Beyond Western Recognition:
History, Memory, Responsibilities
MOSES: How do these interests and strategies come together in your book?
MAMADOU : Le Kajoor au 19ème siècle : pouvoir Ceddo et conquête coloniale (1990) developed from my PhD dissertation. Exploring the colonial conquest of the Kajoor kingdom in the late 19th century, it engages with nationalist historiography. Both the dissertation and the book that resulted from it are in dialogue – in confrontation – with the different traditions of historical thought and writing that Senegalese intellectuals have been engaging with since the 1950s. These are:
- The indigenous traditions of family and dynastic histories (oral or written in Wolof, using first Arabic and later Latin scripts). Such a tradition has been upheld since World War II and the emergence of the nationalist movement by school teachers, bureaucrats, and students, who began publishing regularly in magazines and newspapers, producing pamphlets and broadcasting along with the griots (traditional historians and musicians) on public and private radios;
- The early attempts by colonial administration officers to understand (make sense of) African societies through administrators, historians, ethnographers, geographers, linguists like Maurice Delafosse, Henri Gaden and Paul Marty. Traditional administrators and scholars such as Georges Hardy, Pierre Cultru, Albert Sabatie, and André Villard, whose concerns were more academic and pedagogically oriented, grew up with the consolidation of colonial rule, after World War I. They were colonial educators interested in producing textbooks for elementary and secondary schools with a focus on the French civilizing mission. This tradition has been continued by historians – with a variety of ideological and methodological approaches – of colonial Africa such as Hubert Deschamps, Raymond Mauny, Henri Brunschwig, Yves Person, and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch;
- The American Africanist tradition inaugurated by Philip Curtin, which was more engaged with that African historical (and political?) agenda focusing on processes of accommodation and transactions between colonized and colonizer, while deploying more systematically oral traditions compared to the French and early Senegalese traditions;
- The Senegalese academic historical tradition inaugurated by the first two holders of doctorates in history, Abdoulaye Ly and Cheikh Anta Diop. They became not only the two most influential Senegalese intellectuals (along with the first President, Léopold Sédar Senghor) but also the leaders of the opposition movement to President Senghor and his party. Ly was interested in the connection of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the construction of the Atlantic world and the location of Africa within the imperial/imperialist system. He took part in radical politics, trying to align his activism with his historical production, historiographical intervention, and historical vision. Diop was more nationalist and much more a philosopher interested in identifying, documenting, and locating African contribution to human history against the Hegelian paradigm of a “Dark Continent” ‘outside of history.’ The race of the ancient Egyptians and the impact of Egypt on Black Africa are so central in his intellectual quest that he has been claimed as one of the founding fathers of “Afrocentricism.”
Since then Senegalese historical tradition, though influenced by French colonial historiography and American historians of Africa, has remained split between the two historiographical orientations opened by the first academic historians of Senegal. I locate myself in the Abdoulaye Ly historiographical tradition. In Le Kajoor au 19ème siècle, my aim was to restore the agency of Senegambian actors in the context of imperial expansion, while reconsidering the process through which colonial actors – military and administrative officers, their African associates and collaborators, and colonial traders (Africans, Europeans, and métis) – inserted themselves into the political and military processes of the Senegambian kingdoms and societies. This they did using the multiple religious and cultural resources available to them, in the diversity of their opinions and policy agendas. They were able – through mediating between and/or supporting competing factions within the kingdoms – to achieve their goals of pacification and control by inscribing their colonial designs into local histories. My interest in identifying such transactions and connections and in documenting those processes, focusing on their multiple colonial and indigenous figures of conflicts and cooperation, made me adopt a double strategy of reconstruction and recovery, examining very closely the colonial archive and oral tradition libraries. The reconstruction involved an exploration of the internal political process in Kajoor, the opportunities of alliances available inside and outside ( in the colony of Senegal, the neighboring kingdoms and communities including the Muslim ones scattered throughout Senegambia); and the impact of such alliances on the stability, capability, and desire to resist and/or negotiate a settlement with colonial actors. The recovery consisted of paying careful attention to the language of archival and oral tradition narratives (its aesthetics and specificity) in order to figure out how they interpenetrate one another’s structure, contents, and poetics, and to unveil the stories they harbor instead of considering them exclusively as a reservoir of information, waiting for the historian to turn them into meaningful history.
MOSES: How precisely did you approach this project?
MAMADOU: I approached the project from an innovative and careful methodological standpoint: how history is instrumentalized to give legitimacy and support to a specific narrative for specific political and economic projects, symbolic or material. I sketched and engaged the relevance of oral traditions as historical narratives and uncovered the re-arrangement of their discursive elements by traditional historians, community leaders, and academic scholars. I became more and more interested in the literary, cinematographic, musical, performative, and iconographic representations and delivery of historically based or inspired narratives through my interweaving of historical and literary methods and materials to build deeper and fuller understandings of the Senegambian past. This is what defines my distinctive contribution (unique at the time) and the new orientations opened by my early research (reflected in my writing style) in the field of West African history and the “Ecole de Dakar.” My research shifted the grid from the vision of a homogenous Kajoor society to one ridden with conflicts between different groups positioning themselves in relation to potential allies or enemies including the colony of Senegal. In doing so, I called into question the Senegalese national hero Lat Joor NGone Latyr Dior, opening a public debate about colonial resistance and the writing of history which lasted for many years.
MOSES: You must have had to negotiate considerable epistemological tensions.
MAMADOU: Sure. The location of my early research in the revisionist path of nationalist history forced me to attend closely to the writing of African history in general and African colonial historiography in particular. The focus has been placed on methodologies in the writing and production of history. Such an interest has always been present in my research and writing but it took on a new intensity in the mid-1990s with the publication of two books I edited, the first one on the Subaltern Studies literature and the second on Caribbean social science research. In my engagement with historiographical material, I strove to include the different facets of (dis)similarities and transactions between the local histories (indigenous, colonial, academic, and Islamic) 
deployed in the Senegambian space. My book, Une Histoire du Sénégal: Le modèle Islamo-Wolof et ses périphéries (2001), is an attempt to account for multiple social arenas, voices, practices, rituals and their spatial conjunction and disjunction with the emergence of a heightened sense of affirmation of specific sites for different communities.
My examination of the moment of independence, and the academic and political attempts to recover both a usable past and a historical nationalist master narrative was informed by Pierre Nora’s Lieux de Mémoire and Jacques Le Goff’s Histoire et Mémoire. I have always been intrigued by their discussion of “memory” and “history.” They underscore the fact that a recourse to “memory” in the periphery is a mechanism for decolonizing history in postcolony, while a metropolitan deployment of memory – a “problematic object” for historians in the metropolis – is a response to the acceleration of history, rapid social changes and the problems of identity. Taking stock of Nora’s discussion and the reactions it provoked, on the one hand, and the controversies which were shaking African historiography, on the other, I critically engaged the following issues:
- African nationalist historiography and its changing relations to the past, where the point of departure is the construction of a nationalist historical narrative from fragmented narratives, precolonial, Islamic, heroic histories, royal lineage epics;
- The tensions and transactions between academic writings of history and the growing production of local histories, and the multiplication of commemorations (religious, familial and national);
- The ways in which the valence of the past is taken stock of by different groups, communities but also by individuals, turning it into resources in the challenges, conflicts and competition in the present as well as inclusion and exclusion from groups and/or national communities; and finally,
- Their impact on the contours (ethnic, religious, civic) of different civilities as well as the configuration of the public space when such resources are inscribed in that space: for example the working of colonial policies and the construction of colonial subjectivities, the materiality of the traces (buildings, libraries and scripts), the immediacy of the oral or scriptural recording, the dishes, perfumes, fashion and the visibility of the religious and spiritual images and imagining, in particular the permanent tensions between “the doctrinal and the imagistic modes of religiosity,” to borrow from Harvey Whitehouse.