Of Poetics, Politics, and Fragments: Mamadou Diouf and the Burden of History
Cary Fraser
It is in this context that Mamadou’s observation that - “the poetics and politics of fragments have always been intellectually and politically more challenging” - raises an equally important series of questions. To what extent has the politics of fragmentation been the legacy of the colonial order in Africa while the cartography of reconstitution has been the central challenge to African societies after the so-called passage of the colonial order? What role can History, as scholarly enterprise, play in changing the modes of governance in Africa from fragmentation to reconstitution? In effect, is reconstitution a viable alternative to fragmentation as source of identity and political engagement in the contemporary post-colonial context? And, perhaps, is reconstitution a single path or should one make the case for letting ‘a hundred flowers’ bloom to ensure cross-pollination of the processes of reconstitution?
Mamadou’s observation about the difference between Cheikh Anta Diop - who was interested in establishing “the African contribution to human history in opposition to the Hegelian paradigm of the ‘Dark Continent’ outside of history” – and Abdoulaye Ly - who sought to locate Africa within the Atlantic World and the imperial projects therein – should perhaps be qualified. Both Diop and Ly were interested in locating Africa within the history of the wider world and as a source of historical agency – thus there may be more that unites them than separates them. Mamadou’s focus on the domestic dynamics of collaboration with/contestation of the European imperial projects in the African context is part of the ongoing evolution of the field of African historiography that Diop and Ly helped to create. These continuities and divergences should be creatively mined to reshape the contours of African historiography for current and new generations.
Despite these differences of emphasis, and perhaps scholarly approaches, among historians, it is important to build inter-generational capacity into the tradition of African historiography as a way of redefining the history of the continent away from what Henri Baudet identified as a “marked dualism” in European attitudes to the world outside of Europe:
“Two relations, separate but indivisible, are always apparent in the European consciousness. One is in the realm of political life in its broadest sense, in the atmosphere of … concrete relations with concrete non-European countries, peoples, and worlds. This is the relationship that freely employs political, military, socioeconomic, and sometimes missionary terminology. It is this relationship that has also, in general, dominated the pens of the historians who have recorded the history of our Western resistance and of our expansion. The other relationship has reigned in the minds of men. Its domain is that of the imagination, of all sorts of images of non-Western people and worlds which have flourished in our culture – images derived not from observation, experience, and perceptible reality but from a psychological urge. That urge creates its own realities which are totally different from the political realities of the first category. But they are in no way subordinate in either strength or clarity since they have always possessed that absolute reality value so characteristic of the rule of myth.”