Beyond Western Recognition:
History, Memory, Responsibilities
MOSES OCHONU: Welcome to PQF. Please give us an autobiographical window into your life. Who is Mamadou Diouf?
Mamadou Diouf is one of the finest historians of western Africa in the world today; his work on colonial and postcolonial history touches on subjects ranging from Senegalese brotherhoods to new theoretical tools for African historiography.
- Nicholas Dirks,
Vice President
of Arts and Sciences,
Columbia University.
MAMADOU DIOUF: Thank you. I am glad to be part of the significant Africanist conversation that is developing on this excellent platform – PQF. I was born and raised in a small town, Rufisque, located in the Cape Verde Peninsula, 26 kilometers from Dakar, former capital city of French West Africa and current capital of the Republic of Senegal. Rufisque played key roles in the different sequences of the making of the Atlantic world. During the Atlantic slave trade, it was a port controlled by the Wolof kingdom of Kajoor and a European enclave where some European traders settled – the first synagogue in Africa was built there by Portuguese Jews/New Christians. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, it became the wealthiest city of French West Africa as a port exporting groundnuts – the colonial product per excellence of the French African Colonial Empire. Because of its location and role in this political economy, Rufisque was granted municipal privileges comparable to those of French cities in 1880. The male adult population got the right to elect a municipal council and a mayor and to vote for the selection of a representative of the Senegalese Four Communes (Saint Louis, Gorée, Rufisque, and Dakar) at the French National Assembly in Paris. The inhabitants of Rufisque identify themselves as Lebu. Although they speak Wolof, they nonetheless possess some specific words and grammatical constructions which set them apart from the Wolof. Another difference with the Wolof is that Islam did not remove traditional religious beliefs. Family shrines are still visible in many compounds, a testimony of the very settled association of Islam and Lebu spirituality and healing. In addition to language and religious beliefs and practices (with huge public sacrifice and ritual components), the Lebu are known to be rebellious, overactive political actors, very keen to maintain a democratic, if not anarchist community life. Unfortunately, the city has been declining since the 1930s’ economic crisis. With the completion of the Dakar port, which transformed Dakar into the center of French economic activities and shifted groundnut production from Kajoor and Bawol to Siin and Saluum, Kaolack replaced Rufisque as the most important groundnut port. Thus, I grew up with the reality of a decaying city and the memories of grandeur associated with the history of an Atlantic enclave. I went to elementary and primary schools in Rufisque, moving in a world confined to the Cape Verde Peninsula, completely oblivious to the rest of the country. Later, I received a Fellowship for studies in France. I enrolled in French special high schools (classes préparatoires) in Orléans and Versailles before joining the Universities of Sorbonne (Paris IV and Paris I) for a Masters and PhD in History. I also obtained a Masters in Anthropology from Jussieu (Paris VII).
MOSES: Take us through the trajectory of your evolution as a scholar, focusing particularly on the traditions and formative influences that have shaped your episteme as well as on the implications of your shifting institutional locations – in France, Senegal, Michigan, and now Columbia – for your work and for your contribution to African Studies. What epistemological impulses have your connections to research networks, think-tanks, and other institutional formations in Africa, Europe, and North America generated for your scholarly engagements?
MAMADOU: I was trained in an exclusive French/European historical tradition during my first three years in France. The “classes préparatoires” are exclusively oriented toward training a French “honnête homme”, providing a cultural and intellectual grounding which draws heavily on modern literature, philosophy, geography, and history in a very rigid, secular, and Enlightenment framework. So during those years, I essentially read European history, French literature, and philosophy (Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and a host of others). I discovered Frantz Fanon, read many of the post-1968 French philosophers and writers, while taking part in African student political and social movements – the environment in which I got acquainted with Marxist literature. In fact, I was trained in an environment completely dominated by the debates surrounding the “Nouveau roman” in literature, the 
“Nouvelle vague” in cinema, and the “Nouvelle critique” (Roland Barthes, the magazine Tel Quel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari). So, in a way, I guess you could say I came late to African studies. When I did, I worked mainly in the discipline of History and eventually did a dissertation on the colonial conquest of the most powerful Wolof kingdom of Senegambia in the 19th century, Kajoor. Prior to this time, my reading in African/Africanist history or literature was somewhat limited to politically motivated literature: Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, Ousmane Sembène, etc. It was only after my “classes préparatoires” years that I began reading African history and literature extensively. After completing my Bachelor, I enrolled for a Masters in African history under the supervision of Professor Yves Person, who was the leading historian of Africa and, with Jan Vansina, one of the world’s leading oral historians. Thus, I came to African history with the training of a Europeanist historian focusing on documents, iconographies, social, and intellectual history methods. This explains my fascination with colonial history and the moments of contact (the Atlantic and colonial worlds), histories of representations and production of narratives, and comparative methods.
MOSES: This training must have influenced your approach to African history.
MAMADOU: Yes, it did. I considered Africa as an area of history like any other geographical area of inquiry, neither intellectually special nor unique. My approach was not guided by a desire to shape it as a different entity, with an historical trajectory necessarily contradicting European history, neither did I have any inclination to contribute to reclaiming African history against the colonial “invention” of Africa, to quote V. Y. Mudimbe, or contribute to the burning down of the “colonial library”. My ambition was just to become a historian of Africa and be part of the historical conversation. I knew that I did not want to be a nationalist historian nor was I interested in writing a history of “authentic” – not Western-polluted – Africa. I have never been comfortable with the generalization and excessive homogenization that characterized the study of Africa. Rather, the poetics and politics of fragments have always been intellectually and politically more challenging. The reason is probably because of my location in an imperial space within Senegal – one of the Four Communes – defined by the historical rhythms of the Atlantic world, the colonial French empire formation, and the collapse and the continuous imagining of a Wolof and Muslim universalism. I have always been interested in documenting the “true” African identity of African urban dwellers, in particular, the shaping of an African identity (the identity of inhabitants) by the French imperial citizens of the Four Communes, who kept claiming French citizenship and political rights while resisting French cultural and religious assimilation. Basically, those elements constituted the foundations of my epistemological approach to the writing of history. They have structured my research and teaching. The shift of location – from France back to Senegal and, subsequently, to the United States – did not really affect my praxis, except that returning to Senegal (and joining CODESRIA after years of teaching at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar) helped me learn more about African nationalist historiography and engage with African social sciences debates. My colleagues in Dakar as well as the CODESRIA continent-wide network were crucial in my developing of a critique of French universalist and anti-communitarian ideologies. My US sojourn reinforced my comparative colonial and postcolonial inclinations, in history, literature, and anthropology. Indian historiography, as well as intellectual history (in particular around the work of Michael Kammen, Hayden White, and Frank LaCapra), became key aspects of my intellectual quest. For this latter aspect, my colleagues at the University of Michigan contributed a lot to my formation. Also in the US, I developed a better knowledge of African social science research, in particular those practiced in English speaking countries of Africa. Both CODESRIA and the US helped me escape the intimate, contentious, and incestuous face-to-face paradigm that characterizes the dialogical and confrontational relationship of European and African scholarship. Comparing my material with those from other colonial situations turned out to be more central to my scholarship than restraining myself to the French or British Empire in Africa.
MOSES: Let us explore your work as an eminent African historian. You have produced scholarship that has helped inform a major paradigm shift in African history, namely, a greater scrutiny of the tropes, premises, and simplistic binaries that have undergirded much of African historical writing. Your seminal work, Le Kajoor au XIXe siècle: pouvoir ceddo et conquête coloniale, represents perhaps the most precise guide yet to the way you conceptualize the colonial encounter in Africa, an encounter that you argue involved multiple actors, interests, and motives on both sides, but especially on the African side, which is usually simplistically valorized in African nationalist historiography as an undifferentiated, noble humanity of heroic resistors. Your subsequent books embrace the genre of political biography and national metahistory. Take us through the conceptual cartography that unites these diverse bodies of work and show us the intellectual compass, if any, that guided you from Le Kajoor to your subsequent works.
MAMADOU: I have been especially interested in exploring the production and inhabiting of public, civic, and domestic urban spaces – politically, culturally, socially and economically. I probe the working and construction of colonial subjectivities, in order to examine their valence for the past and present of the Senegambia communities, and their implications for the “packaging” of the many narratives competing for hegemony in the public space. The key concepts that inform my research are: civility, civic cultures, and communities. My interest has always been guided by how stories relate to the past, how they are constructed by individuals and communities, and how such histories – academic or not – confront, negotiate, and/or keep attempting to contain, reorient or subordinate other stories to their own narrative(s). I am convinced that focusing on the form, signification, and tone of historical documents (oral and written) is key in a region and a discipline (African history) saturated by heavy reliance on the oral nature of many “archives” and “testimonies” combined with a continuous production of histories.