The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge

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African Historical Demography in the Postmodern and Postcolonial Eras

DENNIS D. CORDELL

At the Third African Population Congress held in Durban, South Africa, in 1999, I presented a census of publications on African historical demography that had appeared since two landmark Edinburgh seminars on the topic in 1977 and 1981.¹ My aim was to show demographers working on Africa—most of whose research is astonishingly ahistorical—that in recent decades, the labors of historians, anthropologists, and indeed even a few of their own number had laid the foundations for the serious historical study of African population. I assumed that such research was expanding. I hoped that presenting a paper at an international meeting of more than a thousand specialists on African demography would convince some that African historical demography is possible despite the scarcity of the sacrosanct forms of demographic data cherished by demographers.² I also hoped that an overview of research might encourage more demographers to introduce historical dimensions into their own work. To my surprise, the presentation drew an audience of several hundred. Questions and comments were numerous, and debate flourished.

However, the true significance of my paper lay elsewhere. My census suggested that all was not right with the world. The enumeration showed that publications in English about the history of African population had grown slowly but steadily through the late 1970s and the 1980s. However, contrary to my expectations, the number of books, as well as articles published separately or in essay collections, peaked at more than thirty in 1990, plummeted to five in 1991, and remained minimal for the remainder of the decade, except for 1994 when it climbed to ten.

I asked myself what lay behind this apparent reversal in research on African population history. I concluded that perhaps the rise of postmodern and postcolonial studies in the 1980s had led scholars of African history and Africanist social science and their students—the scholars of the 1990s—to turn their energies and enthusiasm away from social and economic history to cultural studies. Both postmodernism and postcolonialism raise questions about what is undoubtedly perceived as the apparent hyperempiricism, overgeneralization, quantitative bias, and hegemonic interest characteristic of demographic research. Demography, perhaps more than any other discipline in the social sciences, has been the handmaiden of the state. Censuses, surveys, and other demographic exercises are more often than not the work of state agencies; and the state deploys demographic data to administer or control its inhabitants. International organizations and agencies, which also have sponsored considerable demographic research, are extensions of the global state system. Postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault and his successors, then, would undoubtedly dispute the objectivity and hence the validity of quantitative data collected by the state and its agents. For their part, postcolonial scholars have also roundly criticized the collection of demographic data in the colonies of the European empires.

A couple of other factors also undoubtedly contributed to the decline in research in African population history. First, demography has been marginalized in the contemporary academy. Population studies are most often housed in departments of sociology, anthropology, or economics. Nonetheless, the field has remained segregated from the other social sciences, including history. Students of these disciplines seldom learn much demography. At best, they see demography as comprising discrete sets of methods learned piecemeal to answer questions raised by their research agendas in other fields. Second, demographic research has been closely linked to contemporary public policy issues and the local, national, and international institutions that foster them.³ Such research has focused mainly on the contemporary period. Neither focus nor funding has favored historical studies.

However, these two features have characterized demography as a discipline since World War II. They do not date from the early 1990s, when I pinpoint the decline in new research. So they do not explain it. Postmodernism and postcolonialism, by contrast, were new to Africanist history and the social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s—some years after both had begun to influence other fields of study. Thus, it seems appropriate to explore the impact of postmodernism and postcolonialism on the production of knowledge in the field.

The objective of this chapter is not to savage postmodernism and postcolonialism, though I do indeed look first at why postmodernism and postcolonialism may well have turned attention away from African historical demography for a time. This analysis is by no means as exhaustive as my census published in 2000, but it concludes on a more positive note. In recent years, a few scholars of population history in Africa have incorporated postmodern and postcolonialist perspectives, while still respecting earlier critical traditions characteristic of history and demography. Others have not been dissuaded from producing solid studies, which adhere to the best critical traditions of history and demography, with little reference to postmodern and postcolonial research. In the sections that follow, I will offer definitions of postmodernism and postcolonialism, and then I will look at how each has impacted historical studies. Finally, I will review recent research on African historical demography in light of both.

Postmodernism: Defining the Undefinable

Postmodernism is marked by two characteristics, both inimical to definition. First, postmodernism defines itself in terms of its nemesis—modernism. The standard-bearers of postmodernism have written extensively about characteristics of modernism: belief in the forward march of progress and reason; focus on the emergence of the modern individual graced with an anchored, centered identity; and confidence that modern individuals, aided by science and sangfroid, will deduce objective truths about the world. Second, the founding figures of postmodernism have not only shied away from developing a definition, they have also insisted that such an effort contradicts their enterprise, which is, in part, to deny the existence of universal truths or metanarratives. Indeed, George Ritzer suggests that intellectuals most commonly associated with postmodernism—Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan—would even deny that they were or are postmodernists.⁴ Ironically, then, it is perhaps modernists, who, in their modern efforts to articulate postmodern critiques, have done the most to delineate postmodernism.⁵

Postmodernism is associated with several core concepts. First, it contests the conviction that modernity has brought progress and that science promises an ever more rational and enlightened future. Postmodernists cite as support for their skepticism the horrors of the last century—two world wars, the genocide of the Armenians that opened the century, the Holocaust and the dropping of atom bombs that marked the 1930s and 1940s, and the genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda that brought it to a close. To this list, we might also add the colonial era—the new imperialism of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. After 1850, Western societies often used their great gains in military technology to inflict horrendous death and destruction on the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.⁶ Ironically, the colonizing powers justified their actions by claiming that the suffering and sacrifice were theirs—a white man’s burden and civilizing mission to promote progress.

Second, postmodern texts submit that the prime movers of human action are not reason and logic but less predictable and less knowable influences. Pauline-Marie Rosenau writes that postmodern thinkers tend to accord great importance to more pre-modern phenomena such as ‘emotions, feelings, intuition, reflection, speculation, personal experience, custom, violence, metaphysics, tradition, cosmology, magic, myth, religious sentiment, and mystical experience.’⁷ Most often through Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, postmodernism looks back to Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century philosopher who characterized knowledge itself—the great achievement of the modern scientific age—as an invention that masks a will to power.⁸

Third, postmodernist authors reject metanarratives, analytical frameworks that offer total explanations. Ryan Bishop defines metanarratives as grand theories for the generation of knowledge. Each theory . . . claims to be universal in regard to truth and application.⁹ Baudrillard has written that the great drives or impulses, with their positive, elective, and attractive powers are gone.¹⁰ Lyotard has echoed him with his declaration that postmodernism is an incredulity toward metanarratives.¹¹ Historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob identify the dominant metanarratives of the post–World War II era as modernization theory, Marxism, and the Annales school. They observe, too, that these theoretical frameworks were exclusionary: All three major schools of history had left women and minorities out of their accounts or had treated them in stereotypical ways.¹²

Fourth, distrust of metanarratives and the identification of such grand theories with strategies for power and control has led postmodernists rather to direct attention to texts and language. They have analyzed or unpacked texts to reveal discourses of power, position, and identity rather than universal truth or knowledge. The objective of analysis is to situate knowledge by demonstrating how it is produced, by whom, and for what end. This exercise leads to historicizing texts—locating them in their own particular historical contexts.

Finally, language is obviously integral to the analysis of texts. Bishop writes that the problems posed by language, rhetoric, and representation with regard to knowledge production and legitimation form an essential element of postmodernism.¹³ This concern about language led to a linguistic turn in the late 1970s and 1980s.¹⁴ Postmodernist presumptions of a chasm between language and speech and between signifier and signified led to questions about gaps between the meanings of words—as used by different people of the same society and era, by people of the same society in different eras, and by people of different societies in the same or different eras. Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss applied Ferdinand de Saussure’s analysis of language/speech to the interpretation of signs in general, giving rise to semiotics.¹⁵

Attention to systems of signs, in turn, promoted attention to the broader role of culture in analyzing societies. The linguistic turn, then, gave way to the cultural turn. The notion of text also stretched to embrace tangible and even nontangible cultural artifacts. These developments and the rise of cultural studies, taken together, aroused concern among historians. Appleby writes that [historians] rely on the stability of word meanings at two points: when they write their interpretations of the past and when they read the texts that serve as evidence of the past. Thus, for [some] historians, the linguistic turn has precipitated an epistemological crisis.¹⁶

Postmodernism and History

Postmodern scholarship draws from a common well of thinking about history greatly influenced by Foucault. Foucault regarded history as a succession of discourses, each of which arose in concrete historical conditions to explain the world in terms of prevailing structures of power.¹⁷ For Foucault, the historian’s task was to historicize these discourses to reveal power relationships, rather than to try to understand the origins of people and events—much less the causal relationships among them. There were two dimensions to historicizing discourse. Foucault referred to the first as the archaeology of knowledge, how a particular discourse or discursive environment constructed knowledge across fields of knowledge or disciplines in the same era. For the modern period, for example, an archaeology of knowledge would privilege inquiry into how modernist discourse was reflected in discursive practices characteristic of history, literature, politics, economics, and science. The second task was uncovering a genealogy of knowledge or showing how discursive formations succeeded each other through time. Once such discursive environments were brought to light, Foucault and his successors focused attention on contradictions within discourses to illuminate sites of contestation or struggle. Bringing to light each contradiction unveiled still deeper levels of contradiction and contestation. The objective, then, was to uncover or peel back each layer of discourse to reveal layers beneath it, a process that was never expected to arrive at the truth. Derrida baptized this kind of analysis deconstruction.¹⁸

Discursive events take the form of texts. Hence, the analysis of texts and their location in the larger discursive formation was crucial. For Foucault and Derrida, the web of language was determinant in fashioning understanding and fostering action, rather than any external reality. For historian Appleby and her colleagues, this postulate undercut historical analysis: Women and men are stripped of the meaningful choices whose reality had once served to distinguish human beings from animals. Change comes about through . . . slips in the fault lines of broad discursive configurations . . . not through self-determined human action.¹⁹ As postmodernism expanded its sphere from language and discourse to culture, it implicitly called into question the usability of the evidence employed by historians to understand the past. Postmodernist criticism undermined regard for historical texts as authored sources, as well as the physical evidence remaining from other eras.

Postmodernism’s denunciation of a positivist and universalizing modernism followed earlier schools of thought that called into question accepted tenets of historiography. By the late 1960s, for example, the rise of social history had underscored the ways that traditional interpretations . . . had excluded marginal or nonconforming historical groups.²⁰ Searching for a new universal narrative, some scholars explored the ways that the outsiders resisted domination and yet struggled to become part of the nation. Social historians offered a more complex picture of the past. . . . Ironically, [however, their work also] fostered the argument that history could never be objective. Such doubts opened the doors to the broader issues raised by postmodernist criticism. In Western Europe, the student protests of the late 1960s asked similar questions about the ways nationalist elites and the educational establishments excluded many social groups—writing them out of the historical experience of the nation.

Finally, the end of colonial empires and the emergence of new nationalist intellectual elites and educational systems in Asia and Africa also attacked the hegemonic, modernist narratives of the West. Still, these narratives persevered and even thrived under new names: colonies became developing states, which together made up the developing world, whose teleology remained decidedly modernist. A generation later, however, intellectuals from Asia, Africa, and other parts of the non-West, along with some Western scholars, raised new questions.

Postcolonialism: Epistemology and Empire

If postmodernism defies categorization and denies the existence of a master narrative, postcolonialism is marked by a multiplicity of definitions.²¹ Kamala Visweswaran writes that when used as a noun, postcolonial suggests a movement, condition, or character . . . that is far more cohesive than the term warrants. However, when employed as an adjective, postcolonial describes myriad conditions, everything from certain critics, intellectuals, bodies of theory or literature, and entire peoples or societies; to a mode of consciousness, a state formation, an historical period, and, finally, the condition of the (post)modern world itself. Indeed, Visweswaran concludes, there is little consensus about what the term means or even whether it should be used at all.²²

Nonetheless, as a descriptor for the second half of the twentieth century, postcolonial has meaning. Postwar, the usual term for the decades after 1945, has been common currency mainly in the North—in North America, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Postcolonial is perhaps more meaningful for the rest of the planet. Between 1945 and the 1990s, more than seventy-five former colonies attained political independence.²³ If China is acknowledged to have been an informal colony of European powers in the nineteenth century, then about 80 percent of the earth’s people live in these new states today. However defined, postcolonial is a major chronological marker.

The term is of double provenance. The work of Edward Said is the best-known and most recent inspiration for postcolonialist analysis. In 1978, Said published Orientalism, an intellectual history analyzing how European scholars and visitors in the early modern period described the Orient. Their descriptions, Said submitted, produced a much broader discourse that reduced peoples and societies in southwest Asia and North Africa to a homogenized and unchanging population of Orientals, whose characteristics were binary opposites of those of Europeans.²⁴ He called this package of description, interpretation, and policy Orientalism, borrowing a term coined earlier to refer to similarities in subject and style among artists and authors from Europe whose works portrayed this part of the world. Through case studies, Said traced how this essentializing European discourse translated into policy and action in the era of European colonialism. He suggested, too, that Orientalism continues to shape Western views of the rest of the world. Said’s work pushed scholars to reread the writings of imperialism through these new glasses; that exercise constitutes postcolonial analysis.

Said attributed three dimensions to Orientalism. The first was academic: Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient . . . either in its specific or its general aspects is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism.²⁵ The second dimension was broader: a style of thought, based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’ This style of thought characterized numerous writers across many fields, who have accepted the basic distinction between East and West. The third dimension was more explicitly about power and hegemony: Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.

Said acknowledged his debt to postmodernism through Foucault, who provoked him into thinking about Orientalism as a discourse that was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient. In addition, Said acknowledged in Culture and Imperialism that what partly animated my study of Orientalism was my critique of the way in which the alleged universalism of fields such as the classics (not to mention historiography, anthropology, and sociology) was Eurocentric in the extreme.²⁶ Like all discourse, Orientalism grew out of power. It reinforced the belief among Europeans that they and their institutions were entitled to rule the Orient. It became second nature.

Although postmodernism and postcolonialism both call assumed truths into question, their objectives are not the same. As Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge point out, If for postmodernism the object of analysis is the subject as defined by humanism, with its essentialism and mistaken historical verities, its unities and transcendental presence, then for postcolonialism the object is the imperialist subject, the colonized as formed by the processes of imperialism.²⁷

Citing a specific example of this difference, Mishra and Hodge note that Salman Rushdie raises questions about historical certainties in his novel Midnight’s Children in a way that recalls postmodernism. However, Rushdie also incorporates magical narratives from the classic texts of the Mahabharata and the Kathasaritasagara, which may be seen as calling on non-Western metanarratives to offer alternatives to those of colonialism and the West.²⁸

The second provenance of postcolonialism is an explicitly political body of thought and texts on the impact of European domination. Visweswaran reminds us that the racial basis of colonial society and the extent to which it served as an instrument of colonial power was discussed anthropologically as early as 1951.²⁹ As an example, he cites the French sociologist Georges Balandier, who noted that intellectuals such as the Italian psychologist O. Mannoni and two Martiniquans—the physician Frantz Fanon and the poet-politician Aimé Césaire—had also explored how European colonialism reduced colonial people to a lesser, homogenized Other.³⁰ Published first in Revue Volonté in 1939 and reprinted many times, Césaire’s powerful poem Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal explores the psychological onslaught that accompanied European hegemony and then sounds a clarion call for colonial peoples to claim European stereotypes and use them as weapons against colonial rule.³¹ The poem became the anthem for the Négritude movement, which called into question the moral integrity of what the French termed "la mission civilisatrice (the civilizing mission) and the British termed the white man’s burden." Négritude proclaimed that African heritage and black skin were positive and