What is African Ancestral Studies?

By Toyin Falola

My decision to write this piece could not have come more opportune. First, I gave four well-received lectures in Ghana on African Ancestral Studies and the variety of knowledge connected with them. Its intellectual demonstration was applied to land, politics, and festivals. The set of these papers will be upgraded into a book.

Then comes the second motive: the practical demonstration of ancestral knowledge in a significant film. The Nollywood (now on Netflix) movie, “Lisabi: The Uprising,” was released only a few weeks ago following scintillating publicity that left the audience thirsting for more from the streaming giant. Since its debut, the movie has received mixed reviews, with ratings as high as ten out of ten and as low as three. I will not comment on my opinion here as that is merely a distraction from the point.

In Lisabi and all the other Nollywood historical movies that have held the Nigerian entertainment world captive lies evidence of a renaissance in the retelling of Nigerian stories — one that is ultimately necessary for rolling back the dominance of Western or Western-inspired tales in our popular culture. It is essentially the same principles of thought that have inspired me to find necessary a reassertion of the place of ancient pieces of knowledge in our contemporary society.

            I say “reassert” because the African sociopolitical landscape is dotted with efforts of historical figures to center Indigenous perspectives on how African societies saw and dealt with the world. In this league are the likes of Julius Nyerere, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kwame Nkrumah, the profoundly flawed Mobutu Sese Seko, Leopold Sedar Senghor, among many others who, either through the instruments of literature, politics or academia, sought to project relatively unique visions of a new Africa. But in the past decades, the perpetual reach for new horizons has been obtained across the black continent, this time with little ideological sentiment. An example abounds in the recent coups in the West African countries of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, framed as responses to Western colonialism but empty in terms of fulfilling promises so far. Another is the ongoing shift in geopolitical winds as Russia batters itself upon Ukraine and China seeks to extend its diplomatic wings. Woven into these complexes are not simply the interests of the traditional great powers but those of countries such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Their gambits are such that they introduce fresh degrees of complications to already existing problems, transforming the external interference from a somewhat more manageable bipolar orientation to multifaceted challenges. Undoubtedly, the Sudan crisis presents the quintessential case study, comprising any and every stakeholder wishing to get a piece of the imploding pie. In Mali, Ukraine has seemingly set its sights on antagonizing its enemies from afar using proxies, even if such tactics were to risk unsettling an already delicate security situation in the Sahel. In my home country, Nigeria, the dramas from which we draw themes for reflecting on our society have conflagrated into one of the most tenuous economic challenges in the country. It does not help matters that we boast the single largest concentration of people within a defined territory in Africa, and neither is it any comfort that the leadership appears in a poorly coordinated scramble for policy responses. The question, therefore, becomes, what benefits does an inward-looking, indigenous perspective offer to solving modern challenges?

            Addressing this question presents its unique complications. Resorting to the application of Ancestral Studies births debates around identity and philosophical choices. Because it is possible to successfully argue that the personhood of the average African is equal parts ethnically defined and equal parts multicultural, due greatly to the impacts of colonial legacies, a tug of war might arise as to which of these selves should legitimately be relied on for conceptualizations. This crisis mirrors the difficulties of reconciling people across racial and religious divides.

Another problem I foresee is the connection of this antique knowledge to the quandaries of the present day. Within this are matters of personnel, such as who decides the application of that knowledge, the capacity in which they do so, and when they should do so. I qualify this as a challenge because the thinking that African ancestral knowledge holds lessons for today risks failing if these lines of thought are preserved with only a sprinkling of academics. Transformational change is as much a project for the individual as it is for their status. Thus, were the privileges of this intellectualism exclusive to the unfortunately obscure territories that learning institutions in Africa can sometimes be, success would be little other than the publication of a few papers and textbooks.  Within this are personnel matters such as who decides the application of that knowledge, the capacity in which they do so, and when they should do so. I qualify this as a challenge because the thinking that African ancestral knowledge holds lessons for today risks failing if these lines of thought are preserved with only a sprinkling of academics.

Transformational change is as much a project for the individual as it is for their status. Thus, were the privileges of this intellectualism to be exclusive to the unfortunately obscure territories that many learning institutions in Africa tend to be, success would be little beyond the publication of a few papers and textbooks. Considering these likely hiccups, we must resolve the meaning of African Ancestral Studies as an academic field. To do this, it is invariably necessary to clarify the meaning of ancestry, a term that even specialized scholars have confused and overlapped with similar terms and contexts in literature. In its simplest, ancestry refers to strictly scientific genetic qualities linking individuals to progenitors.

            It contrasts with the terms race and ethnicity in that while both are socially developed, they derive validity from medically outlined boundaries. Despite including science in understanding ancestry, it remains a contested term in different quarters. This is because of the interchangeability of the term with race and ethnicity and attachment to conceptualizing it as a descriptor for sociocultural origins. This suggests a pedestrian level of convenience in deploying the three terms despite their separate connotations. I may, therefore, decide to accompany a self-description of myself as African by saying that my ancestry is African in the same breath, thus layering these elements of the identity lexicon. It is more straightforward to think of my race as my physical attributes, my ethnicity as my cultural values, and my ancestry as the genetic inputs of my forebears. Yet, to avoid the bias for conflating ancestry with self-concept or personal identity, I opt for the safer, self-evident term, genetic ancestry. This delimits the conversation purely to the biological origins of the individual as opposed to their existence in a geographic location and consequent absorption of the mores and values of people in the same environment.

With this clarification in mind, I contrive African Ancestral Studies as an extensive learning portfolio comprising but not limited to genealogical studies, culture, history, art, language, and religion, to mention a few. In this sense, it implies scrutiny of the evolutions of Africans through time and their impacts on the present day. It aims to plug gaps in scholarly reflections on Africa and solidify existing knowledge by advancing cadres trained in structured ecosystems. Effectively, when we think of the niche, we must, as a matter of necessity, reflect on it as intertwined with knowledge from the past, created by African ancestors or related to their lived experiences. I emphasize genealogy as a crucial pillar of the study because it symbolizes its encompassing nature. Ancestral studies stretch across continents to acknowledge the heavy migratory history of Africans and their consequently dispersed settlement across the globe. It equally rejects the proclivity of commentators to discuss Africa as though its people are a single, cohesive unit. It is a canvas of multiple and complex narratives. Consequently, the objective is to present a bulk study that localizes competence in discovering and interpreting history.

            This takes us back to the question raised earlier: to what end? African ancestral studies pose numerous benefits on collective and isolated levels. A significant prospect of the latter is the encouragement of reconnections to the African continent by people far-flung from it by the exigencies of history, time, and space. The intense circumstances that drove movements of Africans across the Atlantic more than two centuries ago translate to genealogical distances between inhabitants of the diaspora and the home continent. Today, in the 21st century, tenuous economic headwinds, conflicts, and political freedoms propel an outflow of indigenous Africans who frequently procreate biracial natives in their new homes. Fissures in identity develop in both cases. There are journeys of adaptation and settlement that must inherently be undergone by the person, which not everyone will execute successfully. We need to look no further than the civil rights movements of the latter half of the 20th century, highlighting battles between the hosts and the newcomers whose push-pull historical relationships mandate the design of bearable political arrangements. Across all divides, the crisis of adaptation was a formidable factor, and they have also been on an African continent that endured colonial intrusions. Because communities are not always hardwired to be open and receptive to divergent entrants, the instinct to protect the purity of all considered native and traditional is quite primal.

            Since globalization’s sweeping blades must permanently vanish the tendencies, the outcome is an age of cultural or racial admixtures or total domination, with specific essences as time wears. Thus, though this conversation is mainly African, the susceptibility of identity to transformations in external circumstances is as natural as the human planet. For example, my indigenous Yoruba tongue has been impacted by adopting English in my home country, just as other local languages reflect some form of anglicization in their vocabularies and deliveries. The same extends to attitudes to attributes such as food, values, and behavioral patterns, subjected to subtle or conscious transitions even among those who have only been away from their local environment for a few months. Consequently, Africans alienated by these factors confront the puzzle of what parts of their identities are theirs. This search for answers births the field known as ancestral tourism, an exercise during which people attempt to understand their geneses. Undoubtedly, the standardization of ancestral knowledge will go a long way in enhancing the quality of knowledge sought and dispatched.

            The corpus of the discovery activity itself also offers restoration. By this, I refer to all ramifications of restorative projects resulting from a keen awareness of culture and history. In Mali, Google has provided material assistance to a team of locals working to carefully preserve centuries-old texts from the days of Timbuktu’s reign as a center of scholarship. Immortalizing these important texts through digitization has helped ensure that tens of thousands of documentations of a glorious African past are not lost to the insensate tumble of violence. Within the same country, efforts have been committed in the past by international organizations to the restoration of aged infrastructure dating back to the past but are now threatened by conflict. Similarly, some Nairobians have invested in ensuring that the contents of the colonial library stay undamaged and accessible.

            These are a few of many efforts devoted by the genuinely passionate to studying and preserving African history. An independent, professionally inspired effort is more necessary given the standard aloofness of governments in rescuing their national heritages. This tendency projects ignorance of the need to submit alternate narratives to a literary environment muddied by the biases of chauvinist colonial and contemporary scholars. In this sense, the restoration process is also about ownership – who tells the Indigenous stories.  There have been debates about the legitimacy of Western authors in writing or documenting tales of the African continent. These debates cut across pop culture, literature, and fashion. Most recently, the internet has been discontented with Idris Elba’s intention to star Okonkwo in the movie adaptation of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Following the culmination of the EndSars protests, Nigerians also protested Trish Lorenz’s titling of the book Soro Soke: The Young Disruptors of an African Megacity with Yoruba words that had stemmed from grievances of the country’s youth against a heavy-handed police unit. Lorenz had won a hundred-thousand-dollar prize for her work but had mainly complicated issues. She suggested during an interview that she had developed the phrase “soro soke.” Expectedly, her statement generated backlash, prompting publishers Cambridge University Press and Nine Dots Award to release a joint clarification. With Elba, the debates are two-way, one side denouncing his legitimacy to star in such a critical role to which he is non-native and the other arguing about the prohibitive costs for Nigerian filmmakers to obtain production rights to the book in the first place.

            In both instances, the reactions are underlined by a reluctance to see the exportation and appropriation of local narratives. Interestingly, Nigerian authors in the diaspora have not been spared from criticism, as some readers contest the originality of their perspectives. Even festive occasions in the West involving adoptions of Nigerian attires are welcomed with volleys of criticism by ever-sensitive netizens. In response to these, I find the author, Lola Shoneyin’s, response to the Lorenz saga very apt: “If you’re so mad that a white person is trying to reap off your pain, BUY, READ, TALK, WRITE about our title. Own your narrative, and make it a national bestseller, so much so that it overpowers that of this foreigner. We can’t continue to cry over things that are taken from us. We could channel those tears into building and sustaining ours. The West can copy all they want, but let’s center our own stories. How hard can it be?” This, precisely, is the objective of African Ancestral Studies.

            The sociopolitical angle of benefits from interrogating ancestral knowledge cannot be ignored. Today, Africa suffers from unique political and social challenges. It is on a downward spiral of battles against insecurity, poverty, corruption, climate change, and multiple others. Time has proven that applying solutions imported from the West is insufficient to achieve resolution. Rather than relying on tested and inadequate strategies, it might be worth tugging on the positive values preached by diverse ethnic environments. Exemplifying this are principles such as Ubuntu and Ujamaa, ultimately designed to foster a sense of community and leadership. The direct opposite is what obtains currently as ethnic tensions are weaponized to split people further apart. Connected to this is the necessity of historical lessons in sensitizing young people to past events.

            Barring awareness of significant trends and values, society is innately vulnerable to a dearth of political consciousness and contextual intelligence. The demarcation of ideological growth is woven into this, mainly as information is absent on vital epochs. Take the whitewashing of Nigerian leaders, for example. For many, the anti-colonial struggle featured many heroes, sanitary in all respects and without flaws. Yet, a closer examination of informative texts shows a troop of leaders whose faulty decisions and biases were responsible for calamities in present-day Nigeria. Existing without the core perspectives that an Afrocentric study offers us is synonymous with pulling the wool over our faces.

            Unavoidably, we will need to contend with some of the challenges of this field. In an atmosphere where the drive for cultural restriction is isolated to a few enlightened circles, there is utmost certainty that the challenges of democratizing interest and access are uphill. To make matters worse, there are sentiments among the regular people expected to be scholars in the field pointing to a preference for spheres such as medicine, law, architecture, engineering, etcetera. These views are naturally influenced by long-running societal biases, which themselves are also spurred by economic incentives. Fortunately, the positive outcome is that only the most likely people to embark on quests for innovative projects within the estimation of this niche will enroll in it. That reduces the risk of underutilized knowledge inputs. Aside from these, I must also acknowledge the environment within which insights from this learning department can be applied is infantile. Without a doubt, the challenges are myriad but not unresolvable. The results reward the struggle, after all.