Beyond Western Recognition:
History, Memory, Responsibilities

MOSES: You had mentioned your interest in urban studies. Perhaps you want to comment further on that?

MAMADOU: Yes. The most recent work is on Urban Studies. It explores the place of history and memory in urban space in particular; the issue of actors and agency are colonial cities African or European cities? There is a focus on the relationships between spatial, political, social, cultural, and economic performances; on representations and identity formation, social practices of everyday life, urban discourses and forms, art and architecture. The organizing concept I employ in accounting for Senegalese cities and urban dwellers from the early colonial period (the colony of Senegal and the “Four communes”, Saint Louis, Gorée, Rufisque, and Dakar) is urban civility. I use this to engage their historical construction and transformations and to deal more specifically with the formation of civic communities and the production of civic cultures. Like dominant African scholarship from roughly the 1930s to the 1980s, Senegalese history and sociology was dominated by rural sociology and the “tradition/change and modernization” paradigms, which focused on continuities and discontinuities in forms, contents, cultures, concerns, occupations as well as separation and/or overlap between the urban and the rural. Two issues were central to this orientation: the interactions between national and local institutions and the close linkage between urban and development studies, identifying dominant themes such as demographic, socio-economic and ecological factors, provision of services, migration, planning, governance, political change, and poverty. I have worked within this framework which pays more attention to collecting empirical data than to theories. In some cases I quite successfully document the processes of assemblage and re-assemblage of social institutions, networks of actors and resources of material life to illuminate the (de)construction of Senegalese public culture by the convergence of political, cultural, and recreational elements.

MOSES: Let’s talk about the instrumentalization of Africanist historical knowledge. The terrain of African historical reconstruction lends itself to multiple instrumental preoccupations in the postcolony; as a weapon for making cultural claims, for claiming economic rights, and for playing the politics of inclusion and exclusion. The discipline of history is, by its nature, fraught with political danger. African history – or versions of it – has provided fodder for postcolonial projects of exclusion, repression, and even annihilation – as the Rwandan genocide grisly illustrates. Do you see a possibility for the reclamation of African History as history – in the von Rankean sense; or a possibility for the contrapuntal emergence of a positivist, even if crudely didactic, African history burdened with instrumentalist aims?

MAMADOU: Your question raises one of the most difficult epistemological and political challenges to the three actors operating in the African public sphere with regard to the production of history and its multiple usages: the community, the state, and the historian (all three, in a large sense of including producers of narratives regarding the past, the present, and the future). At stake in these divergent and sometimes intersecting interventions is the shaping of the community’s future and the right to participate in the process. This is so precisely because the discussion about the past is a process of selecting who will be included or excluded from the future of the community. When you are not included in a community’s past, it is impossible to make claims to access its resources, material or symbolic. The only thing left is to construct your own past or reread and subvert the narrative you are excluded from. The point then is to examine the question of African historical knowledge in a way that takes into account the multiple functions of historical reconstruction and the various narratives and discursive structures available. I am not sure that it is possible or even necessary to escape the instrumentalization of history. What we need to do is immediately is to examine how such instrumentalization is made possible and how, in many cases, it becomes convincing to the people for whom it is intended; what are the operations involved? What gains accrue to the community involved and to other communities? What are the social, political, cultural consequences? Engaging such issues could help us unpack the multiple histories/stories competing, supporting or disregarding each other in the public space; help us very meticulously identify the formation of dominant or hegemonic cultures. In societies dominated by scarcity and authoritarian rule since the colonial period, to limit myself to such a moment, societies where the state plays a repressive role, administering more than governing (being governed presupposes representation) individuals and the communities, the politics of historical reconstruction tends to privilege one narrative – that of the dominant group controlling the state apparatus. It forcibly erases other discourses. Academic history’s role in this context is twofold. First to translate and interpret theories, practices, and histories from one context to another and, second, to pay attention to changes and diversity in the historical trajectories of societies restructured by the territorial logics of colonial and postcolonial governance systems.  Both translation and interpretation from our institutional vantage point – the academia – can capture the logic of historical production and reconstruction in their diverse forms and formulations towards restoring the poetic, scientific, and political function of history. One of the challenges facing African/Africanist historians is the reconstruction of the economies of knowledge, and the mapping of experiences, ideas, and practices of social actors (including the state) in order to identify and critically address the versions, codes, and intentions of the historical narratives circulating in the public space.

MOSES: Another question along these lines is that of the advancement of “history as fetish,” as a source of moral power, and as a wellspring of economic and political victimhood, to use the expression of your good friend, Achille Mbembe. In this characterization, African history is a stifling, imprisoning narration of historical injuries inflicted by outsiders on a hapless, previously insulated continent instead of the reconstruction of a dynamic, complex story of a continent consciously imbricated and implicated in the key currents of global history. What are your thoughts on this phenomenon, its critique by some Africanist historians, and the possibilities for representing the African past with the simultaneous mediation of these two interpretive tendencies? Do we need to rethink the very foundation of African history from one steeped in a disempowering narrative of victimhood, insularity, binary opposition, and dichotomy to one stressing African dynamism, resilience, and complexity?

MAMADOU: I believe that the dichotomy between the two perspectives and/or narratives is artificial. It is indeed a false dichotomy. Who really can pretend that emotions or subjective concerns are not influential or present in scientific/structural historical reconstruction (in particular in post-slave, post-colonial or post-imperial societies); or that a striving for a rational/scientific explanation is absent from the fetishization of history?  History is a celebration and a commemoration as well as a discipline and a resource for claim making.  We have to take that into account and understand that history as a way of narrating the past to carve a very specific present is an unstable and permanently revised product (whether such a product is iconographic, textual, scenic, musical…) constituted by the tension between its politics and poetics. It is about reconstituting voices and their textures, bodies and their pain and suffering, minds and their (re) adjustments, abandonment and appropriations of old and new forms of thinking, worshipping, loving, and mourning.  It is about loss and recovery, memory and commemoration, erasure and inscription.

Achille Mbembe

MOSES: Is this what Mbembe’s intervention does?

MAMADOU: Achille Mbembe’s intervention is useful because of the polemical context in which it was articulated, more precisely, the controversy about how to write Africa into the moment of globalization and the new environment – the liberal moment of knowledge production.  Its failure is to assume a neat binary of victimhood histories versus global history. His call is to include Africa in global conversation instead of fighting for a space devoted exclusively to explaining Africa as a specific object produced by the Atlantic slave trade and colonial and neocolonial oppression and domination.  He is telling us that African communities were not only victims; they were also agents of the history of oppression, domination, betrayal, and heroism. For him, identifying and dwelling on internal causes and “indigenous” (one of his favorite notions) processes is as important and decisive as the slave trade and colonial systems. Are these challenges worth exploring?  I am not sure that it is possible today to find a historian disputing what Mbembe is advocating because it is at the heart of the historical investigations of the last twenty to thirty years, with studies of colonial conquests and resistance; religious and cultural discourses around such notions as “transactions”, “connections”, ‘subaltern/subalternity”, and “inventions/imaginations”.  In this context, Mbembe not only fails to take into account what was achieved by African and Africanist scholars in criticizing very creatively the approach he is attacking, he is seemingly advocating the production of a single narrative reduced in its articulation to a global epistemology. Do we have to abide by the “commandement” (another favorite word of his) of this global epistemology (the singular is suspicious) or to participate in its production from the African locale as a “banal” site of human activity? My point is that we have to avoid constituting a legitimate epistemology of African history by privileging a single approach, theory, narrative structure, language, grammar, space, moment, object, or resource. Our challenge is to deal with all the voices filling the public space in order to rearticulate the complexity of African history.  In addition one can identify an abundant literature, located outside the “victimhood” narrative, celebrating the achievement of Africans before the advent of Europeans. It gave rise to what we call Afrocentrism today.

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