Harry Garuba and Achille Mbembe at the Wits City Institute, 26 August

The next in the Wits City Institute’s Seminar Series for Term 3 2016 will be held on Friday 26 August 2016 at the Wits Anthropology Museum Central Block, Wits University Main Campus, Braamfontein.    

Discussant - Achille Mbembe, Wits University 

Colonial administrators everywhere were heavily invested in the enterprise of building roads and railways. In tropical Africa where dense forests made many communities inaccessible the desire for roads became something of a pillar of faith of the modernizing, civilizing mission. The physical road or railway brought together the twin axes of the colonial enterprise of commerce and civilization, which functioned as the justification for colonial conquest. After initial hesitation, local communities also became equally, if ambivalently, invested in roads for their own different reasons. In addition to its promise of economic modernity, the possibilities of mobility roads brought forth were seen as limitless by local people, who dreamt of new spaces and places of gain and of adventure and fulfillment. To each side therefore the road promised something materially and symbolically significant.  

In this paper, I explore one of the ways in which roads have functioned in African literature, focusing specifically on the manner in which animist understandings of spatiality and ways of knowing are woven together with modern desires to create a unique kind of enervation and melancholia. I begin by highlighting the ubiquity of roads as physical constructions and as matrix of dream and desire in African writing and then hone in specifically on Wole Soyinka’s masterful play The Road. I read this play as embodying the psycho-social and existential anxieties of an animist modernity grappling with and attempting to understand the lineaments of a new subjectivity.   

Harry Garuba is an Associate Professor in the African Studies Unit and holds a joint appointment in the English Department. His teaching interests include: African literature, postcolonial theory and criticism, African modernities and intellectual traditions of African nationalist writing. In addition to being an author and poet, he is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Heinemann African Writers Series and one of the editors of the newly established electronic journal, Postcolonial Text. His recent publications have explored issues of mapping, space and subjectivity within a colonial and postcolonial context and issues of modernity and local agency. From 2009 to 2011, he was Director of the Centre for African Studies at UCT. Assoc Prof Garuba convenes the Honours stream in African Literature and Culture, and the courses Intellectuals of the African Liberation and Problematizing the Study of Africa.  

For queries and to RSVP contact: Patricia Hadebe patricia.hadebe@wits.ac.za