adjective
originating in and characteristic of a particular region or country; native (often followed by to):
the plants indigenous to Canada.
Indigenous. relating to or being a people who are the original, earliest known inhabitants of a region, or are their descendants:
the Indigenous Maori of New Zealand;
the Indigenous languages of the Americas.
innate; inherent; natural (usually followed by to):
feelings indigenous to human beings.
(dictionary.com)
And so, I’ve been thinking about how the terms Indigenous and African (Indigenous : African) might speak to and with each other. An interest that stems from an invitation issued by SA Smythe to write something for a special issue on the chiasmatic formation of Black and Indigenous, as fields of study, as ways of imagining freedom, as practices of liberation, as pursuits of freedom across difference.
And I learn from Christina Sharpe that I can use dictionary definitions to weave through entanglements of history. And we find: “originating in and characteristic of.” That is plants. The relation between “originating in” and “characteristic of.” Plants. Of humans: “relating or being a people who are the original, earliest known inhabitants of a region” (known by whom?). Are humans like plants? “Characteristic of.” I am going to avoid climatic theory here—the longstanding (racist) belief that the climate of a region influenced character and morals, so, for instance, people from hot climates tend to be more passionate while people from cooler climates are more rational. Avoid, yes, but since I studied it, I note it as a kind of background against which I think.
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(I note that the terms “indigenous” and “indigeneity” do not appear in the 2007 edition of Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. I have yet to check if they appear in the revised editions. The word indigenous appears in the third edition. Something could be written—has it been?—about when and why words appear and disappear.)
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The term indigenous designates a political category that enables solidarity among diverse indigenous peoples and nations. However, what exactly makes a group “indigenous?”—Native Studies Keywords
Who gets to be “indigenous” is typically measured through historical continuity. Language, cultural forms of association in traditional communities, common ancestry with original occupants of lands, and occupation of ancestral lands are some of the ways that historical continuity is established, but as Native studies scholars have shown, proving historical continuity requires adjudication at state, federal, and global levels.—Native Studies Keywords
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Africa sits strangely alongside indigeneity.
One major fiction—I do not use fiction to mean untrue; I use it to invoke the imagination—is that all humans originate in Africa. In this telling, Africa produces an impossible indigeneity, as the origin of all humans. All humans become indigenous to Africa, without the legal apparatus through which indigeneity is figured in international law and across settler colonial states. (I think this legal apparatus needs to be questioned, as it is also a source of violence, but that is for another discussion, and others have already mapped this violence.) Yet, this origin story is also one about deracination, one that makes Africa’s resources endlessly available to everyone who chooses to exploit them, because “we all come from Africa.” A longer story can be told about the relation between this deracinating indigeneity and resource exploitation. Perhaps it has been. I am slacking off on my bibliographic work.
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I have been thinking about indigeneity as a weave—I’m not sure weave is the right metaphor, but it’s the one I have—of at least four relations: Africa and the Black Diaspora, and the production of indigeneity as an effect of deracination; Africa and European colonialism, and the production of indigeneity through colonial administration, especially the tethering of ethnicity to place through reservations and borders and cartography; the production of indigeneity as an effect—is effect the right word?—of the post-independent nation-state and its violent deracination, which extends and compounds and, in some cases, innovates, new relations between the administrative state and Africans; and, the production of indigeneity as a relation between terra and people, threatened by the violence of the modernizing state, but not tethered to that violence. None of these are discrete. Across different geohistories in Africa, some elements of these weave are more intensely experienced than others. Indigeneity is less the cumulative effect of these four than it is woven through—and as—them.
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If we begin from the fiction that all humans are indigenous to Africa, then we might ask what makes Africans indigenous to Africa. That is, especially or specifically or particularly. I am drawing on the relation between two dictionary definitions: original to, as in all humans are original to, and characteristic of, as in Africans are characteristic of. We arrive at the first from a liberal misreading of science and history and we arrive at the second through the human-establishing ruptures of colonial modernity and slavery. Put otherwise, we might all be African, as those obnoxious posters claimed, but some of us are more African than others.
Which is to say, following Sylvia Wynter’s chronology: there’s an Africa that comes into being after 1492 that is substantively different than the Africa that existed before. The Africans produced by the rupture of 1492 differ from those who had existed before. An indigeneity is produced by the ruptures of colonial modernity, in which African indigeneity names a relation to the Black Diaspora. It names not those “original to” or “characteristic of,” but those who were not stolen. The indigenous as the unstolen, though not unharmed.
(Here: it must be added that “characteristic of” sutures those stolen into and as the Black Diaspora and those unstolen as African.)
As the first of many (polemical) repetitions: indigeneity is a relation, not an identity. In this case, African indigeneity names a relation to the Black Diaspora. It has no meaning outside of that relation.
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Unstolen does not mean unharmed. Unstolen does not mean not deracinated. In the fiction we learned in primary school, the European colonial project in Africa halted the trade in humans conducted by Europeans. One must repeat Europeans to grasp the absurdity of this claim.
The indigeneity produced by the ruptures of colonial modernity that disperse into the Black Diaspora is compounded by the indigeneity produced by European colonialism in the 19th century. The key mechanism in this indigeneization is borders. The borders that make African countries and, more particular, make ethno-regionalism through administrative measures.
In Kenya, colonialism attempts to fix ethnicity to place to produce indigeneity as identity. Loose groups of people with similar habits are now framed as “tribes,” removed from histories of travel and interaction and difference. Necessary ethnonationalisms—one organizes and resists with those in close proximity—are ossified by colonial accounts. And cynically used by post-independent regimes.
The indigenous African is generated in relation to the colonial state. Perhaps more intensely in the settler colonies (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya), though I would hesitate to claim that, as the effects of indigeneization are as strongly felt through what I learned to call indirect rule in primary school: colonial administrators appoint local people as administrators. Administered areas are designated homelands: places of origin, places of tether. In Kenya, one requires permission from one’s employer or local administrator to leave these places of tether and to travel elsewhere. Something called ethnicity-as-identity emerges here through colonial administration, as does a distortion that is misnamed indigeneity.
Simultaneously, regional struggles for resistance—I had written regional nationalisms, but that does not quite seem right—are waged in ways that consolidate difference in strategic ways. But, and this is the important part, strategy ossifies into varied ethnonationalisms in accounts by colonial administrators and regional leaders. (I think there’s a longer thing to be said about how ethnonationalisms in Africa are formed and named in relation to the global wars Africans are recruited into, where nationalisms are understood as strategies. Also, the white supremacist historians and political scientists who describe these various African struggles frame them as ethnonationalist, because what else could they be? But I am not writing a book here.)
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Independence from Europeans fractures African states into the seductions of modernity. Africans move, ideologically, if not physically, into the full trappings of capitalism and something called the modern. Working class and professional class Kenyans join in this project, albeit with different aims and effects. Let me truncate something here and say the ongoing project of the Kenyan state from 1963, the year of independence, to the present has been to dismantle the power of unions as political forces. Working class solidarities had been key to Kenya’s independence struggles, even before this place was named Kenya in 1920. (I always note that the name Kenya was adopted in 1920, because I want to press on how else this geohistory might be known and unknown and imagined and reimagined, so it can be of use to those of us who disidentify with its current incarnation.)
And so work—perhaps profession, though work is more accurate—divides the modern African from the indigenous African, though the indigenous African is also monetized. Here, indigenous refers to a figure out of time, out of the modern, used, sometimes, as a prop for tourism. The indigenous names, as well, what holds the modern back. And it is here that the violence of the modern state is most manifest. The indigenous are accused of holding back development, even as their presence is exploited. The worst indigenous—accept the hyperbole—are those who will not allow themselves to be monetized as tourist spectacle. And, instead, insist on tending the earth and waterways. The indigenous resist the violence of extraction, and so are deemed enemies of modernity.
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To follow on from the preceding paragraph, indigeneity also names a relation between terra—by which I generally mean earth and air and water—and humans, a relation of care and reciprocity. At its heart are the various African groups threatened by state and multinational corporation violence because of how they live with and tend terra. These are groups both recognized and disavowed by legal bodies and instruments, named as “protected” at the same time as they are denied rights, and find it difficult to seek redress.
From Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, I learn: “Indigenous education is not Indigenous or education from within our intellectual practices unless it comes through the land, unless it occurs in an Indigenous context using Indigenous processes.” I am drawn to this notion of indigeneity that is not a product of colonial and post-independent violence, or not only so, but, more importantly, practice in context developed through process. I want to sit with it, to see what it adds to the weave I am outlining.
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And so, I offer this brief sketch as one way to weave African : Indigenous, to trouble the assumption that African equals indigenous, to name how African and indigenous trouble each other. No doubt, many other threads I do not know and cannot imagine join this weave, and if you know them, please leave a comment, or find me on Twitter so we can chat.