3 - Africa’s Triple Quest

Abstract

It is with a dose of nostalgia that one recalls the halcyon days when the voices of African scholars resonated in debates about the currents and trends that shaped the different prisms through which Africa was viewed. Refreshing but critical appraisals were offered in an intellectual mix that was mostly dominated by a hegemonic epistemology originating in the West, primarily in the United States, France, and Britain. The terms of contestation often evolved around how, if anything, western scholarship shared in the expost facto complicity that helped to entrench the ‘curse of Berlin’, which originated in that infamous conference of fourteen European powers in 1884-1885 presided over by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and which carved the continent into enclaves for colonial annexation...