A conversation with Kwasi Konadu

KWASI Konadu is the father of three beautiful and very intelligent daughters, a truly grateful husband who is married to an equally beautiful and intelligent wife and life partner, a scholar specializing in the histories of Africa and its worldwide communities, a healer (Tanɔ ɔbosomfoɔ) who studied with his grandfather in Jamaica and healers in Takyiman (central Ghana), and a publisher of scholarly books about African world histories and cultures through Diasporic Africa Press, Inc. Dr. Konadu was born on the island of Jamaica. He traces his ancestry through his mother’s family, which includes a maternal grandfather and a great-great-grandmother who were healers, she hailing from the Maroon community of Accompong. Her (grand)mother came to the island from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). This (grand)mother was named Adwoa Konadu. He began collecting these stories for a family history project, which he initiated as an 18-year-old undergraduate. He, then, also began his life’s work on the history of Africa and its worldwide communities.

 Dr. Konadu is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Chair and Professor of Africana Studies at Colgate University, where he teaches courses in African history and on worldwide African histories and cultures. With extensive archival and field research in West Africa, Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America, his writings focus on African and African diasporic histories, as well as major themes in world history. He is the author of Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), (with Clifford Campbell) The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), Transatlantic Africa, 1440-1888 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), among other books. His life work is devoted to knowledge production and the worldwide communities and struggles of peoples of African ancestry.

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The Interview

TOYIN Falola: What about your background that interested you in African history and the African diaspora?

Kwasi Konadu: I began studying my family’s history as a teenager, and this bled into undergraduate studies, where my family history project led me to the study of African and African diaspora histories. I interviewed and transcribed talks with elderly kinfolk, collected oral narratives of cultural and historical value, consulted the national archives in Jamaica, all before I took a history course. In effect, I was doing history before I formally enrolled in such an academic program. That project and these experiences led me to Ghana, through a dream that told me if I wanted to know more about my great-great-grandmother I had to travel to Ghana—and the rest is history.

Toyin Falola: Was there something in your schooling/education which guided you toward your present work–scholarship and teaching?

Kwasi Konadu: Much of my work is driven by ancestry, meaning my material grandfather’s role as community healer and that of my mother’s female ancestors made me curious of health, healing, and medicine—and the wide cultural ideas and forms to which these are associated. My schooling was had, comparatively, little role in shaping my present scholarship and teaching; instead, I had intentionally begun to shape my schooling, especially in graduate school, to fit my interests and priorities. Even as an undergraduate, I recall taking courses that were not required, but fulfilled something in me, such as a class called Epic Traditions, where I first learned of the Sunjata epic belonging to ancient Mali. I took courses in what was then called Black Studies—now Africana Studies, a broad intellectual study of the African world. These were my gateways to Africa, for the department of the same name was the only academic unit on campus to offer classes (taught by Africa-born faculty) on African history and that of its worldwide African communities.

Toyin Falola: Who or what has exercised the most significant influence on your intellectual work on the African world?

Kwasi Konadu: There is not one person or event or incident. Perhaps a confluence of these, beginning certainly with my material grandfather, then senior scholars like Dr. James Turner of Cornell University and Dr. Mwalimu Shujaa, and finally the writings of people like Tom McCaskie and Ivor Wilks for Ghana and that of Mike Gomez for the African diaspora.

Toyin Falola: How is your work specifically relevant to the African continent and its diasporas?

 Kwasi Konadu: My work, broadly speaking, is about an understanding of Africa’s historicity and its internal and external diasporas through their own self-understandings. In the world where Africa and Africans, including their dispersed kinfolks, are often written in third-person, filtered through this or that ideology, or simply erased through theorizing and silencing, my work is about pushing back against these trends, so that African (world) narratives have a place among the global lore, without pandering to this lore (as in “we must integrate African into [Eurasian notions] of world history), so that they exist on their own terms. I am also very much moved by a celebration of the ordinary, everyday lives, not the individuals propped up for devoted celebration, for they give us a sane view of what happens on the ground, and why human action took this shape/form and not another. They are also the most integral considerations for understanding and achieving human flourishing in the Africa world.

Toyin Falola: What are your most recent intellectual projects and what cutting-edge work can we expect in the near future?

Kwasi Konadu: My most recent project is In Our Own Way in This Part of the World, a book which uses a new approach that I call communography, and through it use the optics of healer and blacksmith named Kofi Dᴐnkᴐ to tell the story of his community and nation from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth. In so doing, I examine in detail and through a people’s history the forces from colonial Ghana’s cocoa boom to decolonization and political and religious parochialism. Dᴐnkᴐ left an crucial intellectual and healing legacy, and the story of his community offers a non-national, decolonized example of social organization structured around spiritual forces that serves as a powerful reminder for scholars to take their cues from the lived experiences and ideas of the people they study. New cutting-edge projects include a book that broadly rethinks the foundations of the modern world through the epic yet the little known story of Europe’s first global empire, the Portuguese empire, and its symbiotic relationship with Africa’s Gold Coast; a second project looks at global empire, slavery, race, and religion through the lives of three remarkable, yet ordinary African women in the 16^th century; and finally a project that will be a synoptic, global exploration of “black people” in “white societies.” This project will be provocative because it will tackle broad questions about modernity, the making of it, and what the records portends about the fate of said people in those societies.

Toyin Falola:  How can we transform the field of African history?

Kwasi Konadu: That depends on if we seek that transformation in the academy, that is, outside of universities in Africa and elsewhere, or if we seek it outside said academy. Our target, or where we start, determines the possibilities for transformation and constraints, with their own plans of actions and limits. Of course, this implies a protracted and nuanced discussion beyond the “solutions” proffered by any one individual.

Toyin Falola: If the books we publish in the West don’t reach Africa, how useful is the knowledge?

Kwasi Konadu: There are useless books published in Africa writ large—both the “popular” and scholarly kinds—and so I do not think where knowledge is produced matters as much as the quality and the usability of that knowledge. First, knowledge in print or in eBooks requires a reading culture, a literate audience, in more than just foreign languages but in indigenous ones as well. Second, the books can be shipped or be in printed in Africa, but this procedure side-steps or even reaffirms the question of quality and accessibility—in language, cost, and reach (distribution). And then are we putting too much premium on books? Even in places with active, reading publics, books occupy a rather small share of their attention, consideration, and time. Reading, outside of schooling, is a hobby. What we need, then, are reading cultures that multiple the effects of knowledge in book form—that is, book clubs, organizations, debates, etc., plugged into curricula, popular radio and television media, and so on. This way, knowledge codified in books cast the widest net possible, and as a means, a platform for planning and informed action.

Toyin Falola: Should we revive the ideas of W.E.B. Dubois on Pan- Africanism?

Kwasi Konadu: I am not exactly sure what this means. The question seems vague, too open-end. If the intent is an approach to knowledge production, then, yes, a pan-African approach would work best; however, that approach is obstructed by the very nationalism and religious parochialism that parades in many people’s consciousness. And how do you combat (destroy?) said nationalism and parochialism without doing the same for the idea of the nation? Unless there are specific ideas belonging to DuBois that related to pan-Africanism and, say, publishing, then it is best we flush this question out then let it serve as a basis for achievable possibilities.

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Kwasi and Dr. Turner

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Interview Analysis: By Toyin Falola

DR. Kwasi Konadu’s story is symbolic of that innate desire in diaspora Africans to establish some connection or a firm root in the homeland. Sometimes, this yearning has been known to take the form of a search for a purpose that transcends a common existence driven by capitalist inspired aspirations for material accumulation. In other instances, it is a by-product of (historically) observed and or lived experiences of inequalities and discriminations visited on peoples of African descent, which inspires feelings of brotherhood and a call to action, a call from Mother Africa even in “dreams.” In the case of Dr. Konadu, it is the curiosity about his ancestry that has inspired this journey into establishing his Africanness. It is apparently to answer the question: “Who am I?”, a question which commands more attention especially when all around the individual are indications of gaps to the story of their existence.

The decision by Dr. Konadu, as a teacher advocating for a proper understanding of her historicity, to take active steps in tracing his ancestry and connecting with his African heritage resulted in a lifelong career of continuous interaction with the homeland. It is a testament of the allure which the African culture has, especially on those who have ties to or have come in contact with it. African culture, disparaged by conventional (Western) scholarship, still represents the source of identity for black people around the globe, whether or not they claim it. Dr. Konadu, in recalling the impact his ancestor’s vocation (as a healer) had on his career path, demonstrates this pull Africa has.

Another factor that might explain this allure Africa has for black people (Africans) in the diaspora, is that need of belonging, a quest for rootedness which, as a vital idea of culture, “stimulates a rich understanding of a person’s place in the complex matrix that is the universe,”  and provides that vantage point whence an individual can appreciate, criticize, or interact with the world. In establishing a connection with Africa, Dr. Konadu found his culture, identity, and place in the universe.

Another take-away from Dr. Konadu’s recounted experiences, especially regarding the factors that influenced his intellectual preoccupation, is the role of earlier Africanist scholars. Efforts of scholars such as Dr. James Turner, Mike Gomez, and Dr. Mwalimu Shujaa, among others, have not only contributed in changing the nature of the study of African communities (Black studies) spread around the globe—in Africa, North America, and the Caribbean—but have also come to inspire another generation of Africanist scholars. These individuals have contributed to raising awareness of the viability of African studies as an academic field worthy of scholarly endeavor, and in carving out a niche for “Africana Studies” in Western academic traditions.

Dr. Konadu’s publications and indicated intellectual interests are testaments of the relative success of the intentions of a host of prior Africanist scholars (as stakeholders) to engender a culture of objective study of African communities by Africans themselves. He represents a generation of African scholars who, having benefited from very productive predecessors, are intent on challenging Western traditions of scholarship; a generation that insists on interrogating and interpreting African history by adopting alien and unrelated ideologies in theorizing and conjecturing to silence or discard African narratives as primitive, barbaric, or ahistorical.

In all, Dr. Konadu’s professed interest in retrieving African accounts/narratives and elevating them to their rightful place in global lore, and “existing on their own terms,” is a reaction to the predicament of African knowledge and knowledge production. These issues make up a good percentage of the discourse around the place of scholarship, as a tool for the liberation and flourishing of Africa. With such intellectual contributions as delivered by the likes of Dr. Konadu—a representative of the African diaspora intellectual wing—there is hope that if the necessary adjustments are made in African academy at home, we can take charge of the African narrative and tell our own stories.