Of Poetics, Politics, and Fragments: Mamadou Diouf and the Burden of History
Cary Fraser
I would agree with Mamadou’s suggestion that the task of producing African history should be systematically located outside of the postcolonial state if history is to serve as a bridge to both the present and the future. It is also important to nurture the Pan-Africanist sensibility as a vehicle for validating a focus upon the history of peoples rather than the history of states. In a continent, where nation and state are not necessarily coterminous, Pan-Africanism provides multiple points of intervention in the elaboration of competing narratives and visions of history. A Pan-Africanist sensibility offers an opportunity to integrate accountability into the shaping of historical narratives in ways that postcolonial state-mandated histories may not. The Pan-Africanist dimension also keeps alive the connections that transcend the interruption of history that was strategically deployed in the mission civilisatrice by the European colonial projects.
As Mamadou recognizes, the task of the historian in the post-colonial African context is simultaneously driven by the imperatives of both authenticity and agency in the reconstitution of African history. He recognizes that his strategic location “at the intersection of colonial and postcolonial history” has allowed him to reframe the historiography of the colonial encounter by way of the use of archival resources. However, it would be useful to know whether that strategic location and the use of archival resources has led him to think about the colonial encounter – a vehicle of cultural symbiosis – as itself a subversion of the tradition of national histories. If so, then how does one establish a benchmark for authenticity on the construction of national history?
This question of the authenticity of history is problematic as Moses Ochonu suggests in his observations about “the use of novels and other ‘non-historical’ devices in Africanist historical pedagogy.” Mamadou’s response emphasizes the importance of “allowing the deployment of multiple narratives to promote critical thinking and tolerance.” However, it may be useful to think of the way in which the American movie Amistad both provided some historical insight into the issue of the slave trade after its ‘abolition’ and the debates over the politics and law in the American Republic, even as it engaged in ‘creative’ representations of the episode and the era in which it unfolded. The challenges that fiction poses as a source of historical insight is not restricted to the issue of Africanist historiography and perhaps it may be useful to situate the discussion in the broader context of historiography across the human experience.
Moses’ question about the ‘irrelevance’ and/or ‘aloofness’ could also have been cast in slightly different terms. History is never just about the past – it is simultaneously about the past, the present, and the future - and serious historians are deeply engaged in examining the human condition across time to illuminate the choices that societies confront. As Mamadou recognizes, African and Africanist historians bring a pluralist sensibility to the task of reconstructing African history as a way of liberating Africa from the “universalist historical frame which constructs Africa outside of history.” The importance of history as method, and as epistemology, is precisely rooted in the notion of “reconstruction” – if one does not know where one was, can one determine where one is?