Africa’s Pasts in Africa’s Future: A Conference Honouring John Lonsdale

The study of political accountability has never been more urgent, for increasingly authoritarian states in Africa (and in the global North) are closing down space for protest. What resources can history furnish to contemporary political activists in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa? 

•  PROGRAMME

08:30                      Opening remarks

Devon Curtis

Derek Peterson

09:00                      Panel I: Professor Lonsdale’s Toolbox  

Emma Hunter, ‘Political Accountability and the Intellectual History of Democracy in Tanzania’

Parker Shipton, ‘Separate Societies, Cultural Continuities? Ordinal Dimensions in Social Relations’

Jon Earle, ‘Self-Masteries and Political Violence in Late Colonial Buganda 

Shane Doyle and Yvan Droz, ‘Bridewealth, In-laws, and Self-Mastery’

Discussant: Megan Vaughan 

10:45 Coffee break

11:30                      Keynote Lecture

Kenneth Ombongi, Chair, Department of History, University of Nairobi 

‘Land, Blood, and Belonging: Rethinking the Moral Foundations of Statecraft in Kenya’

12:45                      Lunch

14:00                         Panel II: Telling Biographies 

Dan Branch, ‘Tom Mboya, Civic Virtue, and Kenya’s Politics of Ethnicity, 1957-69’

Nicholas Githuku, ‘The Power/Knowledge Nexus and Resistance: discursive consciousness and technologies of the self—the case of Jomo Kenyatta’

Bodil Folke Frederiksen, ‘Jomo Kenyatta and Denmark’

Ethan Sanders, ‘Africa’s Past in Our Future: writing African political biography for global audiences’

Aidan Russell, ‘What to do with times of failure: Rwanda's 1960s exile militants and the moral of the story’

Discussant: Saul Dubow