Resilience in African History

Between 1960, when seventeen African countries gained independence from French colonial rule, and 2020, when the global pandemic of Covid-19 emerged, just over five hundred scholarly books or articles were published addressing, to varying degrees, resilience on the African continent. Working toward this special issue has made it clear that there continues to be a great deal of slippage in how scholars describe resilience. This concept is often conflated with terms such as “resistance,” “persistence,” and “endurance.” While these do express ways humans respond to adversity, they are distinct from resilience, which is rooted in adaptation not opposition.1 Some people choose counterviolence or confrontation as the path toward adaptation; however, resilience is not an exact synonym for those other terms. The definitional slippage may result from scholars perceiving resilience to be the inverse of vulnerability and the antidote to collapse or as an answer to the neoliberal need for individual responsibility.