B2: Afrikanische Moderne

The question of the impulses which led to the collapse of the European colonial empires after the Second World War is closely linked with the role of late colonial elites. This project focuses on the life- and representational worlds of urban elites in central and western Africa in the transitional phase from the late colonial era to decolonisation. This period was characterised by rapid social and political change. How did the actors seek to understand this change and how did new political spheres of action and representations develop? Communication between African elites and European colonial rulers evolved, though the dialogue between the two sides was admittedly hierarchical. Various processes of exchange took place, and a political dynamic arose which contributed to the process of decolonisation. This is to be assessed from a transregional and also a transcontinental point of view. African modernity is here understood as African societies’ confrontation with the process of change resulting from European colonialism and is examined in two different projects: as an adaptation of European consumer worlds and as a local reading of metropolitan discourses. The central sources are magazines which in the period roughly between 1945 and 1960 were produced for and, in part, by African elites and distributed in Africa.

Changing elite discourses and lifeworlds
In the 1940s magazines and clubs arose which were operated by the late colonial elites. We investigate this genesis of public spaces in the Belgium colonies of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi as well as the British colony of Gold Coast (Ghana). These clubs ands magazines enabled an unprecedented renegotiation of identities in a rapidly changing colonial system: They were laboratories of representational worlds and places of cultural and social utopia. Within the space of a few years these elites had evolved from being the mainstays of colonial rule to its pallbearers. The project pursues the thesis that the clubs and magazines were a key moment in the emergence of African civil societies, and that decolonialisation was formulated as a discourse and experienced as a cultural practice in them.

Consumption and modernity
For the same area the commercial advertising in newspapers and magazines which targeted the urban, late colonial elites in Africa is examined. Did the advertising messages reflect the political change in colonial societies? How did the actors – European advertising experts and African consumers – perceive one another? A new feature of the colonial advertising was its concern not only with the relationship between the colonised and the colonising but also with that between producers and consumers. The advertising addressed an African who was ‘modern’ in his habitus, work- and lifeworlds. There appears to have been a close relationship between African elite discourses and the advertising messages. The project argues that the appropriation of an European consumer world was a process of local appropriation of modernity and an important element of the process by which these elites established their identities.

Publications by members of this sub-project

• Jörg Feuchter, Regina Finsterhölzl, Andrea Fischer-Tahir, Friedhelm Hoffmann, Johan Grußendorf, Simone Holzwarth, Maren Klotz, Michi Knecht, Veronica Oelsner, Nurhak Polat, Reet Tamme, Stefan Beck, Christiane Reinecke: Wissen und soziale Ordnung. Eine Kritik der Wissensgesellschaft. Mit einem Kommentar von Stefan Beck. SFB 640, Berlin 2010.  (mehr)