, I came to interpret Amira’s statement as an
act of undoing difference: Highlighting my mothering a Black child, and kinship alliance with a
Black Ghanaian family, Amira chose to momentarily ignore my White European identity,
constructing me as “one of them”. In this particular instance, Amira mobilized mothering and
kinship at the expense of race, religion, nationality, and socioeconomics, in order to undo the many
differences that inform our relationship. Bringing intersectionality back in, this situational
11 Joking relationships are well documented in social scientific African studies. For an analysis of joking relationships in
the research region see Schottmann (1998).
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undoing of difference (or: creation of belonging) has absolutely no lessening effect on the
divergence of our structural positioning – and that not just in terms of race, religion, etc., but even
so within our shared identity as mothers: My own mothering differed in many ways from that of
Amira and many other women in Parakou. I did not have to worry about being able to provide
food for my kids. I was able to buy a stack of diapers in a maxi pack instead of buying them piece
by piece (or not buying them at all because they are too much of a luxurious product to afford).
My children had health insurance from the day they were born. I took them to the poolside in
some of Parakou’s hotels once in a while to treat them. My mothering is privileged. There are many
aspects in mothering that could have been mobilized in order to do difference between me and
many of my interlocutors. Interestingly enough – apart from the frequent questions about birthing
practices in Europe – they were never actually mobilized in this way. Mothering, at all times during
my research in Benin, played out as a complex of shared practices, worries, vulnerabilities, and
imaginations that created belonging between me and the women I worked with. It was always
used to undo differences.
5 No Official Trips with Family: Institutional Constraints on Accompanied
Researching
While empirically and methodically, my research projects benefitted largely from the presence of
my children in the field, the organizational, respectively bureaucratic, context of taking them along
posed a number of challenges. I will exemplify these challenges in the following passage by
singling out two aspects:
◼ that of funding the travel and medical costs of my child(ren) and
◼ that of financing childcare in the field.
These are just two out of many challenges that long-term accompanied fieldwork pose for a
researcher which Stolz et al. (2020) in their introductory chapter provide a comprehensive
overview of them all. Some of them are a challenge and require organizational creativity and out-
of-the-box-thinking while some are existential. Often, they result in a temporal and/or financial
disadvantage that can pose a career impediment – especially for women, as I have outlined above.
(Unresolved) questions concerning accompanied fieldwork therefore directly touch on broader
issues of gender equality and policies aiming at supporting families within academia.
First, the financing of travel and medical costs for my children was unclear over long stretches of
time – a fact that generated considerable financial insecurity on my side. Generally speaking, the
reimbursement of field trip costs, including costs for accompanying travellers, depends on the
funding scheme that the overall project financing is subjected to. In my case – as I was then
employed directly by the university (and not, e.g., holding a scholarship or being financed through
third-party funds) – the financing of my field trips was subjugated to Bayerisches
Reisekostengesetz (BayRKG), the Bavarian state law governing official trips of, among others,
university members. BayRKG applies to particular groups of people, as the following translation
of the legal text shows:
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This law regulates the reimbursement of expenses for official trips and official
errands (travel expense reimbursement) of civil servants and judges of the Free State
of Bavaria, civil servants of the municipalities, municipal associations and other
public corporations, institutions and foundations of public law and those officials
delegated to these employers (BayRKG Art. 1 § 1, translation my own).
In consequence, BayRKG is not applicable to people who (have to) travel with the official traveller,
but do not qualify as members of the groups mentioned in the wording of the law – such as
partners, children or childcaring persons travelling with the researcher. Further, the wording of
the law shows that is has been drafted with short-term business trips in mind, leaving some
aspects difficult to apply in the context of long-term fieldwork. Consequently, whereas
researchers who obtain funding by a different organisation, such as the German Research
Association (DFG), may bring the costs for accompanying travellers directly and easily to account,
BayRKG doesn’t offer any such flexibility. I found myself obliged to cover the travelling and
medical costs of one, respectively two, child(ren) travelling with me. With the obviously relatively
small salary of an early career researcher, this posed a substantial financial challenge to me.
Clearly, a law that would provide for the covering of like costs would have to carefully define the
boundary between necessary and unthrifty company of the researcher by family members. This
is mainly a question of the children’s age as well as the care arrangement in place back home and
would have to take the situation of single parents into account – a complex field to draft an
equitable legal framework for. It touches on normative and morally charged questions such as:
When is a child able to be without their parent for, let’s say, six months? Will the answer to this
question be different if we speak about a duration of three months, or one year? Can a
breastfeeding parent be expected to wean their child in order to leave for fieldwork? Can a partner
who would take over the full childcare during the supposed absence of the researching parent be
expected to reduce their hours at their job? Would the law provide for a substitution of the then
temporally reduced salary of this partner? Important to mention here is that travelling costs for
co-travelling children vary immensely depending on their age. While a child below age two travels
to Benin for less than 50 Euros, children above age two pay a full (adult) ticket of about 800 Euros.
Relating this to the large variety in salary between a PhD student with a research assistant
position and a full professor, one starts to imagine how differently the financial load of travelling
with one’s kids impacts families in such different configurations.
Secondly, organizing childcare during anthropological field research can be an equally tricky and
nuanced field to think through. Using my case to exemplify, my graduate school’s funding scheme
had defined that a caretaker would receive the minimum wage of the research country, that is,
Benin. The logic behind this is clear: Researchers are expected to find a suitable person or
institution in their location of research and employ them for childcare, just as they do back home.
Practically, things can be more complex, with language barriers or divergences in pedagogical
practice in place. In my case, the children travelling with me are raised speaking German and Twi
while not mastering any language of the area of my research. Consequently, I recruited a Twi
speaking family member from Ghana for childcare who, for this task, paused their paid work that
had to be substituted, and was in need of travel coverage from Ghana to northern Benin. My
partner was, as the co-parent, legally excluded from receiving funding for carrying out childcare.
Nevertheless, he was oftentimes around to care for the children, travelling at his own costs while
Anna Madeleine Ayeh: Doing Fieldwork while Parenting
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half pausing, half juggling aside his personal career. I personally know several colleagues who
lived the same situation – their partners being there, literally “between the lines” of the forms we
have to fill in order to get our expenses covered, without being able to receive compensation for
the pausing of their occupation for the benefit of their partner’s research projects. In the question
of childcare, similar to the aspect of funding of travel costs, a variety of factors are decisive: again,
the age of the children, also their language proficiency, the availability of a suitable caretaker,
among others. I want to expand on the aspect of normativity here: As Cassell (1987) as well as
Pauli (2020) mention, being in the field accompanied by one’s children leads to a shift of the role
normativity plays in the fieldwork endeavour. While the ideal-type researcher of the
anthropological cultural-relativist imagination is stripped of his normative baggage as much as
only possible, being in the field with one’s children means being in the field with one’s normative
stances (Haug 2020) – with a position towards e.g., what the role and place of children in a
family/community/society is, what boundaries children should experience, if a parent should set
them at all, how and in which activities children should be in- or excluded.12 In field contexts
where parenting common sense is perceived to be differing (in some cases radically) from one’s
own stances, it can be difficult to find a person that one confidently entrusts their children to. In
any case, finding a suitable person to care for one’s children in a fully unknown place can be a
time-consuming endeavour – in a situation where (research) time is tendentially short and
precious. With this aspect in mind, it appears even more necessary that co-parents who are ready
to take over childcare during their partner’s research time become legally eligible to receive
financial recompensation. Further, we know that the availability (and, one might add in the
context of this paper: the affordability) of reliable quality childcare is decisive for parents’ general
health as well as their productivity at work (Borgmann et al. 2019; Juncke et al. 2020) – an
interplay that gained new scientific as well as political attention during the Corona pandemic that
came with the temporal closure of childcare facilities across Europe. Any kind of institutional
investment in good childcare should therefore be seen as a direct input towards the productivity
and wellbeing of its (parent) staff.
6 Conclusion: Which Place for Researching Parents?
Being perceived as a mother informed my positionality “in the field” positively as my family model
corresponded largely to a hegemonic image of family, sexuality, and reproduction in my research
context (cf. Pauli 2020). It mobilized generalized images of a parent being a serious and
responsible person. It facilitated my access, opened up a shared space of belonging between
mothers, thus directly supporting the approach of my project that explicitly focuses on women’s
life worlds. In many situations during participant observation, casual conversations or interviews,
mothering was the ground for my interlocutors to undo difference. Reconnecting my example to
the theorizing on difference, power and privilege discussed above, categories of difference may
12 Think of the famous descriptions by Liedloff ([1975] 1989) being astonished about babies in a Venezuelan Yequana
community playing with sharp knives and at the edge of abysses without any concern, let alone fear, on their parents’
side. Liedloff portrayed Yequana parenting – in a not unproblematic, romanticising manner – as an alternative to a
perceived Western parenting style characterized by overprotectiveness, a timely discourse that is being led under the
buzzword of “helicopter parenting” in Germany.
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produce ambivalent, changing, or even opposite positionings depending on context – resulting in
a privileging in one context and marginalization in the other, and all nuances in between,
depending on the normativities of like contexts. Axes of difference do not necessarily produce
definite positionings in terms of exclusion or inclusion. Rather, positioning is done in many small
interactions. A shift in positioning (such as becoming a mother) may reinforce or disrupt
difference or belonging, allowing people to draw on or withdraw from it.
Within the institutional structure that my work is embedded in, I was quite clearly deferring from
the ideal image of a single-travelling PhD student, with legal regulations doing differences towards
parents who seek to conduct long-term fieldwork accompanied by their children. With access to
resources that could cover medical and travel costs of my children as well as adequate childcare
being (legally) limited, I encountered a situation that produced insecurity and left me with hours
of correspondence that I would have preferred to dedicate to my project. In the end, part of my
expenses could be covered due to interpersonal networks of people at the top of academic
hierarchies, Herrschaftswissen. A structural solution that would provide security for researching
parents in the precarized parts of academia is up to now not in sight. The institutional normativity
rewarding independence from care responsibilities and the field normativity rewarding parenting
status produced diametrically opposed outcomes with regard to my positioning.
Supporting researcher-parents is a way to actively overcome gendered inequality in academia as
well disadvantaging young scientists in precarized contracts. Regulations with a possibly high
flexibility that will work for a variety of family models, travel plans and researching/parenting
configurations are needed – some researchers do brilliant interviews with their kids playing
around, others prefer their kids to stay with a care person while they do interviews. Many
variables from the child(ren)’s age to their language proficiency, rural or urban research setting,
research duration, to mobility play a role. Consequently, a one-fits-all-solution cannot be a feasible
goal for efficient support structures. Researchers with experience in accompanied fieldwork are
experts on these questions and could be consulted and included in the reworking of regulations.13
Researching together with one’s children enriches anthropologic fieldwork in manifold ways.
Returning to Joan Cassell, who called fieldwork a risk of self, she expands further:
In parenting, we also risk ourselves. […] Children are fragile links between our
past and future, fears and hopes. We are doubly at risk, then, when our children
are in the field. In attempting to learn and grow, we risk failure and sorrow, our
own and theirs. In exposing ourselves, we expose them (Cassell1987: 257-258).
In this quote, two aspects of researching with one’s own children are highlighted: First, in taking
our children along, we are exposing them to the field reality, whether they want it or not. Speaking
with Cassell, it means “risking them” alongside risking ourselves – a situation requiring ethical
reflection at its very least. Secondly, it relates field research with parenting more structurally on
the basis of its common characteristics: For Cassell, this common characteristic is the risk, but her
risk is far different from the risks this paper was thematizing. Both parenting and researching are
seen as profound emotional – risky – engagements. I want to take this aspect further by adding
13 This was one of the steps taken by the Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple” at the University of Bayreuth: Following
my return from Benin, the Cluster’s direction gathered a group of researchers who had conducted fieldwork
accompanied by their children, including myself, and included our expertise in the reform process of their travel and
childcare funding scheme.
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that researching and parenting are closely related by processes of critical reflection, questioning
of norms, and a quest to invest in one’s ability to form meaningful interpersonal relationships
through empathetic communication. Expanding on this, the “risking of self” becomes an epistemic
tool to open one’s perspective towards people we seek to closely connect to, but are separated
from by differences: our children, and our interlocutors.
7 References
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Kind: Erfahrungsberichte von Wissenschaftlerinnen. Biller-Andorno, Nicola et al. (eds.).
Frankfurta.M., Campus: 41-50.
Allmendinger, Jutta (2020). Zurück in alte Rollen. Corona bedroht die Geschlechtergerechtigkeit.
WZB Mitteilungen 168. Berlin, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung: 45-47.
Arndt,
Susan
(2020).
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37.
The Challenges of Fieldwork “at
Home” While Doing a PhD in Germany
"Insider" and "Outsider" Positionalities of a Single
Researcher
Alhassane A. Najoum
1 Introduction
How does an African doctoral student in Germany negotiate his "insider" and "outsider"
positionalities by researching a Muslim society? This reflexive question could be framed in several
other contexts to not only remind ethnographers about addressing the objectivity-subjectivity
questions in doing social science research but also the challenges one encounters and the
transparent methods of dealing with such. For instance, can an unmarried, single man study
divorce without raising suspicion due to his marital status? Can a man research married women
without being suspected by their husbands? Can an African researcher, affiliated to a university
in the Global North, in a country associated with Christianity, study Muslims in an African country
without being accused of being a “black skin, white head” – spy in the service of “white people”?
Can a Muslim anthropologist critically study other Muslims without being called a disbeliever?
These are some questions directly related to the concepts of “insider” and “outsider” and
“studying at home” which will be discussed in this article.
What does “insider” or “outsider” mean? Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries defines the concept of
insider as “a person who knows a lot about a group or an organization, because they are part of
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BIGSASworks! 10
it.”1 The same dictionary defines an outsider among others as a “person who is not part of a
particular organization or profession.” 2 The classic debates in anthropology or qualitative
sociology on these positions suppose that they could not be gathered by the same researcher. A
researcher can only be one or the other, but each of these positions has advantages and
disadvantages in field research (Merriam et al. 2001). This is probably why studies on women or
those related to gender in general seem to be undertaken by women more than men. In academia,
my observations show that men seem less interested in gender issues because they may qualify
as the outsiders of this theme. It is known that women have a deep interest, or they are more likely
to orient themselves towards issues considered to be female (Échard et al. 1991). Little is known,
however, about men who study subjects considered to be “the preserve” of women. The
implications of sex, gender, marital status and place of residence of anthropologists in interaction
with their research participants’ gender, marital status and positionality in a heterogeneous
global world order have not received much scholarly attention, not only on the impact of these
positionalities on the relationships they establish with their informants but also, to the
methodological challenges that it poses.
Drawing from my ethnographic research experiences on conjugal alliances and breakdowns in
Niamey, which was part of my PhD project, I show, in this article, how a researcher can be both an
insider and outsider in the study population. The focus of the paper is how to negotiate one’s
gender, marital status and place of residence while doing ethnographic research. In doing so, the
article thus goes beyond the question of gender and marital status to also explore the questions
of power and reflexivity of anthropologists who study their “own” society, their “own” culture
(insider) vis-à-vis the challenges that they live and study outside their cultural boundaries
(outsider). The article also elucidates the challenges encountered during data collection, to show
how, in the midst of these positions and challenges, the author negotiates many complexities with
or without success. It shows how the author’s personality and his own status are linked in
different ways to the field research process and how he was accepted or shut out by his
informants, despite the fact that he is of the same nationality, speaks the same language, has the
same accent and skin color as his informants.
The article first provides a brief overview of how data is collected in anthropology, followed by a
section that deals with questions of the relationship between researcher and research
participants. Being a single Nigerien man, I was considered by many of my research participants
as someone who differs from an ordinary Nigerien. In the third and fourth sections, I discuss the
advantages and disadvantages of some of the statuses I carried, such as marital status and that of
a doctoral student based at a university in Germany, in the context of the social environment of
my study. The fifth section of this article is centered on questions of ethics posed by my
informants, to measure the degree of my “loyalty” to my society of origin (Niger) vis-à-vis my
“integration” into my place of residence (Germany).
1 https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/insider?q=insider, last accessed on November 1,
2019.
2 https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/outsider?q=outsider, last accessed on November 1,
2019.
Alhassane A. Najoum: The Challenges of Fieldwork ‘at Home’ while Doing a PhD in Germany
31
2 Fieldwork Encounters
The question of a researcher’s relationships to the field (in forms of practical, ethical and
emotional dimensions) is not only a question of academic exercise but also an important way of
life or of contact with informants. In this relationship, the researcher can face challenges linked to
identity, ethics or even freedom of criticism (Legrand & Gutron 2016). Apart from the personality,
sex, gender, worldview and personal experiences of a researcher – which can influence their
research work (Sepp 2012) – in field research, the role and position of the anthropologist varies
from place to place, from person to person, from context to context, etc. (Frauenfelder et al. 2018).
Thus, the way of interacting with respondents can constantly change. In order to build or maintain
cordial relations, the rules of the game between researchers and their informants are constantly
defined and redefined (Wax [1971] 1986). In social anthropology, one of the best means which
enables researchers to collect data is to reconcile their status, to reconcile both proximity and
distance, thus, to find a “trick”, even a “tricker” or “finesse” to deal with difficult situations in the
field (Diawara et al. 2006). Therefore, recent debates on the concepts of insider and outsider show
that there is an inherent complexity in each of the statuses and/or personality that a researcher
might have. As a result, the boundaries between researcher’s positions are not clearly defined or
delimited. There is back and forth and a certain fluidity between these statuses (Merriam et al.
2001).
Nevertheless, the degree of researchers’ participation or acceptance by the informants can depend
on their origins, culture, belief, etc. as compared to those of the informants. Ayimpam et al. (2014)
have shown that one of the first challenges in field work is intercultural tension, which researchers
are not only supposed to be aware of but also be capable of resolving it by managing relationships
through distance and proximity in their daily interactions with informants as much as possible.
The degree of complexity in managing these relationships may depend on how the researcher’s
position is viewed as insider or outsider by the research participants (Lichterman 2017; Benelli
2011). Regardless of whether the researcher hails from the study society or not, an in-depth field
research requires a serious and constructive organization including linguistic, social, political, and
economic aspects. To do this, it is essential to create a large circle of research participants who
can become collaborators or coworkers (Spittler 2006). Most of the existing literature dealing
with the challenges of fieldwork neglects the gender relationship between the researcher and
respondents. The little literature explicitly scrutinizing gender relations during fieldwork are
generally written by female researchers. This contribution aims to show how, in addition to the
researcher's gender or origin in relation to the respondents, age and marital status positively or
negatively influence the relationship between researchers and informants. It also aims to show
that researchers may well be insider and outsider of their study population because they are local
by birth but dwelling abroad.
The research on which this article is based on was conducted in Niamey, the capital of Niger
between 2016 and 2018 as part of a PhD project in social anthropology. The main research sites
were institutions involved in conjugal alliances and breakdowns, specifically families, religious
organizations and state agencies. This article is based on my personal experiences as a researcher,
which would not have been possible without the data collection techniques I used which was
participant observation complemented by interviews and discussions. These observations and
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conversations were carried out with (un)married and divorced women and men, their parents
and other important actors in the field of conjugal breakdowns and divorce.
3 “Doing Fieldwork Means Getting Married”: Challenges Related to Marital
Status
In Niger, as in many other places in Africa and elsewhere, there are social pressures on both
women and men related to marriage and/or living as a couple, as well as singles or without
partners. Parents at home, colleagues at work, and friends during hours of outdoor relaxation
often tease and joke about single people. By reminding one that he or she has aged is a way of
mocking one’s marital status, specifically singlehood. Psychological management of pressure in
the form of a reminder, is certainly not without consequences for the collection and production of
knowledge. Marriage which is synonymous with adulthood for Nigeriens is strongly linked to
religious and social status of people (Masquelier & Soares 2016). Thus, my colleagues, friends, and
research participants repeatedly commented on my marital status during the fieldwork. Higher
status or social prestige and availability of a marriageable partner are among other reasons that
people (colleagues, friends, relatives, etc.) used to refute any personal reasons I may have for not
being married at my age. For example, it was recurrent that colleagues and friends told me in
Hausa: “A gaida mantala!” when I was leaving them after our tea-time talks, which means “Say
hello to the mattress” . They said that to mock me for sleeping alone. Ordinarily, they would tell a
married man to greet “madam” when he goes home. The fact that they say “mattress” instead of
“madam” comes from the fact that I am single. Unlike in the context of the Global North where
premarital intimacy is seemingly not a “big deal”, in Niger, it is frowned upon because it is viewed
as a contravention of the social norms.
Others use the famous expression of the French humanist writer François Rabelais (1532: 42),
“Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme”3 to remind people like me of the moral obligation
to marry and start a family. In doing so, one could take advantage of the knowledge acquired in
the science of culture. However, this type of reminder does not happen only in Niamey. Back in
Bayreuth, Germany, several African doctoral colleagues (men and women) often said to me “Le
terrain, c’est le mariage”,4 when I was preparing to go to the fieldwork for collecting data and or
when I was back. The fact that PhD students living in Europe or even lecturers in cultural sciences
have affirmed this, may come from the fact that they were socialized in the same context or in a
context similar to the one where I conducted my empirical research. In the eyes of some of them,
not being married at this level (Nigerien, PhD student in Europe) can be considered “catastrophic”
to use the term of a young African who began his doctoral studies in Germany. Marriage is
undeniably important in Muslim, Christian, or other societies. The objective of this article is far
from wanting to call this into question, but it is about how that can be an important aspect of
knowledge generation for a man, a woman or other who decides to study marriage and/or divorce
while being single.
3 “Science without conscience is only ruin of the soul” (my translation).
4 “Doing fieldwork means getting married”.
Alhassane A. Najoum: The Challenges of Fieldwork ‘at Home’ while Doing a PhD in Germany
33
In Niamey as in Bayreuth, my informants or my colleagues often asked me the same question:
“Why did you choose to work on divorce when you are not even married?” They, therefore,
regarded me as an outsider of issues related to marriage. Some even laughed at the thought that
I, as an outsider of the matters of marriage, would choose to study divorce. I constantly reflected
on this experience, reformulating the question to myself: why do I have to be married or divorced
before studying marital issues? And I often told myself that the fact that I was single (outsider)
would allow me to have more distance and methodological neutrality than if I was already married
or divorced (insider). Even more interesting, is that, to push me or encourage me to get married
(to be the insider of the matrimonial questions), they often talk to me only about the benefits
related to marriage and rarely about its challenges. Although it is both the advantages and
especially the challenges of marriage that make Muslims to consider it as an act of worship
(ibada).5 All these experiences of the field are not limited to my relatives, friends and me, but
extend also to some of my informants whom I know because of my research.
4 A Researcher Seen as a Potential Contender
I have spent a lot of time in institutions (Islamic, state, and judicial) with persons involved in the
process of marital alliances and breakdowns in Niamey. During the participant observation within
these places, good relations were maintained with not only employees (who are sometimes
themselves in marital conflicts, divorced or repudiated) but also with the users of these
institutions. Some of the informants explicitly proposed marriage to me. For example, I developed
and nurtured cordial relationships with legal officers (men and/or women) working in a
magistrates' court where I did participant observation. Some of them, who call me “Mr. Ach so”,6
have explicitly proposed marriage to me. “If you like her, we will arrange everything for you before
you go back to Germany” is the statement they often made to me. The women they had in mind
were often young and beautiful women who, according to them, had several “candidates” or
suitors whom they had rejected. The reason for rejection, according to my matchmakers, was that
the suitors did not display the mentality or “the spirit of whites” with regard to their relationship
ideals. Since I study in Germany, I was then a “prêt-à-porter” in the eyes of some, and a “ready-
made” in the eyes of others. That means a “ready guy” for marriage who is certainly Nigerien and
“black” but who is considered as “white”. The marriage-match proposal first stems from the fact
that we are all single of marriageable age. But it also comes from the fact that they consider me,
on the one hand, as someone with outsider psychology or whose social essence is partly formatted
by social anthropology and/or life in Europe, and biologically (age) and financially ready for
marriage. On the other hand, it comes from the relationship between spouses in Niger which some
women sometimes consider as asymmetrical because they are influenced by certain aspects of
contemporary couple’s relationships in Europe – for instance monogamic marriage- which they
consider positive. Nevertheless, this perception is not only observed among people with
university degrees (employees of judicial institutions) or among young singles but also women
who experienced marital breakdowns and divorced female informants with lower educational
5 http://www.islamophile.org/spip/Le-mariage-un-acte-d-adoration.html, last accessed on December 1, 2019.
6 My recurrence of saying “Ach so (akh so)”, German terms which mean “Oh I see!”, when I understood an explanation
made by informants, let some of them start calling me Mr. “Ach so”.
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BIGSASworks! 10
qualifications – compared to the magistrate courts employees – see me as a potential contender
for their (re)marriage.
Béatrice Lecestre-Rollier (2011), working in Morocco, a country with a Muslim majority like
Niger, noticed that she was positioned by her respondents as more masculine than feminine.
Despite the fact that she is a woman, she had access to information mainly from men who have
the rank of head of the family and who welcome foreigners. She claims that the women themselves
sent her back to men. According to her, there were several factors at play, that led to this outcome:
firstly, her educational status, being considered as “lettrée manipulant le stylo et le calepin”7 and
secondly, her being “white” and French, was perceived by her informants as a representative of
the ex-colonial power. But the fact that she is a woman was also an asset that allowed her, more
easily than a man, to participate in women's activities, observe their rituals, and share the
intimacy of homes. Thus, the fact that she is French and educated has enabled her to have access
to men's public spaces, to the “dominant spaces”. And the fact that she is female has given her
access to women's private spaces. However, she affirms:
La réciproque n’est pas vraie : un chercheur homme, dans un univers social sexuellement
ségrégué, n’a pas ainsi accès au monde des femmes […]. Alors qu’un chercheur homme,
s’il peut sans doute jouer des attributs locaux de la féminité, ne peut en revanche
pénétrer les lieux féminins en raison de son sexe dominant, donc menaçant (Lecestre-
Rollier 2011: 147). 8
The fact that I was a man did not prevent me from having access to even sensitive information
from women and sometimes their intimate places, and the fact that I am single and a doctoral
student in Europe has contributed to this. Furthermore, if my presence with (un)married women
was seen as a threat, it came mainly from the side of men, in whose eyes I could be a potential
rival.
At the beginning of data collection, it was easier for me to be in contact with men compared to
women, especially when the latter were married. As a man, it was more difficult to be in regular
contact for a thorough investigation with a prohibited and married woman than with an
unmarried one. So, my argument is that access to the space and/or information of women depends
on their marital status and the relationship that the researcher was able to develop with them.
However, a married woman can also tell a male researcher the reasons for her marriage and/or
marital conflict. Many women have accepted to tell me their secrets, their fears and conflicts,
despite their status as married women. What sets them apart from others is often the time it took
me to be able to build trust with them and/or their spouses. However, it should be noted that
those divorce applicants, who were “tired of living with (their) spouses” for various reasons, were
more available, more discursive, and more expressive than those who were repudiated and sought
reconciliation with their husbands. Furthermore, compared to men, women who agreed to tell me
about their marital experiences were more open, whether they were married or not. This means
that access to men’s spaces does not always guarantee access to their thorough and in-depth
information. In this case, my identity (sex, gender, age, personality) contributed positively to my
7 “An educated person wielding a pen and a notebook” (my translation).
8 “The converse is not true: a man researcher, in a sexually segregated social universe, thus does not have access to the
world of women […] While a male researcher, if he can undoubtedly play local attributes of femininity, on the other
hand, cannot penetrate feminine places because of his dominant and therefore threatening sex”( my translation).
Alhassane A. Najoum: The Challenges of Fieldwork ‘at Home’ while Doing a PhD in Germany
35
building of trust with women informants. Thus, for an African or Nigerien student studying in
Europe and with the “Nasaru”9 can create advantages during fieldwork in Niger. However, this is
not without drawbacks. Wheareas some considered me as a potential candidate for (re)marriage,
others saw me implicitly or explicitly as a spy in the service of Westerners.
5 “Black Skin, White Head”: A Misunderstood Researcher?
Another challenge of research in the field was linked to my status as a doctoral student studying
in Europe, among the “whites” who are “infidels” in the eyes of some. When searching for couples
with marital conflicts in Niamey, I met three sisters who were repudiated and lived with their
parents. They agreed to share their stories before, during and after their marriages. The first
interview was hitch-free. However, when I met them for our second interview, they told me that
we could not continue because their mother categorically prohibited them from being interviewed
again. To explain the reasons, one of them told me:
Wallahi,10 yesterday when you left, Hajiya [their mother] asked us who you are, where
you are from and what you are looking for. When we told her everything about you,
that you are a student studying in Germany and that you are doing research on marital
breakdowns, she ordered us not to tell you anything more. Because she thinks that
you are doing this research in the service of the “Nasaru’’[Westerners]. And so, thanks
to you they will know the secret of Muslims. She told us that if we kept telling you
more about our married lives, she would never forgive us. She told us: ‘To tell this
student the problems of our society, is to reveal our secret to the unbelievers. It is
helping them to know the problems of Muslims.” (Dar assalam, Niamey, July 15, 2016).
The part of the interview that seems to me the most important is this: “telling this student about
the problems in our society is revealing our secret to the infidels.” Different to what some experts in
qualitative methodology may think, this mother's reaction and forbidding her children from
further interviews with me does not come from the fact that the subject of my research was poorly
presented. It also does not come from the fact that the young ladies did not understand the
purpose of my research or that they did not want to be interviewed. Rather, it comes from the fact
that their mother thinks that I am an outsider or a sort of Trojan horse, present and working not
only in her house which is part of Muslim society, but in the service of the “infidels”. For her, letting
me continue the research in their home or in the society is similar to consciously letting malicious
and intrusive computer software enter one’s own personal computer. Something that pushes
parents to tell their children that they would never forgive them, if they do this or that against
their wills, is very serious and indisputable in Niger, since it could even be a threat of a parental
curse. If this mother threatens her children to such a degree, it is because she sees me as an insider
who has become an outsider and would look for ways to sell or divulge their secrets somewhere
despite the guarantee of anonymity which, for her, seems to be less important, compared to what
I would have as information concerning, not one or three people but an entire society, an entire
9 Plural form of Nasara in Hausa, which means “European,” or by extension “Western.”
10 Arabic for “I swear to God/Allah.” The expression is used to give a statement more emphasis. It positions the speaker
as a righteous Muslim saying the truth.
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BIGSASworks! 10
culture. Furthermore, what is important to note is that this type of challenge has been
encountered across marital homes and with people of different levels of education and statuses.
In other words, the same challenge has been encountered with people who have university
degrees and working at the judicial institutions. At the High Court of Niamey, some of the key
informants I met in their offices decided to stop the exchange of information or to grant me
interviews. For example, one of the important informants from this Court – a head of service –
accepted to support me, but when she learned that I study in Europe she told me: “I do not trust
these people [Europeans or Westerners, in general]. You know? They show us that they love us,
but they do not.” (High Court, Niamey, April 19, 2017).
Unlike the mother of three repudiated women, mentioned above, this head of service of the High
Court talks about love. She says, speaking of Westerners in general, “they show us that they love
us, but they do not.” When I asked her in the rest of our discussion why she said this, she
mentioned the “bi- or multilateral aid” of what she calls the “TFP” (technical and financial
partners) that Western countries very often give to African countries which they consider as poor.
By doing so, she is trying to show to me that she knows how the global system works. Although
she did not say so explicitly in our discussion, we can also link to this aid, the scholarships (North-
South) that Africans like me receive from university exchange organizations of European
countries. So, the help she is talking about could concern me directly since in her words she uses
the inclusive personal pronoun us, when there were only two of us in her office. She includes me
because I may be from Niger (a recipient and “victim” country), and I am a Nigerien like her. She
simultaneously includes me because I study in Germany, one of the places where the aid comes
from. But for her, receiving help or financial support is not enough to trust those countries and, in
turn, people who work and are financed by them like me. Her argument then fits directly into a
political and perhaps pan-African agenda, but the elements that push her not to want to continue
cooperating seem to me to go beyond the purely political or financial aspect to be also religious.
And this is the common point that she shares with the mother mentioned above. I tried as much
as possible during my various meetings with her to change her mind, to have more possibilities of
interactions with her but without success. However, she was one of the key informants who have
a lot of experience at the Court. In front of my informants – skeptical or not – I never hesitated to
make them understand who I was, what the main objective of my research was, and who could
benefit from the results of this research. However, that was not enough to gain the trust of some
key persons like her.
The persons who see me as an insider who has become an outsider in the service of the Nasaru
are both women and men. But the latter often express that in a more indirect and implicit way.
This often prompted me to think about questions of ethics and professional conduct. Should I
continue to give (apparently sensitive) information about me to my interviewees or not? In
addition to these challenges, an insider researcher who is living in Europe for several years has a
risk of being considered as outsider by these informants. Therefore, living in Europe is not always
seen as an opportunity for success or prestige. For some of my Muslim informants, it is a risk of
“perdition”, of forgetting one’s “origins” or “values”, and of becoming a bigger threat from outside
than the actual “Westerners”. The typical question some of my informants who doubted my
Nigerieeness vis-à-vis my Westerness asked in order to measure my insider/outsider levels was
specifically related to Muslim religious practices. Some asked me: “Do you still pray?” The fact that
they use prayer as their insider/outsider evaluation tool is interesting. Prayer is a daily ritual of
Alhassane A. Najoum: The Challenges of Fieldwork ‘at Home’ while Doing a PhD in Germany
37
public performance that is easy to observe among the five pillars of Islam. Some informants think
that whoever keeps praying, remains an insider of the study population despite all other odds.
Even more interesting to me is the use of the adverb of the time (still) in their question. The adverb
shows that they assume that the time I have spent outside Niger, especially in a Western society,
where public display of Muslim religious practices, particularly ritual practices such as prayer, are
not publicly encouraged, is enough to influence me to abandon it. So, the adverb of time is
therefore used to measure how much I remain the insider or how much I become the outsider of
my study population. In their eyes, the gap between these two positions begins or widens when
one stops praying, drinks alcohol and/or eats pork. It is up to the anthropologists in Muslim sub-
Saharan Africa who find themselves in this type of situation to find a balance allowing them to
conduct their research well.
6 Conclusion
By playing on different registers relating to local definitions and attributes of gender,
anthropologists have a panoply of techniques and methodological approaches allowing them to
have access to the data or information they seek regardless of gender, belief, and skin or eye
colors. The challenges one may face depends not only on the local attributes of masculinity or
femininity, but also on where one comes from and by whom one is funded, etc. The question of
gender in anthropological practice has implications in the production and probably even in the
validation of knowledge in the social sciences. This article has shown that it is not only gender that
can affect data collection. The marital status, age and affiliation of the researcher to one or the
other group and to institutions may also have effects in the data collection and knowledge
production. In addition to the gender relationship that plays out between researchers and their
informants, experience in the field also plays out in maintaining relationships amidst pressures
or tensions linked to suspicion, as shown by Ayimpam et al. (2014). These authors have shown
that learning to control emotions or social representations both on the side of the researcher and
of the respondents is an ongoing challenge, throughout the field research. This article has shown
the different contexts in which my inclusion and exclusion by my informants depend not only on
the labels associated with me but also on the sensitivities related to questions on gender, politics
or religion. Thus, the construction of a space of trust based on the intersubjectivity between
researcher and informants can be complicated as much by their marital status, sex, gender, and
age as by the conditions of the intercultural confrontation, explained in this article not because
researchers are or consider themselves “Western” but rather because they are perceived by their
informants as such.
Considering an African anthropologist working on Africa and Africans as a disguised outsider is
not new (see Diawara et al. 2006). This article has shown that this consideration is not only
reserved for European anthropologists, Christian or not, who study a Muslim sub-Saharan African
society. It is also reserved for insiders, African researchers from this society, not because they are
European or claim to be European but because they live in Europe and/or are funded by European
organizations. Thus, whether they are originally from their study community or not, an
anthropologist can be permanently considered or suspected as an “agent”, an “informant” or a
“spy” sponsored by a project, a hierarchy or an administration. That means, the practical
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challenges of accessing information are part of the field research (see Niang et al. 2017). Not
confronting them while researching at home or at other places does not mean that they do not
exist. The important thing is for the anthropologist to know how to treat these different contexts
with the same methodological rigor (Gullestad et al. 2004). The position of the Nigerien
anthropologist who conducts ethnographic research in Niamey and who is interested in marriage
and divorce despite his marital status, gender and place of residence as well as his relationship
with his informants explains that the researcher is linked in many ways to the research process.
This particular link with the informants goes beyond being an insider or outsider of the study
population. Discussions on these statuses presupposed that the researcher mainly assumed one
of the two statuses, each of which had advantages and disadvantages. As Merriam et al. (2001)
point out, the above discussion has shown that the boundaries between the two positions are not
always well defined.
As a Nigerien man, I was certainly an insider to my study population, who benefited from this
position. Most of my informants considered me to be part of their community. In most cases, they
expressed solidarity to me (Headland et al. 1990; Merriam et al. 2001). However, my marital
status and my place of residence made my informants to treat me like an outsider. The social
pressures and the labels that were associated to me come from the fact that I am originally from
the studied society. These pressures are explained by the fact that I study my own culture. It is
because I was “at home” that people in power and ordinary people could remind me of the
importance of marriage. And it was also because I was affiliated to a university in a country in the
Global North, perceived as “Western”, that some saw me as an agent, working for the interests of
“white people”. This particular link with the respondents goes beyond the insider/outsider
dichotomy of the study population and shows how these opposing positions can be combined in
the same person, because I was also accepted for being considered an outsider of the study
population. Finally, the different, real or supposed positionalities and positions linked to gender,
culture and many other factors are tools that allow us to understand the dynamics and challenges
of research within and/or between peoples and cultures.
7 References
Ayimpam, Sylvie et al. (2014). Défis éthiques et risques pratiques du terrain en situation de
développement ou d’urgence humanitaire. Anthropologie & développement 40-41: 21-41.
Benelli, Natalie (2011). Rendre compte de la méthodologie dans une approche inductive: les défis
d’une construction a posteriori. Recherches qualitatives 11: 40-50.
Diawara, Mamadou et al. (2006). Heinrich Barth et l'Afrique. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
Échard, Nicole et al. (1991). Débat sur l'incidence du sexe dans la pratique anthropologique.
Anthropologie des sexes, sexe des anthropologues. Journal des anthropologues 45: 79-89.
Frauenfelder, Arnaud et al. (2018). Enquêter en « terrain difficile »: Production et réception d’une
enquête sociologique dans un centre éducatif fermé. In: Enquêter, former publier au cœur de
la cité. Battaglini, Monica et al. (eds.). Genève, ies: 67-88.
Alhassane A. Najoum: The Challenges of Fieldwork ‘at Home’ while Doing a PhD in Germany
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Gullestad, Marianne et al. (2009). Anthropologie « chez soi» et anthropologie «chez l'autre»: Une
distinction à dépasser. Ethnologie française 39(2): 206-215.
Headland, Thomas N. et al. (1990). Emics and etics: The insider/outsider debate. Newbury Park,
Sage Publications.
Lecestre-Rollier, Béatrice. (2011). L’un et l’autre sexe: une ethnologue au Maroc. Journal des
anthropologues124-125: 137-158.
Legrand, Vincent & Gutron, Clémentine. (2016). Éprouver l'altérité: les défis de l'enquête de
terrain. Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain.
Lichterman, Paul (2017). Interpretive reflexivity in ethnography. Ethnography 18(1): 35-45.
Masquelier, Adeline & Soares, Benjamin F. (eds.). (2016). Muslim youth and the 9/11 generation.
Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press.
Merriam, Sharan B. et al. (2001). Power and positionality: negotiating insider/outsider status
within and across cultures. International Journal of Lifelong Education 20(5): 405-416.
Niang, Marietou; Dupéré, Sophie & Fletcher, Christopher (2017). Une Africaine en «terrain
africain»: Défis épistémologiques, éthiques et méthodologiques lors d’une recherche
qualitative effectuée au Burkina Faso. Recherches qualitatives 36(1): 24-44.
Rabelais, François (1532). Pantagruel Lyon, C. Nourry.
Sepp, Tiina (2012). Interviews as an act of seduction: Analysing Problems I have met during my
fieldwork on the Camino De Santiago and in Glastonbury. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics
6(2): 29-48.
Spittler, Gerd (2006). Heinrich Barth, un voyageur savant en Afrique. In: Heinrich Barth et
l’Afrique. Diawara, Mamadou et al. (eds.). . Köln, Rüdiger Köppe Verlag: 55-68.
Wax, Rosalie ([1971] 1986). Doing fieldwork: warning and advice. Chicago, Chicago University
Press.
Fieldwork as Decolonising African
Literary Studies
Researching Tanzanian Hip-hop and Spoken Word Poetry as
a Ghanaian
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor
1 Introduction
At the dawn of the independence era in Africa, in the spirit of Pan-Africanism, Kwame Nkrumah,
the first president of Ghana, argued for Swahili’s adoption as a continental language of unity. This
led to Swahili’s use in external broadcasts by the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation which included
programmes like Ghana Leo (Ghana Today), Maisha ya Wanawake Kiafrika (Lives of African
Women), and Afrika Leo (Africa Today), as well as its teaching in different higher educational
institutions like the University of Ghana and the Ghana Insitute of Languages (Dzahene-Quarshie
2013: 73). While most of these services were eventually discontinued, Swahili continues to be
taught as an undergraduate degree at the University of Ghana to further Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-
African vision (Dzahene-Quarshie 2013: 77). While only a handful of students pass through the
program each year, it has culminated in some Ghanaian scholars in Swahili studies such as linguist
Amidu Assibi (1995; 2018) who has worked on Swahili morphology and syntax, linguist Josephine
Dzahene-Quarshie (2013; 2016) who specialises in language contact and policies between Swahili
and other African languages. Others include literary scholar Felix Sosoo (2013; 2018) who
comparatively studies Swahili oral literature with Ghanaian folklore and global oral literature and
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor who specialises in Tanzanian and East African popular culture (2017;
2020). This trans-regional relationship, although small, is significant for the trans-regional/inter-
regional, Pan-African perspective it brings to scholarship, particularly in recent debates about
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor: Fieldwork as Decolonising African Literary Studies
41
decolonising the academy, locating “Africa” in African Studies and the uneven power dynamics
between global north and south scholarship.
In recent times, researchers have been sensitised to diverse positionalities and constructions of
self in relation to research. Fieldwork is viewed not as a neutral, objective space, but one that is
influenced by the researcher’s multiple identities, habits, and backgrounds marking fieldwork as
a constant process of negotiation. As Akhil Gupta (2014: 397) aptly states, “not only is
anthropological data often largely qualitative, but it depends in large measure on the affective and
bodily practices and peculiarities of the ethnographer.” With a lens on reflexivity and positionality,
a growing number of scholars are increasingly engaging in a reflexive understanding of their
position in the field and the research process, considering factors like race (Henderson 2009;
Hirsch 2019), gender (Atobrah 2019; Thompson 2019), parenting (Yacob-Haliso 2019) and
sexuality (Clark & Grant 2015). While in African Studies, there are growing reflexive perspectives
that reveal “the stories behind the findings” (Thomson et al. 2013), it is essential to expand upon
the perspectives of Africans researching in Africa, particularly within renewed calls for
decolonisation of the academy and broaden the conversation about researchers’ identities,
particularly those underrepresented.
In particular, a reflexive awareness of fieldwork can influence research perspectives while
addressing ethical, methodological and theoretical concerns. In this paper, I argue that fieldwork
can produce new perspectives towards recent debates on decolonisation, mainly centring the
experiences of African researchers doing research in Africa. A quick search for literature on
fieldwork experiences related to Africa yields fewer results for African researchers and their
experiences, a search described by political scientist Yolande Bouka (2015: 4) as “difficult to find
[her]self” in the available literature. For instance, in the book “Women Researching in
Africa”, published in 2019, only three out of the fourteen contributors identify as African,
discussing explicit ways in which this identity influenced their fieldwork. In this paper, framed
within the discourse of decolonisation, I particularly centre the positions of nationality and
location, i.e., my selves as a Ghanaian working on Tanzanian literature while based in Germany.
Thus, I reflect upon the intersections between institutional framing from the global north and the
researcher’s self that straddles the global north and south. Drawing upon my work on popular
cultural forms in Tanzania, I centre fieldwork as a method for place-based literary research in
producing methodological and theoretical frameworks that centre the lived experiences of African
lives. Fieldwork, I argue, demands a reflexive consideration of the self in relation to others, and
can centre an ethical responsibility to research that guides towards a decolonial framework in
intellectual knowledge production.
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2 Building Frameworks from the Field: “Vibe” as a Way of Knowing Hip-hop
and Poetry
The research upon which this paper draws from is my PhD thesis that explored the aesthetic
experiences of popular cultural forms, specifically hip-hop and spoken word poetry in Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania.1 I was interested in the place of popular culture in people’s everyday lives, how
they shape and are rendered meaningful in everyday lifeworlds. During this time, I travelled to
Tanzania twice, spending eleven months, broken into two periods of seven and four months. Thus,
in addition to textual readings, my research relied significantly on long-term immersion in the
field, a characteristic of ethnography. This double methodology was necessitated by the research
question that sought to understand how practitioners experience performances and texts. Hip-
hop and spoken word poetry are especially characterised by their performative nature. In this
sense, a textual reading alone proves one-sided and ethnographic tools, particularly fieldwork,
exposes the contexts within which the texts are situated and embodied.
For literary scholars, fieldwork involving long-term immersion is often not a practice to contend
with, regarded as “a strange task” in a discipline where immense value is often unsuitably placed
on written texts over other textual practices (Seguín 2014: 9). However, fieldwork can be an
indispensable methodological tool for place-based literary research, enabling literary scholars to
ask, “what did the people write?” in dialogue with “what did people do”, placing text in an
encounter and engagement with context (Puri 2016: 40). Most importantly, I would argue that it
re-emphasises texts that are not easily detached from their performative contexts, such as more
oral centred ones, reengaging with their value. In my research, hip-hop and spoken word are
revealed as valuable not only through an analysis of their written texts but also through their
embodied, ephemeral affectations. This provides a methodological framework that involves close
readings of the lyrics of hip-hop songs and spoken word poems and an investigation into the
elements that make up the performance, i.e., the bodies of the performers and audience, spatio-
temporal location and the written/memorised texts. It was through fieldwork, participant
observation and interviews that it became obvious that these elements of the performance
represented a methodological approach to these popular forms as well as a further site of
theoretical conceptualisation. Simply, fieldwork reveals local epistemological approaches to
popular culture, emphasising popular culture’s value in people’s lived experiences.
In my work, I was interested in hip-hop and spoken word as aesthetic sites of experience which
warranted taking seriously how these forms are experienced and affect practitioners, shown
through corporeality, embodiment, lived experience and practice. In their reflections upon these
popular forms, practitioners used the word “vibe” to attempt a description of their experiences.
From these reflections, vibe showed itself as an indispensable, original framework for
conceptualising the aesthetic experience of popular cultural forms. Vibe, I argued, indicates a
sensuous experience of the performance that is located in the specific encounter between the
bodies of performer and audience, the text-in-performance and spatio-temporal location.
Although fleeting, this experience is also a form of knowledge production through which people
1 The Phd titled “I go for the vibe: hip-hop and spoken poetry as aesthetic practices in Dar es Salaam” was produced
within the framework of the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) at the University of
Bayreuth, Germany and funded by the German Research Foundation under the project “Poetry as Aesthetic Practice.
Form, Experience and Relation to Lifeworlds in Verbal Arts in Madagascar and Tanzania”.
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor: Fieldwork as Decolonising African Literary Studies
43
experience and know the world. Thus, ‘vibe’ becomes a methodological approach and a site of
theorisation for hip-hop and spoken word in Dar es Salaam. The intellectual knowledge produced
about these popular forms is rooted in the lived experiences of the people who are centred in this
form of knowledge production.
Ghanaian feminist scholar Akosua Adomako Ampofo (2019: 68) has argued that research in Africa
must be made up of “ingredients of an African-centered approach” which means research must be
grounded in the lives and cultural imaginations of Africans. Such an approach, she maintains, is a
decolonial approach to global knowledge as it questions the definitions of mainstream or
marginalised knowledge. In particular, she writes that fields like popular culture, often discarded
as valid sites of experience and theorisation provide adequate insight into people’s lives and allow
for the development of an African-centered epistemology that centers the experiences of African
lives. Here, it is a defence for popular culture as a valid context of knowledge production, not solely
as a reference point but also as a site for conceptualising methods, theories, and research
approaches based on Africa. Vibe became a driving approach to my research, conceptualised
through the experiences of my interlocutors. Although hip-hop and spoken word are transcultural
forms that straddle the global and the local, I argue that vibe, revealed through interlocuters’
affective experiences, allows for a uniquely Tanzanian perspective to these phenomena, revealing
local ways of shaping everyday lifeworlds such as language use and gendered identities.
Fieldwork, and in the case of performative texts, attending to the contexts and traces that
performances leave on practitioners, enables conceptualising a framework like vibe that validates
non-mainstream and marginalised ways of knowing. Such a framework that prioritises affective
and experiential ways of knowing, validates popular culture’s value and knowledge production
and is developed out of the experiences and realities of African lives, is inherently a decolonial
project, foregrounding forms of knowledge production that are often marginalised in the global
knowledge industry.
Decolonisation cannot occur in a vacuum far away from the lives purported to be at the centre of
epistemological production. Space and place become central to such a framework providing a
material, historical, and affective grounding that engages with the day-to-day lives of those at the
centre of research. As Robtel Pailey (2019) aptly writes, “epistemic decolonisation cannot happen
in a political vacuum, separated from the African streets”. However, merely engaging in fieldwork
does not make research inherently decolonial and many scholars have written about the colonial
Eurocentric trajectory of fieldwork as methodology amidst questions of power and othering
(Smith 2012). A decolonial framework allows for an acknowledgement and further dismantling of
the Eurocentric leanings of methodologies and paradigms as well as disobedience towards
established epistemologies and canons. In literary studies, a decolonial framework of fieldwork
enables a place-based engagement with African literature that demands a reconfiguration of
questions of power, theory-making, data, methods and expertise. It potentially redefines what can
be “chosen” as knowledge and approaches to knowledge to be presented in the academy’s
structural space. In their article “African Literature is a Country”, Saint and Shringapure (2020)
sought to investigate the kind of texts regularly taught in African literature courses that set up a
seeming canonical representation of the literary scene. Written texts in English dominate such
curricula, led by popular writers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie.
As they further note, oral literature and texts written in African languages were severely
marginalised while novels in English were the most taught genre. The diversity of African
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literature, they conclude, did not feature in the curricula in academic institutions and call for a
decolonisation of the curricula. This emphasis on written texts disregards the widespread use of
orature and orality in different literary forms and reduces performative texts to trivial moments
in the literary scene, a fundamental consequence of the colonial structure. When Ngũgĩ Wa
Thiong’o, Henry Owuor-Anuymba and Taban lo Liyong published their memo “On the Abolition of
the English Department” in 1968, they sought to decolonise this colonial structure, emphasising
the teaching and research of oral and performative texts, African language literatures and thereby,
reconceptualising the curriculum from the ground up (Thiong’o 1972). Their discourse is similar
to recent movements like #rhodesmustfall that agitate for decolonising the educational system by
confronting its racist, colonial heritage and embracing an African based intellectual production.2
Therefore, decolonisation as praxis in African literature engages with both written and oral texts,
foregrounding aspects of literature that are marginalised and thereby redefining what is chosen
and theorised as knowledge. Fieldwork emphasises experience, extending, shifting and redefining
the process of knowing through an engagement with the people at the centre of this knowledge.
Further, what is produced are “situated knowledges” defined by one’s embodiment, position and
gaze (Haraway 1988: 581). Knowledge production is, therefore, inseparable from the social
spaces within which they evolve, while highly depending on the researcher’s positionality and
identities. Fieldwork forces a turn towards the interdependent, often place-based processes
through which knowledge is produced and can be theorised. Fieldwork showed in my work, that
popular cultural forms are not merely trivial cultural practices but also act as sites of knowledge
production, as people’s reflections on their experiences and their affective knowledges revealed
vibe as an indispensable framework that is rooted in situated experiences of the forms.
3 Being Ghanaian in Tanzania: Nationality, Language and Pan-Africanism as
Currency
Field note entry, Dar es Salaam, October 9, 2017:
The other colleagues have returned to Germany and I’m surprised by how much of an
impact that has made on my interviews. People I met through them seem more
reluctant to meet with me now. I am not really having this issue with the interlocutors
I met on my own. I get the feeling it’s because I’m black and young, I don’t seem so
important. I get referred to a lot as “huyu mtoto mdogo” (this young child). It
sometimes feels sarcastic as if to suggest that I am incapable of the position I find
myself in. The race question seems to be the biggest issue though. I suspect because
the other researchers are white, they have easier access to information. My being
based in Germany positions me favourably but, in the end, my blackness outweighs
that. I assumed our shared connections as Black Africans will be a positive point, but
it often doesn’t seem so especially when there are other Western colleagues present.
2 For a discussion on the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement within a decolonial matrix, see Chantiluke et al. (2018).
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor: Fieldwork as Decolonising African Literary Studies
45
Their presence sometimes enhances my position as I gain access to the same spaces
as them that I seem to be denied on my own.
Field note entry, Dar es Salaam, November 11, 2017:
Today I met with Nash MC and we surprisingly bonded over my background as a
Ghanaian especially over Ghanaian rap music. I’ve increasingly seen this happen with
other people. My nationality gives me some privilege here. I think it’s rooted in the
Nkrumah and Nyerere socialist connections. Ghanaian music is also quite popular and
each artist I interview asks me to connect them to the Ghanaian scene. So far, my being
Black has seemed more like an obstacle and I’m pleasantly surprised my being
Ghanaian has given me a little privilege. It’s not just the artists though. Even people
on the streets want to have further conversations with me because I’m Ghanaian.
They want to talk about football, kente and Nkrumah3. I spent a whole car ride talking
about cocoa and chocolate. Who knew being Ghanaian would be a form of currency
here?
I use these two vignettes as an entry point into exploring my identities in the field, centring the
positions of nationality and location. I am a black Ghanaian woman based in a predominantly
white institution in Germany. My research stays in Tanzania occasionally intersected with other
colleagues in African Studies, sometimes white colleagues from the global north and sporadically
black Ghanaian colleagues based in Ghana. In preparing for fieldwork, I familiarised myself with
other scholars’ works that reflexively engaged with their identities and was particularly struck by
the relative lack of scholarship that centred the experiences of African scholars in Africa,
particularly scholars of a different nationality than their research field.4 Conversations about race
appear to dominate in these discussions, highlighting the bias and unequal power distribution in
knowledge production and circulation. This point is aptly illustrated by Frances Henderson who
writes the following based on her experiences in Maputo:
‘Why did you all think I was white?’ I asked my in-country advisor about three weeks
into my initial visit to Maputo, after we had established a rapport. ‘Oh, because the
people who come here from the U.S. to do research are white.’ My advisor’s statement
was telling and opens the door to an analysis of issues of race and the production of
knowledge about African people, culture, and politics (Henderson 2009: 291).
As an African American woman, Henderson’s insight opens up considerations of epistemological
production coloured by race that I find productive in thinking through my experiences in Dar es
Salaam. I differ from Henderson in that whereas she was an African American woman in a
Southern African country, I was a Ghanaian woman in an Eastern African country. Like Yolande
Bouka (2015: 8) who describes her Togolese origins as creating a “continental connection” during
her research stay in Rwanda, my being Ghanaian in Tanzania, furthered by my fluency in Swahili,
facilitated a similar connection. Frances Henderson (2009: 292) further argues that “her subaltern
status” created “the possibility of solidarity with the women of Southern Africa [emphasis in
3 Kente is a type of fabric made from interwoven cloth strips of cotton and silk.
4 For some examples, see Bouka (2015) and Hirsch (2019).
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BIGSASworks! 10
original]” which was mitigated by her citizenship as American. This possibility was propelled by
her racial similarity to the people of Maputo rooted in “historical linkages between ‘shared’ race
as potentially shared culture” (Williams 1996: 77). Borrowing from Zora Neale Hurston’s thoughts
on skinfolk as distinct from kinfolk, 5 in cases like that of Henderson, the researcher is in a constant
state of a “betwixt and between, identity – neither foreigner in a totally unknown form nor native
of a fully knowable type” (Williams 1996: 77).
As a black person from Ghana, I was racially similar to my interlocutors in the field yet
simultaneously unknown. Within this space was the negotiating of solidarity borne not
necessarily only out of race and blackness but also of a national, Pan-African connection and
cultural background. Inherently, these two positions acted as a currency to facilitate my entry and
stay in the field, offering insights into the popular art scene in Dar es Salaam and shaping my
relationships. For instance, as I illustrated in the second vignette above, the rapper Nash and I
bonded quickly over my nationality as Ghanaian, leading to fantastic conversations about the
Ghanaian music industry and its similarities and differences with the Tanzanian, East African
scene. In my initial interviews and fieldwork practices, I often introduced myself in the
professional sense, drawing upon my place in the university to highlight my purpose in Dar es
Salaam. Eventually, I switched tactics and introduced myself with an emphasis on myself as
Ghanaian, which I believe significantly facilitated my reception as a researcher as my interlocutors
often viewed me as culturally similar, simply because we were African. This form of introduction
also de-emphasised the academic context, which I would argue below, with my academic location
in Germany generated distance between myself and interlocuters. By introducing myself as
Ghanaian, there was a cultural similarity emphasised, for instance, with music, where
interlocutors viewed me and my research through the lens of a potentially shared culture. Thus, I
negotiated which self to highlight and present, leaning into the visible cultural and political
relations that were more salient for my interlocutors and their social contexts.
I recognised that my interlocutors viewed this continental connection as a curious oddity and I
was repeatedly informed that my interlocutors were used to seeing white researchers as opposed
to Black, non-Tanzanian researchers in the field and could understand the former, seen as
significantly culturally dissimilar, as interested in learning about a “foreign” space. However, my
presence in the field was viewed as strange as interlocutors did not wholly see me as foreign in
their context. I existed somewhere in between foreign and local, creating a space of negotiation.
During interviews, this view did not cause confusion but rather offered great insights relating to
the entangled global histories of hip-hop and spoken word. Interlocuters pointed to their
knowledge of Ghanaian music to illustrate hip-hop’s global and yet local nature, which guided
numerous discussions about authenticity in language and popular culture, leading to
conversations rather than one-sided interviews. On the other hand, this perceived cultural
similarity led to confusion during my attendance at popular cultural events and in my day-to-day
activities. Whenever people addressed me during such events, and I responded, they were visibly
perplexed about my accent. Coupled with my dreadlocked hair and penchant for wearing West
African print fabric people often assumed I was a “foreign” Tanzanian or East African from the
diaspora. What was obvious was that it was essential for most people to place me and understand
my nationality. This confusion often led to what they perceived as “teaching” moments, where
5 Zora Neale Hurston mentions this in her autobiography “Dust Tracks on a Road” (1942).
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor: Fieldwork as Decolonising African Literary Studies
47
they tried to guide me through the Tanzanian experience. Globally, hip-hop retains a
hypermasculine character and in Tanzania, numerous cultural and economic barriers for women,
including unequal access to public space contributes to its masculine leaning form (Clark 2014).
Although there are women hip-hop researchers in Tanzania, such as Msia Kibona Clark cited
above, the combination of my gender as a woman and the initial confusion around my nationality
created a sort of imbalance where the often-male hip-hop interlocuters aggressively “tested” me
through questions and comments about obscure hip-hop facts. I was aware of the underlying
gendered intent, which was exacerbated with the confusion around my nationality.
Accordingly, although interlocutors sometimes viewed me as closer to a local, I was also viewed
as foreign, neither completely the other. However, I was significantly aware that nationality
played a role in this negotiation space as the perceived possibility of solidarity, connection and
similarity was based inherently in a historical Pan-African link. Ghana’s relationship with
Tanzania is rooted in a shared socialist and Pan-African history popularised by the two first
presidents of both nations at independence, Dr Kwame Nkrumah and Mwalimu Julius Nyerere,
respectively. Language was pivotal to Nkrumah’s vision of a Pan-Africanist continent who saw
Swahili as fundamental towards redefining African lives in the post-colonial setting. Thus, Swahili
in Ghana as a language in the University of Ghana’s curriculum exists beyond simply being a
foreign language. It is a language with a decolonising agenda. This discourse is prominent in
debates about Swahili’s adoption as a continental lingua franca, debates that are often ignited even
at national and regional levels outside of East Africa (Assibi 1995; Khumalo 2018). Many
Tanzanians expressed pride at the discourse of Swahili as a continental connector. Having studied
Swahili in Ghana, language sustained the expression of a possible, negotiated solidarity as my
interlocutors saw my language skills as a reflection of a perceived continental commonality,
making language a fundamental currency that facilitated my entry and stays in the field. As a
Ghanaian, the question of language within Tanzania’s cultural and political context is extremely
fascinating. Mwalimu Nyerere’s vision of a Tanzanian identity was anchored on Swahili’s
deliberate promotion as a fundamental symbol of the nation. While Swahili was used during the
colonial era for administrative purposes, it was chosen and promoted during the independence
period as the language of the people, freedom and the new nation, mostly due to its “supratibalistic
component” (Gibbe 1983: 182). It became the country’s national and popular language, a symbol
of its free and homogenised national culture. Therefore, although Tanzania is technically a
multilingual country, Swahili remains intimately intertwined with Tanzanian identity, a role never
accorded a single Ghanaian language. Instead, Ghana maintained a multilingual system that did
not seek to privilege one language over the other (Boahene-Agbo 1985).
Coming from this multilingual background, I found fascinating the constructed nature of Swahili
especially in relation to the nation’s identity and its direct influence on the literary scene, although
I also found it slightly stifling as I always wondered about its weighty effect on the “other”
languages, especially the place of English within this context. This speculation led me to reflect
upon the significant although overlooked number of poets, artists, and spaces who privileged
English over Swahili but were notably absent in larger academic debates on popular culture in
Tanzania. As I experienced the field, I pulled upon this thread or rather, this thread pulled at me,
eventually becoming a significant frame for the thesis. As I wrote about spoken word and hip-hop
spaces in Dar es Salaam, highlighting how English shaped some of them, I realised that this route
would have been missing without my ethnographic encounters. Rashmi Sadana (2016: 160)
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writing about the relevance of fieldwork to her work in literary studies maintains that “if
embarking on fieldwork threw up my idea of which texts to study, it also opened up new arenas
of questioning, and eventually, new texts in particular social and political contexts that called out
for analysis”. Much like Sadana, being in the field suggested new texts and questions that arose
from my interactions with artists, poets and audience members of the performances. As Swahili
became my currency into the field, I became even more aware of the overlooked English using
artists and poets and their contributions to debates on language authenticity and identity. Rather
than taking for granted the significance of Swahili towards the nation of Tanzania and the plethora
of Swahili using artists, it opened up new arenas of questioning especially regarding renewed
debates regarding the identity of English within post-colonial states. As hip-hop artists
appropriate English in Tanzania to craft their entangled transcultural identities, they readjust the
status of the language, shifting it from a hegemonic oppressor of local culture to a tool of
decolonising perceived colonial standards. Elsewhere, Bill Ashcroft et al. (2002: 38) have argued
that writers use the strategies of abrogation and appropriation to force colonial languages, in this
case, English to “bear the burden of one’s own cultural experience”.
The discussion around nationality becomes even more pressing as it recalibrated relations
between my self and the other, as people interpreted my presence including other Ghanaian
scholars as a step towards the decolonisation of intellectual production, seeing our presence as a
form of local and continental ownership and production. This was aptly conveyed by Tanzanian
rapper KBC when he told me directly, “it’s good to see another sister doing research on African
hip-hop. It is usually white people who come and write books on it”. 6 KBC’s use of “sister” as a
faux familiar connective is rooted in a racial similarity and shared continental connection. Sister
attempts to dismantle a dualism between Africa as a place to extract data that is then solely
processed and circulated in other places. I found KBC’s statement relevant in unpacking
approaches to and meaning of research in/on Africa as it highlights questions of identity, location,
and epistemology. In particular, there is an irony to his statement as it appears to reject my
location as a German based scholar in favor of emphasising my nationality as a guiding approach
towards my research.
When feminist scholar Amina Mama (2007) questions if it is ethical to study Africa, she presses
us to reflect on how our identities, geographical and historical locations, methods, and
epistemologies inform our scholarly ethics in researching Africa. As she further and rightfully
argues, simply being African does not exempt African scholars from questions of ethics (Mama
2007: 8). Concretely, I would argue that my being Ghanaian and a perceived sense of solidarity
does not automatically exempt me from thinking about ethical scholarship and decolonisation as
practice. Ethical scholarship is shaped by a sense of responsibility to African lives, which demands
engagement in social contexts, uses methodologies and theories rooted in the research space, and
is shaped by a reflexive reflection on positionalities and identities (Mama 2007). KBC’s use of
“sister” foregrounds the question of ethical scholarship, in that even as it negotiates a sense of
solidarity, it questions a sense of responsibility towards the lives at the centre of my research. This
was obvious in subsequent meetings with other artists, where I was challenged to be truthful and
6 Interview, KBC, March 1, 2017. KBC was specifically referring to Dr. Msia Kibona Clark, a Tanzanian born scholar of
African hip-hop cultures although there are a number of other women scholars on Tanzanian hip-hop such as Dr. Shani
Omari.
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor: Fieldwork as Decolonising African Literary Studies
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respectful in my findings as a “sister”. This solidarity, racial and continental, rooted in ethics,
demands a reflexive engagement with the field and the designing of methods and theories
grounded in and reflect the everyday lived experiences of my interlocutors.
Fieldwork in literary studies can force such a reflexive, decolonial turn. Reflecting on the place of
fieldwork in literary studies, Shalini Puri (2016: 40) suggests, “when a researcher reads in a
library, nobody is reading her back. When one reads in the field, one is constantly being scripted,
being made the object of a counter gaze, and is thereby forced to confront not only one’s
geographical but also one’s historical location.” What I find productive about this quotation is the
encounter between researcher and field that is set in a flexible, scripted process. Rather than a
singular linear activity, fieldwork becomes a collaborative process formed through experience,
foregrounding how our identities inform the process. For instance, for most artists, I represented
an opportunity to connect with artists from Ghana, particularly in light of West African afrobeats
music's popularity. In hip-hop, there have been collaborations between Ghanaian and Tanzanian
artists. These include Ghana’s Kwaw Kese and Tanzania’s Professor Jay with the popular
collaboration “Who Be You” in the 2000s and more recently in 2020, Tanzania’s Mex Cortez with
Ghana’s Lyrical Joe produced “Holy Flow”. As Msia Clark (2012) has argued, hip-hop from Ghana
and Tanzania share similarities as they were both introduced during economic structural
adjustments in the 1980s, often act as social commentaries and invoke reverential images of their
respective first presidents Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere. Thus, there already exists a
connection between the Ghanaian and Tanzanian hip-hop scenes I became part of. On certain
occasions, I facilitated this connection such as writing a blog review about Tanzanian hip-hop
artist Nash MC for a Ghanaian hip-hop blog and recommending Tanzanian hip-hop for its
playlists.7 In the field, I was scripted continuously through my nationality, viewed through the lens
of shared solidarity that appeared to translate into a collective sense of ownership of intellectual
production.
4 The Politics of Location
What then does it mean for the rhetoric of promoting and protecting local knowledge when I am
a Western-based scholar? What does this suggestion of continental ownership drawn from
cultural similarity and nationality mean when placed against the politics of my location in
Bayreuth, Germany? In her reflections on her fieldwork in Malawi, Joanna Woods (2009: 56)
suggests that her status as a researcher was often viewed as more authentic and acceptable if she
was seen as related to an organisation linked to humanitarian aid where the researcher came
across as “helping”. Wood’s reflections suggest that the researcher’s identity shaped by the
organisation that backs them is an essential aspect of fieldwork. My location, as based in Germany,
usually authenticated my presence in the field, and the occasional presence of white colleagues
enhanced this positive reception. As I soon realised, this reaction was built on the assumption of
my access to resources – educational, monetary and organisational – based on my location in a
western country. Nevertheless, this authentication often clashed with my other identities. My
7 I wrote for the Ghanaian hip-hop website Yoyo Tinz, which were looking to expand their coverage of hip-hop to cover
the entire African continent. See www.yoyotinz.com (last accessed on 27.03.2021).
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other selves as Ghanaian, Black and African eventually showed as the preferred selves. Ultimately,
it became apparent that my interlocutors were increasingly reacting negatively to my location as
based in Germany, seeing it as a form of epistemic violence. As one interlocutor mentioned in
different conversations, I was a conduit for the recolonisation of knowledge by the west as my
research would be based abroad. It was especially such conversations and discourses that led me
to reflect upon how the field could produce a decolonial matrix for my work. If my interlocutors
inferred my presence as a form of epistemic violence from my location, how could I do research
that was the opposite? How could I do research that centred their lives and epistemologies, caring
not to marginalise their interests and agendas?
Scholars have written about the marginalisation of African voices and interests in African Studies
and the global academy and the privileging of intellectual labour from the global north (Nolte
2019). This is manifested in knowledge networks around academic publishing, workshops,
conferences prominently based in the West and the entrenchment of Eurocentric theories and
methodologies. Fieldwork itself is not detached from this bias. For instance, Chisomo Kalinga
(2019) writes about the exhaustion of African bodies as they are extracted for data, often
unethically by Western based scholars, who lack a nuanced understanding of their lived
experiences. Here again, Amina Mama’s (2007) question of how to ethically study Africa remains
infinitely relevant. While fieldwork demands an engagement with people’s lifeworlds and a
reconfiguring of research approaches, it can also be a form of epistemic violence. What comes to
fore is the centrality of place to fieldwork, i.e., the space of the field, the space of intellectual
knowledge production and the spaces of circulation of this knowledge. Heavily bound to this
spatial and profoundly political process is the dualism of research on/in Africa that removes data
to be processed elsewhere. A decolonial matrix foregrounds the researcher’s responsibility in
creating a liberatory, collaborative work that emphasises the value of the lives at the centre of the
research. Speaking about hip-hop in Senegal, Ali Neff (2015: 450) suggests that researchers
should hold a “critical ear toward these neocolonial discourses” and participate in “research based
in collaboration and advocacy with artists on the margins”. Such a decolonial framework “offers
the possibility of movements and solidarities altogether different from the trajectory of extraction
that haunts the work of the global media industries” (Neff 2015: 450).
Such a collaborative endeavour became a significant process of my fieldwork. My work went
beyond documenting hip-hop and spoken word to working with poets and artists to amplify their
work outside the academy. With some poets, we produced a short documentary on women’s
sexual and reproductive health issues in Africa, a topic that often cropped up in discussions with
poets that identified as women, and in their performances.8 The documentary titled “A Thousand
Needles” created a space of collaborative work with the poets my research was based on, also
becoming a methodological tool for my research. Its focus on women’s health helped to locate and
foreground a stigmatised topic, helping to advocate for open conversations through the poets'
works. This collaboration which included writing sessions, long conversations and visual
brainstorming sessions with some poets provided a different texture to the research. My work
contributed to the advocacy that these poets had already started, merely helping to amplify it
through the film, especially centring the women in the poetry scene. As we produced the film, I
8 The film “A Thousand Needles” is available at www.athousandneedlesfilm.com (last accessed on March 15, 2021).
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor: Fieldwork as Decolonising African Literary Studies
51
became especially attuned to the knowledge produced on and around poetry, shaping my
intellectual enquiry and informing my methodological and theoretical approaches, centring the
lives of the poets. Producing the film as a collaborative endeavour demanded an ethical
perspective to fieldwork, one that sought to amplify rather than marginalise the lives of those at
the centre of the research. This collaborative endeavour falls within what Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
(2017) rightfully posits about decolonising research where he writes,
decolonising methodology, therefore, entails unmasking its role and purpose in re-
search. It is also about rebelling against it; shifting the identity of its object so as to re-
positon those who have been objects of research into questioners, critics, theorists,
knowers, and communicators (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017).
5 Conclusion
Being a black Ghanaian woman based in Germany influenced my research on the popular cultural
forms of hip-hop and poetry in Tanzania in many ways. Drawing on vignettes and experiences
from the field, I have highlighted the messiness, complexity and multi-layeredness of my identities
intersecting with the field. The field itself is not a neutral passive space but rather exists with its
underlying power structures and norms. As the researcher encounters the field, it opens up many
possibilities for reconfiguring the research process. In particular, fieldwork proves a strategic tool
for locating Africa in African Studies by demanding an engagement with the lives of those at the
centre of the research. As I have argued, fieldwork can provide new perspectives towards debates
on decolonisation. In African literary studies, fieldwork remains a relevant methodological tool
for emphasising the value of oral, performative texts. By hanging out with practitioners, soaking
and prodding, I explored the aesthetic experiences of hip-hop and spoken word in their everyday
lives, placing the texts in dialogue with the contexts and networks within which they were
produced. This approach guided my methodological and theoretical conceptualisation from the
ground-up, rooted in the lived experiences and lives of practitioners of these forms. As I have
argued, Vibe provides a site of conceptualisation grounded in the cultural practices and
imaginations of practitioners. To truly think of decolonising African literary studies, it is such an
approach that we must take.
In addition, my identity as Ghanaian and my knowledge of Swahili acted as currencies that
facilitated my stay in the field, being interpreted as a Pan-African and decolonial approach to
knowledge production and ownership. When intersecting with my location in Germany, a
different perspective was revealed where my presence was interpreted as a form of violence.
However, at the centre of this process was attention towards the ethical study of African literature
and African lives, which resulted in a deliberate, collaborative approach to research that centred
my interlocutors' lives. Fieldwork thus produces a space of negotiation while demanding a
reflexive engagement with the lived experiences of those researched, providing a matrix that
foregrounds marginalised genres, ways of knowing and ultimately, provides a way to rethink
knowledge production in the academy.
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Literary Fieldwork in Nairobi
Becoming Chinku and the “Third Mankind”
Mingqing Yuan
1 Introduction
At a friend’s invitation, I attended the launch ceremony of the cooperation between
China UnionPay, a Chinese financial corporation, and the State Bank of Mauritius in
the Continental Hotel in the city center of Nairobi. With all Kenyan waitresses dressed
in red cheongsam and two waiters in Maasai clothing drumming and singing to
welcome the guests, I was standing together with my flatmate, an Indian working for
an Italian NGO, and another Chinese, who works for a Chinese technology company in
Kenya. Then, a high-ranking official from the State Bank of Mauritius came to us and
started chatting. He asked about our occupations and when he heard that I was doing
field work in Kenya, he seemed very interested and asked, “what’s the topic?”, to
which I replied, “Kenyan literature”. It was very noticeable how his smile froze as he
confusedly asked, “then what are you doing here?”. I felt a bit uneasy and taken aback,
not knowing how to explain why those cultural decorative elements can inform my
research project, but I was not completely surprised by this question, since it often
came up in one form or another by people who learned that I was doing fieldwork in
Kenya about literature. Why Kenya? Why Literature? Why are you here? Or even, is
there literature about China and Kenya? (Fieldnote, September 12, 2019)
Justifications, explanations and even self-defence are always needed when I state that I’m in
literary studies. The feeling of “disciplinary homeless” always accompanies me, especially when
meeting historians or anthropologists in the field, who question me about research methodology
in my literary fieldwork. I always have to justify why I am doing fieldwork and why it is not enough
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to just read some novels at home. Meanwhile, the general curiosity and doubt about a literary
scholar on China-Africa studies sometimes also offer a recluse and excuse for me, as this topic
presumptuously is not financially sensitive or hard-core political. As a Chinese national doing
research on topics related to China and Africa, I am constantly asked (also by myself) what
purpose my fieldwork serves and what literary studies can uniquely contribute to the
understanding of the massive commodity and capital movements between China and Kenya in
this globalized time. On one hand, all these questions show a pervasive institutional and
disciplinary delineation of literary studies, which partly isolates it from the world outside of books
(written texts); on the other hand, it entails questions of what literary fieldwork is, how it is or
should be carried out and what the relationship between field and texts is.
Thus, what is my positionality as a Chinese literary scholar in Nairobi? China’s recent prominent
engagements with Africa receive attention both in the media and academia. Questions of how to
situate and interpret China’s rise are often met with divisive opinions of it either being a neo-
colonizer or an anti-imperialist comrade who was also previously colonized. This debate repeats
a binary thinking, but it also ascertains that China’s global rise disturbs the long existing
dichotomies between the West and the rest and of the centralized and marginalized. In this sense,
is there a pre-existing positionality for me to assume in my fieldwork in Nairobi? Or even, is there
a gaze specially belonging to and projected on Chinese scholars doing fieldwork in Kenya? This
paper would like to address these questions by reviewing and reflecting on my own fieldwork
experience as a Chinese in Nairobi through the lens of positionality and reflexivity. It is an attempt
to see how relationships and boundaries are negotiated and intersected in a dynamic and complex
power network and to raise attention to the nuanced interactions and literary interventions on
the ground.
As Puri and Castillo (2016: 6-9) summarise, the fieldwork within humanities, especially literary
studies, is not only sharing fuzzy boundaries with anthropology and its interest in everyday life
within larger structure and context, but is also involved with area studies, especially studies and
discussions on the Global South. In this sense, literary fieldwork, seemingly dealing with
imagination, is highly political, closely related to geopolitics and a lived experience, transferring
the activity of reading to embodied, temporal and spatial engagements. Both the authorial voice
and the readers’ responses and interpretations play a crucial role in the process of “data-
collection”.
In August 2019, I started my trip to Nairobi, two years after the launch of the Standard Gauge
Railway (SGR) from Nairobi to Mombasa, which is part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It was
the same year that the contract of the SGR got leaked and China was criticized for its “debt
diplomacy”. Even though China has often been portrayed as the neo-colonizer in African media
since the early 2000s, long before the leak, its economic and political activities are neither based
on colonial baggage or “legacy” as it is in the case of the UK or France, nor violently executed on a
political and cultural level. The re-emergence of the term neo-colonialism, which is defined in its
broadest sense, does speak volumes about the ills of current capitalist systems and actually admits
the fact that Chinese activities in Africa are carried out within the framework and infrastructure
of the world economy with a set of rules that inherits the colonial system and that puts Africa in a
disadvantaged position economically. However, the naming of China as a neo-colonizer due to its
relatively “late” coming to the interactions with Africa, actually reveals a linear timeline with the
Mingqing Yuan: Literary Fieldwork in Nairobi
57
West again deemed as more advanced and exemplary. In this sense, undeniably both China and
Africa are in a postcolonial context, but power asymmetry between the two demands a more
nuanced, dynamic and closer look. To some extent, my topic is closely related to current affairs
and development as well as political comics and comedy shows, but it provides another picture
outside of this neo-colonial debate.
My trip was designed to find more literary texts on China and Kenya, including political cartoons
and comedy shows, another form of narratives that address China’s presence in Kenya. Thus, the
trip included archival research as well as studio visits with interviews of writers and cartoonists
in-between. I find the discussions about positionality and reflexivity useful for disentangling the
complexity and fluidity of relationship between me and the interviewees. On one hand, they touch
upon the dynamics and diversity of relationality in the fieldwork, especially in regard to the widely
conceived binarity between outsider and insider; on the other hand, they address the impacts and
even gaps, regrets and misunderstandings in the process, which further exerts influence on the
selection, definition and interpretation of data.
Positionality often refers to positions and identities of a person that influences one’s opinions and
understandings in a certain social and political context, but its close relationship with progressive
movements in the 1960s sometimes renders the understanding of it to be rigid and categorized
according to identity category. As Robertson summarises, positionality
is premised on ever more specific categories of identity that can invoke a kind
of cultural relativity […and] retain[s] an asymmetrical relationship between
‘the West’ and ‘the Third World’. […] Not only can positionality become a form
of self-stereotyping, it can also effectively stereotype others in a way similar to
mirroring: as ‘the self’ the other way around (Robertson 2002: 789).
Robertson’s article doubts the effectivity of naming and using identity categories and points out
the implication of “cultural relativity”, as Merriam et al. (2001: 411) summarise, that “positionality
is thus determined by where one stands in relation to ‘the other’”. This cultural relativity
discussion can also be seen in the discussion about insider and outsider, about native and foreign
researchers. However, I would like to take cultural relativity and distance of differences out of
categories a prior to emphasize the elasticity and negotiation of positionality in the fieldwork and
to take the social and cultural structure that stipulates the differences between self and other into
a dynamic and shifting terrain. In this sense, positionality is not a rigid, previously fixed
precondition but comes from reflexivity in the interaction and negotiation with the constantly
changing social and power structure and actors. The positionality of a researcher is not just
determined by his or her own social class, cultural background or tags based on identity categories;
instead, it is a processual variable that is closely related to situation, relationality and even
performativity of the researcher in the field.
Meanwhile, positionality should not be understood as a fully conscious self-positioning, as Gillian
Rose’s (1997: 311) discussion of “transparent reflexivity” questions the visibility and knowability
of one’s positionality. This actually puts the reflexive and analytical power of scholars into
question. Rose argues that since identity is constructed through social relations and differences,
this determines the failures of transparent reflexivity in relation to a visible positionality, both of
which assume a knowable self and other. She proposes to render the agency of the researcher “as
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a performative effect of her relations with her researched others, […] a ‘decentered self’” (Rose
1997: 316). Her emphasis on “webbed connections” acknowledges intentional or unintentional
deviations in actions and understandings through the performativity of identity. The dynamic and
even contradictory workings of relativity and positionality can cause and be caused by conflicting
and fluid identifications and debates within the researcher’s self, between the researcher and the
researched or the field, and between the field and the larger context and discourse. This partly
explains the need for critical reflections on regrets, mistakes and ignorance in the field after
leaving it.
The main methods that I used in my fieldtrip are individual interviews and archival research into
historical records and media reports. The interviews contained two threads, one on the Kenyan
artists who have worked on China and the other on the Chinese diaspora in Nairobi; the two
differed but also interrelated. The interactions and dynamics between the two groups also feature
in my overall project, which offers perspectives on China-Africa from a quite diverse spectrum of
people across occupations, educational backgrounds, social classes and religious beliefs. In the
following parts of this article, I will use some situations that I encountered in the field to reflect
on the construction of positionality and the relationship between fieldwork and literary studies,
even though these moments cannot be directly defined as “data”.
2 “Where are You From?”
Questions about one’s origin or nationality are often the start of a conversation, but they come in
diverse forms such as a simple “Ni hao,” (“hello” in Mandarin) which already categorises an east
Asian-looking person as a mainland Chinese. This ethnic greeting constantly reminds me of my
distinctive physicality on the ground. This marked-out foreignness does bring me benefits,
including finding help more easily, but it also sometimes puts me into a situation in which to
perform or exhibit my “(non)-Chineseness”. Officially affiliated with a German institution for
almost six years and flying to Nairobi from Germany, this link with the West allows for improvising
and performativity in the field, manoeuvring the conceptualizations both associated with China
and western Europe. This “German” card can be taken out in some situations to counter certain
images of China and to disrupt the direct link between physical appearances and assumptions of
one’s place of origin as well as expectations of certain responses, but in retrospect, I think my
selective answer to my social identity might have infringed the line of ethics as a manipulation of
power relations. My preference for this fluidity in identities also comes from an elite education
background that enables me to think and have the cultural capital to transcend boundaries. Acting
like a so-called “world citizen” is a privilege embedded in the possibility of international mobility
which makes my transition and “performativity” possible and that gives me the chance and ability
to perform.
The incident that increased my consciousness about the question of nationality and ethnicity was
the following:
It occurred when I was wandering through central Nairobi shortly after my arrival
and tried to take a photo of a government building. I was on the other side of the street
and snapped one photo of the building simply out of the admiration of its grandeur.
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Then an armed security guard in uniform came to me and asked me whether I took a
photo of that building. I affirmed, after which he pointed to a small board on the side
of the gate and asked me to read it. That was the moment when I realized that taking
photos was not allowed here. I turned to the guard who demanded to see my phone.
I handed it over to him and he found the photo along with some other photographs of
government buildings that I took previously in a different district, where I did not see
a no-photo sign either. Then he said, “I have to take you to the police station now,
because you have taken so many illegal photos”. My first thought was that I have never
experienced a Kenyan prison which will definitely be a very unique experience, but
the thought of nobody to bail me out in Nairobi propelled me to make an effort to
mitigate the case. I said they were just photos and asked if I could simply delete them
from my phone. He suddenly asked where I was from and whether I could speak
English. I was surprised by the question since our whole conversation had already
been carried out in English, and so I answered positively since I “came” from Germany.
This answer that I unconsciously used to prove my English level made him scrutinize
me further which was soon followed by the question of what I was doing there. I
replied that I was a student studying Kenyan literature and very new to Kenya. He
demanded to see my student ID and asked how long I would be staying in Kenya. I
presented the required documents and answered the question truthfully. He
examined my student card while holding my phone and then said he would still need
to take me to the police station because I had simply taken too many photos. At that
moment, the mixed feeling of nervousness, shame, regret and the anger of being
treated this way brought me on the verge of tears. I did not understand why some
photos could bring me to prison, so I just repeated that I could delete the photos. He
did not speak after my pleading. I felt that I was expected to say something, but I did
not know what else to say so I just stood there in silence under the sun. Maybe after
one minute or so, he said, “Okay, I forgive you this time, and you can delete them and
go” (Fieldnote, September 11, 2019).
In that moment during the conversation, I was mainly blaming myself for not being observant as
I took photos and felt lucky and thankful to be “forgiven” and let go in the end, but in retrospect,
the final comment of the guard and the unnecessary seriousness or threat made me suspicious
about the real purpose of the questioning. It was noticeable that he was confused and uncertain
after I presented my student card. I do not know whether the invitation to the police station is a
common practice stipulated by the regulations or whether it is just used to extort bribery based
on the stereotypes of Chinese in Kenya who are known for their limited English abilities and
“collaboration” – petty bribery – with local police. I do not know whether I was allowed to go due
to his generosity or the German student card that I showed, or just being a female exhibiting
vulnerability through being on the verge of tears or my inexperience and inability to understand
and carry out the “local practice”. I also do not know whether I was stopped only because of my
wrong-doing or because of my foreign looks or even more precisely my Chineseness. Later I
searched that place on Google Maps and saw a comment describing almost the same experience,
but clearly that person was not forgiven and had to pay 5,000 Kenyan shillings, approximately 50
USD, for one photo. Similarly, when I told this story to some Chinese residing in Nairobi, they also
suggested that the intention of the guard was bribery, which is not uncommon and might not
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specifically target Chinese based on their experience, though the demanded amount of the bribe
might vary in different situations. Since then, I regretted my dumbfounded reaction and not taking
the questioning easier and “questioning” back the guard to pursue the “hidden” reasons of being
halted. The answers to my confusion will remain unclear forever but the incident shows that
entanglements and intersectionality might all contribute to the happening of a certain
relationality through various possible divisions and categorizations. Even though this is not a
structured interview designed for my research, it does impact my understanding of transcultural
interactions in everyday life.
How to answer where I am from plays a role in my interactions with the Chinese community as
well. This question often comes after the inquiry about name, out of a yearning to know whether
one comes from the same or a close region back in China. China has a large population with diverse
ethnic backgrounds and different respective dialects as well as living and food customs. Chinese
companies and expatriates in Kenya are also diverse in their motivations, associated
organizations and socio-economic backgrounds. They are not always co-operators, sharing
solidarity with each other in another country. Some companies and people have a strong
geographical attachment and belief in regional differences. No doubt, it is easier for persons to
communicate and relate better when they share similar memories and dialects of a certain area,
but this might also install a linguistic and sentimental barrier towards other groups. Thus, it is not
uncommon to be asked the question among the Chinese community and to establish some
relationships along this line. I attended a food gathering with some Chinese diasporas where there
were games designed in-between to facilitate the participants knowing each other. During the
game, individuals are not addressed by their respective names but by the name of the province or
city that they come from. This raises attention to the differences within the Chinese community
and involves the inner politics and geopolitics within China. Certainly, I have to admit that my
alertness to this question is out of a sensitivity to some stereotypes and prejudice towards the
province where I come from and the observation of a high concentration of people from one
adjacent area in China in certain industry or business in Kenya. On the national level, since the
Chinese government carried out a policy called “provincial assignment for project construction”
(duikouyuanjian), through which one provincial government is assigned for an African country in
project construction, even though the project might be signed between the Chinese central
government and African governments, workers from these provincial companies tend to mainly
come from these provinces, which determines the provincial concentration in a specific African
nation. On the individual level, some successful entrepreneurial companies tend to be family
companies or based on one’s own network, which to some extent also explains the emphasis on
regional ties. This emotional and economic closeness constructed by geographical affinity back at
home brings the existing dynamics and heterogeneity within China to Kenya, which deconstructs
the homogeneous imagination of a holistic Chinese community.
The question of origin is not simply about place, nationality, ethnicity or physicality but also about
all social factors including education, class, power dynamics and even my own experience and
performance, both in the past and at that specific moment. All these above-mentioned instances
might not be considered valid data to inform literary theories, but they remain as a perspective to
enquire microlevel interactions and representations in the literary texts and provide a glimpse
into the dynamics of negotiations of positions and power relationships in daily life that inform
fictional writing and literary imagination. The conceptualization of a certain category as nation or
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academic identity might serve as an approach for analysis, but it does not automatically become
a position. There are more mechanisms and intersections at work that reinforce or disrupt the
discursive practices and power structures, which complexly negotiate and act out the positionality
in relations. Those unclear moments are points of entry to my research on how China is perceived
and points of reflexivity on how I have biases, stereotypes and conceptualizations of Kenya. These
moments of confusion and missed chances are the reminders of the fact to me, when I approach
the imaginary world in texts, that there exists no homogeneous China or Kenya as a self-
explanatory category and it is not simply a self and other division but more dynamic and fluid.
This drives me to abandon all my previous theoretical frames such as “the gaze” or orientalism in
approaching Kenya-China writings.
3 “Chinku, Chinku”
I stayed at an Airbnb in Kileleshwa in Nairobi during my field trip. Matatu are small vans or
minibuses ran by different private companies that I took almost every day to the city center to go
to the archives. The drivers and conductors took me just as any other passenger without any gaze
salute or teasing and I felt no pressure to engage in conversations as in taxis. This generated an
illusion that I was just like anybody else on the matatu, rushing from one place to another.
In the morning, the matatu was caught in a traffic jam close to Odeon, the matatu
central station. I was sitting next to the window and heard some metal knocking on
the bus. It startled me because it reminded me of the stone that was thrown at the
window of the train carriage that I was sitting in when I was in Morocco, but when I
turned over, I saw three to four matatu men in their red uniform waving at me with
shouts of, “Ni hao!” and, “China!” (Chaina). I smiled and waved back. When they saw
me turning around, one of them did a kunfu pose in the narrow gaps between matatus
and I laughed very hard. It was a mixed feeling of amusement and a slight taste of
magical realism. Do they think this is the way Chinese greet each other? Or do they
think that I am a kungfu master just because of my physical look? (Fieldnote,
September 5, 2019).
I wonder where their impressions come from and what they think Chinese are, but I am sure that
this attention is different from those that I got in a small, German town.
During my visits in the studio of a comedy show, I saw a video named “Chinku, Chinku” in the
archives, which contained an episode on the relationship between China and Kenya. The name
caught my attention due to its similarity with the term “chink” in English, which has a derogatory
denotation and is considered offensive, so I asked the staff what chinku ment and if it carries any
cultural implications in Kenya and where it comes from, as made-in-China goods are often
referred to as fong kong in Zimbabwe and ching kong in Nigeria.1 The two staff members talked
and thought for a long time and reached the conclusion that they did not know and they did not
think it was related to the English word “chink”, at least not in its derogatory sense. Does it come
1 This information is provided by Deng Zheyuan and Zhang Lifang.
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from “chink” in the English context or is it a local transliteration of Zhongguo (中国), the name of
China in Mandarin, to Sheng or Swahili? Undoubtedly, Chineseness is marked out in this word, but
should it be directly submerged to the discussion of race or even “yellow peril” in some examples?
With the curiosity about the meaning of the word, I searched the internet to see how it is used in
context. The finding is a song by Jabidii from 2018 published on Youtube named “China Chinku”,
which depicts Kenyans imitating Chinese by acting in kungfu poses popularized by movies of
Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and wearing Chinese clothing, including Asian conical hats and red
lanterns to signify the peculiarity of Chinese, their love for money and disbelief in God. This video
somehow connects the episode that I had on the matatu and the term chinku, but it also opens the
space to distinguish the differences within similar Kenyan and Western conceptualizations of
China, since these similar cultural articulations come out of different power hierarchies and have
a different historical lineage. This further questions my own interpretation frame of whether to
directly insert these cultural productions into a western narrative or to take the phenomenon as
a changeable and negotiated dynamic with cultural specificity. For me, to suspend judgement and
routinized interpretations are the beginning for critically reflecting on one’s positionality. Being
chinku or being named as Chinku is a position but not identity, a fragmented space to negotiate
instead of dwelling and an angle to enter a debate. This might be better seen in another incident.
During my fieldwork, I was also looking for historical archives. After spending almost four weeks
there, I got to know most of the staff. On the last day, I went to bid farewell to them.
A member of staff came to me and asked whether I really was from China. I said yes,
and he asked whether I could bring him a second-hand smartphone when I came back
to Kenya. I was not prepared for this turn of the conversation and was not sure
whether he was joking or being serious as it is widely known that made-in-China
goods are often associated with fakeness or low quality. Then he added that China
produces good smartphones and perhaps it would be easy to find a good second-hand
one for him. I was perplexed since I was not going back to China but to Germany. I told
him that and it seemed to surprise him. He staggered and simply repeated that if I
returned to China before coming back to Kenya, I should remember him and his
request (Fieldnote, September 13, 2019).
This conversation impressed me not because of his directness but because of his
conceptualization of Chinese goods and the turn at the mentioning of Germany. The literary texts
and media reports that I encounter often associate Chinese goods and projects with low-quality
and cheapness. This positive conceptualization of Chinese products surprised me and motivated
me to look more into the section. Chinese phone brands such as Huawei, Xiaomi and the other
three owned by Transsion Tecno, Infinix and Itel are not far away from Kenyans’ daily life but the
latter three are mainly focusing on the African markets. In addition to phones, the comedians that
I was following online also post on some app developed by Transsion. This interaction reveals a
more nuanced understanding of “made in China” and exposed my own bias towards Chinese goods
in Africa. It also called my attention to the line between have and have-not. I do not know whether
these words are meant to please me or to increase his chances of getting a phone for free, but
clearly I was taken as a more well-off person with extra phones to give away and was considered
to have easier access to “good Chinese phones” since I am Chinese. Differences are drawn not only
according to my physical appearance, the impression of Chinese government, companies and
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goods but also to me as a scholar doing research, the mobility and entitlement that I carry with
me due to my educational background, which mixes the so-called Chineseness and Western
thinking and even self-orientalization.
In addition, from the very beginning I had an apologetic feeling about the mass-produced Chinese
goods sold in the local markets, especially second-hand clothes with Chinese characters on them.
I deplored the withering of the local industry disadvantaged by Chinese goods in price and felt
Kenyans as have-nots being exploited under the flooding-in of Chinese capital and commodity,
especially after I experienced a sharp contrast in the residence between some Chinese expatriates
and local Kenyans.
One time after a whole day in the Bunimedia studio, I walked to the matatu station
with Chris, an intern at the studio who was about my age. As we walked through the
street stands nearby, I expressed my thoughts with a tone of apology to him about so
many Chinese goods and Chinese being in Nairobi. I was expecting some criticism
from him but to my surprise he answered, “You know, that’s also how these people
make a living. It’s they who brought Chinese goods here. Perhaps without Chinese
goods, they won’t be able to make a living, and many people cannot afford many living
necessities if these Chinese things are not sold.” (Fieldnote, August 28, 2019).
This made me aware of my own negligence and blindness to local agency and the hypocrisy of my
imaginative condescending sympathy. Consciously or unconsciously, I assumed and positioned
myself as privileged in opposition to the locals in a binary discourse between exploiters and
exploited. I thought this self-critique was a reflexive review of my positioning, but it actually
reinforced my assumption of a binary position of either-or, an essentialized simplification and
understanding of nationality and class. It is a condescending, pretentious self-critique. My
interlocutor’s comments on the other hand showed his empathy and understanding, which
problematizes the binary between the researcher and the researched, the previous one not as the
sole knowledge producer and the latter one not as a passive object for study.
Certainly, the performativity within my own and my interlocutor’s actions should also be taken
into account. Did I express my uneasiness about China’s presence on the ground out of my
received education and information acquired from some biased reports and/or out of a desire to
distinguish myself from the “business and politics” people, to bestow value and a certain
objectivity into the position of being a “scholar”, especially a literary scholar? Was I appropriating
the criticism against China to seek for an acknowledgement of my open-mindedness and self-
differentiation from other chinkus, rebelling against the stereotypes by adopting the position of
critics? And was his answer really what he thinks about commodities made in China or was it
because he was talking to me, a Chinese researcher? Did he make this comment based on his own
life experience; because of his university-educated background that enables him to see different
angles?
However, unfortunately I missed the chance to find the answers in that very moment and what
remains accessible is only my point of view. All these questions drive me for a review of my own
subjectivity and positionality. Being a Chinese national does not imply a naturally separate stance
and view from the Western knowledge system or naturally a Chinese perspective. What I detect
in myself is the inheritance of the imperial gaze projected both on myself and Kenya, both
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stereotyped and represented in certain discourses. The fieldwork experience instead proves the
invalidity and inability of directly applying concepts of race and nationality in the Western context
to the context in Kenya and ascertains the failure of one-dimensional and imposing paradigm of
self and other. Positionality is not only an issue of identity but is a process experienced and
constructed through interactions, communication and even miscommunication. This is not to
deny the existence of certain categories and materiality, which delineates and restricts the
positions, but the ambiguity and dynamics that challenges the rigidity and limits of identity
politics should be the focus that allows the positionality to grow and multiply in multiple
directions. This also reveals the transition of a private and personal matter to a dialogical
positioning. To some extent, positionality is not only where my interlocutor positions me or where
I personally stand but also in which context the conversation takes place and how the relationship
between me and my interlocutor is. This allows the performativity, especially when I said or acted
in certain ways, consciously or unconsciously, to reinforce a self-image internally and to project
an image of myself externally.
4 “So, You’re a Real Third Mankind!”
In Nairobi, even though I only knew two Chinese before my arrival, it turned out to be very easy
to establish links with the diasporic community. Most of the time when asked, they were either
expatriates from some Chinese companies residing in Kenya for a limited time or short-term
exchange, but there were also investors, consultants, global nomads and scholars with degrees
obtained in Europe or the U.S. who had long-term plans in Kenya. This means that a huge diversity
exists in the group of Chinese in Nairobi and this might produce different facets and dimensions
of China’s engagements with Kenya. However, among all these people in infrastructure, diplomacy,
business, media and scholars from different areas with different specialization, I seemed to be the
only one doing literary studies. Often after my self-introduction, questions followed ranging from
the surprise and doubt about the existence of Kenyan literature to the usefulness of literary
studies but most of the time, the conversation turned to another topic.
Once at a party, after I revealed my research area, a consultant working for a famous
international consulting firm happily said: “I’ve read some Kenyan literature! Out of
Africa is very well-written! Have you visited Karen’s house? It is pretty”. Despite a
strong reservation, mixed feelings and the urge to talk back to him, I simply answered
him: “No, I have not.” Then he asked: “But what can you contribute to the
understanding of China and Kenya? How do you predict the future of the relationship?
Can novels tell you that?” I answered honestly that I did not know, even though I
became more certain at that moment that I should continue with my research and
certainly not limit it solely to academia. (Fieldnote, August 24, 2019)
This encounter made me reflect on the possible contribution of my own work and the positioning
of literary studies. Should it be related to area studies, to policy-oriented conclusions? Or should
it remain “detached” or join the highly political discussion of international relations? What is the
boundary, or should there even be a disciplinary boundary? Does the perspective on an individual
and human level really contribute to the knowledge production or mutual understanding? What
is the responsibility of literary scholars eventually? These questions still remain central to my
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research, but this encounter exactly ensures the values of literary studies in understanding
interactions and categorizations between Kenya and China. Another encounter that forced me to
reflect on gender and the relationship between literature and the world took place at a group
gathering.
I attended the gathering of a religious group for Chinese and Chinese overseas in
Nairobi to celebrate the Mid-Autumn festival. I was invited by an acquaintance, who
is a member of that religious group, even though I am not. At the gathering, I was
asked by an older Chinese lady about what I was doing in Kenya. After I told her that
I was doing my doctoral studies in literature in Germany, she asked me how old I was
and whether I was married. When she found out that I was almost 30 years old and
still single, she shook her head while leaning back and said, “So you’re a real Third
Mankind!” (Fieldnote, September 13, 2019).
The expression “third mankind” is a popular phrase used in China particularly to refer to female
doctors outside of the binary division of two mankinds as in men and women. The name comes
from gender stereotypes in China, that women are supposed to find someone older and more
educated than themselves and stick to the gendered roles and divisions of labour and power. As
it is more difficult for female doctors to find someone more educated than them and having a
doctoral degree means an advanced age in the context where the late 20s are considered to be the
deadline for getting married, female Doctors of Philosophy are not popular on the marriage
market. This means to some extent being “left over” or out of the heterosexual marriage structure,
which renders them to be the “Third Mankind”, not feminine or masculine enough. Thus, being a
single female with a doctoral degree is taken as a failure and a losing mark for the woman and her
family. After the exclamation, the old woman advised me to get my head out of books to look
around the world and doubted the value of studying humanities, especially literature, since this
will not earn one much money.
This relates to the previous discussion of positionality. On one hand, as a Chinese person at a
meeting with the majority being from China or having a Chinese heritage, I was under a Chinese
gaze in the Chinese cultural context, despite how I position myself on the issue and where the
conversation is spatially located. On the other hand, the discourse seems to reinforce my gender
identity in relation to my education background. I was put under the gaze of a heterosexual
patriarchal frame by the old woman who internalized the cultural structure. I am not aware of her
educational background or marriage status, but clearly my gender identity together with my
educational background were taken as negative factors for my marriage prospect. I regret that I
did not pursue further to ask her where these ideas come from and how her life experience
informs her about it. Clearly, she did not say this to upset me but really out of an auntly concern,
but I missed the chance to continue the conversation and to find out more about her perspectives.
What makes these two cases stand out is that they took place in Nairobi, but both are imbedded
in a certain discourse that is popular within the Chinese cultural context.
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5 Conclusion
My one-month fieldwork stay in Nairobi seemed to be short and cursory, but it did open a space
to reflect on the dynamics, relationality and fluidity of positionality, which is more negotiated and
constructed, which is opaque instead of blatantly intelligible and which seems to be mystified so
that the fragmentation, disruption and undercurrents are made invisible. For literary scholars,
being in the field is breathing the air, touching the soil and navigating the physical space, as well
as an embodied approach of textual analysis and data collection. It can provide a deeper
understanding in the careful reading of texts and offers an opportunity of collecting more cultural
texts and archives for study. All these interactions and experience provide a tangible dimension
and insight from a particular position that requires more thoughts into the polemic universality
of representation and knowledge production. This also offers a way to glimpse inside the literary
productions, which is creative and fictional, but which is also deeply entrenched in the everyday
life and discourses, heavily influenced by capital and personnel movements and enhances or
contradicts what is happening on the ground.
The aforementioned cases show how nationality, geographical positions, profession, gender and
cultural context intersect and dynamically interact with each other, which are also the moments
of reflection and regret that many questions remain unasked and unanswered. I find Rose’s (1997:
317) argument useful due to her attention to the “fragmented space, webbed across gaps in
understandings, saturated with power, but also, paradoxically, with uncertainty: a fragile and fluid
net of connections and gulfs”.
The misunderstanding, non-understanding and misinterpretation occurring or lost in the
communication and (un)learning process in the field are the moments required of reflexivity. It
also calls my attention towards both my own and my interlocutor’s performativity of identity and
position in our interactions, which creates gaps, absences and contradictions. As a beginning
researcher in the field, almost without any previous training in research methodologies, this
conceptualization of positionality gives me a space to reflect not only on the highlight of my
fieldtrip but also on the failings, the lost chances and regrets that I had in the field, which were
only discerned after the fieldtrip. It renders some confusing or unpleasant moments to be
meaningful and revealing, which might not be deemed as useful data or contributions to the whole
project. In this respect, Rose’s reflections on positionality echoes with Lichterman’s
conceptualization of “interpretive reflexivity”, which focuses
on mistakes, gracelessness, hard-won insights, experiments in attribution, and other
inter-cultural encounters whose outcomes may or may not correlate predictably with
social position. Interpretive reflexivity tracks missed connections, lost opportunities
to act differently by attributing meanings differently, as well as the ethnographer’s
little reality tests that get it right (Lichterman 2017:39).
All these gaps and fragmented moments of interactions show the opacity, complexity and
dynamics of my own positioning and of my interlocutors’. This in a way constructs the relationship
between me and the context and the relationship in turn constructs my positionality and deviation
from the positionality that is often associated with identity category. Meanwhile, these
interactions also reveal a multi-layered and nuanced understanding of China-Africa relations in
everyday life, beyond the news and headlines steeped in a discursive and ideological contention.
Mingqing Yuan: Literary Fieldwork in Nairobi
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New terminologies and paradigms are needed to capture these nuances and dynamics. Fieldwork
does not only inform the analysis of literary texts but also the theoretical framing of my project,
which is certainly not free from previous narratives but is also different and new from the
simplified conceptualization of both sides.
6 References
Lichterman, Paul (2017). Interpretive Reflexivity in Ethnography. In: Ethnography 18(1): 35-45.
Merriam, Sharan B., et al. (2001). Power and Positionality: Negotiating Insider/Outsider Status
within and across Cultures. In: International Journal of Lifelong Education 20(5): 405–416.
Puri, Shalini & Castillo, Debra A. (2016). Introduction: Conjectures on Undisciplined Research. In:
Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities. Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global
South. Puri, Shalini, and Castillo, Debra A. (eds). New York, Palgrave Macmillan: 1-26.
Robertson, Jennifer (2002). Reflexivity Redux: A Pithy Polemic on “Positionality”. In:
Anthropological Quarterly 75(4): 785–792.
Rose, Gillian (1997). Situating Knowledges: Positionality, Reflexivities and Other Tactics. In:
Progress in Human Geography 21(3):305–320.
Fùjí Music in Contemporary Yorùbá
Urban Spaces in Nigeria
Reflections from the Field
Oladapo Opeyemi Ajayi
1 Arriving in the Field
On July 31, 2018, I arrived in the city of Lagos from Bayreuth to commence a six- month fieldwork
exercise as part of my research titled “Fújì Music and Everyday Life in Contemporary Yorùbá
Urban Spaces in Nigeria”. Unlike in the social sciences and natural sciences, fieldwork is not
considered a first option in the humanities such as in literary studies. One is expected to
extensively justify why and how fieldwork is relevant to one’s research. The internal tension the
idea of fieldwork evokes among early career researchers in the field of literary studies feeds into
what Puri and Castillo (2015: 2) describe as the absence of “institutional consensus”. As they
explain further, early career researchers who choose fieldwork in literary studies might suffer
some level of “institutional consequences” (ibid. 2015: 2). In spite of the dilemma on the potential
consequences of my choice of fieldwork especially as it relates to my disciplinary situatedness, I
found justification in: 1) the nature of my primary materials – since my research focuses on
contemporary Yorùbá popular music genre, and as such I identify and use them as a cultural text;1
2) the nature of one of my research questions to explore how Fújì music is experienced in
everyday Yorùbá Urban Spaces in Nigeria; 3) the aesthetics and spatial theories that I employ for
my research analysis. In this regard, I am interested in the aesthetic experience of Fújì music.
1 Barber (2007: 4) discusses text as one of the things societies produce, and one of the things people do.
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The Fújì music genre became part of Yorùbá music repertoire in the early years of the 1960s, the
period of Nigeria’s independence from Britain. Fújì music started as Islamic music, which is
performed in the context of Ramadan. From its inception, Fújì music is also performed in many
other contexts that are connected to Islamic religious celebration and beyond. Fújì music is
characterized by heterogeneity of both themes and rhythm. In this sense, it is flexible and draws
intertextually from dissimilar sources like Yorùbá oral poetic forms and religious narratives (most
especially Islam). Fújì music straddles both Yorùbá indigenous and neo-traditional vs popular
music experience. The adaptable nature of the genre makes it appealing to different audience
which cut across different socioeconomic classes and religions. Until recently, where there are
more women participating in the performance of Fújì,2 an average Fújì band is predominantly an
all-male band with an identity which is typically formed around the image of a lead musician. The
clear hierarchy dynamics between the lead musician and band members is described as an
“embodied […] aural structure of Yorùbá popular music” (Waterman 1990:374). The lead
musician is usually distinguished from the rest of the band in all things and at all time.
I opted for a multi-sited fieldwork in three Yorùbá speaking cities of Nigeria, which are Lagos,
Ìbàdàn and Ìlorin. The cities of Lagos, Ìbàdàn and Ìlorin alongside other 33 cities in Nigeria are
designated by law as capitals of their respective states. These capital cities are considered urban
spaces – their urban status is derived in relation to the socio-economic realities of towns and
villages (usually less populated in comparison with the capital cities). Notwithstanding, the
following factors can be considered as markers and characteristics of the Nigerian capital cities or
urban spaces: 1) commensurate level of public infrastructure, 2) sizeable population, 3) some
degree of diversity amongst the population, and 4) identifiable patterns of class distinctions in
neighborhoods and professional clusters. In this regard, capital cities in Nigeria are commercially
viable centers with conspicuous presence of commerce, politics and cultures.
2 Self-Reflexivity: Fújì Music and Religion
This section explores my positionality as a researcher on Fújì music, especially as it relates to
religion and social stratification. Fieldwork has been described as characterized by “typical
subjective or personal experiences'' (Robben and Slukka 2012: 13). This argument strengthens
how the process of self-reflexivity plays out in my reflection on the fieldwork process, even when
my Yorùbáness and Nigerianess somewhat qualify me as an insider in the research field. There
are other factors, which demand of me a further reflection on the implication of my positionality
in relation to the research field.
My background from a Yorùbá Christian home implies that my socialization and in fact my
aesthetic taste at the formative age is somewhat skewed to reflect the Yorùbá Christian
community taste and orientation. This dynamic is relevant in the Yorùbá context, as there are
2 Although women have been in related genre since 1950s. Klein (2020: 19) illustrates that “during the 1950s the fusion
of indigenous Yorùbá and Islamic religious musical also produced gendered genre, influenced by the gender politics and
belief systems of the Islamic tradition. One of the leading female Fújì musicians today is Modinat Àshàbí, popularly
known as Barrymade.
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strong communities of Christians, Muslims and Yorùbá traditionalists. Even though the society is
a multi-religious space, sociocultural identities of worshippers in many ways reflect and influence
their religious identity. This in turn implies that ways of life and certain practices are acquired in
form of certain “cultural competence” or worldview. Since Fújì music, although secular is not
merely regarded as Islamic, its peculiar vocal style and melismatic tone which is usually rendered
through nasal timbre tone and constant reference to Quranic citations makes its identity Islamic
(Klein 2019: 147). Thus, in retrospection, my Christian leanings have implicitly distanced me from
Fújì music until I became independent enough to embrace the music genre.
3 Self Reflexivity: Fújì Music and Social Stratification
Towards the end of my six-month fieldwork in Nigeria in January 2019, I was in the company of
four childhood friends. As usual, we were discussing Nigeria’s politics and the upcoming general
election in February. Part of the trending news we discussed was the incident that occurred at a
political rally in the city of Lagos. During the campaign activities of the All Progressive Congress
(APC) political party at a stadium in Lagos state, violence erupted among factions of the Road
Transport Workers Union in Lagos. According to media reports, one of the union’s leaders, Mr.
Músílíù Akísányà, popularly known as MC Olúómo, suffered a critical injury on his neck. MC
Olúómo was attacked on the musical stage of the popular Fújì musician Wasiu Ayinde alias Kwam1
at the political rally ground. All my friends believed MC Olúómo and Kwam1 are uneducated thugs.
Indeed, it is a public knowledge that MC Olúómo’s social relevance and prominence can be partly
linked to the scale of violence and hooliganism that the union he leads perpetuates in the city of
Lagos (fieldnotes, Ibadan, January 14, 2019).
The reference to some catgeories urban working class in a derogatory term like thugs is a common
practice amongst the Yorùbá middle-class and educated populace. It is an opinion that is
convenient on the surface but calls for a deeper reflection. The evening’s passionate argument did
not end without cautious remarks from my friends. In their words: “Dàpò, you need to be careful,
it appears you have been spending too much time with these Fújì musicians in the name of your
research.” Although it was an innocent warning from friends, the statement has been strong
enough to cause me to reflect on my position in relation to my field of study. In this regard, I begin
the process of admitting positionality in the field as a Yorùbá, Christian, educated male. All of these
play a huge role in my relation and interaction with Fújì music across time.
A researcher’s position in the field, no doubt, is part of the uniqueness of the fieldwork (Ibrahim
2018). Indeed, my immersion into the world of Fújì via ethnography changes my perception of
self, particularly in relation to the workings of social stratification in Nigeria. In this context, I
became aware, and, feel differently about separation or distinct class differences of people – there
is the class dynamics between working class versus educated class. There is also the dynamics in
the religious communities. The most prominent in this context is between Christian and Muslim
communities. However, Fújì is playing an important role in collapsing these entrenched divisions.
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4 Lagos, Ìbàdàn and Ìlorin: The Nigerian Urban Spaces and Fújì Music
Cities and neighborhoods are often referenced in Fújì lyrics in form of self-praise by the musician
or in relation to his subject of praise. Fújì musicians and their fans exhibit and express their
sentiments in performances. As such, the cities of Ìbàdàn, Lagos and Ìlorin are prominent
references in cities in Fújì lyrics. Amongst other factors, the two established figures in the Fújì
canons Sikiru Ayinde Barrister and Kolawole Ayinla Kollington are from the cities of Ìbàdàn and
Ìlorin respectively. However, the city of Lagos is a metropolis where most successful Fújì
musicians live. This part focuses on how transformation of infrastructure in urban spaces is
profoundly changing the way Nigerian experience their everyday soundscape.
Within the context of political discourse in Nigeria, Lagos and Ìbàdàn belong to the south-west
geo-political zone of Nigeria. The two cities are described as “the urban hubs of Fújì music” in
today’s Nigeria (Klein 2020: 2). Lagos city and state, until 1993, was Nigeria’s economic and
political capital. It currently has an estimated population of over 18 million inhabitants while
Ìbàdàn has over 3 million inhabitants. A road trip between Lagos and Ìbàdàn amounts to 129
kilometers. Unlike Lagos and Ìbàdàn, the city of Ìlorin presents an interesting cultural dynamic.
Ìlorin is a multi-ethnic Yorùbá city with over one million inhabitants, its inhabitants comprise
people of Yorùbá, Fulani, Hausa, Nupe and other minority groups. Scholars have described it as “a
space of fusion of northern Islamic and Yorùbá Islamic cultures” (Peel 2016; Klein 2020).
As one of my research destinations, Ìlorin is particularly peculiar for the dominance of Yorùbá
Islamic culture in the city - this Islamic religion and Yorùbá Islamic community are significant in
the history of Fújì music. Klein (2020) describes Ìlorin as the home of Were music genre which is
one of Fújì’s foundational genres. Ìlorin is also “renowned for its institution of higher education,
[and] Quranic scholarship” (Klein 2020: 2). So, while Lagos (and Ìbàdàn) are tangential to Fújì
music production, distribution and consumption, Ìlorin is crucial to the foundational development
of the genre. An average Fújì musician is quick and passionate in declaring his place of origin. They
often do this in the form Oríkì, the Yorùbá poetic praise form. They narrate their place of origin
with a sense of allegiance and nostalgia. This is evident in their music and media interviews.
On the contrary and more often, places of origin play a secondary role in Fújì’s clientele network
and their weekly performance destinations. The clientele network in this context is not fixed, it
refers to a wide range of the musicians’ self-identified fans club, the musicians’ sponsors, and the
audience at various performances. Even when they overtly reference or lay claim to certain
neighborhoods, town, or city, Fújì musicians are in fact not confined to any space or territory. As
such, one can allude that Fújì and its musicians have always been cosmopolitan when the idea is
not so pronounced in African arts.
As I immersed myself into Fújì music bands and their performance during the fieldwork period, I
soon realized the limitation of my choice of three cities even though the three cities remain viable
as my research destinations. With regards to Fújì music, however, the three cities are intricately
connected to other Yorùbá speaking cities at the level of performance frequencies and
consumption rate. Fújì performances and associated activities overlap across cities, towns, and
villages daily. A typical week for a Fújì musician means the possibility of performing between
three to four days of the week in any city, town, or village across south-west Nigeria where there
are consistent demands for the band. Thus, the scope of my research transcends beyond the
initially projected cities of Lagos, Ìbàdàn and Ìlorin.
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5 Further Reflections: The Changing Urban Yorùbá Landscape
As earlier discussed, the fieldwork enlightens and reveals new layers of reality. This is more
important in relation to my personal background as a Yorùbá. In this section, I will further explore
my personal reflection in relation to Fújì music and the contemporary public space of Lagos city.
The narration of my personal encounters in the city and further reflections will set the motion to
imagine Fújì music at the crossroad of changing times – some of which is partly anchored on urban
renewal and infrastructure projects. The day after my arrival in the city of Lagos (August 1, 2018),
I set out to commence my immersion into the city. According to my pre-fieldwork plan, I wanted
to observe some motor-parks and neighborhoods in the selected cities. In the city of Lagos for
example, I considered some markets and public spaces like Ojóta, Ojùèlègba, Obáléndé and Oshòdì.
Apart from being accessible to the public, the motor-parks are also the main operating or work
space for the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW). The transport workers union
is informal and highly populated. Fújì musicians have strong affinity with the union
I am familiar with most of the selected public spaces in the cities of Lagos and Ìbàdàn because I
have lived in the two cities before I travelled to Bayreuth for my studies. In this case, I considered
and approached the spaces with seemingly familiar experiences and expectations. With my
presumed background knowledge, I set out with some notions that were based on my knowledge
of the spaces over the years. Even when it is not scientifically tenable, researchers are bound to
make certain assumptions by relying on their human instinct prior to their arrival at the field,
although Nyamnjoh (2013: 106) draws our attention to the debate of “scholarly obsession with
defining a priori and then proceeding to observe”.3 However contentious this mode of scientific
practice appears, it is still acknowledged as part of “basic human instinct” (Nyamnjoh 2013: 106).
In this regard, and in my own case, I begin to admit to my own obsession prior to the field
experience. I approached these spaces with both my instinct and knowledge of the spaces;
therefore, I looked forward to what I considered as the unique characteristics of the spaces.
Broadly speaking, I knew the spaces to be densely populated and marked by a high volume of
informal economic activities.
Bearing in mind fully that sound is a defining feature in the Nigerian public space, its international
link with everyday life in the public is part of my research interest. Sound interacts with human
bodies at these spaces on several levels. Apart from the almost constant sound of vehicular
movements and continuous horn blaring, there is a high emission of loud sounds from
loudspeakers at different locations on the street. Hence, there is a good chance that a visitor is
immersed in some dose of sound effect in these spaces. Music, being part of the experiences in
these spaces is unsolicitedly consumed via the commuting buses and taxis. In other instances,
there are record stores which are located across these spaces. The record stores in these public
spaces are known for their imposing sounds, its effect usually spread across the space and its
environs. The justification for the imposing sound in the space for an average record storeowner
is the idea that every passerby is a potential customer.
3 Nyamnjoh (2013) ascribes the debate on scholarly obsession before field observation to some earlier works like Gupta
and Ferguson (1992; 1997) and Keesing (1994).
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While the genre, style, and thematic focus of music one encounters at the public spaces varies, one
can attempt to map a pattern or make sense of the choice of music in a particular time or season.
As such, one can look forward to encountering “new releases”, especially the ones that have gone
viral. It is also not out of place to encounter songs addressing the relevance of different days of the
week and/or season (Mondays and Weekends, Christian and Muslim festivities), or those that
address a topical societal issue like current affairs, and sports. I approached the spaces in
anticipation of a familiar experience concerning the presence of record stores. However, such
anticipation disappears in the face of ongoing government urban renewal projects. The city of
Lagos in particular, like many capital cities in Nigeria, have for several years witnessed, and are
still witnessing considerable changes. As new infrastructure emerges, the old infrastructure and
known spaces are undergoing re-modelling and re-organization. In this case, public facilities and
public spaces like motor parks and markets are emerging. These structures disturb the landscapes
and transform them from the familiar to unfamiliar, evoking new experiences, and vice-versa. The
new development challenged my so-called insider’s position and assumptions. This is in relation
to my personal memory of the public spaces in question, especially as part of my Fújì music
experience is anchored around these spaces. Thus, the emergence of more permanent buildings
in the spaces in the form of shopping complexes or/and iron barricades challenge the long-
standing experience of these spaces. The make-shift shops are not just substandard structures,
but rather symbolize a class constellation and representation of multiple realities, i.e., an urban
space which accommodates and acknowledges the rich and not rich enough, the consumers of Fújì
music and any other musical genres.
What is at stake in this context? Several low-income activities in the Lagos public space continue
to give way to a middle-class oriented experience. This development is not entirely innocent in
the context of what can be considered as an aesthetic taste that is class-based, defined or regulated.
Fújì music is no doubt closer to the Yorùbá working community, and a displacement of these
communities technically threatens the stability of class-based culture and experience. The record
stores and other informal outlets in the neighborhoods of Ojóta and Ojùèlègba constitute a part of
the distribution network, which Fújì music relied on in the past decades. They are not only organic
but also guarantee an important role in curating the Fújì music culture into the collective
consciousness of Yorùbá/Nigeria urban dwellers. The affected makeshift record stores in this
context are not just small business outlets; rather they have always been part of an ecosystem of
Fújì music’s network.
As the make-shift shops and stalls continue to give way to newer and permanent structures at the
motor-parks and markets in today’s Nigerian urban cities, small businesses like retail record
stores are displaced and fast disappearing in such spaces. As a result of their displacement and
other economic condition, most record owners are forced to target passersby at the traffic
congested routes. In essence, record stores fall into these categories of small-scale business whose
owners are not able to afford the new shops. However, to avoid the pitfall of a narrow justification
for a threatened urban spatial experience, which the displacement of most record stores in the
Yorùbá urban space in Nigeria symbolizes, I also reflect on the implication of the emergence of
another urban-based popular music known as Afro-beats and Afro-pop.
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6 Afro-beats and Naija-pop: The New Kid in the Yorùbá Urban Space
It is no exaggeration to claim that there is a sudden surge of interest of global attention on the
contemporary Nigerian music scene, especially the Afro-beats and Naija-pop genres. These
musical genres are largely driven by the millennials and Gen Z and they have not only gained
global prominence through series of international collaborations and awards.4 This story is also
true for the Nigerian movie industry, Nollywood, whose global boom precedes the popular music
experience. However, the success of this genre of Nigerian music both locally and globally has a
multi-dimensional effect on the everyday experience of the urban Yorùbá space in Nigeria. The
aspect of the local dynamics of Afro-beats in relation to Fújì music is what this part attempts to
bring to fore by way of further reflecting on my fieldwork experience. Clifford (1988:119) sheds
more light on the role of fieldwork concerning knowledge production when he refers to the
experience as “production of knowledge from an intense intersubjective engagement”. This part
discusses how the demography of the urban-based Yorùbá working class community who self-
identify as Fújì fans and are often mobilized by Fújì musicians as a primary constituent in the last
decades is gradually becoming the group which the Afro-beats and Afro-pop singers also cultivate
as core constituents. Because of my daily encounters with Fújì, it begun to occur to me that there
is a significant demography and generation of music consumers who grew up largely on the new
Afro-pop genre. Afro-pop and Afro-beats even as a new genre straddles intergenerational
representation of African music experience; this is through its combination and cross-referencing
of genres across the African continent.
The fieldwork did not only illuminate my perspectives on the sound and rhythm experience of the
urban Yorùbá/Nigerian space. The fieldwork becomes more productive for me to further reflect
on Fújì experience through other material forms. They come in the forms of stickers, paintings,
graffiti, and vehicular inscriptions amongst others. They are symbolic vocabularies that are
invoked by the new experiences of Afro-pop/Afro-beats. Fújì genre is prominent amongst the
multiple forms of non-verbal expressions in the urban space of Lagos. Before the emergence of
the Afro-pop genre in the mid-1990s, Fújì musicians were one the most prominent icons on the
street in the Yorùbá speaking cities of Nigeria. Fújì musicians across generations are popular and
highly revered amongst the working-class operating in the informal economic sectors of Yorùbá
speaking cities. Even when there are evident images of military presidents, religious figures, and
civilian political figures in the iconographies one encounters in these cities, none of them matches
the level of acceptability of Fújì musicians.
During my research in the 2010s, I observed the presence of non-verbal and iconic images of new
Afro-beats and Naija-pop artists that are significant enough to either rival or complement the
dominant Fújì representational experience. Since Fújì appeals to a large demographic of Yorùbá
working class, Fújì musicians often boast of their acceptance on the street. The street as a core
constituent of Fújì is often self-evident in the everyday urban experience. There is a strong appeal
for Fújì music amongst the working-class people in the informal sectors of the Yorùbá urban
spaces.
4 During the 2021 Grammy award edition, the best Global music Album was awarded to Oludamini Ebunoluwa Ogulu
alias Burna Boy for his Album titled “Twice as Tall” (2020).
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Although, the “street” is a term usually referenced by Afro-beats singers to refer to core fans, the
term when deployed in the urban Yorùbá space further complicates the debate and opens up a
new reality. This is about the genres reach to a wider audience of non-Yorùbá speakers. Its reach
to a wider audience is made partly possible through the adoption of English and Pidgin, unlike
Fújì music, which is primarily in the Yorùbá language. It is therefore not surprising that the
contemporary Afro-beats and Naija-pop artists have a large followership in the urban space of
Yorùbá. In essence, the non-verbal experience of Fújì music in the contemporary Yorùbá urban
space overlaps with the contemporary Afro-beats and Naija-pop’s experience. The fieldwork
further brings to fore the dynamics in Nigeria’s contemporary music scene where there is
intertwined relationship and interaction between a relatively newer genre of Afro-beats and Fújì
music.
7 Fújì and the Invention of New Vocabularies in Words and Slangs
This section builds on the earlier argument that discusses Fújì music as continuum of urban
experiences. It brings the reflection on Fújì music and my fieldwork experience closer to myself.
In fact, this part further teases out my insider’s perspective in the field. Raji-Oyelade (2012: 27)
discourages any approach, which assumes “fixity of forms” since it contradicts the ideas of
“dynamisms of societies and cultures”. In this sense, Fújì music as a text form usually responds
and contributes to the societal cultures' experiences of dynamism. Pasuma is a stage name for a
Lagos based popular Fuji musician Wasiu Alabi. Pasuma came to limelight in the early 1990s.
Amongst his popular works is an album titled Òròbòkibo, which was released around 1995/96.
The story of Pasuma’s Òròbò or Òròbòkibo is a signifier of what Fújì has been in defining and
mediating the contemporary Yorùbá’s everyday experiences. The two terms are paradigmatic of
how Fújì music contributes to the urban Yorùbá language vocabulary and experience.
In Yorùbá, the term Òròbò means “extra-large”. As such, a 50cl of Coca-Cola is referred to as Coke-
Òròbò (extra-large bottle of coke). In addition, a big polythene bag is described as nylon-Òròbò
(the extra-large nylon). This is also true for humans: a chubby man can be colloquially described
as brother-Òròbò (a chubby man), while his female counterpart will be colloquially referred to as
sister-Òròbò (a plump woman). Similarly, the phrase Òròbò-kibo is a vulgar slang, which translates
and describes an act of sexual penetration. Thus, Pasuma’s usage of the slangs in his songs, paint
a graphic connotation of how Fújì music didactically reflect the everyday life experience in words
and slangs. In essence, urban slangs like Òròbò-kibo are part of how Fújì music contributes to
contemporary language. Fújì musicians do not only create words, they escalate them as viral
slangs in their music.
Fújì music as a genre whose “experimental versifications” often transform aspects of Yorùbá
spoken language by creating the “aesthetics of funk” (Raji-Oyelade 2012: 88)5. The Fújì musician,
Pasuma like his other counterparts have played a significant role in redefining contemporary
Yorùbá language experiences. This aspect which feeds into the youth and urban culture are
recognizable on several levels. The urban experiences are sometimes revealed and mediated
5 Raji-Oyelade’s (2012) work “Post-proverbial as Archetypes of Modernity” discusses a sub type of Fújì genre and lyrics
which contains “habitually seed, inventive and banal” language.
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through new urban slangs in Fújì music. The role of Fújì musicians in this regard is partly
described as being “graphically revisionist”. This situation is said to contribute to today’s “crisis
of linguistic competence as well as freedom of verbal play” for Yoruba language speakers,
especially those in the urban spaces (Raji-Oyelade 2012: 89).
8 Conclusion
The main objective of this research is to reflect on the fieldwork experience from the perspective
of an early career researcher in literary studies. This perspective pursued is seen through the lens
of Fújì music. I arrived at the conclusion that fieldwork irrespective of one’s disciplinary leanings
has its own voice that is always important to consider and incorporate in a research. Fieldwork
becomes particularly relevant because, more often, what one perceives or imagines outside or
before the field experience may differ from the emerging reality from the field. This is evident and
demonstrated in the section which explored the impact of the urban renewal project on Fújì music.
In order to understand the popular culture of urban spaces, it is essential to gather lived
experiences. The field draws one’s attention to the emerging phenomenon of the new Afro-beats
genres, especially as it relates to the older genre of Fújì music. As one maneuvers the lived
experiences, the emerging data challenges one’s perspective of history even as an insider. Unlike
literary studies methods which demand a close reading of text for one’s analysis usually from a
distant place of imagination, fieldwork not only affords the researcher to bring on board one's
perception of text, it also permits an appraisal opportunity for both conventional fixed text and
the emerging text (narratives) from everyday lifeworlds. The instance of new vocabularies might
have emerged differently if I relied solely on lyrical analysis. However, fieldwork enabled me to
track how lyrics become part of embodied text in everyday context. Furthermore, fieldwork
allows the researcher to acknowledge and embrace one’s position. In fact, it enables the
researcher, alongside Fújì practitioners, consumers and fans to become a character in the field.
The lens of reflection turns on the researcher in ways where one should also reflect on one’s
situatedness in the multi layers of social dynamics.
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Gupta, Akhil & Ferguson, James (1992). Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of
Difference. In: Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6-23.
Gupta, Akhil & Ferguson, James (1997). Discipline and Practice: “The Field” as Site, Method, and
Location in Anthropology. In: Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 27
BIGSASworks! 10
The Reviewers of this Volume
Dr. Shola Adenekan
University of Amsterdam
Dr. Msia Kibona Clark
Howard University
Prof. Dr. Debbie Klein
Gavilan College
PD Dr. Jeannett Martin
University of Bayreuth
Dr. Babajide Ololajulo
University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Prof. Dr. em. Achim von Oppen
University of Bayreuth
Prof. Dr. em. Gerd Spittler
University of Bayreuth
Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke
University of Bayreuth
Wei Ye
University of Minnesota
Acknowledging the Reviewers of this Volume
We are grateful to the reviewers of this issue who provided valuable support, feedback and
critique. We are especially grateful to Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke who agreed to accompany the issue.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic posed many challenges to this issue, we are grateful to the
authors and reviewers for their immense efforts in bringing this issue to fruition.
Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in Africa
79
Our latest BIGSASworks! Publications
Title
Editor(s)
Year of
Publication
Number
Fieldwork Experiences and
Practices in Africa
Nikitta Dede Adjirakor,
Oladapo Opeyemi Ajayi,
Hanza Diman and Mingqing
Yuan
2021
27(10)
Gender and Social Encounters:
Experiences from Africa
Shillah S. Memusi &
Adeyemi Balogun
2019
23(9)
Living in African Cities: Urban
Spaces, Lifestyles and Social
Practices in Everyday Life
Azza Mustafa Babikir
Ahmed, Delia Nicoué,
Johanna Rieß, Johanna
Sarra and Florian Stoll
2018
18 (8)
Perspectives on Translation
Studies in Africa
Uchenna Oyali
2017
17(7)
Religion and Space: Perspectives
from African Experiences
Serawit Bekele Debele &
Justice Anquandah Arthur
2016
15(6)
Actors, Institutions and Change:
Perspectives on Africa
Matthew Sabi & Jane
Ayeko-Kümmeth
2015
13(5)
80
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 27
BIGSASworks! 10
Challenging Notions of
Development and Change from
Everyday Life in Africa
Girum Getachew Alemu &
Peter Narh
2013
11(4)
The Making of Meaning in Africa:
Word, Image, Sound
Duncan Omanga & Gilbert
Ndi Shang (eds.)
2013
10(3)
Trends, Discourses and
Representations in Religions in
Africa
Meron Zekele & Halkano
Abdi Wario
2012
9(2)
Women’s Life Worlds ‘In-Between’
Antje Daniel, Katharina
Fink, Lena Kroeker & Jaana
Schuetze
2011
7(1)
How to cite this work:
Adjirakor, Nikitta Dede; Ajayi, Oladapo Opeyemi; Diman, Hanza; Yuan, Mingqing (eds.) (2021).
Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in Africa. University of Bayreuth African Studies Working
Papers 27, BIGSASworks! 10. Bayreuth: Institute of African Studies.
Adjirakor, Nikitta Dede; Ajayi, Oladapo Opeyemi; Diman, Hanza; Yuan, Mingqing
(eds.) (2021). Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in Africa. University of Bayreuth
African Studies Working Papers 27, BIGSASworks! 10. Bayreuth: Institute of African
Studies.
