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Africa

Africa: In Memoriam – Elleni Centime Zeleke’s Tizita

todayOctober 3, 2024 2

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Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.

When we were asked to write a tribute for Elleni Centime Zeleke, just a few days after her passing, we were confronted with the awfulness of having to write about her in the past. We lost a sister, a friend, a mentor, a professor; it’s overwhelming. But the strength to write this comes from the fact that we owe it to Centime to share our account of her and what she meant to us on both personal and intellectual fronts. Yet, how are we to write about Centime without reducing her influence on our intellectual growth to a few anecdotes, but also without heroizing her? Knowing her, she certainly would not want that. What does it mean to write about an intellectual, the genealogy of whose work we consider as an anchor?

A personal note may be a good place to start. We first encountered Centime in 2007/8 when we were both students at the Addis Ababa University Institute of Ethiopian Studies. She was then a visiting fellow at the Institute doing research for her doctoral dissertation. She offered us a seminar on major themes in Ethiopian Studies. She designed the seminar with a list of compulsory readings. Missing any of the readings (which were heavily theoretical and philosophical) would mean looking like a fool in the classroom. Because we did not want to look like fools, we were diligent with the readings as well as writing the expected weekly response papers. On her part, she did not miss closely reading what we wrote and telling us what she thought. She was not just interested in the substance of what we wrote but in how we wrote it too. She was invested in mentoring researchers who could write well. We heard the saying “writing is a discipline” for the first time from her, where she meant it is an exercise that demands discipline, commitment, patience and care. She advised us to write as if we were writing to our mothers because accessibility matters. She also taught us how to pose questions. As a result of these multilayered interactions, the seminar ended up giving rise to mentorship, friendship and sisterhood for years to come.

As mentor-friend-sister, Centime continued to do the job of guiding us, giving us the kind of guidance Black women require to survive academia. She knew silence could get us nowhere and the right time will never come for us to be safe enough to begin to speak up. She taught by example by speaking truth to power. At the cost of being called inimical, which she has been called one too many times, she stood up for herself and for intellectual integrity. She refused anecdotization, she resisted erasure, she called out mediocrity, she rejected complicity with power. But as her colleagues and friends, us included, bear witness, she did this with grace and generosity. There is always an invitation for a rigorous and robust engagement; Centime is not known for dismissal. She was too curious and too interested to dismiss. Now that she belongs to the ages, in staying true to Centime’s Tizita (memory), we embrace her with the melancholy losing her entails; recognizing that she has a real presence and demands her due from us. One of the many ways through which we remember Centime is knowledge production and how to think about the social and political relations that structure it.

The social sciences in Africa/African Studies in the social sciences

The recurring questions from the seminar on themes in Ethiopian studies introduced us to the debates on the politics of knowledge production and the workings of the social sciences in Africa. Themes in Ethiopian studies also introduced us to a topic that she was passionate about and that mattered to her: the question of the social sciences in/and African Studies. Most of what we discussed in the seminar would constitute the thoughts in her book Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016, the chapters of which we had the pleasure of reading, debating and commenting on. Through a close and generative intertextual reading of V. Y. Mudimbe, Talal Asad and Archie Mafeje, Centime points out what the study of Africa has meant and what drives it so far. Like Mudimbe, she highlights that we have been working with a paradigm constructed and defined by the Western preoccupation of what social science should mean and achieve, which is never about living and breathing Africans but about what Africa signifies for those who invented it.

Yet, Centime goes beyond demonstrating the predicaments of the social sciences in knowledge production and how it shapes African Studies as well as those it claims to address, Africans. She extends the work the likes of Mudimbe began by showing that knowledge production is a site of social struggle that produces “a very specific political subjectivity, a relation to community and self as a form of knowing and acting”. She insists that the approach to knowledge production as a site of social struggle needs “an alternative method of practising the social sciences” beyond and outside of the dichotomy of the universal and the particular. As part of devising an alternative method, Centime deploys Tizita to chart alternative pasts and futures by rethinking existing conventions of posing questions. At once a genre of song and memory in everyday Amharic usage, Tizita for Centime is meditative thinking about the uncanny; about loss the haunting of which refuses to go. It is a form of rethinking practice between past and present; it opens up the present as a space of engagement, and rethinks how revolution and knowledge production are theorized through praxis in and from the Third World. This theorization thrives not only through the complex interweaving of different temporalities but also draws on the personal accounts of what shapes us into becoming who and how we are in the world. To achieve this, she releases herself from the pretensions of interest-free positivist social science in order to be able to produce knowledge that is accountable to the communities it wishes to address as it stays true to the self. She then develops “a notion of knowledge production as situated and relative, while also holding on to a notion of social progress as immanent to human activity.” Through Tizita as method, Centime’s notion of theory as memoire is articulated as a political theory emerging from embodied knowledge. What makes theory as memoire possible is the recognition that “to be human is to be given a self through historical relations with other human and non-human species.” It is made sense of and theorized through Marxism which helps her tease out relationality.

The Tizita alternative and theory as memoire are only possible by working through personal stakes within these larger social and political processes instead of considering the researcher as disinterested onlooker of the researched. Situated therefore means accounting for “the body as the site of the sedimentation of multiple social and political histories.” Centime’s scholarship revered and took very seriously her historicity, her situatedness, her body, affect as sources of knowledge, method and theory from which she departs towards the universal, the human, the political. Her response to her interlocutor Arash Davari on why she wrote the book captures this more succinctly. Centime explains her motivation by stating that the book is written as a defence of embodied knowledge arguing that “there is no other kind of knowledge but embodied [and situated] knowledge”. She argues that embodied knowledge is not to be neglected as just personal because the universal is constituted by “us in the world, how we relate to the universe”. Centime suggests that instead of looking for the universal “out there”, one has to start within the self because what constitutes the universal is our account of the world in which we live, which is always relational. For Centime, to be faithful to embodied knowledge means writing an account of oneself, which necessarily demands the consideration of knowledge production as part of social struggle filled with ideological and political discourses. She invites us to seriously consider the thoughts that are generated by our feelings, instead of disregarding them as irrelevant, or even compromising of the quality of an objective knowledge. Her work sheds light not only on how to read and analyse multimedia ranging from film, photographs, and novels to music and oral history, but also how to write in a way that does justice to our own imagination, the material we are thinking with and the substance that is generated from these deep engagements without privileging form over content or the other way around. This is where the 1974 Ethiopian revolution becomes an important point of departure to make her claim that the particular is part of the whole. Through memoire of Ethiopian revolution, she makes a broader claim that a serious consideration of Third World revolutions as world historical makes the social sciences more an ongoing and open quest than a stable tool of understanding political struggles. She makes the case that Marxist method of revolution as a praxis is essential for theorizing the social sciences as an ongoing battlefield in Africa and beyond. She is of the conviction that we do not have to forsake Marxism, but we think with it on our own terms, on the basis of our specific and situated experiences, histories, archives and in tune with affect and embodiment.