Mamadou Diouf and the Spaces of History:
Random Reflections
Abosede George
Having “listened in” on the conversation between Moses and Mamadou, I can only echo Paul’s initial response to the inaugural PQF dialogue between Pius and Ato by saying: What a feast indeed! There is so much to say and yet so little new to add. One thing that should be said before going any further is “hats off” to the Convener, Pius, for orchestrating this meeting of minds. The very pairing of these two historians, one who emphasizes a discipline focused approach to African History with the other who tends to lean toward an engagé scholarship tradition, sets the stage for revisiting one of the foundational debates of the field of African History; this is the debate about the role of the historian in contemporary African realities.
As I read the dialogue, I was reminded of a variation on this question about the role of the African intellectual vis-à-vis the community which appeared recently in the universe of African listservs. The specific question posed was “where are the Nigerian intellectuals?” I imagine that much the same question is being directed at various African intellectual communities, not just the Nigerian one. Participants on the listserv I was looking at explained the alleged absence of the intellectual in African public cultures as the effect of avarice-fuelled brain drain. Here was a notion that had been repeated, absolutely unchanged with no nuance, at least a million times. The initial question contains a set of assumptions that are problematized when one asks who and where are the African publics? Where are the sites of public culture located? Who are our intellectuals?
Almost as response to the last question, Mamadou’s suggestion that we expand our notions of the intellectual beyond the academic scholar to encompass the various types of knowledge and culture producers that are currently commenting, often very publicly, on African histories and historiographies, is a refreshing one. What is particularly interesting about the suggestion is the way it seeks to radically democratize the relationship between academic historians and other history producers. An argument for this experiment was laid out in Mamadou’s 2003 piece, “African Historiography Between the State and the Communities.” My understanding from that earlier work was that Mamadou sought to destabilize the hierarchies of authoritativeness involved in the production and presentation of African histories. History, he argued, was “freeing itself from academic writing”; academic historians, by inference, were being freed from historical authoritativeness.
Yet there is a tension that emerges when one considers Mamadou’s new characterization of the academic historian as an arbiter of histories, one who will “translate and interpret theories, practices, and histories from one context to another” while noting “changes and diversity in the historical trajectories of societies.” The key challenge for academic historians is here understood as the challenge of reconstructing “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.” In effect the academic historian dwells in a separate intellectual realm from the producers of history- the state, the communities, the artists, and so on. Perhaps I have misread but if there has been some subtle shift in the thinking about academic historians vis-à-vis the larger spectrum of history producers, I am curious to know how it came about. Ultimately, it seems to me that the pronouncements that historians make on history do still vastly outweigh the pronouncements of other knowledge producers and cultural producers, including the state. If this is the case, the question becomes: are there, as Amina Mama asks, ethical obligations for scholars to meet?
I am reminded of the case of Rwanda where historians were asked to revisit the history of the nation and perhaps reconcile the various counter narratives submerged beneath the state’s seemingly hegemonic narrative. Deterring violence over the autochthony question, a fundamentally historical question was central to the project of the Rwandan history conferences. Whatever the final outcome of these conferences might have been, I will only say that in the Rwandan case it was unsatisfactory for historians to devote themselves to deconstructing already circulating narratives. Ethical considerations demanded that they delve into the actual reconstruction and recovery processes that directed the classic works of African history. While historians may be less motivated than colleagues in other disciplines by this question of how our works enter public cultures, I think it is a question worth facing- particularly in the current era of proliferating civic possibilities in our various African communities. So I applaud Moses and Mamadou for taking up the question and Pius for so subtly weaving it into the architecture of their dialogue.