Beyond Western Recognition:
History, Memory, Responsibilities
MOSES: The French President, Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy, gave a speech recently in Dakar, in which he defended France’s colonial role in Africa and questioned the reality of a precolonial African civilizational flowering. What is the political and ideological import of Mr. Sarkozy’s revisionist claims and what challenges do they pose to Africanist historians and scholars seeking to explain Africa’s colonial and post-colonial entanglements?
MAMADOU: The French President committed a crime worse than what you described. Not only did he question the reality of pre-colonial African civilization, referring to French “ethnologie” and British anthropological colonial libraries, he reaffirmed very vigorously the location of Africa and Africans outside of history, modernity, and civilization. According to him Africans have never been able to change nature and their environment. According to his narrative, the continent and its inhabitants have always followed the laws of nature and submitted to its rhythms. Sarkozy’s reference to the most racist and condescending colonial literature serves his anti-immigration policies. For him the African lack of innovation (civilizational capacities) is the cause of their illegal invasion of Europe and the threat they pose to European culture and civilization. The food they cook smells badly (according to the Jacques Chirac of “le bruit et l’odeur” fame) and they are polygamist, do not speak French, and create communities that risk segmenting the French national community. In fact, Sarkozy is inventing a usable past to support his project of an imagined French community that is based on assimilating new ethnic groups to France by invoking the only available instrument – the republican secular idea of citizenship. It is much more a discourse directed at the French community than to Africans. Is it productive to mobilize against his revisionist claims? My answer is no. I don’t believe that African historians need to repeat the same gestures that have been the intellectual and political gestures of the “New Negro” movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the Pan African and Négritude movements and of the numerous Black Marxist intellectuals, who tried hard, through their writings and practices, to think simultaneously about race and class (Claude McKay, C. L. R. James) besides generations of African and Africanist historians doing the same. The search for Western recognition is over. We need to move from it to claim our share and contribution to world history, live a full present and shape a future that compels respect and establishes absolute equality between the many human communities in the world, while recognizing radical difference, to borrow Gandhi’s formula in his attack against Western secularism. Our role as historians is to provide a context and a critical edge to ensure the expression of plural voices and the continuing imagining of stable and inclusive communities. It is the best way to ensure an African presence in the global world. Frantz Fanon rejected the revival of an unjustly unrecognized civilization – Négritude writing. He famously said: “I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and my future.”
MOSES: Permit me a little personal indulgence. I have been personally inspired by your theorization of the evolution of trans-national African cultures and modernities in the context of globalization and its centripetal backlashes. In the case of Murid Islamic, moral, and commercial brotherhood – your empirical point of departure – the expression of a uniquely African, yet dynamic, moral technology of commerce, artistic expression, cultural re-calibration, and political mobilization has enriched Africanist discussions on paradigmatic, alternative, and parallel modernities. I have a sense that Africanist scholars are yet to fully harvest the insights from this truly path-breaking work and I want to give you an opportunity here to point us to some of the salient contributions you sought to make with this work.
MAMADOU: I agree with your reading of my contribution to trans-national discussions and to how migration affected African cultures and civilities. Recovering the plural voices and practices and the multiple idioms deployed by social actors are the condition for critically understanding the past and the present of Africa. More than dwelling on the idea of ownership – a key concept of the era of economic globalization and liberalization – or authenticity, the challenges are precisely to understand the resources, ideas, practices, and relations that define African communities’ engagement with themselves and the world. These are the very process through which they are constantly (re)inventing themselves and modernity in the same movement.
MOSES: Finally, what projects are you presently engaged in, and what are your future directions?
MAMADOU: I am still working on the different figures of West African urban culture in relation to youth interventions in the public space, as well as these figures’ constant attempts to creatively redefine the languages of politics and citizenship in the Braudelian longuedurèe. I am trying to understand how the colonial world was tamed and/or redirected and reformulated by African colonial subjects but also how postcolonial Africans have been engaging with modernity, reorganizing, and reshaping it for their own needs. I am also beginning to rethink the transnational intellectual history of Black modernity, from an African perspective, following the works of Brent Hayes Edwards (The Practice of Diapora), Michelle Wright (Becoming Black), Nihil Singh (Black is Another Country) Michelle Stephens (Black Empire). Perhaps it is time to reopen the old Pan-African debate in the context of the 21st century!
MOSES: Thanks, Mamadou, for your time.
MAMADOU: You’re welcome.
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