African History and Institutions

The course aims to provide students with the interpretive tools necessary to understand: (1) the assumptions regarding the formation of the colonial state, (2) the processes of decolonization, and then (3) the constituent elements of independent states in Africa and regional economic communities, realized in the face of domestic problems and global challenges.

At the end of the course, students will have gained an understanding of the impact of the colonial "event" experienced by the various peoples of Africa and their subsequent political, economic, social, and cultural structures. They are expected to refine a specific ability to recognize and articulate the different human reactions to the impact with the variety of colonial experiences that arise from the export of the ius publicum europaeum, used, on the one hand, to divide the continent among the European powers and mark the boundaries of their respective spheres of influence, and on the other, to control not only the exploitation of land and mineral resources, but above all its "human capital", retribalized in a process of objectification, dependence, and systematic epistemological annihilation of African cultures that still today produce consequences in the very way of interpreting Africa in the current vulgate of Western countries and within the African continent. The third monographic teaching unit, relating to South African "settler colonialism" and the regional reverberation of the struggle for the end of the apartheid regime, will complete the course. Students will thus understand the link between the historical legacy of competition for the control and management of natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa, starting from the commodification of human resources to the globalized one of resources by the developmentist state. The course aims to stimulate in students a capacity for critical and historically informed thinking, in analyzing cultural conflicts and institutional stratifications of the past and their consequences in the present.