What is Africa to Me? Knowledge Possession, Knowledge Production, and the Health of Our Bodies Politic in Africa and the African Diaspora

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Periodical article

Title:	What is Africa to Me? Knowledge Possession, Knowledge Production, and the Health of Our Bodies Politic in Africa and the African Diaspora
Author:	Busia, Abena P.A.
Year:	2006
Periodical:	African Studies Review
Volume:	49
Issue:	1
Period:	April
Pages:	15-30
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	Africa Ghana
Subjects:	funerals memory poetry speeches (form) Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Urbanization and Migration Education and Oral Traditions Literature, Mass Media and the Press
About person:	Kofi Abrefa Busia (1913-1978)
External link:	http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/african_studies_review/v049/49.1busia.pdf
Abstract:	This essay, which is the text of the Mashood Abiola Memorial Lecture, delivered on November 10, 2005, at a plenary session of the African Studies Association at its annual meeting, deals with African rituals of mourning and their meaning for those of the African diaspora. The author, daughter of the Ghanaian sociologist K.A. Busia, offers no grand narratives, but exemplary moments of (her own) poetry. She reflects in particular on the way in which the many kinds of eulogizing acts included in Ghanaian funeral rituals have inspired her to write some of her poems. The poems she presents here are those that have arisen out of the juncture between the political and the personal, the 'space between the State and the supposedly safe havens of the personal'. They include poems commemorating her father's death in 1978. Bibliogr. [ASC Leiden abstract]