African History and Meleko Mokgosi: Your Trip to Africa

Abstract This article argues that the group of paintings entitled Your Trip to Africa, by US-based Botswanan visual artist Meleko Mokgosi, advocate for a clearer, more realistic encounter with Africa and its people. The paintings, motivated by Peter Kubelka’s 1966 experimental film documenting a hunting party in Sudan (Our Trip to Africa), admonish the viewer to pay attention not just to what they see but to how they see. This admonition is an important reminder for African historians as well. We should beware of the pitfalls of writing the history of Africa through a racialized discourse, fashioned in the West, that ignores or distorts experiences and subjectivities of the dark-skinned Africans that, necessarily, precede any racialized discourse. Just as important, Mokgosi reminds us that in representing African history we should be wary of essentializing or aestheticizing Africans to confirm our preconceived notions of their lives and histories: Africans should not be made instruments to serve historical narratives that reinforce our own ways of looking. Ultimately, Mokgosi’s paintings remind us of the artifice underlying any effort to portray the reality of Africans, and their history.