Political Biography and the Agency of Audience

Development as Rebellion, the massive biographical study of Julius K. Nyerere, written by three leading Tanzanian scholars and published in 2020 by the august Dar es Salaam imprint Mkuki na Nyota, illustrates how authors and audience are entangled in discursive practice. Jacques Derrida's postmodern concept of iterability suggests that any message, let alone a nationalist biography, never exists in a stable univocal state, but that its meaning takes form, continually mutating, in an interactive social context between author and audience. It is not merely that the authors address an audience imprinted with the intellectual traditions known as the "Dar es Salaam School" of the University of Dar es Salaam; they engage not just the concerns of that audience, of which they are themselves members, but their priorities and categories of thought. This essay offers a review of Development as Rebellion as evidence for a theoretical argument about how an audience shapes the composition of a piece of writing, and how this helps us address the ongoing debate about the way scholarly authority in African studies tends to reside outside Africa. Addressing this circumstance must begin counterintuitively with questions about the audience of Africanist scholarship rather than its authors.