Beyond Western Recognition:
History, Memory, Responsibilities

MOSES: For decades Africanist historians have had to contend with the interpretation and representation of the historical experiences of African peoples in literary, anthropological, and sociological texts. Buoyed by the monumental success of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, the genre of the historical novel in particular has granted to many audiences an aesthetic-literary entry into the African past, audiences that might not have otherwise accessed that instructive past. On the other hand, disciplinary anxieties and disciplinary protectionism abound among Africanist historians, with several of them decrying the use of novels and other “non-historical” devices in Africanist historical pedagogy. Comment for us on how you and other Africanist historians have encountered and dealt with this challenge of interdisciplinarity in an age of heightened disciplinary insecurities.

MAMADOU: The question of who has the right to interpret the African past, to (re)order it in the most comprehensible, convincing, and usable way for the communities to which such interpretations are addressed, has always constituted a terrain of contestations and struggles. Some of them have been very violent and deadly: Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, the Southern region of Senegal, the southern region of Mauritania, the Northern region of Côte d’Ivoire… There have been attacks against ethnic groups whose autochthony is contested. These are vivid examples of the fact that the production and circulation of histories in the public space have consequences within and between communities. The issues of identifying very precisely the legitimate producers of historical knowledge, of controlling the grammar and poetics of historical narratives and of defining the particular historical circumstances in which they are produced and circulated, have always, particularly in Africa, defined history as a field of inquiry (for academic historians), of aesthetical production (for artists and writers) and of fetishization (for politicians, community historians, and activists). At stake are the moral and material configurations of communities – the ways in which they are imagined, lived, and projected in the past –  and the geographies of power, rights, duties, access to, and usage of, resources. All the players mentioned are not operating side by side; they are also engaging one another, trying to establish a dominant narrative while suppressing and/or subordinating other discourses to their own logic and moral and economic power.  It is in this changing context that we need to address the issues you are raising. The producers of history are not intervening from the same space and with the same resources. They also don’t share intentions, instruments, audiences and institutions they are accountable to [academic historians].  All those elements intersect from time to time but they don’t always overlap. In the case of historians and novels such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Sembene’s God Bits of Wood, Djibril Tamsir Niane’s Sundiata, Tsitsi Dangaremba’s Nervous Conditions, Chimamanda N. Adechie’s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone for example, the relation is more complex. On the one hand, African literary production has largely been read as autobiographical works and interpreted literally, leaving usually no room for an aesthetic engagement that pays attention to language, literary innovation, and creativity.  Do we have to read African literature as a journalist’s report and/or ethnographic rendering or as rhetorical strategies that perform African cultures and social and moral practices against or in addition to the “colonial library”? We need to reevaluate such processes by considering the two issues of translation and revision. The question we must ask is:  Is African literature a site for the historian to visit to provide an ambiance and find some ethnographic evidence for the history he is telling? It is necessary to go beyond the literary text as a primary source in order to consider it a historiographical intervention.  By doing that, historians will open a more creative space for the writing of African history, allowing the deployment of multiple narratives to promote critical thinking and tolerance. More than the science of history, we have to strive for a poetics of history in order to develop a conversation across the diverse modalities of historical production to include processes, performances, texts, tales and proverbs, icons, and practices of everyday life – gestures, body language, etc. 

MOSES: Like the practitioners of other humanistic disciplines, historians are sometimes accused of being aloof or irrelevant to the raging socio-economic and social challenges confronting the world. This perception of irrelevance is particularly rife in Africa, where a fixation on the past is sometimes interpreted as a distraction from the big continental issues of the day: AIDS, poverty, globalization, integration, and democracy. Keeping this in perspective, how can Africanist historians insert themselves into discussions and debate on these raging issues and problems and how can the insights and lessons of African history enrich the effort to understand and solve these challenges?

MAMADOU: The only way historians can insert themselves into the discussion is by doing what they are supposed to do best: engage with the discourses and perceptions you mentioned to unveil their historicity, and to unveil very meticulously their strategic articulation of Africa as a continent to be pulled forcibly into modernity as determined by the history of Europe. The aim here is to steer clear of a universalist historical frame which constructs Africa outside of history. The fixation on the challenges Africa is facing today calls for a rigorous understanding of African historical trajectories. We have to contribute to identifying the problems by linking Africa to the history, politics, culture and economies of the West as a way to uncover the various figures of what Mudimbe calls “the colonizing structure”. The solutions to Africa’s deepening crisis are the fastest growing industry of scholarship and policy making since 1950 but the problem they are addressing is never defined. It is imagined or represented within the genealogy of what Africa is. The mission of African and Africanist historians is precisely to contribute to the understanding of the African condition from multiple perspectives and registers.

MOSES: The Cultural Turn in the social sciences has enriched African studies with a new sensitivity to the social constructedness of the most important categories through which Africa is represented, explained, and understood. There is however a sense –  shared in many quarters of the African Studies community – that the elevation of cultural causation and explanation is an epistemological luxury that African studies cannot afford as more consequential questions about lingering structural injustice and material poverty call for the privileging of political-economic analysis. Similarly, there is an emerging anxiety that faddish flirtations with social construction and postmodern instabilities can undermine the bounded taxonomies that constitute the institutional and philosophical foundation of African studies. First, do you think that these anxieties are justified? Second, can you envision a productive field of play between these theoretical currents on the one hand and African Studies on the other, and what might such a convergence look like?

MAMADOU: Why should we exclude ourselves from new perspectives and methodologies that are enriching our disciplines? When we resist such inroads, are we not confusing our institutional position as academic historians (for example) accountable to our disciplinary units and our political and social role as citizen/members of various communities? In each case we need to pay attention to what we are advocating and the effects of our intervention. At the professional level it is needless to say that we have to participate critically in the global debate – with the risk of losing the secure niche carved for African studies by area studies – to reframe both history and African studies in a moment which is radically different from the period and context in which they emerged – the Cold War. The risk is worth taking in a context defined by the various interventions in the field of African studies and the increasing number of actors. I strongly believe that postcolonial literature and epistemologies as well as the cultural turn allow us to think about Africa – outside of the colonial and nationalist libraries of victimhood, backwardness, non-responsiveness to progress, modernity, authenticity, and redress – in terms much more consistent with the trajectories of the continent. These trajectories are characterized by transactions, connections, and a series of creative (re)adaptations, identifications, complexities, ambivalences, and negotiations.

MOSES: Let us shift the conversation to broader issues of the politics of African(ist) knowledge production. You were involved in African studies from a programmatic location during your years in CODESRIA. You have also actively participated in the production and mediation of knowledge about African peoples through your affiliations with and tentacles in academic institutions, publications, and funding agencies. From these vantage points, would you say that African Studies is a threatened, dying practice, about to be subsumed by emerging trends towards the internationalization and universalization of knowledge? I have in mind here the increasing institutional and scholarly appeal of trans-locational fields such as World History, Diaspora Studies, International History, Atlantic Studies, and of fields of knowledge defined by linguistic and/ or neo-imperial affinity such as Francophone Studies, English Studies, British Empire Studies, Commonwealth Studies, etc.

MAMADOU: Your question dovetails Pius’s query about the considerable place diaspora occupies in the work of our colleagues, Quayson and Zeleza, in the first PQF dialogue. I must reiterate Ato’s point that we have no reason to worry. I don’t think that African Studies has ever been threatened or has become a dying practice; nor do I think that it has lost its attractive power as an area of inquiry. But I strongly believe that it has been changing ever since it became an intellectual space of reflection, creativity, and policy interventions. In the early 20th century W.E.B. Du Bois was lamenting what he considered as one of the most terrible consequences of the upgrading of African Studies as an academic field, namely the displacing of “black activism” – and activists – from its content and operations.According to him African Studies was – and needed to remain – a key component and the foundation of the black struggle for freedom and citizenship. We can follow the traces of African Studies discussion from Du Bois to the idea of “decolonizing” African Studies by nationalist intellectuals eager to produce and preserve a research agenda that is specifically African, delinked, according to Samir Amin, from Western Eurocentric agenda, and/or articulating African agenda against Marxist or global liberal agendas.  Codesria is a product of a moment defined by postcolonial authoritarian regimes assaulting academic freedom and drastically cutting funding for scholarly research and publication. The founders of African social sciences institutions were interested in keeping open a space for research, in particular, of Marxist influenced/leftist research and public debates. The institution has been very successful in maintaining such a line and opening up to new directions, to new epistemologies from gender studies, languages, and the disciplines. At its launching it was limited to English speaking countries. It has now included French, Arabic, and Portuguese languages. The dominant discipline was political economy. Today the humanities (history, literature) and social sciences (Political science, economics, anthropology and sociology) are largely represented in the research working groups and publications. The creation and funding of African national and multinational working groups and the publication (in English and French, first, and now in Arabic and Portuguese) of their findings as well as the policy of translating major texts from one language to the others, have maintained not only a high level of effectiveness but also a presence of African research and publications in the global market of ideas. It has also preserved the African conversation internally, while creating a larger African scholarly community across national and linguistic borders. For me one of the greatest achievements of Codesria is to have enabled a productive dialogue between different African traditions of research. Such an experience is precisely what can prepare African scholars for engaging with the very rich fields in which they must operate and innovate. I strongly believe that African artists (musicians and filmmakers in particular) have been teaching us, through their practices and interventions, that what we need is not to retreat from the global scene but to introduce an ‘African Beat’ into world musical conversation as Youssou Ndour, the Senegalese World musician once said. We need to be present on the intellectual world stage to contribute from our experiences, histories, and philosophies to the reconfiguring of both modernity and universalism. More than a century ago, the Martinican Négritude poet, Aimé Césaire, called for the “rendez-vous du donner et du recevoir”, a gathering of all cultures and communities to reinvent humanism.  We are facing the same situation that Pan Africanists and Négritude intellectuals faced in the interwar and post World War II periods. We can learn from them as well as from the experiences and practices of other postcolonial intellectuals

continued •••>