Return to Sender, Do Not Repeat Order: Nicolas Sarkozy’s Speech at the University of Dakar
Chris Dunton
Nicolas Sarkozy has always been a gift to cartoonists: his head has that lop-sided set to it, his gaze at times a touch of the mad axe man. Whether he will come to be considered a gift to Africa is most unlikely. Certainly, African journalists, scholars and public intellectuals have spurned the conceptual goods he proffered in the speech he gave at the University of Dakar on July 26th of this year.
At the very best his commentary on the state of the continent, its history and future, has been condemned as being rooted in a colonialist mentality; writing for the Montreal newspaper La Presse (September 23rd 2007) Dany Laferrière speaks of Sarkozy’s vision of Africa as being “passéiste”. Elsewhere Sarkozy has been excoriated as a pathological liar: in the opinion of the blog Kamerunscoop he is “a mythomaniac turkey-cock” [translations mine, throughout].
A whole number of questions can be brought to bear on the July 26th speech. What, for example, did Sarkozy hope to achieve through delivering this? In an extended critique – lucid and trenchant – published in the on-line journal Africultures (August 2007) Achille Mbembe suggests that one motivation might have had to do with French domestic politics: that Sarkozy perceived a need “to rally the French around an aggressive vision of the national signifier.” This is credible, and would hardly be unprecedented. But what on earth might Sarkozy have hoped his speech would gain in respect of Franco-African relations? Was any expert advice in this field brought to bear on the writing of the speech, and if so who were Sarkozy’s advisers? In the days of Mitterand these things would have been contrived with so much more cunning.
What interests me – and this is my main focus here – is that while the speech is so inept, so ill-informed and arrogant in its take on African affairs, it represents at the same time a technically skillful throwback to a species of oratory that it now takes considerable audacity to engage in. The classical devices of rhetoric are foregrounded here in a way that is not that often heard nowadays; the fact that Sarkozy chose to speak in this way and in the apparent belief that no young Senegalese would smirk in derision may in itself say something about the view he held of his audience.
Addressing that audience at the outset as “the elite of African youth”, Sarkozy then launches his ship of follies with two assertions, one a personal warrant, the other a general one. First, the personal: “I love Africa, I respect and love Africans.” The rhetorical trick here – parallelism, or repetition with variation – is decked out with the ingenious insertion of the verb “respect” between the double bell chime of “love” (lest anyone think Sarkozy’s purported commitment to Africa be an affair of the heart alone).
Then comes the following: “Between Senegal and France history has woven ties of friendship that no-one can pull apart.” The active constituent here is the implication of parity. Friendship joins France and Senegal as a bridge links the two banks of a river; the threads that bind the two are as the warp and woof of a piece of cloth, the one of equal importance to the other.
This kind of specious assertion goes back a long way. Compare a campaign speech made by A. Alakija in Lagos in 1926 (and reprinted by E. A. Ayandele in his book The Educated Elite in the Nigerian Society) in which the author counters the argument that he is too friendly with the British colonialists by stating that “The interests of Europeans and Africans in this country are very closely interwoven and no one section of them can do without the other.” Like Sarkozy – who was, astoundingly, speaking 81 years later than the Nigerian politician, but in the same ideologically suspect terms – Alakija projects the relationship between colonialist and colonial subject as being akin to that between members of a mutual assistance society.
As Sarkozy then returns to the personal warrant, he adopts something of the same strategy as Shakespeare’s Mark Antony: “I have not come, young people of Africa, to cry with you over Africa’s misfortunes. For Africa has no need of my tears.”Yet, unlike the case of Antony, it becomes clear that to a large extent Sarkozy has come to bury the past.
Addressing the subject of slavery, he speaks repeatedly of “the black man” – “l’homme noir” – a phrase that echoes the language of Négritude (and Senghor will be an important reference point later in Sarkozy’s speech). Here, on the slave trade, he appears to acknowledge the black man’s burden, yet very soon a recognition of group-specific suffering dissipates into the most audacious universalisation: “The suffering of the black man is the suffering of all mankind . . . your wounds and your suffering are ours, and hence, are mine.”