Exams and disassociative nonresults: 2 classes

Well hot dawg I am finally done with it.

Graded the damn things.  So many of them.

The good ones okay.  The mediocre ones a reminder of death, of the body as a piece of stupid machinery or clockwork.

The very bad ones sometimes hilarious.  One student unnecessarily attempted a thumbnail review of the whole history of technology (in a paper about an African leader) and wrote, "of course people still talk about the wheel."

In a typical paper, move to page five or six, and often a bit of reality intrudes, gets stuck in the gums and is spat out.  An observation.

My unreasonable gratefulness for that much.

The papers aside: the final exams. Each little ballpoint pen essay is a unique piece of torture. Begin with the generalities. Commence ignition. Turn toward the topic at hand.

The recitation of my own communications, now in burlesque form.  

"MK, Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation, was the militant wing of the ANC . . ."  No, the military wing.  The PAC was the militant wing of the ANC.

That's the only moronic pecadillo I am enforcing in my exam.  The rest of it was a giveaway. Hence the huge number of Bs and A-s this season.

Meanwhile my precolonial Africa class did terribly.  

True, some of them did okay, but the final exam was not that hard, and almost no one did well.  I do not know why until I seize the exams from my T.A., who is arriving back from les vacances today, but it does not matter.  Either he is incapable of the mastery of the topic necessary to be flexible and deviate slightly from the answer key I hastily jotted down for him with my fountain pen, or we have failed to hammer home the salient narrative signposts that I put on the test: Mali, Songhay, Mande-speakers, Askiya Muhammad, Fulani and Fulbe-speakers, Wolof, Senegambia; Pende, Kuba, Efe and Lese, these are the basic signposts of any such course today, and half of my students could not in my view (again I've yet to review the finished final exams) hack it.   Am I at fault?  What the f*** would that mean?  I emphasized the pattern of large Sudanic trade-state expansion ca. 1400s, Mande-based, sending peoples and ideas all around south and west, into the forests and coasts, where hierarchical societies reigned; these communities, valuing wealth in people, encountered Europeans desirous of paying for human cargo.

That is it.  Sure, I cover the Indian Ocean routes and Swahili and other networks entailing Great Zimbabwe, etc.  And I know, colleagues, sure, you can complicate this story!  You can attach caveats and reversals to it!  You can and I do add Kongo and Mbundu in Angola, and indeed Feti in Angola!  But in its essence, it holds up as a story about "pre-colonial" Africa without creating a fetishized tribal past.

The narrative is about prestige (Mande-ness; we read the epic, Sunjata, in two different versions), in organizing hierarchy, not wide solidarities; it is about the organization of new states under the conditions of warfare and capture, including Asante and Benin and Danhome. We deal with autocracy and ceremonial killings.  But most of all it is about the Sudanic empires seeding formations in the forest littorals that subsequently opened up routes to slave exports.

And I include a lecture on an African American maroon slave community, the Saramaka / Djuka, based on the anthropologist Richard Price's work and the history of Suriname, because these are if "Atlantic Creoles," also, African people.

But back to this: Sudanic growth: affecting forests: slave trade dynamics.

That is the bare bones story.

Did my students get it?

No.  Most did not.  Most did not take notes in class.  Most did not understand the information I divulged to them as the narrative baseline of the course.  Many refrained from writing down anything unless I posted words in giant Powerpoint.  History lectures about Africa were a new motif for them.  Some rose to the challenge of being in college.  Some could not.

Five could not.  Five failures not counting total no shows.

From "we are descended from a common Bonobo, Chimp, Human ancestor in central Africa" and :South African hominids of 140 thousand years ago are the earliest anatomically modern human beings" . . . to the dawn of national imperialisms, the shift from Brandenburgian forts and Portuguese castles with slave baracoons on the coast, and ending with two sorts of religious, missionary interventions in response to the tumultuous effects of the slave trade: the Western early missions and settlers, and their focus on slavery: and the great Qadiriyyah jihad creating the Caliphate of Sokoto, in its focus on combatting Muslims' enslavement.

But still, I have to point out again, the final exam tested little more than: 

Mali, Mande, expansion / Islam / trade; seeding forests; wealth in people slave-holding societies, not national identities.

Okay.  I know.

It's a sad story.  Not a tale of solidarity or a harbinger of future justice, a righting of wrongs.

Not a happy let's get up and dance story.

It's just the story of Africa as it rushed up to meet the beginning of the long nineteenth century.

I just tell it, I don't make it. 

And the following era, the modern era of "then to now," the Victorians to the Reaganites: epidemics, direct conquest, and mass killing.  That is a much more pleasant tale!  I'm working on polishing it up for the new semester, right now!

Using Primary Source Material to Teach Africa's History . . . the Logbook of the Northern Light Gold Mining Company

This semester I plan to do something new in the South African History course.

I do not want to compete with the world of visuals as put forth in available media. But I want to ride it forward a little.

My initial thought: people's sense of time in the past differed from today's, especially in rural places and before the railroads.

I have a "logbook" from the cook and account keeper with a party headed by Danial Francis transporting head gear to the previously defunct "Blue Jacket" mine between the Tati and Shashe Rivers, in the middle of nowhere, by "ox wagon": up from Barkly to Kanye and into the hinterlands of Khama's and Lobengula's dominions. The "logbook" is a daily update, at times laconic, at times hilarious, at times offensive, ultimately revealing of a particular time and place the way few other sources I have encountered are. It is still unpublished: I found it in the Zim Archives -- try going there now!

But it works only if each entry is read slowly, and clearly, over a long time — in fact, ideally, when each entry is read only in series, one per day, every day, over the same amount of time that the entries cover.

It goes from July 7th, 1881, to October 9th, covering 94 days or about thirteen weeks, mostly in laconic prose, but sometimes in verbatim and colorful quotations exposing the class and racial tensions in the outfit.

Three months. That's how long it took to haul a piece of machinery from the Cape docks to Tati District, a little piece of South Africa stuck in the corner of Botswana.

The effect, if the kids do it, listening to each installment, is to force the listener to slow down, to stop their expectations, and to relive, in something approaching real time, the entire journey, which is repetitive and dull . . . but then sometimes suddenly hilarious or awful.

The narration is then racist and casually uses Kaffir and once even N——, which we are told is absolutely verboten. It also pits "white men" against one another and rehearses their colorful language toward one another. It is laconic and stark and the reader has to think about what is going on in order to piece together the relationships between the principles and the people around them. I'll help with the larger context, of course.

I am going to edit myself on IMovie to bleep both the N and K words. I do not want to offend anyone in a stupid way, when the facts of history manifest in the narrative of the "log book" are legitimately offensive, because of what they WERE.

Otherwise, therefore, my plan is to read, in a straightforward manner, each entry, labelling each one by the day, and linking them in series to the syllabus, posted on line.

Students will sometimes hear a few concise words, "Inspanned at the river, paid the boys," and that kind of thing; but over time, something very different will emerge, a glimpse of the past in realtime.

Anyone interested in trying it will ultimately also find the links posted here, on my obscure website. As they will also be linked to my syllabus, I'll be identifiable by name for anyone who can type, I suppose.