“The Hour of Decision: Power, Persistence, Purpose, and Possibility in African Studies” was the theme of last November’s meeting of the African Studies Association, which was held virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Northwestern faculty, graduate student, and alumni participation was significant. Adia Benton (anthropology faculty) chaired two panels, “Coronavirus on the Continent: Government and Citizen Responses” and “Mental Health and Healing in Africa.” Visiting scholar Abdulbasit Kassim presented the paper “Holy Defiance and Faith Skepticism: COVID-19, Science, and the Palliative Force of History and Religion in Nigeria.” Florence Nthiira Mugambi (Herskovits Library) participated in the roundtable “Persistent Collecting: Building and Supporting African Studies Collections in the 21st Century.”
Five graduate students presented papers:
- Colin Bos (history), “‘The Owner of All Antique Work’: Antiquities and Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1930–1970.”
- Andrew Kim (anthropology), “Evaluating the Mental Health Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Urban South Africa: Perceived Risk of COVID-19 Infection and Childhood Trauma Predict Adult Depressive Symptoms.”
- Moritz Nagel (history), “African Trade Policy during the Establishment of Colonial Rule: Debt, Port Fees, and Prices in Cameroon, 1884–1897.”
- David Peyton (political science), “Beating the Odds: Strategies of Property Protection in Eastern Congo’s Urban Areas”
- Andrea Rosengarten (history), “Gathering the ‘|Haohâb’: Territory in Translation on the Mission Stations of Southern Namibia, ca. 1830–1880.” Rosengarten also chaired the panel “Reconsidering German Colonialism in Africa: Timelines, Comparisons, Legacies.”
- Nana Akua Anyidoho (University of Ghana), “Social Difference and Individual Agency in the School-to-Work Transitions of Ghanaian Tertiary Graduates.”
- James Brennan (University of Illinois), “Passing Familiarity: Leo C. Aldridge Jr., Mozambique, and the Politics of Mimesis in 1950s Los Angeles.”
- Catherine Cole (University of Washington), “The Credibility of Performance and the Postcolonial Incredible.”
- Moses Khisa (North Carolina State University), “Africa’s Global Security Regionalism: Pushing Up from the Bottom Tier.”
- Susanna Sacks (College of Wooster), “The Poet and the University: The Malawi Writers’ Group and the Contestation of National Identities.”