What has been Africa’s relationship with Europe and the Americas over the past four centuries? What factors have contributed to that relationship, and how has that relationship changed over time? Perhaps more importantly, how have Africa’s links with the West affected the lives of people in Africa? This session focused on current historical debates about these questions, with particular reference to the slave trade, colonialism, and post-colonial developments. While Prof. Lindsay discussed Western ambitions with relation to Africa, she also emphasized African agency and the importance of distinguishing between the interests, strategies, and constraints of differently placed African groups and individuals. She explained that we ultimately should present Africa to students not as an exotic world of passive victims or modern barbarians, but as a place where people are both similar to and different from ourselves, facing international and local structures, which must be understood historically.
Lisa Lindsay received her Ph.D. in African history from the University of Michigan in 1996 and currently is an assistant professor in the history department at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses on West African history, women and gender in African history, colonialism, and the slave trade. She has published articles in the American Historical Review, the Journal of African History, and Slavery and Abolition and is at work on a monograph entitled Working with Gender: Men, Women, and Wage Labor in Colonial Nigeria. She has received research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and her 1999 article on the 1945 Nigerian general strike won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians article prize.