Of Poetics, Politics, and Fragments: Mamadou Diouf and the Burden of History
Cary Fraser
The political decolonization of Africa changed the terms of Africa’s relationship with the world. The recognition and consolidation of African agency in the world - even as it examines the ways in which the world’s engagement with Africa has changed the context within Africa – becomes of vital importance in negotiating the future of African societies. In this context African history can be freed from the thrall of the imperial project (and the European imagination) to explore the shifting terms of engagement that have shaped Africa’s interactions with the wider world across the centuries. Mamadou’s contribution is certainly moving the field in this direction.
One of the key issues that perhaps should be seen in a context larger than Senegal is the transfer of both crops and systems of land and labor organization from the Americas to Africa as part of the reorganization of the political economy of the Atlantic World. In what ways did the re-export of the plantation system from “Plantation America” to Africa, and its level of specialization, affect patterns of human settlement in the continent, including the rise of urban centres and the emergence of the politics that created new forms of communal association? In focusing upon nationalist historiography of African societies, it would be important to ensure that the economic underpinnings of colonialism and nationalism are charted in relation to the wider world. This strategy of looking simultaneously at the African and Atlantic environments in the shaping of the political economy across the continent may provide some interesting insights into the pathways that Africans have trod – as well as open ways about thinking of new paths into the future.
Mamadou’s discussion of the trajectory of history in the African context – “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) to identify and critically address the versions, codes, intentions of the historical narratives circulating in the public space” – provokes several interesting questions. How does the historian escape the politics of identity (trans)formation that is implied in the reconstruction of knowledge and the mapping of experiences? Is the historian’s identity reshaped by these processes and how does that influence critical engagement with the various historical narratives? If the historian functions as an écrivain engagé in this context, how does the narrative escape a descent into propaganda? How does the mobility of populations across the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial contexts affect the narratives that transcend the confines of the contemporary states in Africa? If the state’s imaginary boundaries can be transcended through history, at what point does the state’s legitimacy become an arena of false consciousness and with what consequences? Is History as an academic discipline capable of serving as an alternative gatekeeper of knowledge and its production, in light of Mamadou’s observation that the postcolonial state has failed “to become a credible historian”?
This issue of historical credibility of the postcolonial state should lead to a careful examination of what has been the mandate of that state. Can it fail when there is no mandate? As Mamadou observes, professional historians played a key role in the nationalist movement and the early postcolonial period in shaping an anti-colonial and Pan-African sensibility. We perhaps need to ask whether either the colonial project or the post-colonial state has seen history as within their mandate. If one assumes that the colonial project was shaped by some version of the mission civilisatrice and, as a consequence, was focused upon the transformation of Africans – was there a need to address history except as a way of emphasizing the need to escape it? Given the focus of the postcolonial state upon the issue of “modernization” and its corollary, “development”, has it also sought to escape history, i.e., colonialism as a constraint upon African capabilities?