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IDENTITIES AND CONFLICTS IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA |
Future researchGroup conflicts are an omnipresent factor of the political situation in Sub-Saharan Africa in the post-colonial period. The initial optimism of the majority of the African researchers supposing affiliations other than with the modern state have disappeared from the identities’ agenda; it has all rapidly disappeared in the eruptions of violence, more and more frequent in the 80’s and 90’s. It has been demonstrated that the hypothesis of the theory of modernisation, in fashion at the time of decolonisation, had been excessively linear to be applicable by a complex ensemble of factors that make up the Sub-Saharan societies. Thus, the individual in Sub-Saharan Africa has, maybe even more than Europeans, a repertoire of elements that differ in their importance by the momentaneous definition of his identity. In the African case, we have to take into account the role not only of the so famous ethno-cultural and religious factors, but also of the linguistic and family questions and of the solidarities to pre-colonial states and “traditional” rulers. In this context, the colonisers with his attempts of classifying and missionise and of anthropological penetration, had, obviously, a significative role, although these processes were not explained only by his cultural work. In this context, we intend to achieve a comparative study dealing with several different regions of eastern Africa, between 1800 and 1950, concerning the following case-studies: - monograph on trade caravans in XIX century Angola - genesis of conflicts in French Western Africa (AOF) - monograph on radio diffusion in Ethiopia - analysis of the changes in the problem of gender in Morocco - compared perspective on Cape Verde’s ethnography: colonial and post-colonial - analysis of a local language that will provide a comparison to the methodology of colonial classifications (Ngyungwe) - analysis of the 19th and 20th African ethnographic collections of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, with the aim of creating a virtual museum. This group’s activities involve field work such as anthropological work and an intensive use of several archival sources in Europe and in Portuguese-speaking (Angola, Mozambique) and non-Portuguese-speaking Africa (Senegal, Togo, Ghana, Serra Leon, Morocco). The objective of this group’s members is to present the substantial results of their research in an international seminar on identities in Africa, previewed for 2009. In this context, the group members intend as well to publish several articles in international African studies journals and a collective book with innovative parts of their research. Researchers
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