ABSTRACT
Monuments and Memory in Africa provides a non-disciplinary (Mafeje 1991) approach to the reading and study of contemporary questions on decolonisation, decoloniality, colonial symbols, memory culture, violence, historicity, coloniality, and erasures of African intellectual archives, all achieved through ideas and practices enmeshed in the epoch of European imperial violence. That memory and knowledge were racialised and thereby hierarchical is an old-age debate that has animated scholars across the ages from the African continent, its diaspora, and critiques of colonial modernity (see Fanon 1961; Mudimbe 1988; Mafeje 1991; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Horne 2020; Elkins 2022). But what are monuments, and what is memory? Monuments are history, or histories, as well as archives, that bequeath to any people group living archives to provide contours of the outworking of a civilisational discourse. If the archive and the colonial library have long been deconstructed by, among others, Cheikh Anta Diop (1974, 1981), Mudimbe (1988), and Ifi Amadiume (1997, 1987), there remains the niggling question of how archives can be interpreted in the decolonial turn. The argument that archives are historically constituted, incomplete, and expressive of power relations is indisputable, yet it does not follow that the project of epistemic decolonisation can dispense with the archive as such. On the contrary, a major stumbling block in the endeavour to create decolonised institutions of knowledge across Africa has been the precarious economic and material conditions of what might be called custodianship of the past.
