Remembering Africanization: two conversations among elderly science workers about the perpetually promissory

Abstract

P. Wenzel Geissler teaches social anthropology at the University of Oslo. With Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, Noémi Tousignant and other scholars and artists, he published Traces of the Future (Intellect, 2016). With Ruth Prince, he is currently studying the remains and afterlives of the East African AIDS epidemic, revisiting their book on AIDS in Kenya, The Land Is Dying (Berghahn, 2010).

A failing anthropology of colonial failure: following a driver's uniform found at Amani research station, Tanzania

“…This idiosyncratic collection of scientific and intimate, powerful and insignificant, material and immaterial objects deepened our attachment to Amani, which began to resemble the longing, indeed homesickness, professed by the elderly people we met, who had worked there in the postcolonial 1960s and 1970s (Geissler & Kelly 2016 a ; Geissler et al. 2020). Yet, although obviously framed by colonial violence, historically derived differentiation, and enduring injustices, our historical‐anthropological Wunderkabinett did not yield simple moral‐political meaning, nor add up to one overarching, ‘critical’ narrative.…”

“…On these journeys, the ease and pleasant sociability of which themselves were constant reminders of colonial-derived privilege, we gathered increasingly detailed, if strangely purposeless, knowledge of the minutiae of Amani and those who had worked there during the second half of the twentieth century, around and especially after Tanzania's independence. This idiosyncratic collection of scientific and intimate, powerful and insignificant, material and immaterial objects deepened our attachment to Amani, which began to resemble the longing, indeed homesickness, professed by the elderly people we met, who had worked there in the postcolonial 1960s and 1970s (Geissler & Kelly 2016a;Geissler et al 2020). Yet, although obviously framed by colonial violence, historically derived differentiation, and enduring injustices, our historical-anthropological Wunderkabinett did not yield simple moral-political meaning, nor add up to one overarching, 'critical' narrative.…”