To be sure, there are several subjects adjacent to the question of pleasure that already attract our attention in African studies research, including discussions about African popular culture and experiences of leisure. But they should not be dismissed, nor should we underestimate the role that pleasures of any variety play in enabling those who are otherwise distressed to reclaim some sense of their humanity. Those pleasures may be fleeting and accessible only to the few. As we state in the introduction to the forum, even in very dire circumstances, one cannot rule out an occasional incidence of pleasure. In the African Studies Review forum titled Africa/Pleasure: An Agenda for Future Work, we explore pleasure simply as one of many facets of African life, and not as a spectacular exception to the norm of African humanity. But we cannot claim to have a complete understanding of any society, no matter its failures if we ignore its experiences and rationales of pleasure. Pleasure tends to enter into the record of African studies, then, mainly when it serves an acceptable social or political agenda. And when we do reflect on pleasure in Africa, we do so with apologies for setting aside our usual engagement with the very serious matters that as well-informed researchers of the African continent we see as our true vocation and calling. In the pleasure-unpleasure nexus, then, our attention tends to be firmly fixed on unpleasure and displeasure, notably the unpleasure of the populace at large. Think of Mobutu Sese Seko’s palatial home at Gbadolite, Houphouët-Boigny’s massive cathedral at Yamoussoukro, or Jacob Zuma’s constantly expanding country home at Nkandla. With good reason, the pleasures enjoyed by rulers of diverse ideological temperaments are viewed with barely concealed disdain. Those of us who make it our business to offer a defense of African peoples and their ways of life consider as always suspect the pointless indulgences entertained by prominent African figures. This is not so much because we subscribe to the reductionist view of Africa, but because it seems almost irresponsible to devote our energies to a subject as mundane as pleasure when we could be busy responding to whatever deficiencies have been most recently observed somewhere in Africa, or somewhere about Africa. We are usually more attuned to Africa’s pains than to its pleasures. And yet, despite being keen observers of the African world, we too are often implicated in a preoccupation with what ails the continent on any given day. As cultural critics and scholars, we are inclined to lament the stereotypical and reductionist version of African realities that passes for truth. Decay, despair, disease, and corruption: these are the recurrent images of Africa bandied around the world.
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