Beyond Western Recognition:
History, Memory, Responsibilities

MOSES: This question focuses on one important theme in your response. An emerging trend in the field of history in Africa is the proliferation of local and community histories, histories written by and for small villages and towns by commissioned professional and sometimes untrained historians. The transactional economies and the overtly political preoccupations of these histories index a growing disenchantment with the failure of institutionalized professional Africanist historians to produce usable histories for African communities in search of them. They also point to the tense and politically volatile presence of the past in the African present. It is precisely this currency of the past and its entanglement in today’s political and economic struggles which makes local history writing a lucrative commercial terrain, enabling the production of what most trained historians would arrogantly see as poorly researched and poorly written histories. How should professional Africanist historians respond to this trend? I am concerned here about how the production of usable African histories, pioneered and envisioned by the first generation of African professional historians of the Ibadan, Dakar, and Dar es Salaam schools, can be sustained in the face of a pervasive aversion to instrumentalist humanistic knowledge in the Western academy, where, it must be said, most academic Africanist histories are produced.

MAMADOU: If we agree that historical reconstruction (and production) is a polysemic site of different and contradictory narratives, we will have to accept the proliferation of multiple histories (stories) to serve communities that strongly believe that they are not represented  (or are underrepresented) in the master narrative. I think it is less about the failure of professional historians as it is the failure of the African postcolonial state to become a credible historian.  Professional historians played a key role in the nationalist moment and the early postcolonial period, helping to forge, not necessarily national identity narratives – nations were then in formation – but a kind of continental Pan-African identity against the colonial civilizing missions and their denial of African history and agency. The deployment of such an identity (converging from different colonial territories) did not really accommodate the variegated trajectories of the numerous African communities. They were silenced violently or restrained by communities ready to join the independence dreams of development, justice, democracy and equality.  The many dreams associated with independence were powerful enough to mobilize Africans. On the one hand, the collapse of the dreams of liberation, development, social, cultural, and economic upliftment, and on the other, the  failure of unity, and the retreat of the postcolonial state from many sites, – as well as its abandonment of many social, political, ideological and educational functions – opened up new opportunities and spaces to communities. They filled the abandoned spaces and used their new positions to mobilize and make claims to a better share of the national pie or to break away from the nation.  I am not sure that well-meaning “national histories” of Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa or Zimbabwe will do the job you are calling for.  What is happening is an exact reproduction of what happened in the post-World War II moment. African historians began writing to recover their lost or denied histories in order to support independence claims. Today, African communities are trying to recover an identity suppressed by the postcolonial state: a self-contained, arrogant, and very authoritarian state unable to deliver the goods and promises of independence.  Therefore, to map the production of a usable past, we must place it in a regional (defined by the intersections of historical African regions and colonial territories) and continental space (defined by Pan Africanist and Black internationalist ideas).  It transcends the binaries and the temporalities (slave trade and the colonial) in which African history is captured, establishing a more complex and productive relation and collaboration between, amongst and within cultures, religions and ethnic groups, communities, and nations in the African continent. Ibadan, Dakar and Dar es Salaam Schools of history fulfilled their role of recovering African history against European factual and ideological distortions, though they did not provide a narrative to imagine the nation. They imagined Nigerian, Senegalese, and Tanzanian nations by default, as part of a larger African imagined community. The historians of these schools were not nationalist, they were Pan-Africanist. Could their intellectual legacies constitute a solid basis for an African epistemology which deals positively with the proliferation of exclusivist community histories?  I don’t know. But we need to consider revisiting their legacies by establishing a creative dialogue between those different cartographies of historical production and reconstitution – both inside and outside Africa – if we are interested in productively engaging the issues we face.  At stake is the presence of African tonalities, rhythms, and temporalities not in a Western but a reconstituted universalism, to paraphrase Négritude philosophers.

MOSES: There has always been an unspoken, ever present intra-disciplinary tension between historians who study the African precolonial past and those who study the subsequent periods. Historians of precolonial Africa tend to see themselves as interpreters of an authentic Africa, the real Africa. Conversely, historians of colonial and postcolonial Africa are sometimes portrayed as investigators of a distorted and globalizing Africa. Precolonial history is advanced as the methodological and custodial province of the Holy Grail of Africanist historical reconstruction: oral tradition. Their anxiety is particularly acute, given the colonial origin of the archive in which most historians of colonial Africa work. Their craft of the latter is sometimes construed as imperial history, the study of the activities of European colonialists in Africa and of their views on and representations of the Africans they encountered. Is the burden of the colonial archive exclusive to historians of colonial Africa or could the canonical corpus of precolonial Arabic sources that is mined by historians of precolonial Africa be described as another kind of colonial archive fraught with silences? How have you confronted this discourse of authenticity and distortion in your own work? Articulate for us, if you would, a theoretical and methodological possibility for overcoming the ideological and representational limitations of the texts with which historians of colonial and post- colonial Africa work.

MAMADOU: The “authentic” Africa has been the permanently reinvented Africa that (re)fabricated traditions and values through internal and external interactions, across the Sahara, the plateaus and valleys, and mountains of its topography. It is also a constant invention of Africans and Europeans. Its authenticity is historically defined.  The idea of a “real and authentic Africa” has a polemical function; it allows the possibility of telling histories outside of the European libraries. Taking the “risk of essentialization,” to quote Gayatri Spivak, seems to be a necessary move if one is trying to “provincialize Europe.” In many cases, it takes the form of a claim to authenticity as a strategic move. What does this mean in actual history writing? I believe that the construction of African antiquities is part of the historian’s mission. It is much more about making inroads in an academic discipline than about ideologies and politics. Like any ordinary institutional historical investigation, pre-colonial historical research cannot be considered a basis for ethical, moral, or cultural judgments and condemnation or claims.  So, I am not sure that we need to pay attention to the controversy pitting African/Africanist pre-colonial historians and African/Africanist colonial and postcolonial historians against each other as long as the sources, methodologies, and theories used by both groups are appropriate and productive. Here one may address the question from a different angle.  Pre-colonial historians’ contribution to the writing of African history and to its methods was a crucial element in carving an academic space of African history and delinking it from Imperial and Colonial history.  In addition, their participation in the codification of oral history was decisive.  This being said, I believe that one cannot reduce African history to the search for an authentic moment long gone, even though nostalgia has its own charm and attraction.

Colonial history is the result of an encounter of different cultures and actors. According to V. Y. Mudimbe, the “colonizing structure” rested on colonial conquest, the incorporation of African economies in European economies, and the reformation of the African mind. We have to account for the encounter and the engagements which resulted from it. The colonial history of Africa is simultaneously African and European.  This is precisely what makes colonial history an aspect of imperial history; it seeks to explore not only how colonies were shaped by metropoles but also how empires are the product of the interactions of colonies and metropoles.  Such an approach using concepts such as “transactions” and “connections” – which constructed the colonial moment – restitute agency to colonial subjects.

All archives are fraught with silences, and they are full of noise, smells, and perfumes. They speak loudly and always carry institutional or family projects. Documents, images, and objects are archived for a very precise goal. A corollary to this is the structure and language of the archive. How was it generated, preserved, and circulated? How is the observed – whether the observation is done by Arab, European but also African travelers – and/or the colonial subjects constructed or present in the archive? These operations are indispensable for any type of archive and historical exploration when we are attempting to reconstruct the discursive networks that constitute the archive.  My interest in the African communities that are located in the interstices of the colonial world, from the first Atlantic African enclaves to urban African communities, is the reason for my focusing on the constitution of discursive networks. Tracking the traces of the observed/colonized subject’s presence and the ways that the observer/colonizer manifests his power in the archive became a key aspect of my engagement with both the discourses of authenticity and of lack of agency in the African colonial subject. This was made possible by the location of my work at the intersection of colonial and postcolonial history.

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