Globalization and the Seduction of Africa's Ruling Class: An Argument for a New Philosophy of Development 0786448407, 9780786448401

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Globalization and the Seduction of Africa’s Ruling Class

ALSO BY K. MARTIAL FRINDÉTHIÉ AND FROM MCFARLAND Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture, Politics and Theory (2009) The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures (2008)

Globalization and the Seduction of Africa’s Ruling Class An Argument for a New Philosophy of Development K. MARTIAL FRINDÉTHIÉ with a foreword by George Klay Kieh, Jr.

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Frindéthié, K. Martial, 1961– Globalization and the seduction of Africa’s ruling class : an argument for a new philosophy of development / K. Martial Frindéthié ; with a foreword by George Klay Kieh, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4840-1 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Economic development — Africa. 2. Africa — Economic policy. 3. Africa — Economic conditions— 21st century. I. Title. HC800.F745 2010 338.96 — dc22 2010026436 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2010 K. Martial Frindéthié. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover image ©2010 Shutterstock Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

Table of Contents Foreword by George Klay Kieh, Jr.

1

Preface

5

Introduction: We Shall Return to Fanon

7

1. Of Consciousness: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fanon and Others

21

2. The “Old Globalization” and the Invention of Africa

32

3. “Does Anyone Out There Love Me?”

51

4. Françafrique: The Longest Economic and Human Genocide

68

5. Capitalism and Neurosis

93

6. Modernization Theory and the Making of the Abandonment-Neurotic African

108

7. The “Mamadou Syndrome”: Disease of the Native Informant

124

8. Lessons from the East: India’s and China’s Experiences with Liberalism

144

9. Palliative: Toward a New Development Paradigm for Africa

149

Conclusion: Shifting the Center of Development Thinking

174

Chapter Notes

179

Bibliography

189

Index

195

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Foreword by George Klay Kieh, Jr.

Africa is besieged by a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, it is the richest continent on the earth in terms of the reservoir of natural resources— oil, minerals, and so on. But, on the other hand, it is the poorest region in the global system. And this is reflected in the various indicators of economic and social development — unemployment; underemployment; poverty; low standard of living; limited access to healthcare, clean drinking water and acceptable levels of sanitation; food insecurity and hunger, and the resultant vulnerability to diseases and low life expectancy; limited access to education and the attendant low literacy rate; and the limited availability of habitable houses. What is the explanation for this paradox and the resultant crises of underdevelopment that have bedeviled the continent since the dawn of the postcolonial era? The various hegemonic paradigms— modernization, primordial, neo-patrimonial, greed and grievance, and the “new barbarism,” among others— have attributed the African predicament exclusively to a battery of internal factors such as cultural values, ethnic antagonisms, patronage, corruption, the penchant to acquire wealth through the plundering and pillaging of natural resources, and ecological and demographic factors. Clearly, as the repository of evidence indicates, these hegemonic paradigms that have dominated the discourse on Africa miss the point in two major interrelated ways. First, they neglect the central role of the global capitalist political economy in shaping and conditioning the crises of underdevelopment on the continent through slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Second and related, the dominant explanations fail to take cognizance of the fact that the internal factors they identify are by-products of the portrait of the externally created peripheral capitalist state. Martial K. Frindéthié’s book, Globalization and the Seduction of Africa’s Ruling Class, represents a major contribution to the counter-hegemonic discourse on the root causes of the multifaceted crises of underdevelopment that have plagued the African continent since “flag independence” began sweeping across the region in the 1960s. Specifically, Frindéthié’s seminal contribution revolves around his focus on 1

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Foreword (George Klay Kieh, Jr.)

the “mental colonization and neo-colonization” of the members of the local ruling classes in Africa, especially the bureaucratic compradors, who manage the state on behalf of metropolitan-based ruling classes and their respective dominant states. Drawing on the brilliant work of Frantz Fanon, he begins his book by deciphering the modes of “mental colonization and neo-colonization” that have been employed by the metropolitan-based bourgeoisies since the colonial era to shape and condition the minds and thought processes of the compradors in Africa. Next, he discusses the ways in which the mentally colonized and neo-colonized mindsets of Africa’s leaders impact their conduct of the affairs of the various states. At the vortex of the “mindset,” according to him, is an inferiority complex. That is, African leaders believe that the members of the core-based ruling classes are superior intellectually and otherwise. Accordingly, the development models that were designed by the metropolis and their associated “blueprints” are the “only games in town.” Hence, African leaders continue to uncritically adopt them. For example, the notorious “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs) that were developed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in concert with the United States and other core states in the mid–1980s were accepted by various African states. After more than a decade of implementation, SAPs wreaked havoc on the political economies of the various African states that adapted them, as evidenced by burgeoning rates of unemployment, poverty and deprivation, and the widened human needs deficit. Characteristically, in the late 1990s, the “mentally colonized and neocolonized” African compradors accepted the repackaging of SAPs and the underlying neo-liberal dogma that propel them as embodied in the so-called “Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative” and “Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative.” Operating under the hoax of “debt forgiveness,” African states are recommitting themselves to the tried, tested and failed peripheral capitalist mode of production and its relations of production. Frindéthié then links the mental colonization and neo-colonization of Africa’s so-called leaders to the operationalization of the structural underpinnings of the continent’s crises of underdevelopment. The thrust is that the various African client regimes accept the vagaries of the global capitalist political economy as reflected in the unjust “international division of labor,” “the system of unequal exchange” that undergirds Africa’s trade relations with the core, and the predatory activities of international finance capital, among others, as “givens.” Undoubtedly, this is at the heart of the difficulties that are encountered in establishing a new and just international political economy. Another major contribution of the book is the discussion of major ways to resocialize Africa’s leaders, so that they can be liberated from the bondage of “mental colonization and neo-colonization.” Additionally, Frindéthié underscores the significance of developing a new generation of politically conscious, committed, patriotic and service-oriented African leaders, who will develop and implement people-centered public policies that will create jobs, tackle the vagaries of poverty,

Foreword (George Klay Kieh, Jr.)

3

and provide healthcare, education, housing, and other basic human needs. Equally important, this new cadre of African leaders, unhindered by the mythology of the superiority of the core states and their ruling classes, will be well positioned to deal with the core-based ruling classes and their dominant states from the position of serving the interests of the African peoples, especially the subalterns. Drawing from the experiences of China and India, he then suggests some ways in which Africa’s “mentally liberated” leaders can shepherd the development processes to benefit the continent and its peoples. Specifically, he argues that this would involve, inter alia, finding ways in which Africa’s peripheral states can position themselves to take advantage of little opportunities and openings in the global capitalist system, as China and India have done. Finally, this book is a must read for those who are interested in understanding the critical role the “mental colonization and neo-colonization” of African leaders has played and continues to play in the perpetuation of the crises of underdevelopment on the continent, beyond the superficiality of the hegemonic discourse on the continent. Kudos to Martial K. Frindéthié for undertaking this important study, especially for putting on the “front burner” the critical role of the psychology of African leaders in the perpetuation of the dialectical relationship between underdevelopment in Africa and development in the metropolitan states— United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, and others.

George Klay Kieh, Jr., is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of political science at the University of West Georgia, and a senior research fellow at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the coauthor of Assessing the Bush Administration’s Policy toward Africa, 2009, and The First Liberian Civil War: The Crises of Underdevelopment, 2008, among other works.

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Preface These days, as globalization has become a fashionable word in politics, popular culture and academia, it has also become terrifying for anyone to dare to question it. Globalization, which is the bedrock of contemporary development literatures, has turned into some sort of impervious province. To globalize is as trendy as to carry the latest electronic device. Consequently, global studies programs have exponentially mushroomed at universities; students have been jostling to enroll in these curricula that, for once, at least in their pretention, seem to understand and to have an explanation for everything that is happening out there, in the real, and most scholars and learners of globalization have also been turning into global apologists. In this agitation toward the global, the compressed and the unique, my study proclaims that globalization is the process of formation of the neurotic; it further alleges that Africa is undeveloped not in spite of globalization, but precisely because of the kind of globalization that has become the paradigm in international development practices. This volume, whose focal movement lies in development practices, has been haunting the comparatist and postcolonialist in me for years. Writing it was both daunting and exhilarating, as it forced me to face up to my own apprehension in crossing such theoretical borders as history, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, international relations and political science, and to probe the compelling parallel between development literatures’ “messianic sense of correctness in purpose,” as Jean-Germain Gros would put it, and colonial discourses’ saintly mission of salvation of Africa. Indeed, I could not have demonstrated that the development of Africa in the age of globalization is comparable to that of a neurotic, and I could not have shown that the old and new systems of globalization have reduced the African governing class to a body of neurotics incapable of devising an appropriate development scheme for the African continent, without reviewing the history of intercontinental encounters and empire building and without appreciating the psychoanalysis of the oppressed and the oppressor. I could not have proposed a more just political and economic system for the Third World without drawing upon the philosophy of freedom, examining the global political economy of growth, analyzing the United Nations’ global 5

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Preface

intervention schemes, and without interrogating the World Bank’s lending practices. I could not have written this book by remaining within the conventional confines of Francophone studies. This book indicts globalization from an interdisciplinary standpoint.

Introduction

We Shall Return to Fanon Fifty years after the rapture that accompanied the end of the “old globalization” (which started with the first intercontinental encounters) and the recapture by the Third World countries of their political independences (from around the late 1950s), Africa is politically and economically more dependent on the First World than ever before. In the meantime, most Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern states have been pushing to build a respectable position for themselves among the world economic titans. It would be enlightening to understand the reasons why, despite their administering geologically well-endowed countries, African leaders have had so much difficulty creating a minimum of meaningful growth for their constituencies whereas Asian and Middle Eastern leaders, whose countries do not possess as abundant and diverse natural resources as those of Africa, have been able to secure for their communities significant social and economic changes as well as political leverages that command more respectable consideration from the Western powers than the kind of attention that has been so far accorded to Africa. Moreover, it would be instructive to understand whether the sources of Africa’s development difficulty are entirely endogenous or are also caused by some exogenous factors. Furthermore, in order to remedy the plight of the millions of people that consider Africa their permanent home and remove a considerable number of these people from the list of the world’s wretched, often referred to as “the bottom billion” by social scientists, one would need to know whether the causes of Africa’s lack of development are mainly structural or attitudinal. The unifying problematic of this book is that the impediment to Africa’s development is both structural and attitudinal, but principally, it is attitudinal. The book argues that because the governing African elites are caught up in the rehearsal of an idea of themselves manufactured and propagated by an anxious and imperialist West driven by profit accumulation, these elites have entered the “old globalization” (1400 to 1960) and the “new globalization” (late 1950s onward) with the material cupidity and cerebral addiction characteristic of neurotic egos engaged in compulsive quest for signs of likeness to the West and its approval. This in itself is a slave mentality. The slave mentality of the African leaders, their ethos of dependence, has facilitated their submission to the First World’s biased economic, political, social, bureaucratic 7

8

Introduction

and ethical propositions, primarily meant to augment the First World’s power, but disseminated as recipes for universal salvation through the presumed saintly amplifiers of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and their numerous surrogates. This book demonstrates, through some interrogations of pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial discourses, as well as through a questioning of the development narratives of the twentieth century as they have been propounded by the World Bank, the IMF and their academic offshoots, that globalizations— both new and old — have reduced the African governing class to a mass of neurotics who, suddenly discovering themselves according to the West, horror-struck by the stigmas attached to their blackness, and bedazzled by the glittering truths being brandished by the West, are unable to devise appropriate development schemes for an African continent that they have been reared in Western academic, military and financial institutions to abhor and disserve. Given the abundant evidence that the economic genocide, military takeovers, constitutional coups d’état and psychological blows against African nationalists have been and continue to be undertaken by black operatives brought up in Western institutions, one wonders what kind of education these native informants receive in the Western nurseries where they are bred; that is, one wonders what kind of education their masters give them until one listens carefully to them. Here is what one of these native informants, Colonel A. Afrifa, the slayer of Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah, has to say about the way he perceives himself morally, spiritually and intellectually. Afrifa’s words are revealing of the state of mind of most black elites. These elites are abandonment-neurotics, self-haters, black slavers and pathetic seekers of white approval. I am a Christian of an English non-conformist faction by baptism, a member of the Church of Scotland by confirmation, and a member of the Church of England by education and association…. I entered Sandhurst in the winter of 1958…. I was thrilled by Sandhurst, the beauty of its countryside, and the calm Wish Stream which separates Sandhurst from the rest of the world. Sandhurst so far was the best part of my life…. Sandhurst gave us independence thinking, tolerance and liberal outlook…. I left Sandhurst, crossed the Wish Stream, looked back at my old school and was filled with boundless gratitude…. Now I look back at Sandhurst with nostalgia.1

Nostalgia for his enslavement is, indeed, the proper of the black slaver. For Colonel Afrifa, who interrupted Nkrumah’s nationalist revolution, Ghana was better off as a colony under British rule than as an independent country under an African sovereign. For Afrifa, Great Britain was the exemplary locus of intellectual achievement and moral rectitude. The British colonizers, who brutally invaded his native Ghana, ruthlessly reprimanded any resistance attempt by the Ghanaian people, and for centuries exploited his country’s resources to aggrandize England, deserved boundless gratitude from the Ghanaians. Where then is the African constituent of Colonel Afrifa, this black man from Ghana, whose grandfather had been second-in-command of the fierce Ashanti Army that had resisted British invasion for nearly a century? Where in his eulogy to Great Britain and its obviously alienating educational

We Shall Return to Fanon

9

institution can Afrifa make room for the narrative of his grandfather and recognize, ever so slightly, the sacrifice that his ancestor made for Ghana’s independence? Where in Afrifa’s panegyric does he acknowledge the sacrifice of any African nationalist at all, when he is so slobbering over anything British, when he is so yearning for the time when his people used to be under British oppression? It should not be surprising that Colonel Afrifa reclaimed Ghana for the Commonwealth the moment the opportunity presented itself. Afrifa was an abandonment-neurotic African privileged. When it was not through use of the guns and cannons supplied by the West that the nostalgic, neurotic African elites disciplined Africa for the First World, the domestication of Africa was undertaken through the cerebral conscription of the masses by a regimented African elite, an African elite of Grand-Narrators sold to the idea that the measure of greatness lay in the West. Let us listen to that other nostalgic, Léopold Sédar Senghor, poet, writer, playwright, first Senegalese president, first black face at the so-immaculate French Academy and founding father of the Negritude Movement. Let us listen to his lamentations about the kind of connections that he loses as he leaves France, the neurotic Francophone’s quintessential nation. Let us listen to Senghor’s grioticization of the French language, a eulogy that falls short of rationalizing the French subjugation of Africa. [Le français] est une langue de gentillesse et d’honnêteté, le français nous offre, à la fois, clarté et richesse, précision et nuance…. Les mots français sont clairs et précis. C’est qu’ils ont tendance à l’abstraction, qui en fait un merveilleux outil de raisonnement…. Comme j’aime à le dire à mes compatriotes, tout ce que j’ai appris en France, au Quartier latin, c’est l’esprit de méthode.2 [French] is a language of kindness and honesty. French offers us clarity, richness, precision and nuance, all at the same time…. French words are clear and precise. They privilege abstraction, which is a wonderful reasoning tool…. As I like telling my compatriots, all I have learned in France, in the Latin Quarter, is the spirit of method.

Kindness and honesty, said Senghor? What of the bamboozling French economic and political cooperation schemes that since the first encounters continue to siphon Africa’s riches for the development of the Hexagon? We would ask that the reader forgive us this lengthy evidential recollection. The Hexagonal compulsion for takings was so imperative that France devised a number of “cooperation” schemes to remain the privileged speculator in the newly independent countries of Africa … so that economic resources could continue to be transferred from Africa to France as natural and expected facts…. Previously, during the colonial system, protectionist France had mandated free entry of French goods in the French African colonies and imposed tariffs on colonial goods entering France. This decision had the obvious consequence of impoverishing the colonies while enriching the metropolis…. France also forbade its colonies to export certain products to foreign markets, thus forcing those foreign countries to purchase only from France products that would otherwise be available in the colonies. In addition, France placed duties on some foreign imports competing with colonial goods entering France. These duties ranged from 11 percent on non-colonial bananas to 100 percent on cocoa, passing through 34 percent on peanuts and palm kernels and 91 percent on non-colonial coffee…. In fact, the Hexagonal protectionist measures of colonial times continued through various appellations in post-independence Francophone Africa. Under the sly excuse of insuring the economic safety of the ex-colonies, the various preferential economic system put in place by France on its own, and later with the cooperation of the E.C. and the E.E.C., actually

10

Introduction

sought to maximize France’s profits by curbing France’s dwindling returns in the colonies…. [The] late 1980s Washington Consensus, with its menu of one-sided de-politicization of the state that opposes social public sector investment in welfare, job creation, environmental protection, healthcare, education, and poverty reduction, offered France the blessing of the Bretton Woods institutions to carry on a game that it had been perfecting for so long: that of draining off wealth from Africa under the semblance of reciprocal improvement.3

It is hard to see to what French kindness and honesty Senghor is referring. In the African governing elites that from the late 1950s were supposed to show their African constituencies the way to full emancipation after centuries of Western domination, one can still sense, indeed, a deep lack of confidence, a sometimes conscious, but most often unconscious, attraction to the West, a desire to strip themselves of their “African shell” and reveal a subcutaneous self that would ultimately come out as pasty as their white masters. Like the Moroccan prince of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the insecure black leaders plead for incorporation into whiteness as a state of normalcy: “Mislike me not for my complexion, the shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun, to whom I am a neighbor and near bred.”4 Pay no attention to my skin; the tropical sun overcooked me, pleads the black slaver. What then are the historical circumstances that have created in the black elites such self-hatred?—for extreme dislike of self is what it all amounts to. What are the events that have turned the black leaders into abandonment-neurotics? What impacts do the black leaders’ self-hatred and infatuation with the West have on the development of the African continent? Given the duplicity of the West for the last 600 years of encounter with Africa, should Africa really place any more faith in the Western institutions that pretend to work toward the betterment of the African people? The reader will easily appreciate the rhetorical mode of this last question. So then, what new collaborations should African states seek which would be conducive to the kinds of developments that Africa actually needs? Subsequently, what new models of development would lead the continent to genuine growth? This book proposes for Africa a standpoint development that gives precedence to local perspectives. The kind of standpoint development which is put forward in this book is not about recoiling behind myths of Africa’s bygone glories; neither is it an appeal for an implausible African absolute sovereignty, a political seclusion or an economic protectionism in the age of irreversible globalization. African nations have not made much headway by rehashing the jaded tale of Africa’s uniqueness, and they will not grow by withdrawing behind melanin ramparts or fortifications of regional integrations which, though semantically charming, such as the African Union, or the United States of Africa — as being pushed now by African leaders like ex-Malian president Alpha Omar Konaré and self-image-inflated Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi— are structurally flawed because they are reactive and conceptually, logistically and practically lacking. For instance, African leaders like late Omar Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Amani Toumani Touré of Mali, Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso, Paul Biya of Cameroon, and Sassou Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville

We Shall Return to Fanon

11

have never been consistent regarding the texts of the African Union. A simple telephone call from the Great White Master at the Élysée has always been a compelling enough stimulus to spur these African heads of state, full of inferiority complexes, toward amending their initial stand on any issue of great repercussion for their continent. For example, while the texts governing the African Union are formally against armed takeovers of any government by any group, these heads of state have usually waited for their positions to be dictated to them by Paris whenever a coup d’état has taken place in Africa. The contradictory positions adopted by African leaders over military takeovers or attempts at takeovers in places like Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Central African Republic, Mauritania, and Guinea, for instance, show the extent to which the African Union is a weak and pitiable satellite of the European Union and how pathetically African leaders can bow to their European masters, placing the economic interests of those masters above all other considerations, making their countries twenty-first-century protectorates of the core states. African regional integrations have been successfully blackmailed by the Western countries because these integrations have always been weak on their own. A bunch of weak countries getting together does not produce any less weak organizations. Perhaps in their process of reforming, such integrations need to go beyond mere regionalism and seek partnerships with the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and Middle Eastern states; but above all, African organizations need to unshackle themselves from the alienating tutelage of the Western states, or else they will only be entrusting the historical robbers with the house key. African leaders and their constituencies ought to face the ineluctable reality that they, too, belong to this world, whose direction they need have a say in shaping. Africans ought to understand that exchange is the fundamental signifier of the third millennium. The developing countries of the Third World and of Africa in particular have much to gain through genuine political and economic exchanges with the developed countries of the industrialized world. “Exchange,” however, is a nebulous term; in its idealistic and academic sense, it differs from, and sometimes contradicts, its practical prehension. Philosophically, exchange presupposes reciprocity in terms, that is, a barter of ideas and goods supposed to be of approximately equal value. Practically and economically, however, exchange implies profit, false pretenses, and degradation of the provisos of substitution. Traditionally, even the well-intentioned, less corrupt African leaders have adhered to international organizations, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), with a romantic understanding of exchange, believing that even by showing up empty-handed at international gatherings, philosophical debates on the decency of mankind and the equality of the human race would yield for their constituencies satisfactory outcomes. They have often been deceived. The development schemes proposed by the core states to the countries of the Third World are usually designed to purposely siphon wealth from the Third World to the Occident. For the Third World in general and Africa in particular, what is at stake, in order for this imbalance in wealth distribution to be reme-

12

Introduction

died, is a growth format that reassesses the taken-for-granted Westernization of the center, a development format that demythologizes the Occident’s logic of racial partiality disguised in universal salvation and moves the unique center from the countries that are the biggest speculators and consumers of the world’s geological resources to the countries that actually have custody of these resources. What Africa needs is a standpoint development that is built upon an understanding of the psychology of oppression and submission. The premise of a standpoint development for Africa is that the continent is the victim of a systemic oppression. By adhering to the ethics of globalization as it is widely accepted today, Africans have agreed to an understanding of the world structured by the core states and to the advantage of the core states; consequently the solutions Africans seek to their problems are always thwarted, because these solutions are already designed within an epistemology of globalization that falsely labels Africans as victims and underprivileged, to be saved by incorporation into a teleology of which the West is the transcendental steward or the leading entity of a divine order. It is this mysticism of salvation, this theology of rescue and liberation of the presumed wretched Africans by the assumed saved Occident — which is in fact meant to exploit the Third World under the semblance of helping it — that has been pretentiously termed globalization. In fact, Africa’s advertised position of victim or underprivileged is actually one of privileged. Elsewhere, we have argued that Africa was victim of its wealth.5 This statement is not a mere idealistic exercise. It is factual. For instance, while France continues to label Francophone African countries as poor and expendable, much of France’s economy depends on its exploitative relations with these Francophone countries; the multiple civil conflicts set up in Francophone Africa (Rwanda, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, or Madagascar) must be understood in the context of France’s desire to control the rich geological resources of the Francophone African countries. Furthermore, in the general scheme of usury that determines the North/South relationship, the lender cannot prosper without the unfair lending practices imposed on the debtor. So, there is in fact something which in the condition of the Third World as epistemically oppressed actually puts it in a position of privileged. This is the contradiction in terms that the Third World needs to grasp in order to affirm its potency. However, the Third World will never ascertain its strength by thinking from the standpoint of the core states and by attending international meetings with the conviction of an underprivileged bloc that comes to ask for handouts. A standpoint development for Africa is about identifying and developing the assets that Africa should bring to these international meetings so as to achieve something meaningful on a global scale. It implies that Africa undertake a thorough inventory of its resources and rethink their exploitation within a design that takes as fundamental the welfare of the people on whose land these resources are located. It implies that Africa’s intellectuals take the core states at their words and bring some missing wisdom into the core states’ and their surrogate financial institutions’ conjectures about good governance by remind-

We Shall Return to Fanon

13

ing them, constantly, that good governance has much to do with legitimate individual states identifying their people’s needs and fulfilling these needs without any duress exercised on them by the core states, without any financial blackmailing, without the martial installation of marionette regimes, but above all, without the cooptation of abandonment-neurotic national elites lured by the promise of Firstworldist enjoyment —for neurosis is indeed one of the fundamental sources of Africa’s woes. These days, when every discourse seems to have been sanitized and repackaged so as to satisfy principles of political correctness, the term neurosis has fallen in disrepute. The arrangements of euphemisms that have replaced this signifier have not eliminated its symptoms, however. For the Africans, the alienating consequences of neurosis, which Frantz Fanon decried in Black Skin, White Masks6 and against whose destabilizing effects he warned the newly independent African countries in The Wretched of the Earth,7 have become factual. The disturbing pyromaniac development of Africa presents all the signs of self-hatred. It demands that we return to Fanon’s theory of alienation, once again, despite some previous suspicions of Fanon’s clinical gesture,8 in order to identify the root of Africa’s wretchedness and find it some resolution. So, the first chapter of this book will clarify for the reader what is really at stake in the philosophical-clinical diagnosis of Africa’s wretchedness. The notion of alienation, insofar as it links up to Fanon, has several precursors; and some concise but enlightening tracking of Fanon’s engagements with the preceding theories of alienation that have contributed to his own formulation of the black’s debilitating alienation in the colonial context have been undertaken in other places.9 In chapter 1, we shall carry on this task of genealogical disclosure of the concept as we set the stage for, on the one hand, an explication of its various symptomatic manifestations in the framework of Africa’s development and, on the other hand, an exploration of solutions. Could alienation be anything other than incapacitating? Could estrangement bear any value other than a debilitating one? Not necessarily, according to some thinkers. In fact, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, and Lacan, to cite only a few, all seem to have conceptualized, in different terms, an inherent, necessary alienation as a prerequisite to reaching out to independence. In the first chapter of this book, we will therefore mark the distinction between this primary and universal estrangement — which seems essential to being — and a secondary, psychologically harrowing estrangement — which seems avoidable because it is imposed by others’ will-to-domination. The latter, coined by Oliver as “debilitating alienation,” seems to be more characteristic of the condition of the Africans in their attempt, or lack thereof, at development. In the second chapter, we will explicate the process of alienation of the African, which took place during the “old globalization,” that is, from just before the transAtlantic slave trade to colonization, up to the period before the African independences. The era of the old globalization was the age of the first encounter of Western Europe with Africa and of the Western definition of Africa and blackness, a defini-

14

Introduction

tion that would serve to cement the contending ideas of Europe itself; for the signifier “Europe” never necessarily inspired a unified idea even within what is now known as Europe. This chapter will show how the age of the Enlightenment was one of anxiety about blackness. The period of the Enlightenment saw the emergence of a “science of race,” whose aim was to explicate racial differences from a phylogenic point of view. Some scholars suggested that blacks were simply from another species. Others countered that racial differences were more a matter of culture than of differences in species. These two seemingly contending positions about race exhibited, ultimately, a general anxiety prevailing in Europe about the black alterity; for these scholars were all constituents of a system that thrived from a commercial activity based on racial differentiation, that is, the trans-Atlantic slave trade; a commercial activity that was in great need of ethical rationalization. As the chapter shows, it is Christendom which, in trying to come to terms with its internal contradictions, offers a biblical explanation to the fact of blackness; that is, of blackness as sinfulness and evil, an explanation which will support the institution of slavery up to and beyond the relative extinction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The chapter shows that the idea of black as sinful is actually a modern invention. Antiquity had a different view of Africa and of blackness. Ancient Greek scholars like Herodotus and Aischylos, for instance, traced Greek population structure, religious rituals, governing styles, and philosophical and scientific knowledge to Egypt in a time when Egypt, Africa and black were used interchangeably. It is precisely because the negative idea of blackness is a modern invention that it has been inculcated in the African leaders through colonial education, transforming these elites into neurotic subjects bawling with their gaze turned to the West, “does anyone out there love me?” The third chapter argues that in the era of the “new globalization,” the cry “does anyone out there love me?” is the primordial mode of expression of the African leaders; an uncertainty to which the West has responded with the false promise of universal salvation: where love was previously forbidden to the black ego and the gates of white paradise, subsequently, were shut to the black ego forever, now the bemused black ego in search of appreciation from the West is learning from a cunning Occident that provided he gives away the object of exchange for love, that is, provided he gives away what he should have reserved for commercial exchange (his diamond, his gold, his timber, his rubber, his bauxite, his manganese, his copper, and his oil), love is within reach. So then the black ego surrenders the object of exchange for assurance of white love, where love presupposes no exchange of object. Has not “universal truth” broadcasted that everything is commoditized, and that love is negotiable, exchangeable? So, his diamond, his oil, his bauxite, his gold and his uranium the black ego in search of assurance of love mines freely and gives away for a piece of white paradise. His trees he cuts and gives away for some assurance of reciprocity. The signata of whiteness, anything that amounts to the world of the white, he amasses so as to mark the difference between his wretched race brothers and sisters and him, the black ego ascending to white paradise and shaking off his black stripes in a dew

We Shall Return to Fanon

15

of milk. Every time he surrenders the object of exchange for reciprocity, love is deferred and made pricier, but the bruised black ego also has a beaten memory; the experience of his elders never educates him. One of the voices that have historically answered the black ego’s anguish for approval, especially in the Francophone African world, is Françafrique. Under the pretense of reciprocity, Françafrique is actually a criminal machinery designed to ensure France’s position as a major world player by guaranteeing it privileged access to Africa’s agricultural and geological resources, by financing France’s expensive political life, and by positioning France as America’s preferred sub-contractor. This chapter introduces the reader to the events that have occasioned the creation of Françafrique and the fortuitous trial that has helped uncover, albeit partially, this labyrinthian world of greed and immorality. If a statesman were to be crowned the perfect allegory of the abandonment-neurotic black ego of the twentieth-century, late Central African Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa would be that self-hater. Chapter 3 develops this proposition. Chapter 4 shows that in the twenty-first century, late President Bongo of Gabon has until his death been unsurpassed in his role as the godfather of Françafrique and the most faithful guarantor of French interests in Africa. Bongo’s partnership with Françafrique’s decision-making team has had extremely depressing consequences for Africa, as the neurotic dictator has facilitated the destabilization of many African nations, the assassination of African nationalist leaders and the manufacturing of misery on the African continent. The chapter raises the question of the longevity of Françafrique; it argues that given Françafrique’s unchanged modus operandi throughout the Fifth Republic, and the quasi-inexhaustible line of neurotic egos waiting to experience Occidental bliss at whatever cost, Françafrique still has a few good years ahead. The Tutsi genocide, the Congo-Brazzaville carnage and the Ivorian massacre, to cite only these few events, have been designed and choreographed by French operatives. The saddest reality, however, is that these tragedies were enabled by black abandonment-neurotics in search of white approval. These new native informants are likely to be recruited through First-World capitalist institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, if they are not already being bred in the palaces of the African dictators. Chapter 5 shows the harrowing effects of capitalism on African states. It argues that Western capitalism is for most African states a source of neurosis. As surrogates to the core states, the Bretton Woods institutions, mainly the World Bank and the IMF, set for African states unrealistic or unreasonable standards to reach in order for Africa to enter the state of grace of Western capitalism. In the discourse of the financial institutions representing the (capitalist) core states, economic political and social concepts apply to Africa only insofar as they are the antonyms of what they mean in the core states; these concepts apply to Africa only insofar as they require of the Africans that they alienate themselves from their social environment and constantly defer their political, economic and social fulfillments. This chapter also denounces the underlying logic of the World Bank and IMF’s politics as being one of usury

16

Introduction

rather than universal brotherhood. From this perspective, the World Bank and the IMF have misrepresented themselves to the world, for there is nothing worldly in the World Bank and the IMF other than their saleability, that is, their ability to sell false development narratives to the Third World with immense returns. The minority of Firstworldist shareholders that the World Bank and the IMF enrich are far from representing the majority of Thirdworldist borrowers that they abuse through their lending schemes. The core states, through the World Bank and the IMF, have been able to keep the Third World chained to their exploitative system of usury by carving for them development narratives that legitimate abuse. Chapter 6 examines the new identity ethics that the core states have carved for Africa through the various theories of development. This chapter argues that the identity of the modern African, which according to Western modernization theorists such as W. W. Rostow will pull Africa out of its “backwardness,” requires of the African a level of dismemberment, of intense compulsive superfluity and of reckless mimicry of Occidental archetypes. Modernization values could be summed up as the capacity to understand the world in scientific rather than spiritual or religious terms, the ability to defer enjoyment and consumption and the ability to multiply one’s savings, the tendency to estimate oneself and others through accomplishment in the material world, the capacity to act rationally, and the ability to highly rate speculative investments and usury. These values go against the very principles that missionaries and scholars of the old globalization (Leo Frobenius, Maurice Delafosse, Henri Labouret, and Robert Delavignette, for instance) had fixed for Africa, and to which Africans had striven so hard to conform, such as understanding the world in intuitive and mytho-poetic rather than scientific terms, privileging a collective rather than an individualist notion of being and a communal rather than a private conception of property, deferring to social rank and family origin, and regarding wealth accumulation and usury as rapacious. Chapter 7 argues that, of the many indicators of the governing African elites developmental alienation resulting from globalization, the “Mamadou Syndrome,” the African’s perfection of the villainy taught him by the fortunately non-monolithic West, is the most pervasive. The “Mamadou Syndrome,” an instance of self-hatred, betrayal, ecological oblivion, obsessive superfluity, myopic political and economic perspective, puerile gullibility, abandoned exuberance, and sick heroization of the past, which is triggered by the black’s desire to be accepted in white paradise and experience white bliss, has caused some disoriented African “intellectuals” to join in the conspiracy for the plunder of Africa. The native informant affected by this condition has become the unashamed and most passionate purveyor of the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank/IMF’s destructive prescriptions for Africa. The native informant, this shameless impersonator, this minstrel of modern times, would have been left alone in his quest for white jouissance if his actions did not endanger the existence of a whole continent. So, chapter 7 insists that though in the context of globalization, with its insistence on political correct-

We Shall Return to Fanon

17

ness and color boundary erasure, the native informants tend to be under the immunity of the “sacred cow,” their betrayal is, nonetheless, extremely depressing for millions of other Africans. For that, postcolonial critics have the duty to index the native informants and expose them for what they really are. The “Mamadou Syndrome” prevents the African leaders from conceiving a standpoint development of the kind that has successfully steered the Orient away from the neurosis of Occidental capitalism and ushered Oriental states into the third millennium. Chapter 8 contends that despite the formidable power of alienation of the core states, the Orient gives us reason to believe that even in the age of the new globalization, it is still possible for semi-peripheral and peripheral states to trade with core states in ways that preserve a level of dignity on both sides. So, the chapter argues through a cursory examination of the development routes adopted by China and India that the Orient was able to enter the third millennium, if not as equal, at least as valued partner to the diverse West the moment the Orient subverted the neurosis of Western capitalism and birthed for itself a second covenant, a tailored capitalism that privileged an organic development rather than a development based on standards imposed from without. Hence, chapter 8 unveils what in Western capitalism was deemed alienating by the Orient, how the Orient reframed the terms of capitalism so as to make capitalism relevant to its specificities, and how this Oriental brand of free enterprise is successfully working alongside Western capitalism and even often impressing its terms on world economy. The twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have demonstrated the influence of Oriental entrepreneurship through two disturbing economic shocks. Twice, sneezes at home, in the Orient, threatened to give the entire world severe colds. Firstly, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, which sent economic shockwaves throughout the world, ended up convincing the multiple West that for it to survive, it also will have to be watchful of the Orient’s interests. Secondly, the world financial crisis of the late 2000s, said to have commenced in the United States, and which is often blamed on subprime mortgages, has in fact a deep Oriental origin. What is not often recognized, as hinted by founder of FedEx Frederick W. Smith during a March 11, 2009, interview on Marketplace (Public Radio), is that it is in fact Joe Six Pack’s dilemma between paying his mortgage or filling his gas tank in order to maintain a job that is to be blamed for the recession. The skyrocketing price of oil, up to $145 a barrel in 2008, is in great part the root cause of this crisis. In that, the Orient bears great responsibility and has proven its indispensability in the world economy, albeit in regrettable fashion. With limited natural resources, countries like India and China are being managed with such particular pride and standpoint as to make the Orient a considerable voice on the world economic market. In the meantime, and paradoxically, Africa, the greatest producer of the most diversified natural resources, is like a flotsam drifting eternally on the currents of Western capitalism, disoriented by the unforgiving iridescence of a silver sun, enduringly accepting orders and never taking command, permanently looking outward and never inward, compulsively running away from itself and into the

18

Introduction

crushing embrace of the other, content with transporting its assets rather than transforming them. Chapter 9 asserts that despite decades of abuses and exploitation inflicted on Africa by internal as well as external speculators, the future of the continent is still bright, provided African leaders engage resolutely on a new political and economic path. This chapter suggests for Africa a series of palliative measures that would help the continent make its mark in this new millennium as a partner in world affairs and not as a pushover. What Africa needs is a development that is adapted to its specificities; that is, a standpoint development. A standpoint development, we hypothesize, should have the psychological advantage of getting Africa out of the slave mentality that is responsible for its elites’ abandonment-neurotic superfluity and dismemberment and restore its pride and swagger. It nevertheless requires some basic commitments.

• Africa needs to realize that fair competition stimulates growth while trade barriers impede growth. The emergent economies of India and Asia really started to take off the moment restrictions were lifted on enterprises and individuals and markets were open to competition. However, African states should undertake liberalization with some caution. • A certain level of endogenous liberalization should precede full-blown openness to external competition. Endogenous liberalization should help African states build up viable light industries, assess regional needs to better orient foreign investments, develop a middle class educated to the rudiments of liberalization and capable of competing against external speculators, and increase their savings to levels necessary for economic takeoff. • Africa needs to promote legality through a strong middle class, a middle class whose interests lie more in the perpetuation of fairness and transparency than in corruption, illegality and shady deals. • As remarked BBC World Affairs correspondent Mark Doyle, “[a] joke that does the rounds in the salons of the Gabonese capital Libreville is that the quickest way to become a minister there is to start an opposition party.”10 This does not hold true exclusively for Gabon. It is an African reality. African states need to defragment their political systems by trimming down the number of political parties and non-government organizations. Political parties and NGOs in Africa have mushroomed at every street corner, in every wealthy person’s home and around every popular sports or music icon since the 1990s, and these parties and NGOs have served as commercial enterprises and cradles of corruption. Democracy does not necessarily mean an uncontrollable number of political parties and civil societies that act more as impediment to policy adoption and implementation than as factors of progress. The countries that pride themselves on their so-called democratic values (the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France) have been able to limit the number of political parties without international outrage. These countries should

We Shall Return to Fanon

19

be careful not to encourage havoc in peripheral states by equating democracy to a disproportionate number of political parties. Here, too, reciprocity should be of the uppermost importance. • African states need to restore the rural sector in order to build up capitals. Africa’s many, 80 percent of the African population, are in the rural sector. By growing this sector, by outfitting farmers with tools, fertilizers, irrigation systems, and communication infrastructures, and by providing the rural sector with such social services as health, education, adult alphabetical and financial literacy, and recreation centers, African governments would ensure the growth of the many, and thus put their countries on the path to irreversible development. In Africa, the preponderant role of government should be the development of social services and the upgrading of social infrastructure. • African countries should, in a first phase, and for limited time, export commodities in order to garner foreign exchange, to build up a reasonable level of savings, and to develop their infrastructure and capacity in preparation for the stage of intense industrialization. • African states should, in a second phase, intensify on-site commodities transformation. Besides food-processing industries, efforts should be made by African states to transform mining commodities on site as well, using local expertise. Only by transforming their commodities rather than transporting them will African countries be able to level the terms of exchange. Transforming requires technical skills. African states should build these capacities through intense technological collaboration with the emergent nations of the Orient, since the Western countries for more than six centuries have failed to live up to their promises of technological cooperation. Thinking of collaborating with the Orient will not be that easy for Africans, as for generations Africans have been conditioned by the West to regard the Orient, just as they regard Africa, as a land of degeneration and inequality. Has not the father of Negritude tried to scare African nations out of doing business with the Orient, lest they should import in Africa the evils of Oriental systems? Dans les pays de l’Ouest européen — et chez leur fille l’Amérique du Nord — l’État est défini, d’une façon générale comme la personnification juridique de la Nation…. A l’Est, l’État se définit comme l’instrument de domination d’une classe sur une autre…. Une étude sérieuse montre que chez nous, il n’y a pas de classe détenant les principaux moyens de productions, et assurant grâce à cela, sa domination sur une autre classe.11 For Western European countries— and their daughter North America — the state is generally defined as the juridical personification of the Nation…. In the East, the state is the instrument of domination of one class over another…. A serious study shows that in our countries there is no class owning the primary means of production, which would consequently guarantee it domination over another class.

With such misinformation, it is evident, therefore, that the African elites, fed the propaganda of Western powers presenting the Orient as the bogyman, will show

20

Introduction

some resistance to collaborating with the Orient. Every year that Africa hesitates to seek collaboration with the Orient and remains consequently locked in its exclusive rapport with the West represents immeasurable loss.

• Finally, African states should invest in reforming their educational curricula so as to outfit them with a strong civic component; they should invest in forming and retaining elites committed to national developments, and they should ensure steady replacement of their skilled workers and continuity of their programs. This paradigm shift in development will require of the African leaders a simple determination, the will to serve the African continent, the refusal to remain satisfied sitting ducks, native informants with an eternal idiotic smile at the West. Most of all, it will require of Africa new men and new women. It will require the death of the old Negritude, which is still very much alive and kicking in the African elites. The formation of Africa’s new men and women capable of steering the continent toward genuine growth will only be possible if the educational system is conceptualized anew. Africa needs curricula that emphasize, among other things, civic duty and service learning.

1

Of Consciousness: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fanon and Others Da-sein is always its possibility … it can “choose” itself in its being, it can win itself, it can lose itself, or it can never and only “apparently” win itself. It can only have lost itself and it can only have not yet gained itself because it is essentially possible as authentic, that is, it belongs to itself. Martin Heidegger —Being and Time1

Heidegger is but one father amidst a crowded field of theorists of authentic existence that have proliferated since Aristotle’s precursory assertion that life in society is human beings’ primordial instinct, and that outside of collective situations, individuals are necessarily faced with a life of insufficiency.2 For the purpose of expounding what we shall name here Africa’s neurotic or inauthentic development, we shall revisit some of these fathers at this moment. The qualifiers “neurotic” and “inauthentic” call up, to a certain extent, Fanon and Heidegger, the latter whom we shall summon up before arriving, after some non-sequential but useful detours by way of Nietzsche and Lacan, at the former, whose debate with Hegel shall be our starting point for examining the neurotic development of Africa in the age of the new globalization. In fact, the route taken here, in this first chapter that seeks to comprehend the nature of authentic consciousness as illustrated by Fanon and others, has already been traced elsewhere.3 It is a trail whose pointers remain useful, though we do not necessarily travel it in the same direction nor stop at the same roadblocks. The seminal question that threw Heidegger into theoretical inquiry in Being and Time could be summarized as such: “What is authentic human?” Heidegger’s answer to this problem could also be summed up as follows: What differentiates an authentic human being, a Da-sein, from the multitude of other beings, or mit-dasein, is that the genuine human is a “who?” as opposed to a “what?”4 This distinction is loaded with complex but insightful implications. By Heidegger’s account, beings are either existences or categories, either who or what. Initially, holds Heidegger, all beings live in the world, in the middle of others, as what; that is, as objects to be apprehended by the others’ consciousnesses. As such, they are just objective categories, things of which one speaks.5 However, the proper of Da-sein is that it is endowed with the responsibility to either project itself into authenticity or fall prey to the world as 21

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Globalization and the Seduction of Africa’s Ruling Class

inauthenticity, for, though in its everydayness Da-sein exists in the surrounding world as thing encountered or as what, the condition of whatness, the state of being a mere object of investigation or of speculation, is not the essence of Da-sein. The ontology or nature of Da-sein is more than being there as object in the world. Possibility is what defines Da-sein; but even more than mere possibility, the facts of understanding that possibility and acting upon it constitute the true mode of Dasein. It is precisely the fact of acting on its possibility, the fact of seizing the possibility of becoming in order to throw itself from the condition of what is “caught sight of,” of “what is visible,” into the state of “who sees” that constitutes the true essence of Da-sein. Its thrownness is what makes Da-sein existential and not merely categorical. As writes Heidegger, “thrownness is the primordial mode of Da-sein…. It is the mode of being of a being which always is itself its possibilities in such a way that it understands itself in them and from them (projects itself upon them).”6 True Da-sein implies, thus, a double throw; it is a throw from the thrown, for there is a primordial throw, which is proper to all beings. All beings exist in the world of perceptions in relation to a past, a present and a future. The proper of Da-sein, however, is that it is first and foremost a historical being, that is, an individual placed in the course of a history that it understands as essential to its existence. It is by assuming its historicity and by projecting itself into its futurality, forward toward its death, that Da-sein distinguishes itself from just being-there as a category. For Dasein to assume its temporality is not easy, however. It implies a certain level of surplus; it presupposes that Da-sein should ride out anxiety, burden, and angst, while it could be easier for Da-sein to go along with the flow, to live comfortably in conformity alongside others, among “those from whom one mostly does not distinguish oneself, those among whom one is, too.”7 Being-with-others is not necessarily a state of resentment. On the contrary, in the middle of others, in mit-dasein, the subject is both with others and with itself, and thus finds in the collective world much consolation and exuberance; though the subject remains inauthentic. “Inauthenticity can determine Da-sein even in its fullest concretion, when it is busy, excited, interested, and capable of pleasure.”8 In fact, in mit-dasein, where Da-sein is nothing but an inauthentic host in the middle of others, Da-sein’s most conspicuous characteristic is cheerfulness, but fake, inauthentic cheerfulness all the same. So, the Aristotelian crowd or society where the individual, escaping the alienation of isolation, finds comfort and self-sufficiency constitutes for Heidegger the site of estrangement. For Heidegger, the genuine subject or Da-sein is a leap out of group reassurance and crowd morality, toward death, death which is not a negative state, but which, when bravely confronted by the subject, rather affirms the subject’s recognition that potentialities are in the future and not in sick adoration of the present. From this perspective, Heidegger’s Da-sein has much in common with Nietzsche’s Overman. In fact, for Nietzsche, this rendezvous with affirmative death, with death that is the condition of realization of the subject, is life outside of social enslavement, out-

1—Of Consciousness

23

side of the kind of life that is the promise of Christian norms of decency. For Nietzsche, the type of man that “must be reared, must be willed, as having the most value, as being the most worthy of life and the surest guarantee of the future” must be as far apart as possible from “the domestic animal, the sick animal man, — the Christian.”9 Christian morality is, to speak untimely, Nietzsche’s quintessential mit-dasein; insofar as the Christian crowd, with its adoration of pity and depression, is the multitude where the subject supposed to be Uberman falls alongside, settles in weakness, antagonism, corruption of tonic passion, and denial of life. Christianity has sided with everything weak, low, and botched…. I once ventured to characterise the whole of Christian training of penance and salvation (which nowadays is best studied in England) as a folie circulaire methodically generated upon a soil which, of course, is already prepared for it — that is to say, which is thoroughly morbid. Not every one who likes can be a Christian: no man is “converted” to Christianity — he must be sick enough for it.10

At this point, would it not be justifiably alluring to venture that Christianity is in Nietzsche’s pharmacy a mere metaphor for Western cultural, social and political moods, and, more importantly, that Heidegger’s Da-sein is a rephrasing of Nietzsche’s will-to-power as it is embodied in the Overman standing in defiance of Western thought? The temptation to confuse Heidegger’s Da-sein with Nietzsche’s Overman comes from the perception, a legitimate one, that Nietzsche’s affirmation of freedom out of crowd morality is the starting point of Heidegger’s affirmation of authentic freedom out of the encapsulating mode of the mit-dasein; for, after all, is not the Uberman, Nietzsche’s new man, the antithesis of the multitude? Is it not his refusal to comply with the rules of sociality that has caused the Overman to be indicted as a renegade, and his creator, Nietzsche, to be dubbed a nihilist, while in fact it is against the nihilism of Western Judeo-Christian thought that the Overman stands, while in fact Nietzsche, as has been suggested in several places, posits nihilism as the condition for new bursts without actually advocating the denial of life?11 Nietzsche’s Dionysian ethics, with its refusal to settle in a world of presumed beauty and contemplation, with its aspiration to throw one at the mercy of danger and destruction, so as to see how disillusioned one could be with the kind of life that one pretends to so desperately seek through Christian morals, could rightly be regarded as the precursor of Heidegger’s Da-sein throwing itself in the face of its death, in the face of its futurality. It is perhaps tempting to assimilate Heidegger’s Da-sein to Nietzsche’s Overman; this would not necessarily be prudent, however; for if Heidegger advises that one leap towards one’s futurality by facing death, Nietzsche had advised before him that the liberating jump should be that of a hyperborean, that it should take the subject beyond “the north, the ice, and death,”12 beyond modernity, outside of Western rationality, back into “[t]he wonderful Moorish world of Spanish culture, which in its essence is more closely related to us, and which appeals more to our sense and taste than Rome and Greece.”13 Heidegger’s remedy toward authentic consciousness is a crowd-departing gesture. Nietzsche’s recommendation is more radical. It is a

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Globalization and the Seduction of Africa’s Ruling Class

space-surrendering gesture. Nietzsche asks that one leave the West and its decadent Judeo-Christian morality, and that one birth the new man away from the cowardly, compromised modern world. This, insofar as the bedrock of what is commonly referred to as the “West”— with its overall influence from the Roman Empire, with its economic system of wealth accumulation known as capitalism,14 with its cultural, social, technological, and encyclopedic system of knowledge understood as modernity — is first and foremost Judeo-Christian, more precisely Christian first, and then slowly willing to accommodate Judaism. Nietzsche’s escape-to-the-Orient-as-cure flies in the face of a twenty-first-century narrow-mindedness that has grudgingly, though not entirely, gotten over a suspicion of the Jew but remains inflexible about the corrupting influence of the Black and the Arab, when technology, with its alleged dilution of Western standards, with its de-compartmentalizing of moral codes, with its erasure of cultural dependability, is not indexed as the source of all evils. Indeed, many scholars, such as the political theologian Carl Schmitt or the Christian historian Albert Mirgeler, were convinced that the “true West” could only be saved if Jews, whose economic success they interpreted as condensing all that was evil in capitalism, abhorrent in American economic imperialism, and destructive of the Holy Roman Empire, were done away with, and if, as a result, Christianity were restored. In the post–World War II era, however, this strongly held view of the 1930s made room for a less antagonistic, a less anti–Semitic discourse. The corruptor of Western civilization founded on Christianity was no longer necessarily the Jew. Technology became increasingly the new corruptor of the Western ideal.15 This triple gesture of anti–Semitism, gradual tolerance of Jews, and transfer of resentment toward technology illustrates the West’s difficulty coming to terms with its own characterization. As notes David Gress, the idea of Europe was born out of a grand narrative of enlightenment that understood Europe as the daughter of “Christendom, which was particular,” and of civilization, which sought to be universal. There is a progressive and often radical thinking of Europe for which freedom could not emanate from Christianity, but from human effort, and which believes, in fact, that freedom is to be “asserted against Christianity, against censorship, ignorance, superstition, and irrationalism of [the] hierarchical church and its theological apparatus of justification.”16 Notwithstanding their political influence, the proselytizers of the idea of Europe as progressive, multicultural, and universal are not the most boisterous ones. There is a second narrative of Europe, also produced by the discourse of enlightenment, whose members, albeit in disgrace today, are more inclined to creating polemics. The latter idea of Europe, the Europe of the skeptics, is grounded in a Christian past. It believes that inherent qualities to Christianity such as freedom and civilization are automatically bestowed upon particular societies that embrace Christ. This second idea of Europe is more afraid of universalism in the sense of multiculturalism. It bristles at the idea that “Western identity has … come to an end and been superseded by a lowest common denominator of communication, technology,

1—Of Consciousness

25

capital markets, free trade, and doses of American entertainment.”17 This is the idea of Europe that accepts Jews while biting its tongue to the blood and wags its finger at Islam. This is the idea of Europe that Nietzsche’s escape-to-the-Orient-as-cure might offend the most, insofar as Islam has always been for Europe a factor of great anxiety. For, indeed, Islam has in all times provoked ambivalent sentiments (curiosity and repulsion) in Europe, even as it is of Europe. There is a general sense in Europe, evidenced in recent years by the discussions over the inclusion of Turkey in the European Union, that Muslim faith contaminates the ideal of European-ness and its perfect model of romantic nativism derived from the nuclear family of the holy trinity, a model so jealously preserved in Western mythology through literature, arts and films. “[H]istorically,” as notes Talal Asad, “Europe was not … distinct from Christendom,” and even today, “for liberals and the extreme right the representation of ‘Europe’ takes the form of a narrative, one of whose effects is to exclude Islam.”18 It is yet in the very world that the West or Europe, from antiquity to today, posits as its antithesis that Nietzsche announces the dawn of the new being. In reality, Nietzsche’s cure is less about leaving at all than changing one’s attitude. Here Nietzsche’s cryptic language works for a very straightforward goal: politics. It is tortuous philosophical language at the service of basic quotidian lived experience, the call for the dis-alienation of the subject for the sake of its absolute realization. In the words of Robert Sinnerbrink, Nietzsche, like the (meta)physician he proclaims to be in The Antichrist,19 “takes a critical knife at the diseased body of [Western] culture, not only to diagnose [the West’s] malady but to prescribe a possible cure. The philosopher is a physician who diagnoses, an artist who transfigures, and a legislator who prescribes ‘remedies’— interpretations or values—for our decadent modernity.”20 Nietzsche is able to take this stance of physician, artist and legislator, as remarks Peter Poellner in his insightful review of David Owen’s Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality,21 by first giving up Christian belief and detaching himself from the encapsulating Christian morality that obscures metaphysical investigation, which for Nietzsche amounts to investigation of the real. Nietzsche’s diagnosis reveals several societal maladies, one of which is at least directly relevant to understanding the soul of the alienated black in the global plantation. [Nietzsche’s] genealogical story as reconstructed by Owen goes roughly like this: ‘slave values’ … originate in a post-tribal political community in which a group of “nobles” brutally rules over and instrumentalizes another group as slaves. The slaves in this setting cannot experience their agency as largely their own, nor can they experience and think of their typical capacities and dispositions as having intrinsic (rather than instrumental) value as long as they think in the evaluative terms espoused by their masters who value the very traits that enable them to express their agency — by ruling over the slaves, among other things. Since human beings, according to Owen’s Nietzsche, are characterized by a fundamental desire to experience themselves as agents, and the slaves cannot express this desire in physical action, there develops among them, unintentionally, an alternative evaluative perspective enabling them to conceive of and experience their very powerlessness as a kind of power — as their agency. This picture comprises, first, a notion of virtue in terms of the typical character traits of the slaves (humility, etc.) and, secondly, a concept of free choice according to which practising the slave virtues is a merit, not only in the sense of being good or praiseworthy, but presumably also in the

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Globalization and the Seduction of Africa’s Ruling Class

sense of deserving favourable treatment or reward. In any case, Owen agrees with most other interpreters of the slaves’ ressentiment values that the new evaluative picture is not one that the slaves are genuinely committed to— their apparent commitment to humility (etc.) is selfdeceived … and in reality expresses a desire for power over the nobles.22

It thus results that the condition of the slave is one of alienation, and that enfranchisement from slavery supposes first and foremost dis-alienation; it presupposes self-determination, independence from the inauthentic views of oneself, departure from the master-produced views of oneself and master-produced ethics offered as one’s own ethics. Nietzsche and Heidegger are just saying, respectively, that within Judeo-Christian morality and in the middle of mit-dasein, the subject is nothing more than an exuberant slave; exuberance being that which keeps the slave from crying on a quotidian basis; thus the necessity for a space-surrendering gesture —for Nietzsche — and crowd-parting gesture —for Heidegger. That which is only allegorical for Nietzsche and Heidegger becomes seriously real for Fanon. For the dis-alienation of the black in the (post)plantation and (post)colonial contexts, Fanon suggests that both gestures are indispensable. The black enslaved in the obvious Manichean system of colonization cannot afford to intellectualize his freedom. He cannot afford to function at the levels of metaphors. Nothing is surreptitious in his oppression. His condition is blatantly real to him. In the colony, the black only has to raise his head to see the violent injustice that surrounds him. The “native” sector is not complementary to the European sector. The two confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they follow the dictates of mutual exclusion…. The colonist’s sector is a sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things…. The colonized’s sector … the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere from anything…. The colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light.23

Consequently, for Fanon, the allegorical struggles for freedom, such as proposed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and especially Hegel, the latter whom he takes directly to task, find little solution to the dilemma of the black colonized, when they do not forthrightly divert the black from his effort toward independence. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s ideas are not totally absent in Fanon’s thinking. In fact, it would be fair to say that they inspire, support, and reinforce Fanon’s thinking, just as they have inspired, supported, and reinforced the thinking of Fanon’s elders, Senghor and Césaire.24 If Nietzsche should be the father of nihilism, as he is often referred to, he should hold that title not on the argument that he has cultivated nihilism and called for its permanence, but, on the contrary, because he has exposed nihilism as the cancer destroying modern Europe and prescribed its expurgation through the bold actions of a ressentiment-free Uberman. For Nietzsche, ressentiment is a sign of weakness; it is the fundamental approach of the slave. Ressentiment is a mark of the slave’s limitation, endless rumination, and envy of and jealousy toward what the master pos-

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sesses and which the slave sees as unreachable. As observes Hayes, for Nietzsche, resentment “is a corrosive and contemptible attitude that contaminates anyone who experiences it.”25 There is, nevertheless, this not-so-negative particularity in resentment, that “hunger for revenge” is its fundamental cause. Nietzsche himself recognizes that this hunger for revenge makes of resentment the starter of revolution. It is thanks to plebeian resentment that Rome has been submitted to Judaic rule. The Romans were the strongest and most noble people who ever lived…. The Jews, on the contrary were the priestly, rancorous nation par excellence, though possessed of an unequaled ethical genius…. Has the victory so far been gained by the Romans or by the Jew…. Rome, without a doubt, has capitulated … thanks to the plebeian rancor of the German and English Reformation, together with its natural corollary, the restoration of the Church.26

Likewise, it was resentment in the form of a “vindictive popular instinct” that led to the French Revolution, thus occasioning the collapse of what Nietzsche mourns as “the last political nobleness Europe had known.”27 Fanon, like Nietzsche, acknowledges the debilitating effect of resentment. Fanon, too, agrees that the resentful subject is a reactive subject and not necessarily a rational one. “Racism, hatred, resentment, and ‘the legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot nurture a war of liberation,”28 though resentment might be geared toward liberation. From this perspective, hunger for revenge is affirmative in the colonized’s struggle for emancipation. From this perspective, then, what we might call Fanon’s affirmative resentment, for instance, could be rightly credited to Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Fanon acknowledges that the slave’s daily performativity, however exuberant it might appear, is misguided, inauthentic; it actually conceals the slave’s desire to perform the contrary act. The slave that bows in front of his master actually wants to stand up and grab him by the throat. The slave that waits on his master wants to sit at his table. The slave that says “yes” actually wants to shout “no.” The slave is full of resentment. Where Nietzsche sees little positive value in resentment, Fanon, however, finds in resentment a certain affirmative charge. However, the author of Black Skin, White Masks observes with much lucidity, too, that the necessary reactional attitude of the opening phase of the emancipation struggle has to be replaced with actional attitude. I said in my introduction that man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating that. Yes to life, yes to love, yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom. Man’s behavior is not only reactional. And there is always resentment in reaction. Nietzsche had already pointed that out in the Will to Power. To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act.29

For the black colonized subject habituated to a life of mimicry, the Nietzschean/Heideggerian conceptual space-surrendering gesture is urgent; it demands true action, which Fanon could not afford to let others perform for him lest he should relapse in the very space out of which it is necessary that he leap. For Fanon, it is not for the black’s fundamental other, the white, to design the term of the black’s consciousness. If left to the white man to be constructed, the black man’s identity risks

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never coming out of its neurotic shell; in the world designed for the black by the white, in the colonial and plantation society, as well as in the postcolonial society where the independence of the black was given as a gift rather than conquered, rather than taken by force from the white, the black has always been but a neurotic subject. So, when Occidental phenomenological theories undertake to devise hypotheses about blacks’ consciousness, Fanon, as a man born in the plantation society, who, in his lifetime, witnessed firsthand both the plantation and post-plantation racial divides, takes offense, judging them presumptuous. He argues that the racial, cultural, and social specificities of the colonized black render inadequate the claims of universal applicability of consciousness theories that are elaborated in Occidental laboratories by Occidental scholars. One such inadequate science, for instance, is the phenomenology of Hegel which theorizes that the slave can attain freedom if he melts himself into a happy universal synthesis with his master. Indeed, in The Phenomenology of the Mind,30 Hegel theorizes two consecutive moments of subjective existence preceding the individual’s arrival at objective experience; two moments which he terms, respectively, the thing in itself and the thing for itself. The thing in itself, defined in the spirit of the Kantian noumenon, is an object of the thought that does not make itself known to the senses or to other subjects. It is a construction of the imagination that a subject posits as real in the world of the senses, but which is not actually real, as it holds no contents in relation to the world of actual objects. This product of the imagination, which is contentless, is not nonreality, however. Its having no contents does not mean that it has no reality. It does have a reality that is the reality of the consciousness that conceives of it. The consciousness that conceives of the reality of the thing in itself is a consciousness that is shut within itself, that has no relation with other consciousnesses. Consequently, the reality that the, say, isolated or self-enclosed consciousness constructs, the thing in itself, has no rapport with the absolute; the absolute is the sum total of all experiences; the sum total of all experiences is truth. The contents that the thing in itself lacks are contents of the absolute, contents of truth; for the thing in itself has only contents of its own imagination, that is, subjective contents. The thing in itself is thus truth-contentless but untruth-contentful. However, again, this false content is not absolutely false; it is false only insofar as it is partially true, only insofar as, like a puzzle piece, it also has contents to be uncovered elsewhere, in the realm of the other. As holds Hegel, “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized.’”31 For the solipsistic truth of the thing in itself to become objective, it has to be constructed by both self and the other. A question that haunted Fanon is one that Philip J. Kain also raises in the following terms: It is certainly true that before being a reality for itself, the self is also a reality for others, and thus I must admit that at least in part my self is constructed by others…. If I alone lack certainty, if I alone have difficulty in being sure of myself, what will happen if the other disagrees

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with whatever positive self-assessment I can muster? What if others take me to be not a subject but merely an object of their self-consciousness?”32

As Hegel goes on to explain, the relation of dependence of the self to its other is both reciprocal and essential; it makes the self and its other both unified and discreet. As the self and the other are locked in this paradoxical interdependence, neither of them can afford to undermine this mutual reliance without undermining the possibility of its own consciousness, for to refuse engagement with the other is to refuse the possibility of being recognized in the world of the absolute. The need for engagement by the thing in itself, this primary moment of thrust toward the other for the purpose of reaching out to objective truth, has had several formulations, as we have discussed above with Nietzsche and Heidegger. Hegel illustrates this primary alienation with the tale of the master and the slave. According to Hegel, though they seem antithetical, incompatible, conflicting, and irreconcilable, the master and the slave are actually interdependent. The dependence of the slave is obvious. He relies on his master for everything. As such his existence is not objective existence, insofar as he exists for another, his master, who sees him as a mere thing, a possession. Thus, the existence of the slave is in the form of thinghood, the thing-of-the-master.33 However, in the general sense, the slave, though existing as merely a thing, is also consciousness that tries to distinguish himself from things around him by cancelling them. Because he is not real existence, but existence only in the form of thinghood, the slave cannot go so far as to annihilate them. He can only work on these things that are there for the master to enjoy. For the master to enjoy these things, he needs the slave to work on them. So, by placing the slave between himself and the object of his desire, the master, who by seeing the slave as negativity had cancelled him, lets the slave live, nevertheless, instead of annihilating him totally. The master needs the slave as much as the latter needs the master. Thus, the sense of self-sufficiency that the master exhibits in front of the slave is, in fact, a sense of insecurity. The master’s certainty is contingent upon the existence of the slave, the very “thing” that he holds as negativity. In this case, just as the slave cancels himself by cancelling his work, the master, too, cancels himself by cancelling the slave. In other words, there is no slave without work, and there is no master without slave. Just as the master realizes that he “is not an independent, but rather a dependent consciousness that he has achieved … [the slave], consciousness repressed within itself … will enter into itself, and change round into real and true independence.”34 The master and the slave, being independent, but still only subjective consciousnesses, must, according to Hegelian logic, enter a relationship, a life-and-death struggle against each other, in order to reach out to absolute consciousness. Yet, because whatever one consciousness does to the other it also does to itself, the struggle is not one of elimination, but of sublation, that is of cancellation and retention of what is cancelled. Sublation is thus the process by which interdependent consciousnesses “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”35 At this point, we could imagine Fanon chuckle. Hegel’s slave is not the slave of

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French Africa and the Caribbean. “In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.”36 In the French colonies, the black’s gaze is constantly turned toward whiteness or anything that amounts to it, because the black is made to believe that whiteness is invulnerable, that whiteness is salvation. The French black needs a real challenge, a physical one — not a metaphysical sublation — that will prove the vulnerability of whiteness and expurgate the black’s sense of worthlessness and his compulsive desire to pass as white, for it is indeed of neurosis that the black French suffers. Here lies the relevance of Fanon’s study. “So the purpose of our study becomes more precise: to enable the man of color to understand, through specific examples, the psychological elements that can alienate his fellow Negroes.”37 In Fanon, the synonymic relation between alienation and neurosis is established. Language, Fanon would say, has much to do with the neurotic condition of the French black. The indictment of language as the site of structuration of the subject’s unconscious is no novel contention. As has been alleged by Nietzsche, “[w]here there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar — I mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions— that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical system.”38 More recent inquiries into language, such as undertaken by Saussure, Barthes, and Derrida, to name only these few, have also uncovered some links between subject formation and linguistic gifts.39 Althusser, for instance, has written at length about society’s ideological control of the subject through language. Althusser’s theorization that language is the means of persuasive ideologization par excellence is a marriage of Marxism and psychoanalysis, especially of Lacan’s psychoanalysis which holds that the unconscious is structured like language.40 Despite Fanon’s intimation that Western social theories are inadequate in explaining the condition of the black, his critique of the black’s alienation in the French colonies, too, has the particularity of combining Marxism with psychoanalysis. In the colonies, Lacan would argue, language is a structuration machine. However, language does not structure the unconscious of the black just for the mere sake of structuration, but rather for the purpose of maintaining conditions of production that favor the colonist. The French black caught in the web of the colonist’s language, which he/she perceives as the locus of salvation, is actually a concrete subject of ideology whose cheerfulness about belonging in the world of the colonist is in the order of neurosis. The white colonist caught up in his superiority complex, who goes to extraordinary length to exhaust the black, is equally a neurotic. The black’s imbecile cheerfulness concurs, however, with the abandonment of his self, the spoliation of himself, for the enrichment of the colonist. The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation. Therefore I have been led to consider their alienation in terms of psychoanalytical classifications. The Negro’s behavior makes him akin to an

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obsessive neurotic type, or, if one prefers, he puts himself into a complete situational neurosis. In the man of color, there is a constant effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence…. The attitude of the black man toward the white, or toward his own race, often duplicates almost completely a constellation of delirium, frequently bordering on the region of the pathological.41

Our argument is the following: to understand the failed development of Africa today, in the age of globalization, one only has to write “black elite” where Fanon writes “Negro.” The abandonment-neurotic black leaders that are in charge of policy making in Africa since the so-called African independences are the result of an extensive process of alienation started overtly in colonial times and pursued aggressively, albeit very covertly, during the “new globalization.”

2

The “Old Globalization” and the Invention of Africa The colonial cultures were never direct translations of European society planted in the colonies but unique cultural configurations, homespun creations in which European food, dress, housing and morality were given new political meaning in the specific colonial social order. Ann Laura Stoler —Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power1

The ideas of Africa as hell on earth and of the black as damned are inventions of Europe. They were disseminated first within Europe itself and circulated later, concurrently in Africa and the rest of the world, as the consolidating glue for a socially, physically and metaphysically scattered Europe. For Europe was indeed a multiplicity within. The discourses on Africa within Europe, whether they were competing or collaborating, contributed to the construction of a continental body of knowledge and epistemological practice as well as to the sedimentation of a European idea of self — let us include Great Britain in our conception of the continental. Once the ideas of Europe and of the European, in contradistinction to those of Africa and the African, were fossilized in the European collective memory, they no longer needed to be proven; they only needed to be uttered to acquire truth value. Europe, even for such diverse thinkers as Hume, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Nietzsche, stood as the antithesis of Africa. Gobineau, a passionate Aryanist, offers, of course, one of the most irreconcilable dichotomies between Africa and Europe. He sees descendants of Europe as the perfect accomplishment of the human race from physical and mental standpoints, whereas blacks exemplify for him a subhuman species of mental deficiency and physical hideousness. As he writes, I have already observed that the human groups to which the European nations and their descendants belong are the most beautiful…. The peoples who are not of white blood approach beauty,2 but do not attain it. Those who are most akin to us come nearest to beauty; such are the degenerate Aryan stocks of India and Persia, and the Semitic peoples who are least infected by contrast with the black race. As these races recede from the white type, their features and limbs become incorrect in form; they acquire defects of proportion which, in the races that are completely foreign to us, end by producing extreme ugliness.3

This idea of Europe and its other was constantly competing against a reality within Europe, for Europe was in fact as diverse an entity as Africa. Within Europe, 32

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33

there existed a system of gradation whereby certain skin complexions, certain hair colors or eye colors, certain economic classes or family origins were preferred to others. This contradiction within Europe would also play in the European’s formulation of self in the colonies. In the African, American and Asian colonies, the European colonist tried to reproduce a European idea of self, but an idea of identity that would be inspired by the “best” representation of European-ness emerging from the most visible contradiction within Europe, that of the waged people on the one hand and the property owners on the other hand, the working class and the bourgeois. In the colonies, the colonist’s invention of self was to be a reproduction of the toiling African’s exact opposite in Europe; that is, the European nobleman.4 The colonist’s attempt at duplication of European high-class status in the African, American or Asian colony, as has been argued in several places, was an exercise in delusion; nothing is an absolute replica of anything else, and especially of something that exists only as a fantasy. Nevertheless, though colonial societies were not carbon copies of European society, colonial societies were repetitions, in the Deleuzian sense of the term, of European illusion. They were festivals of Europe’s fantasy of self, in the sense that without adding a second or third time to the first, “they repeat[ed] an ‘unrepeatable’ by carrying the first to its nth degree.”5 In the African and American colonies, the colonist rehearsed and disseminated a European truth, a local opinion that had been fossilized in the European imaginary as “the Truth”; that is, the truth that Europe was the Promised Land and the Europeans the Chosen People. Ann Stoler has advised that one resist the temptation to think of Europe as a homogenized unified entity and that one not believe in the existence of a “shared European mentality, the sentiment of a unified conquering elite,”6 and she is right. Nevertheless, we shall remain mindful of the fact that more than any people in history, the European people have been inclined to dominating other peoples, to conquering other places, and to submitting other cultures to their cultural ideals. In fact, much of Europe’s scientific and technological effort has been undertaken with the purpose of conquest in mind. Europe’s material and intellectual investments in the subjugation of other peoples have been so far unrivaled, and it is very improbable that they will be matched in the future. There has always been a European consensus toward subjugation of the other, a consensus derived from a sense of superiority and logic of divine predisposition, which is consciously or unintentionally shared by most Europeans regardless of their social status. While in some European subjects this sentiment of superiority manifests as a moral compulsion to uphold and disseminate conservative European morals, in others this feeling of superiority manifests as a liberal, paternalistic obligation to protect the wretched lot of the earth from Europe’s aggressive conquering bent. The contradictory debates of the age of Enlightenment typified this paradox.

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Tracing the Discourse on Blackness The age of Enlightenment, which propelled Europe toward the conquest of scientific knowledge, and thus toward the discovery of foreign places and faces, was not an epoch of unanimity as regards the “science of race.” In the eighteenth century the ground on which the European thesis of the inferiority of non–European races— the black race precisely — up to then had rested started to shift from one of attitude or culture to one of phylogeny. While in pre–Enlightenment discourses blacks were generally believed to be inferior to whites on account of their different cultures and “unusual” attitudes toward life, in the pseudo-scientific discourses of the Enlightenment, blacks were increasingly regarded as low-grade, because they were simply thought to be of another species, a lower type. Edward Long, for instance, a British planter and administrator in Jamaica, wrote of the blacks in terms that were highly evocative of animals. In his view, blacks did not just conduct themselves like apes, as his contemporaries would think; Long was convinced that blacks had sexual intercourse with apes, and even that they would not hesitate to establish themselves in domestic partnerships with orangutans. [The Negroes’] faculties of smell are truly bestial, nor less their commerce with the other sexes; in these acts they are libidinous and shameless as monkeys, or baboons. The equally hot temperament of their women has given probability to the charge of their admitting these animals frequently to their embrace. An example of this intercourse once happened, I think, in England. Ludicrous as it may seem, I do not think that an oran-outang husband would be any dishonor to an Hottentot female. [The oran-outang] has in form a much nearer resemblance to the Negro race than the latter bear to white men.7

The eighteenth century also witnessed an increase in attempts to posit human differentiations on the ground of comparative anatomical research. Science, too, was frequently at the service of Aryanism, and scientists were increasingly discovering in black people the physical characteristics and psychological distinctiveness of apes. Blacks’ craniums, complexions, hair, lips, and geographic habitats were likened to those of primates. In fact, blacks were believed to be the missing link in the human development chain. Postcards in Europe very naturally represented blacks both as animals and in the company of animals. One could very matter-of-factually read captions like “Luke the Baboon Boy” or “Negro Boy and Apes,” respectively describing the pictures of an adult black man and of an African boy carefully positioned between a baby chimpanzee and a baby orangutan.8 While blacks’ association with apes derived from characteristics that they allegedly shared with the latter — lust, libidinousness and promiscuity — the inspiration for the notion of the promiscuous and libidinous black originated in fact from the slave institution that prevented blacks from marrying, but which encouraged them, on the other hand, to have sexual intercourse with multiple partners in order to produce numerous offspring that would augment the number of the masters’ slaves. Under these conditions imposed by the system of slavery, every sexual encounter between blacks would fall under the designation of the promiscuous. Fur-

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thermore, blacks’ strong desire for living, their refusal to let go of life even under the most dreadful conditions imposed by slavery, in the fields, under the scorching sun and at the end of the overseer’s cracking whip, gave rise to the notion of the physical and potent black.9 In fact, the indictment of libidinousness to which the black was constantly subjected translated a certain European anxiety, the fear of contamination of the so-called pure Aryan race by the purportedly impure black race. Tales of the black’s ape-like sexual proclivities were meant to scare the white woman out of the black man’s comforter — be it a comforter of linen or of shrubbery. It also was meant to explain a certain white male’s sexual uneasiness about some possible phenomenal bliss that the black man was likely to give the white woman. It is as if the white man was cautioning the white woman in the following terms: “Whatever pleasures the black man could give you, remember that they can only be unchristian, repulsive, and beastly.” Despite rhetoric of blacks’ bestiality, sexual intercourses— often forced ones— between white men and black women were very common, as evidenced by the number of interracial children that trotted about the colonial plantations. The rhetoric of the aggressive and passionate black — to which black women were not immune — helped white men proffer “the best possible justification for their own passion.”10 White men could always clear themselves of the guilt of interracial intercourse prohibited by their social and religious upbringing by saying that they were seduced by the aggressive black woman. Just as the devil was lurking and inducing people of good intention into wrongdoing, the black woman, with her tempting and provocative bearing, had caught them in moments of weakness and caused them to buckle. The more the white man sneaked out of the conjugal chamber to force himself on the black woman in the barn or in her shack, the more bliss he reached while raping her, the more fantasies he constructed about her, and the more he became insecure about his own sexuality and about the presence of the black man. Just as he found satisfaction in the black woman, he wondered, would the white woman, too, be looking for satisfaction in the arms of the black man?11 This nagging interrogation, this guilt of the white man, made of black man the phobic object of the white man. The black man became that which caused anxiety in the white man, precisely because the white man thought to see something desirable in the black man that he, as a white man, was not permitted to have, that he could not have unless he turned black, and that the white woman could desire. The black threatens the white, repulses him, frightens him, puts him ill at ease, because the white man sees the black man as desiring that which constitutes his proudest tenure, the milky-white bride that would ensure him pure, immaculate pedigree. The black man threatens the white man because the white man, who has defined the black man as bestial and dirty, has also, and paradoxically, exoticized him as the quintessential love-making machine. From this irrational perspective, the white man sees the black man as someone who is likely to give his white and clean bride a level of bliss that goes against and beyond all that is sanitary, proper and Christian. The

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image of the profane and unchristian-like potent black man — which has dominated European literature, and has even been faithfully reproduced by many a black writer — was a hanging threat to the white man’s sexuality. Fanon quotes Michel Cournot, who writes: The black man’s sword is a sword. When he has thrust it into your wife, she has really felt something. It is a revelation. In the chasm that it has left, your little toy is lost. Pump away until the room is awash with your sweat, you might as well be singing. This is good-bye.… Four Negroes with their penises exposed would fill a cathedral. They would be unable to leave the building until their erections had subsided; and in such close quarters, that would not be a simple matter.12

This imaginary naked black, who boldly exhibits his anatomy — this anatomy that the white woman is suspected by the white man to have gazed at with a mixture of fear and curiosity at the slave auction place — seems to taunt the white man, as it simultaneously invites the white woman into a savage, boundless jouissance. The moment the racist white man pictures his white bride panting in the brutal embrace of this “beast,” he is no longer sure whether what he perceives in her eyes is pleasure or pain, whether she is begging him to come to her rescue and deliver her from the “savage” that labors on her or whether she is henceforth gauging him with disappointment. From that moment on, the racist white man hates the black man for not being allowed, on account of his Christian upbringing and his race, to possess these unchristian and bestial attributes that would indubitably — were he only permitted to have them — ensure his prowess and his lineage. What the white racist seems to say in his hatred of the black is the following: “I blame you for something I do not have, that I imagine you have, that I place a huge amount of importance on, and that would make me better than what I am.”13 As asks Fanon rather rhetorically, “[O]n a genital level, when a white man hates black men, is he not yielding to a feeling of impotence or of sexual inferiority? Since his ideal is an infinite virility, is there not a phenomenon of diminution in relation to the Negro, who is viewed as penis symbol?”14 Fanon’s own psychoanalytical investigation on the kind of impulses that the word “Negro” triggers in some whites indicated some strong inclination to associate blacks with sex, physical potency, bestiality and sinfulness. Over three or four years, I questioned some 500 members of the white race — French, German, English, Italian. I took advantage of a certain air of trust, of relaxation; in each instance, I waited until my subject no longer hesitated to talk to me quite openly — that is, until he was sure he would no offend me — Or else, in the midst of the associational tests, I inserted the word Negro among some twenty others. About 60 per cent of the replies took this form: Negro brought forth biology, penis, strong, athletic, potent, boxer, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Senegalese troops, savage, animal, devil, sin. Senegalese soldiers, used as stimulus, evoked dreadful, bloody, tough, strong.15

Despite scientific evidence suggesting that, on average, blacks’ penises are no larger and no smaller than those of their white counterparts, “the white man is convinced that the Negro is a beast; if it is not the length of his penis, then it is sexual potency.”16 On the slave plantations of America, “the myth of the black sexuality grew. Black women were continually raped, and black men were seen as ‘potential

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rapers’ of white women.” The haunting fear of blacks’ sexuality is observable in the laws of castration in the American southern states. Blacks were castrated for sexual as well as non-sexual offenses, such as striking a white person or running away from their masters.17 In fact, racial hatred is all about sexual insecurity. It is all about the genitals. The white family and Christian values that spurn blackness are no more than values of the genitals. In the colonies, these values of the genitals, the white’s racial anxiety and its consequent attempts to police interracial sexual intercourses, were often placed under the justification of respect for God and country. Upon visiting the Portuguese colony of Angola, Livingstone had this to lament: The Europeans sent hither as soldiers have not had an opportunity of marrying any except the people of the country, and many other of better ability have been content to follow the example. Hence many of the children have imbibed superstitious ideas from their parents, in the same way that children who are neglected by their parents [receive] injurious impressions from servants, by narrating to their youthful charges stories of ghosts, witches, fairies, etc., which remain with them through life.18

Livingstone’s expression of grief about the consequences of interracial unions is reminiscent of the condemnation of interracial relationships in the Indies expressed in 1849 in a pamphlet by Dutch Javanologist and schoolteacher Albertus Wilkens. Wilkens’s paper, which recounts a day in the life of an interracial child (a darkly), often of Dutch father and Javanese mother, is clearly meant to discourage interracial unions for what they produce: neglected, dirty, unholy, disrespectful, and unpatriotic offspring. It is not possible for us to sketch all the nuances of the ways in which children in the Indies are raised. We will limit ourselves to the darkly (not the darkest) colored, and take those households as general standard where the parents and the children speak Malay. At six or six-thirty in the morning the children usually get up, neither say good morning to the father nor mother, and meander in the garden in sarong and kebaya until their grumbling nursemaid, threatening, pushing and pinching them takes them to the well, washes them, brings them to their rooms and puts them into their clothes. Next, they receive some money from the mother for breakfast, consisting of rice with condiments. A native rice seller comes to the backdoor of the garden and serves the children with her rice, or the nursemaid goes to the corner of the street and buys it in a foodstall. Before the clock strikes 8, the nursemaid brings the children to school with slates and books under her arm and picks them up again when school is out. Once at home, they eat, sometimes with the parents, sometimes separately, before or after them. Prayers and thanks are sometimes said, if the children eat with the parents, otherwise it depends on the desire of the children themselves, and some do not know what it [prayer] is. After they eat, they undress themselves under the direction of the nursemaid. Some parents like to have their children take a nap as they do themselves, so as to avoid them playing in the streets, or conversing with the servants which would happen most of the time if the children stayed up. Others give the child money to buy snacks, more out of custom than for fear that they, who have eaten an hour before, would starve of hunger. In the evening, when it is time to be dressed it is the nursemaid who, as in the morning, does it again. As soon as they are dressed, they sit in front of the door, rather than inside, play on the street or in the garden or go wandering about as they please and sometimes receive money again. In house where there is a fixed hour for the children to eat, they sit at the table together; otherwise, they do it irregularly, one after the other, and go to the kitchen to ask for food. After the evening meal, they undress. Then they play a little again in their sarong and

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kebaya until they get sleepy and finally, wishing neither mother nor father goodnight, go to bed. Neither evening nor morning prayers accompany going to bed or getting up.19

Clearly, race mixing has produced a mutant race forgetful of good manners, country and God. The darker race has alienated the whiter race, as even the white father in the company of his dark wife seems oblivious of decorum and morality. The eighteenth-century “science of race” that put forth the inferiority of the black was all about policing race relations. The mixture of “superior” and “inferior” races, it was argued, could only produce a bastardized, uncivilized race, unworthy of Europe and of European untainted Christian principles. However, besides this “science of race” that propounded the inferiority of the black, was another “science of race” that aimed at demystifying Europe’s claim of ontological superiority. Paleontologist Pieter Camper, for instance, after measuring the physiognomic proportions of blacks by means of his infamous “Camper’s facial angle,” concluded with the disheartening assertion for white supremacists that “individual Africans differ from other Africans as much as [individual] Europeans differ from [other] Europeans, or even more so.”20 Likewise, thinkers like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire did not see racial differences as the outer form of phylogenic difference (difference in species), and their opposition to slavery was, consequently, based on this conviction. As writes Montaigne, I find that there is nothing barbarous or wild about [foreign nations]; to judge by what I’ve been told; it’s only that everyone gives the name of barbarism to whatever he’s unaccustomed to; just as, in reality, it seems we have no other gauge of truth and reasonableness than the example and notion of the opinions and customs of the land we live in.21

Despite their contention that racial differences were more a matter of culture than of phylogeny, these various thinkers exhibited their own racial biases. In his Persian Letters, for instance, as notes Martin Bernal, though he was using illustrious Persians to ridicule Europe, Montesquieu was also presupposing Europe as the “scientific” and “progressive” continent. His favoritism toward Europe caused him to show hostility to Asia and Africa. Likewise, “Rousseau, in his Social Contract … violently attacked any justification of slavery. On the other hand, he followed the school of geographical determinism, believing that a people’s virtue and political capacity depended on climate and topography. Rousseau was Europocentric and showed remarkably little interest in Egypt and China.”22 Montaigne also had this to say in defense of the foreign nations so misunderstood by his contemporaries. Thus those nations seem so barbarous to me because they have received very few lessons from the human mind and are still very close to their original simplicity. They are still governed by the laws of nature, very little debased by ours; but with such purity that I sometimes grieve that they weren’t discovered sooner, at the time when they were men better able to judge of them than we are.23

This unexpected collaboration between Aryanists and liberals is certainly what John Rowe pointed out, albeit in a different cultural and historical context, when he asserted that “culture industry … does its works in ways that encompass a wide range

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of nominally different political positions, so that in many respects left, liberal and conservative cultural works often achieve complementary, rather than contested ends.”24

Christendom and the Anxiety of Blackness The main justification of slavery, which was the uttermost denial of the unity of mankind, was not provided by science. Though the science of the Enlightenment, as all sciences, could easily explain the inferiority of the black — easily in the sense of not being burdened by any moral question, for science does not have to embarrass itself with questions of sentiments— Europe was still very much Christian, and the question of the unity of mankind, the belief that all human beings are the progeny of the same progenitors, constituted one of the central pillars of European faith. How then could slavery, the chief activity of European economic expansion, be reconciled with Christian faith? This question was a haunting predicament for European Christians as much as the complexion of the enslaved Africans constituted a riddle. Why were Africans black and what was their purpose for being black? Some attempts at explanation offered latitudinal causes. Africans were black and had “wooly hair” simply because they lived in the tropics and were under the rudeness of the sun, would venture thinkers like Ptolemy and Shakespeare.25 The latitude-base explanation merely passed muster; other peoples who lived under the equator, though tanned, were not as dark as the blacks of sub–Saharan Africa and did not have the latter’s type of hair. Furthermore, if the sun were the factor in blacks’ dark complexion, then once they had been removed from the sun for a considerable length of time, blacks should have whitened up; this was not visibly happening either for the blacks that lived in Europe for a significant period of time or for their children that were born there. If the equatorial inhabitants of Africa were blackened by the sun, why not the people living on the same line in America? Logic required them to be the same color…. [The Indians were “olive” or “tawny,” and moreover they had long hair rather than the curious “wool” of Negroes]. Clearly, the method of accounting for human complexion by latitude just did not work. The worst of it was that the formula did not seem altogether wrong, since it was apparent that in general men in hot climates tended to be darker than in cold ones…. If [nevertheless], the heat of the sun caused the Negro’s blackness, then his removal to cold northerly countries ought to result in his losing it; even if he did not himself surrender his peculiar color, surely his descendants must…. Negroes in Europe and northern America were simply not whitening up very noticeably.26

Even Aryanists like Gobineau seized the occasion of the latitudinal argument to further drive in their contention that racial differences were but the outer shell of “more radical and far-reaching differences between human races.” Gobineau cited the examples of the Arabs who, two centuries after their invasion of Europe, had not changed in physiognomy or form, or the “German Jews” who have remained singular in shape and temperament from “the European race.” “The fact of the permanence of type”

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has been, in his view, satisfactorily “established in all the cases where observation was possible.”27 Could it be, then, that there was a divine purpose behind the blacks’ blackness? Could it be that God put blacks on earth to toil for whites’ prosperity; and if so, would not the enslavement of Africans by Europeans be justified by the Divine Law? In effect, Christianity provided rationalization of slavery through various narratives of the tale of Ham, the damned son of Noah, whose descendants Noah had condemned to an eternity of servitude. As one of the legends goes, Noah got drunk and fell asleep naked. Ham, his youngest son, walked upon Noah and did not cover his father’s shame. Sem and Japheth, on the other hand, covered their father’s nakedness. When Noah woke up and heard of what happened, he blessed Sem and Japheth and cursed Canaan, son of Ham, condemning him and all his descendants to a life of servitude.28 All that was needed for the enslavement of the blacks to be justified was to attribute a particular complexion to Ham. In the sixteenth century, black was the convenient skin tone for Ham. So, “[t]he continents peopled by the descendants of Japheth (Europe), Sem (Asia) and Ham (Africa) were ranked in a master-slave relationship … until well into the nineteenth-century … this remained the most popular explanation of slavery.”29 Elizabethan adventurer George Best provided a less convoluted scriptural version of Cham’s (Ham’s) fall from grace. In his account of blacks’ blackness, it is God himself who betrothed Ham’s descendants with the “infection” of blackness. As Best recalls, Noah’s entire family was white. Naturally, their children should have been white, too. But the evil spirit caused one of Noah’s three sons to disobey the commandments of his father and to bring into the lineage cursed black descendants. During the great flood, Best explains, Noah had instructed his sons and their wives to restrain from sex and to pray to God during their entire stay on the ark that he built to escape the deluge. However, persuaded that the first child born after the flood would inherit all the dominions of the earth, Cham (Ham) disobeyed his father, “used company with his wife, and craftily went about thereby to dis-inherite the offspring of his other two brethren.” To punish Cham, God decided that “a sonne should be born whose name was Chus, who not onely it selfe but all his posteritie after him should be so blacke and lothsome, that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde. And of this blacke and cursed Chus came all these blacke moores which are in Africa.”30 For scholars like Gobineau, even the interpretation of the Bible that tends to blacken Ham is a flawed one, precisely because it starts from the premise of unitary origin. Blacks, Gobineau contends, cannot share the same ancestors as whites, for they are from another species. Adam, he argues, is the father of whites, and his children are of no other race but white. We must, of course, acknowledge that Adam is the ancestor of the white race. The scriptures are evidently meant to be so understood, for the generations deriving from him are certainly white. This being admitted, there is nothing to show that, in the view of the first compilers of the Adamite genealogies, those outside the white race were counted as part of the species at all.31

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Whether whites believed that they had the same ancestors as blacks or not, with the spread of the curse of Ham in the seventeenth century and the growing racism of the late seventeenth century, the Egyptians started to be blackened in European pictorial representations.32 Faith and reason ultimately reached the same verdict on Africa and Africans, which validated the commerce of slavery. It thus became natural that “every slave had black skin and almost every black person was a slave,”33 which was going to justify the subsequent unequal “exchanges” between Western Europe and Africa up to the twenty-first century. The myth of the “Dark Continent” promoted by explorers was not a new invention. It was rather the rehearsal of a European myth-formation about Europe and about Europe’s other which took centuries to develop in a web of ambiguities, and which, at last, was going to exonerate Europe of its most inhumane commerce, the transatlantic slave trade.

Blackness in Antiquity and the Middle Ages The European idea of Africa and the African did not follow a linear pattern of development. In Ancient Greece and Rome, for instance, Africa brought into play competing ideas of worship, apprehension and loathing. In Greek poet Aischylos’s play The Suppliants —alleged to be the only remaining piece of a trilogy that included The Egyptians and The Danaids —Zeus’s child Epaphos was born in Egypt, of Io, the daughter of King Inachos of Argos. “Epaphos’s descendants and their spouses included Libya, Poseidon, Belos, King Agenor of Tyre — the father of Kadmos and Europa — and the twin brothers Danaos and Aigyptos.”34 So, in Greek mythology, not only were Libya and Europa descendants of the same ancestors, but Egypt was the birth place of Epaphos, the god child. In Greek folklore, the terms “Egyptian” and “black” were often used interchangeably. Nevertheless, the color of ancient Egyptians has never been a matter of total agreement either among Egyptologists or among Egyptians themselves. The great Greek historian Herodotus, author of The Histories,35 originally written around 450 BCE, referred to Egyptians as having “black skins and wooly hair.”36 On the other hand, Egyptian illustrations tended to represent Egyptians as black, Caucasian or yellow, both as servants and dignitaries. Whenever European researchers, for one reason or another, have felt the need to denigrate Egyptians, the latter were decisively found to have Negroid features. J. Winckelmann, for instance, does not share the eighteenth-century European enthusiasm for Egyptians. He finds them ugly, especially in their resemblance to the Negro. How can one find even a hint of beauty in their figures, when all or almost all of the originals on which they were based had the form of the African? That is they had, like them, pouting lips, receding and small chins, sunken and flattened profiles. And not only like the African but also like the Ethiopian, they often had flattened noses and a dark cast skin…. Thus all of the figures painted on the mummies had dark brown faces.37

In the absence of irrefutable scientific evidence on the nature of race —for as observes Bernal, research on the question of “race” has tended to say more about the

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predisposition of the researchers than about the question itself — it is undeniable that for the last 7,000 years at least, the population of Egypt was constituted “by African, South West Asian and Mediterranean types,” that the further up the Nile one went, the more Negroid this population tended to become, that “Egyptian civilization was fundamentally African,” and that the Old and Middle Kingdoms had a stronger African influence.38 Despite Aryanists’ attempts to minimize the Egyptian, thus African, import in Aischylos’s account by accusing Aischylos of exaggerating the influence of Egyptian civilization on Greek culture, the playwright had proven to be, as Bernal argues so convincingly, too much of a Hellenic chauvinist himself to want to overstate the Egyptian constituent of the Greek legend. It would be more probable that Aischylos would want to diminish any foreign, and especially Ethiopian, component in the formation of the Greek society.39 In fact, Egyptian mythological characters appear too often in Greek mythology for their occurrences to be merely coincidental or hyperbolic scholarly gestures.40 For Herodotus, the conquest of Greece by Egyptians and the subsequent implantation of Egyptian rule in Greece were abundantly documented by numerous scholars before him, and any further recounting of it would have been superfluous. [If ] someone were to recount the ancestors of Danae daughter of Akrisios and trace them all the way back in continuous sequence, it would become obvious that the leaders of the Dorians are actually genuine Egyptians by direct descent. The forefathers of Akrisios, they say, were, as the Hellenes also say, Egyptians…. Others have told of the deeds they performed to obtain their positions as kings over the Dorians, even though they were Egyptians, so I shall leave that subject alone.41

Egyptian colonization deeply affected Greek faith, as it contributed to the creation of temples. “[T]he sanctuary of Athena in Lindos is said to have been founded by the daughters of Danaos when they came to shore, there after running from the son of Aigyptos. Those then were the offerings that Amasis dedicated.”42 This Egyptian migration affected Greece’s demographic makeup. Kadmos son of Agenor had put in at this island during his search for Europa, and whether it was because he found the island particularly pleasing or for some other reason, he left there some of the other Phoenicians— even his own relatives, including Membliaraos. These then were the inhabitants of the Island called Calliste for eight generations before the arrival of Theras from Lacedaemon.43

Egyptian colonization of Greece introduced new rituals into Greece, such as the Dionysian rite and the rite of Demeter. Dionysian rituals were transmitted to Greeks by Egyptians, who celebrated the rite in the same way as Greeks did, except that Egyptians did not have choral dances and used marionettes half a foot tall outfitted with phalluses that moved vertically, and which women would carry about. Melampoulos son of Amythaon was not ignorant of this sacrificial ritual. I think, rather, that he was actually quite familiar with it, for it was Melampoulos who disclosed the name of Dionysos to the Hellenes, and who taught them how to sacrifice to him and perform his phallic procession…. Melampoulos learned about Dionysos chiefly from Kadmos of Tyre and those who accompanied him on the journey from Phoenicia to the land now called Boeotia.44

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Herodotus would not give full details of some of the ritual of Demeter in reverence for the gods, but he wrote freely of its Egyptian beginning. Now, although I know all the details of these rites, may my reverence endure that they remain unspoken. I feel the same way about the rite of Demeter which Hellenes call the Thesmophoria, so may my reverence ensure that they also remain unspoken, except for that which one can say without offense to religion. The daughters of Danaos were the ones who brought this ritual from Egypt and taught it to Pelasgian women.45

Greek philosophers and mathematicians, like Pythagoras, travelled to Egypt to gain education. Even Isokrates, the chauvinist and xenophobic pupil of Socrates, could not help admitting the Egyptian colonization of Greece and Egyptian influence upon Greek culture. “In former times, any barbarians who were in misfortune presumed to be rulers over the Greek cities. [For example] Danaos, an exile from Egypt, occupied Argos; Kadmos, from Sidon, became king of Thebes.”46 Furthermore, Egyptian gods and goddesses like Amon and Isis were worshipped in Greece, respectively, by the fourth century BCE and the fifth century BCE. Likewise, in the Roman era, after the war with Carthage, Africa became part of the Roman Empire. Blacks were part of the Roman armies and were regular constituents of the Roman social landscape. Important Egyptian shrines existed in Pompeii and Emperors Dominitian and Hadrian visited Egypt and were very respectful of the Egyptian religion.47 So, in the views of antiquity, blacks did not necessarily connote evil or negative creatures. Within Africa itself perceptions of skin complexion shifted according to political events. Around 2500 BCE, blacks were valued in Egypt. The color black metaphorized beauty and fertility. As the relationships between Egyptians and Southern Nubian kingdoms changed, so did the connotation accorded to blacks. After 2200 BCE, Egyptian iconographies represented darker-skinned blacks as warriors, then as enemies of Egyptians and later as defeated adversaries after the Egyptians overpowered their darker neighbors of Nubian Kush kingdoms. This period saw a mounting representation of blacks’ role as servants, and Egyptian iconographies figured blacks as submitted under the pharaoh’s feet.48 This image of blacks would turn positive again in the era of the hegemony of Kush, Moröe and Napata, from 800 BCE to 300 BCE, which included the conquest of Egypt by Nubia in 700 BCE.49 Blackness had no stable connotation in antiquity. Political contexts defined the images associated with blackness. It is actually with Western Christendom that the color black started to acquire a somewhat stable negative connotation. In the early Middle Ages, blackness represented sin or evil. “Origen, head of the catechetical school in Alexandria in the third century, introduced the allegorical theme of Egyptian darkness as against spiritual light…. In early medieval paintings, black Saracens, black tormentors and black henchmen torture Christ during the Passion.”50 The idea of black as devil was transferred to the Muslim enemy in the late Middle Ages, as the crusaders contemplated a coalition with blacks against Muslims. The reevaluation of the image of the black in European iconographies followed the legend of Prester John (John the Presbyte-

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rian), believed to be sovereign of a Christian kingdom in Ethiopia. A descendant of one of the Three Kings that visited infant Jesus, he was alleged to be “the guardian of the gates of paradise.” His legend ushered in “a love for a Christian Ethiopianism … a love for black Africans and a preoccupation for Africa.”51 Nevertheless, Europe’s love affair with the Christian Ethiopianism of the fifteenth century was short-lived. By 1444, black men, women and children were being rounded up and showcased as exchange commodities in Portugal. Before long, the whole European continent was involved in the lucrative transatlantic slave trade; to justify that trade, the idea of the Africans as “savages” and “barbarians” started to be disseminated and began to gain increasing reception in Europe. The idea of savage and barbarian has not always been associated with Africa. Barbarian and civilized were terms that used to define inter–European relationships. For the Greeks, the term barbarian was used to designate non–Greek speakers, strangers or anything that one was unaccustomed to.52 Herodotus used the term barbarian in The Histories to describe Egyptians and Libyans in the same sentence in which he spoke of Greek knowledge as originating from Egypt and Libya. “By making inquiries, I discovered that the name of the [Greek] gods came to Hellas from barbarians, and I myself concluded that they derive specifically from Egypt, for the names of the gods have been known in Egypt since the earliest times [except for a few].”53 The term barbarian was also often used by Greeks to refer to the people in the north, that is, to Western Europeans. To the Romans, it meant people outside of the Empire.54 In fact, until the twelfth century, when the European idea of Africa was limited to what we might call Herodotus’s Libya (Egypt and Nubia), Europe corresponded to barbarity and Africa to civilization. Europe was the forest land inhabited by people “huddled together in clusters of small feudal villages, separated by expanses of natural vegetation,” people whose main exports were products of the forest. Africa, on the other hand, was perceived as the land of “prophets, saints and monks.” The African desert was the crying place of such prophets as Moses, John the Baptist, Jesus and Mohammed, while the European forest was the dwelling place of monsters, of creatures “between human and animal, myth and reality, like the homo ferus, who was raised by wolves, and the homo sylvestris” or Wild-Man.55 By the sixteenth century, with the intensification of cultural encounters between Europeans and non–Europeans, the notion of barbarity came to signify people outside of Europe. These people, as notes Pieterse, were non-white and, for the most part, non–Christian. As the quintessential non-white and non–Christian continent, Africa became the “ideal continent for Europeans to come and make history,”56 but most importantly, it became, from a philosophic-religious point of view, a continent whose children would collectively salvage their damned souls through hard labor for the Chosen People of Europe, an idea that prevailed in Europe until the 1800s. When in the sixteenth century iconographers illustrated the continents as women showcasing their riches, Africa was depicted as a “dark woman with loose and curly hair, almost naked, [wearing] a coral necklace and earrings, [carrying] an elephant’s

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trunk on her head, and holding a scorpion in her right hand and a cornucopia containing ears of corn in her left. On one side of her [there was] a ferocious lion and on the other [there were] vipers and venomous serpents.”57 As for Europe, she was a queen adorned with a crown, carrying a scepter and accepting the offerings of the other continents. Asia was a beautiful woman wearing fine garments and gold. In frontispieces, Africa, America and Asia were often in kneeling positions before Europe, offering her the yields of their lands. In addition to the minerals and ivory Africa had to offer Europe, she was also generally figured with a chain in her hand, symbolizing her children in bondage as a present to Europe. These images of Africa, America and Asia as lands of abundance at the disposal of the European — which in fact was at the source of eighteenth-century Europe’s economic expansion and the individual European’s upward mobility — reinforced a general relation of power in Europe that colonial cultures could not wait to rehearse and disseminate.

Colonial Racism as Means of Social Repositioning So, colonial cultures, we shall hold out against Stoler’s argument, are direct translocations, if not direct translations of European spirit in the colonies, perhaps by subjects who, in Europe, could not necessarily have lived the ideal European culture, but subjects who had keenly observed that European culture, had coveted it, and were finally in a position to experience that ideal culture elsewhere, that is, in the colonies. European explorers’ eccentricities, Stanley’s insistence that at each expedition he be provided with rare cigars and expensive champagne bottles and scores of porters, for instance, are translocations of European gentlemen’s smoke parlors with their numerous invisible attendants and of European capitals with their carriages and steam cars. Stanley’s legendary “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” was, as Pieterse notes so observantly, a carefully rehearsed line by the naturalized English, “in imitation of the aloof upper-class style.”58 In British society, both Livingstone (a Scotsman who mistrusted the English) and Stanley (the illegitimate son of a Welsh woman, adopted by an American businessman) were marginal figures. Nonetheless, from the outside of British society, they looked inside with much envy. Only in Africa could they be absolved of their alien status and become whites among blacks. Only in Africa could they reproduce the bourgeois lifestyle that was so denied them in Europe. It is hence understandable that Livingstone would prefer to remain in Africa, not for love of the African, but rather for love of himself. It is also understandable that Stanley would prefer to return to Africa as often as the opportunity was offered him, loaded with expensive cigars and wines. In Africa, at least, their authorities were incontestable. They were white masters amidst black underlings. The postcards that the explorers and colonial agents sent home to their families, and which featured them as controlling figures surrounded by emaciated, docile, haggard black faces, were meant to duplicate European high-class valor. Obviously,

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in the colonies, for climactic reasons, the khaki shirt, slacks and shorts had to replace the European white shirts, high collars, bow ties, dark vests and suits, and dark slacks. The hard hat had to replace the city haut-de-forme. The boots or hiking shoes replaced the dress shoes. Nevertheless, the substituting items were meant to function exactly as the substituted items did in the metropolis; they were bourgeoisified; they functioned as symbols of European social condition. They were meant to index high class, if not bourgeois class. They were markers of the differences between the European and the native, but most importantly, they were indicators of a white state of grace, which albeit often misunderstood by the average European and sometimes resisted by him, became very obvious and urgent in the colonial space, with its intensification of contacts between whites and non-white natives. In that regard, colonial societies were festivals of European society. There was no reinvention of European dress code in the colonies, nor reinvention of food. All was adapted, that is, translated in the way a movie adapts or translates a novel. But it was translation all the same. In fact, Stoler recognizes that colonial racism is founded on “a sense of [white] community … fear of the other, preoccupation with white prestige,”59 a preservation of white consensus that emerges with an increase of encounters with the native. This preoccupation with preserving white consensus and preventing contamination of white superiority with native “underlings,” which becomes suddenly imperative for whites in the colonies, participates in a common logic of purity and domination. Overfed in Europe with images of “inferior races,” Europeans nurture, despite their internal social discrepancies, a sense of natural endowments that they are only impatient to claim in actions. The opportunities for action-oriented assertion of white supremacy offer themselves in the colonies, in the face of the native other. On the terrain of colonial encounters, Europeans act out this sense of superiority. The colonial images of Africa and the Africans disseminated in Europe by missionaries, explorers, and adventurers, though they did not add significantly original information to the European body of knowledge, did fossilize, nevertheless, a Eurocentric idea of the other that predated encounter with the unfamiliar, a sense that no universe or thinking being that could exist in a probable elsewhere could be, respectively, as agreeable as Europe and as sophisticated, in matters of experience, comportment, or spirit, as the European. The first missionaries who made the voyage to Africa had a preconceived idea of Africa as an immoral place and of the African as a sinner in need of deliverance. Such was the inspiration that prompted the missionaries’ soul-salvaging mission in the first place — the idea was that somewhere beyond the seas and oceans, some people less sophisticated and less fortunate than the blessed Europeans were in need of atonement. Once in Africa, the missionaries had to justify their mission to their superiors by claiming that the task at hand was even greater than they could have imagined it to be initially. As wrote Livingstone in a December 22, 1841, letter to Joseph John Freeman, foreign secretary of the London Missionary Society, the authority to whom he was ordered to submit at least two reports per year detailing his proselytizing activities in Africa,

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[Formerly], when viewing the heathen world at a distance, the measure appeared one of great importance, and I resolved to give it my earliest attention. But now when I have come into close contact with it, and beheld a little of that vast extent of surface over which the population is scattered in the regions before me, I powerfully feel its special, nay overwhelming importance.60

Having finally seen the Africans in their native environment, Livingstone claimed, he had come to the conclusion that, indeed, they conformed to this predetermined notion, which was prevalent in Europe, that Africans were a remote kin of the Europeans that had descended in the abyss of savagery, but a kin still salvageable from a life of primitivity. For that, Africans had to be human, and Livingstone found in them some positive human traits. The native African missionaries, he acknowledged, were efficient, warm, and affectionate “in their manner of dealing with their fellow countrymen [and in] their capability to bring the truth itself before their mind.”61 If black missionaries were so approaching full humanity, it was particularly because, by the fact of their contact with the white man, and more precisely with the white missionary, they had been rescued from perdition. Hitherto, it would have been impossible or terrifying for one to conceive of the natives’ kinship with the European. Joseph Conrad wrote of the frightening sentiment that overcame the white when he was visited upon by the prospect that the black, that thing that wore all the aspects of the devil, could after all be a human and, even worse, a remote relative of the white. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth … that wore the aspects of an unknown planet … suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage…. The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours— the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly.62

As held by Paul Landau, “[in] the history of circulation of images in and about Africa … the substitution of what is familiar and internal for what is alien” is a routine form of explanation that both Africans and Europeans employed.63

Colonial Education and the Formation of the Neurotic It was not enough for Europe to nurture an idea of Africa within Europe. In Africa, too, African children and aspiring elites had to be taught a perception about themselves that would situate them at the substructure of the human pyramid and keep them there until deliverance through their eventual espousal of Western ideals. Colonial education constituted one of the principal instruments of that pro-

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gram of human devaluation. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 1885 Berlin Conference, the colonial powers set out to effectively take ownership and control of their colonies in order to govern them for the profit of the home country. The administration of the colonies required some managerial apparatus of which colonial schools and armies were indispensable, for Africans had to be trained to serve as intermediaries and interpreters between colonialists and autochthonous populations as much as pockets of local rebellions had to be pacified. It was, therefore, primarily for need of native informants that colonial education developed in the African colonies. Colonial schools were run either by missionaries or by the colonial governments. In French Africa, for instance, the schools were primarily managed by the colonial administration, whereas in the Belgian Congo they were almost exclusively run by the missionaries. Whether administered by the clergy or by the government, colonial schools were operated under the same logic: Africans were intrinsically inferior to Europeans and were, therefore, to submit to Europe’s tutelage if they hoped to reach a level of perfection. In fact, despite the Christian ethics regarding the unity of mankind, missionaries in Africa — as the particular example of the Congo demonstrated — intended to serve God last and country first.64 “As the colonial system emerged the demand for unquestioned submission became more and more prominent. In many areas, Africans were to stop and salute any passing Europeans.”65 Colonial schools were to teach this kind of unquestioned obedience by permeating the kind of education that the Africans received with strong ideological suggestions— whether that instruction was secular or religious. In the French colonies, for instance, the schools instructed pupils that the mastery of the French language and culture constituted the only means of individual realization; in the missionary schools of the Congo, conversion to Christianity was presented as a passage from a world of falsities to one of truth, but equally important, as a means for attaining material and cultural evolution.66 France’s refusal to grant citizenship to Africans, while, in the fervor that followed the 1848 revolution, according citizenship to the inhabitants of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana and Reunion, further impressed the idea that European status was a state of grace, better, paradise, for Africans to reach at the cost of innumerable trials. The usual justification for the denial of citizenship to Africans was that the latter were heathen rather than Christian. Nevertheless, faithful to its Divide and Rule policy France granted citizenship to the inhabitants of the Senegalese towns of St. Louis, Rufisque, Gorée and Dakar. These were the African-French that would be efficaciously used to make the non–French Africans resentful and desirous of the French paradise. For that, the black French of French Africa were recruited into a conquering French colonial army of about 8,000 soldiers by 1900, called the tirailleurs sénégalais (Senegalese sharpshooters), an African military force which, led by French military officers, subjugated the Dahomey Kingdom between 1892 and 1894, defeated the Ahmadu state in 1893, overpowered Samory in 1898 and crushed a rebellion in Côte d’Ivoire in 1910. Nevertheless, the Senegalese who were granted French citizenship could not, on

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account of their race, gain full recognition. Late Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s Camp Thiaroye tells of the tirailleurs’ failed attempt to claim recognition by the French colonial administration after their contribution to the liberation of France during World War II. As an alternative way to gain recognition, some of the educated elites turned to an obsessive accumulation of Western signata. They would collect Occidental symbols of social class the way a football enthusiast would collect paraphernalia of his best team, with the hope of forcing open the gates of the Western paradise. Late Senegalese president Senghor was one of these compulsive accumulators of Western “stuff.” In contrast to the poised pastoral stance of Houphouët, his Ivorian counterpart, Senghor was indefatigable in his search for recognition from France and the Western world in general. He published scores of treatises praising French culture or Francité, mastered the highly complex French grammar, collected honorary doctorates, divorced his African wife and married a French woman, obtained a seat at the prestigious French Academy, only to pass away in his France home of Verson and be buried in his native Joal, Senegal. In Belgian Congo, it was never a question of according citizenship to the natives. However, education promised them the status of évolués. As such, they “adapted the religion, the language, the culture and the economic outlook and level of achievement which were seen as ideal among the citizens of France and Belgium.”67 Nonetheless, the educational system was such as to keep the Congolese évolués in a state of semi-literacy for a better exploitation of the Congo’s resources by Belgium. As lamented Maurice N. Hennessy, the third-grade education that the elites of the Congo received by design from the missionary schools had enduring consequences. Even after the Congo’s independence, the deficit of education of the évolués constituted a serious threat for the stability of the Congo. The Primary education system of the Belgians, and the technical training which accompanied it, created in the Congo a lower middle class, but no professional class which could have taken over the reins of government in a crisis. The limit to which this was carried can best be judged from the almost unbelievable fact that, at present moment, there is not a single trained Congolese lawyer.68

Hennessy’s hint came to materialize. In 1961, the Congo crumbled due in part to the inexperience of its semi-literate leaders.69 Many African countries are still ruled by elites that have received most or part of their education from the debilitating colonial school system, either in the colonies or in the metropolis. As such, they have been formed for the production and maintenance of European domination. Though some of them have managed to free themselves from the mental entrapment of colonialism, many still remain trapped in the stultifying psychological dependence on the West. Their Occidentalism is sometimes stomach-turning. They have internalized the negative discourses on blackness that have been the essential constituents of colonial secular as well as religious curricula, and which they now mirror in their daily dealings with Western economic and political operatives. Their allegiance is not to Africa. All they want is to please the West.

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They are seeking assurance from the West that they belong, that they are passable, acceptable. They would do anything to please the West. Their allegiance to the metropolis is pathological, because they have been ingrained with a slave mentality that causes them to identify their salvation in the West or anything that amounts to the West. Their neurotic condition carries deeply depressing effects for the development of the African continent. While they should be working at ways to pull Africa out of its misery, misery to which they have greatly contributed by their indolence and sick heroization of the West, instead, the black elites have their gaze turned toward the Occident, to which they holler in the jungle of globalization: “Does anyone out there love me?”

3

“Does Anyone Out There Love Me?” In the process of their education and of their functioning within colonial society, [the black elites] seem to have internalized and believed the malicious view of the black man’s past concocted and propagated by those who sought to distort and hide that past. Chinweizu —The West and the Rest of Us1

“Does anyone out there love me?” asks the black ego in the theater of globalization. The ego of this interrogation, Jean-Luc Marion tells us, “addresses love like a poor man, who with fear in his gut because he is penniless, never imagines he could be dealing with anyone but usurers, each more pitiless and rapacious than the one before.” Assurance being for him more costly than certainty, the ego is ready to sacrifice more knowledge and tolerate more ascesis to leave the hyperbolic doubt that assails him with the heaviness that only truth possesses.2 The ego of this interrogation is willing to pay the price of assurance, any price for assurance. What he expects in return for this fee is honest exchange, that is, reciprocity. This, however, he will never get as long as he is so uncertain and so self-deprecating. Does the ego know it? The other, his lack, has already taken tenfold the price agreed-upon for reciprocity and still has delivered nothing approaching reciprocity. The ego has noticed the other’s insincerity. The ego has noticed that each time he pays the agreed-upon price for love, love is redefined and pushed further out of his reach and made pricier, too. The lack, his other, taunts him from the core. From the periphery where he stands, the black ego sees the distance to the center increase exponentially each day, each hour. Why does the black ego keep on giving despite the duplicity of his other? Why does he keep on submitting to the blackmail of his lack? It is because the black ego is, from this time forth, merely a panicked ego; a panicked ego in search of assurance does not think rationally. Irrationality is the fundamental mode of the ego in panic; compulsion is what characterizes the panicked ego’s actions, which explains why the black ego is willing to pay a thousand times the tenfold that has yet to yield anything resembling reciprocity. The black ego in panic will steal, rob, lie, cut, embezzle, sell abroad, and kill; he will launch in all sorts of acrobatics and contortions for 51

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reassurance from his other, reassurance that will never come, precisely because the black ego has revealed to his other that he is ready to pay anything for the other’s truth. So, the black ego remains eternally at the periphery and the subject of his lack taunts him from the core. The relationships between the black ego and his other could be defined in reference to the properties of the cycloid. Let us consider this axiom by Blaise Pascal: The axis of a wheel that rolls across a table traces a straight line that is parallel to the surface of the table. Let us mark that line as a metaphor for “the truth according to the West.” On the other hand, any given point situated on the external periphery of the same wheel that rolls on a table will trace a curve in space. Let us mark this curve as the metaphor of the black ego in pursuit of “the truth according to the West.” The relationship between the straight line and the curve explains the relationship of correspondence between the West and Africa, and more precisely between the Western subject at the core of the rolling wheel and the black ego at the periphery of that same wheel; the first one is self-assured of his position as purveyor of truth and the second one, a neurotic, is trying desperately, through countless acrobatics and obsessive contortions, to be relevant according to the truth content of the Western subject as the wheel of human experience turns. The term “acrobatics” should itself be understood as an allegory for all the acts that the black ego poses in order to attract attention from the West, in order to win recognition from the West, at the same time as he hollers “does anyone out there love me?” We shall give some examples of these acrobatics here and in the next chapter. In the meantime, let it be known that “does anyone out there love me?” describes the relationship between the exclusive purveyor of truth and the consumer of that truth. How is the truth that the black ego pursues obsessively constituted, however? Wittgenstein informs us that it comes by way of takeover of the language game. The self-proclaimed purveyor of truth is he who is able within the language game to give values of natural, grammatical propositions to empirical propositions, just as one would give the value of truth to the proposition 12 ¥ 12=143 by imposing the form of representation of those who believe in the accuracy of this equation — while it would only suffice, in order to dismiss this as mistake, to enforce the form of representation of those who believe that 12 ¥ 12=144.3 In Wittgenstein’s terms, grammatical propositions are those propositions that “shape what counts as an intelligible description of reality,” that lay down the rules of the language game; whereas empirical propositions are those propositions that are merely descriptive without having rule-defining power in the language game. Nevertheless, “empirical propositions can harden into grammar and therefore be removed from the traffic of doubt. It isn’t that grammatical propositions can’t be proven; it is that they no longer need to be proven.” They need not be proven because they have been imposed by a whole machinery of power as truth. From this perspective, truth is not created. It is simply interpreted from old opinions, old assumptions. The production and dissemination of truth, as Steven

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Ward reminds us, necessitate a number of expert centers whose task is to “transform the abstract, ill defined, and unknown into the concrete, systematic and understood.”4 Whoever controls these various expert centers that make the local opinion into universal truth controls the manufacturing of truth, not only his truth, but also the truth of the other. Though no particular knowledge-producing group is outfitted to generate absolute truth, nevertheless, some entities are in a better position to produce hard knowledge.5 This is because for truth to be sustained and to travel so fast and so far as to establish itself in the world of the other as universal truth requires enormous resources, such as financial capital, the construction of equipment, the collection, sorting and storage of data, the production of artifacts, the recruitment of allies, the forging of a network of knowledge creators. The rest is merely a matter of transforming “fragile opinions” about the nature of an object, event or phenomenon as truth — by way of recruiting and attaching itself to “a heterogeneous array of allies.” A weak statement becomes fact “not by showing that a particular position corresponds with the real, as in traditional epistemology, but by establishing strong allies and associational networks that are capable of resolving dispute over data interpretation, ending controversies, resisting the deconstructionist tactics of adversaries and spreading the word.”6 Truth is soft opinion made hard knowledge, local proposition made universal fact. However, for this hard knowledge to reach the masses, for it to be accessible by the majority of people, it has to go through a somewhat reverse process whereby it is softened, made appealing and friendly, decrypted from its hermetic form into a more user-friendly mode. This operation of refashioning truth for mass consumption requires enormous means, too. It demands a network of media resource services, television stations, computer connections, libraries, newspapers, conventions and conferences, educational institutions, etc. Sinning by naïveté, imbecile tranquility and complacent trust in the West, the black ego does not have these resources, has not developed these resources. Has not the great white tutor — France for Francophone Africa, and Great Britain for Anglophone Africa — assured the black ego that he needs not bother, and that in conformity with a cooperation design they signed together any technology discovered in the West would be sent his way? So, the black ego surrendered to the great white tutor the construction and ownership of the means of production of truth, being merely contented with consuming the other’s truth, the other’s travestied historical veracity, while the world seems to watch, immobilized in stupor, the creation and transmission of technological and historical truths scurry back and forth on a latitudinal artery, from West to East.7 For, indeed, “history,” too, is an invention of the other, a particular Western interest in aspects of the past, investigated through the written word as evidence, by means of a particular methodology, which ultimately rationalizes the place of the West in the world. It is therefore not surprising that history has been so dismissive of the kind of interest in the past that informs memory or tradition.8 In this sense

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the question “what is world history?” could call up a number of similar questions, including “what is the World Bank?” The latter we shall discuss in another chapter. For the time being, let us recall that in the name of “world perspective on historical thinking” or world truth, the black ego has grieved of seeing the great white tutor in grief, starved his people so the latter could have his fill. The black ego has rooted for the unforgiving conqueror of his kin upon the promise of a white bliss. Now, a dejected black ego stands on the periphery, bellowing a pathetic cry: “does anyone out there love me?” How can anyone love the black ego when he so hates himself ? How can anyone trust the black ego when he so betrays himself ? For it is indeed in betrayal, in self-hatred, that lies the malaise of the black ego for whom the “truths” of scholars like Best, Winckelmann, Gobineau and the axioms of institutions like the United Nations, WTO and World Bank have become World Truth. To “does anyone out there love me?” the black ego could be objected that love has nothing to do with exchange; or more precisely, that in the international political and economic arena, it is less about love than about exchange, that “reciprocity has nothing to do with love and befits only the economy and calculation of exchange.”9 The principles that ruled the old globalization were less circumlocutory than those that govern the new globalization. In the old globalization, the black was constantly reminded that love was impossible, that all was about interest. De Gaulle used to say that he had no friends, only interests, but the black ego has a short memory. Today, before every international intervention, the American Congress unanimously inquires whether any action taken is in the interest of the United States. In 1981 President Reagan launched a wide-scope investigation to see whether the World Bank was, as expected, still working for the interests of the United States or whether it had been overtaken by compassion for the Third World and was thus undermining its profit-making assignment. During the Iraq war, the American Congress threatened to withdraw America’s support to the United Nations unless the institution reformed and revised its growing anti–American rhetoric. All these signs and a thousand others seem to have passed by the black ego without him deciphering their significance. Had he only read them correctly, he would have understood that love has nothing to do with exchange. “The loving actors have nothing to exchange (no object) and thus cannot calculate a price (whether fair or not),” whereas the exchange actors have real objects at stake upon which they make calculations. The bruised black ego’s most imperative drive is assurance of belonging. The verdict cast upon him by the harbingers of black inferiority is the most important element he has retained from history, and the Aryanists’ judgment haunts him like his own shadow. The black ego, previously beaten and trodden on, the black ego hitherto likened to the beast and the devil, the black ego historically denied love, wants some assurance of love. Bemused, he seeks love where exchange is called for. He gives the object of exchange for love where love does not presuppose exchange of objects; where love cannot presume exchange of objects and thus has no object to give, the black ego gives and by so doing, kills the possibility of both love and exchange; for the former deals not in

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exchange of objects, and the latter gives not out of love. The black ego has an inferiority complex that leads him to engage in the most perilous acrobatics of donation in search of Western signata. Eager to be accepted in the circle of humanity as defined by the West, the black elite will give away the object of exchange for assurance of love. His other knows it and will exploit this weakness to the fullest extent. In the age of the old globalization, the mantra was “better be poor, for happier are the poor, because they will inherit the heaven” or “it’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God”; so the black ego gave everything away, even put his children in chains and sent them to faraway lands to slave for others. Could one be poorer than he who loses his children? Could the gates of paradise be closed to he who is so deprived? Things have not changed much. In the age of the new globalization, the hymn is “surrender the object of exchange and you will belong to white paradise.” So, to the black ego’s “does anyone out there love me?” the most nostalgic nation answers with a deceitful “yes,” and to this most nostalgic nation, the black ego gives away what he possesses, and what he does not possess he steals from his people so as to give it away for a place among the Chosen People of God. The method of programming and the machinery of preservation of domination that keep the black ego so closely chained to his vomit deserve examination. We propose to carry out this examination by looking at Françafrique, or what the late activist François-Xavier Verschave has named a criminal factory.10

Françafrique: France’s Criminal Factory No nation is as nostalgic as France. We are not talking here about the drive that pushes the Hexagon to desperately cling to its gastronomic and sartorial myths, nor are we talking about the frantic notion that a certain French accent has to be carried over in any other language, at any cost, when every other glory has faded away. What we mean is that no nation has been as reluctant as France to come to terms with the independences of its former colonies; consequently, no nation has so diabolically schemed to undermine independences in Africa. The reason for this is simple: France had never envisioned self-government for its African colonies and had therefore attached its own economic survival to the continual exploitation of Africa. This is what we understand by the infamous phrase of l’exception française. L’exception française is France’s politics of Anglo-Saxon phobia, of duplicity, of double-talk, of obscurantism, of aiding and supporting dictators, of assassination of dissidents, and of human and economic genocide in Africa. In other words, l’exception française is Françafrique, France’s factory for economic and human genocides in Africa. When the prospect of independence for French African colonies finally materialized, French officials saw no other alternative to Hexagonal economic growth than the manufacturing of a biased collaboration with the new African elites reared in the

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nursery of French colonial assimilation policy, a biased collaboration that would keep the resources of Africa flowing nonstop, and at little or no cost, toward France. That collaboration was Françafrique; the influential lobby that used to sustain it was a big French oil company with more than 4,000 affiliates named Elf (replaced today by no less cupid businesses such as Total, Bouygues, and Bolloré). Tales of the mafia-like activities of Elf in Africa were rumored but never really penetrated or proven. They were only uncovered in light of an audacious investigation led by Judges Eva Joly and Laurence Vichnievsky, who rocked the French political and financial galaxies with their relentless pursuits and indictments of seemingly invulnerable French personalities. The word Françafrique was initially coined by the first president of Côte d’Ivoire. For President Houphouët Boigny, Françafrique signified a perfect collaboration between France and its former African colonies, a collaboration governed by mutual African and French interests.11 For the activist François-Xavier Verschave, however, the word Françafrique concealed the subconscious criminal intent of those who propounded this Franco–African postcolonial alliance. Françafrique has a more revealing homophone, France-à-fric, which could mean either from France to money or money-ridden France. Indeed, for the corrupt French politicians and businessmen who saw the pillaging of Africa as a perpetual source of wealth, the post-independence Franco–African collaboration carries all the prospects of a voyage to Treasure Island. For the crooked African elites who sacrificed their countries’ independences for approval by France and for personal fortunes through a neo-colonial alliance with France, a crooked collaboration with France was like going to Treasure Island. So Verschave pejoratively coined Françafrique to signify “the secret criminality in the upper echelons of French politics and economy, where a kind of underground Republic is hidden from view.”12 Françafrique as a criminal factory was first conceived by General de Gaulle in 1958. With France’s defeats in Indochina and Algeria and their deleterious effects— the imminence of sub–Saharan Africa’s independences in the late 1950s— de Gaulle realized the inevitability of the radical mutations to come. France would have to release its grip on its African colonies. So de Gaulle admitted independence for France’s African colonies only in theory, while keeping them reliant on France in practice. This was de Gaulle’s understanding of the new Franco–African relations. This was his Françafrique, an iceberg whose visible part had a banner that read “France is Africa’s best friend,” but whose submerged part comprised the mechanisms of preservation of France’s domination in Africa with the help of corrupt native informants in search of Paris’s love.13 The reasons for de Gaulle’s decision to keep Africa dependent despite artificial declarations of independence were multiple. As was noted, de Gaulle wanted to: 1. ensure France a position as a major player at the United Nations, with a number of African countries voting with it,

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2. guarantee France priority access to Africa’s agricultural and geological resources, 3. finance France’s political life, principally the Gaullist party, and then all the other so-called government parties, through diversion of portions of development funds to Africa or through the sale of raw materials from Africa, 4. position France as America’s privileged sub-contractor during the Cold War.14 For de Gaulle, France was to grow the way it had always grown, that is, by attaching itself onto Africa in the same manner a parasite attaches to a host body. So de Gaulle instructed Jacques Foccart, his chief adviser for African affairs, his “man in the shadow,” to build the system that would fulfill this objective. The strategy was to find a few corrupt African elites that would participate in the feast at the detriment of the great majority of Africans. [Foccart] maintained dependence, using inevitably illegal, secret and shameful methods. [He] selected heads of state who were “friends of France”— through war … assassination or electoral fraud. To these guardians of the neo-colonial order, Paris offered a share of the income from raw materials and development aid. Military bases, the CFA francs, which could be exchanged in Switzerland, the secret services and the outwardly innocent businesses acting on their behalf (Elf and numerous supply or “security” companies) completed the system.15

Françafrique was extremely barbaric from its inception. While the African elites that were compliant with the system were left to loot their countries with impunity as a reward for their collusion with the predatory French government, defiant nationalists and their most faithful followers were simply massacred. In Cameroon, for instance, a freedom fighter of Nelson Mandela’s stature, Ruben Um Nyobé, was assassinated in 1957 and around 400,000 of his numerous supporters were slaughtered in 1960. All the leading fighters for the independence of Cameroon died of poisoning, and a great part of the Bamiléké population in western Cameroon was exterminated in a scenario that was to prelude the Tutsi massacre in Rwanda.16 Wide-range criminal activity such as envisaged by Françafrique requires not just political skills. It demands financial means, business management ability, and military and intelligence expertise. Foccart chose French oil exploration company Elf to be the force of the French diplomacy of Françafrique. This was a well-thought choice. Elf was not just any oil company. It skillfully mixed business operations with military and intelligence tactics. Pierre Guillaumat, the creator of Elf, had intelligence background. He was in charge of French secret services in London during World War II. He had also acted as defense minister and had directed France’s atomic weapons programs. His top employees had business knowledge and were equally versed in intelligence matters. In the words of Judge Joly, “intelligence was built in the genes of Elf,”17 and secrecy was its paramount motto. Foccart’s strategy was to surround his handpicked “black governors”— selected more for their proclivities for bribery than for the popularity of their political agenda among African constituencies— with French advisers that were in fact chaperones from the French secret services having the task of ensuring that all major decisions made in Africa were congruent with France’s economic and strategic interests, of keeping the corrupt African lead-

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ers on leashes, and of eliminating the renegades.18 Other criminal manipulations by Foccart, besides the Bamiléké massacre in Cameroon (1958 –1964), are his probable coordination of the assassination by Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togolese pro-independence president Sylvanus Olympio in 1963, his permanent contact with the mercenary Bob Denard (who assassinated two Comorian presidents and deposed a number of others), the assassination of nationalist president Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso (1987), and the Ivorian implication in the Liberian civil war.19 Françafrique did not die with Foccart. The criminal apparatus that Foccart put in place and personally supervised from 1958 to 1974 was modernized; the strategy he initiated was perfected; his ruthlessness was surpassed, and the web of secrecy that Foccart initially weaved around the organization of Françafrique/Elf was strengthened with every means that modern technology could offer. Understanding the labyrinthian world of Françafrique/Elf, differentiating what was private from what was statal or parastatal, distinguishing official transactions from semi-official or private ones was not an easy endeavor. It is by chance that Judge Joly, the woman who would have the gumption to take on this mafia-like system, stumbled upon the Elf galaxy. Judge Joly was investigating a seemingly routine case of a textile company bailout, and she did not realize at first that she would be drawn into something monstrous and tentacular. What raised her suspicion was some “overcomplicated financial arrangements, strange patterns of transactions.” Her experiential reflexes kicked into gear; she gave instructions to speed up the inquiry. Even then, at that moment, Judge Joly could not have imagined that years later, the case she was investigating would take her to every continent, uncover several billion francs of misappropriation, indict some 37 people, and be summed up in 100,000 pages of evidence. She could not have imagined that she had just stirred up the biggest scandal ever to rock French business and government, that is, the Elf Affair. Two executives of Elf that came under Judge Joly’s scrutiny and who will be ever-present throughout our discussion of how Françafrique is stealing Africa’s independence are André Tarallo and Alfred Sirven. Tarallo was the managing director of Elf-Gabon from 1977 to 1997. Like former French president Jacques Chirac, Tarallo was an alumnus of the École nationale de l’administration. He was also director of Elf-Congo (1984), Elf-Angola (1988) and Elf-Trading (1992).20 Tarallo was principally in charge of handling Elf ’s secret payments of commissions since 1967.21 He was the major link between the corrupt Western African leaders and Elf ’s affiliates, thus his nickname, “Mr. Africa.” Tarallo was charged by Judge Joly for payments in excess of 100 million francs made illegally through Elf-Gabon.22 Sirven, referred to as the “bag-man” or the “pay-master” of Elf, had at his disposal more than 1 billion francs to bribe leaders and buy political influence. He used more than 4,000 Elf affiliates to channel money all over the world.23 After being on the run for more than three years, Sirven was finally caught in the Philippines and extradited to France to face trial. Taking on Elf ’s officials was a task of the greatest audacity for Judge Joly. Faithful to their criminal ways, Elf ’s agents harassed, threatened, and intimidated Judge

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Joly and her collaborators. For six years, Judge Joly lived and worked under tight police protection. This safety measure did not prevent Elf ’s agents from breaking into her living quarters, her office, and her son’s apartment, or even from stealing evidence in French police custody. One day, during the interrogation of Tarallo, Judge Joly realized that her phone was actually functioning as a microphone for Elf ’s agents. In March 1998, during the interrogation of Tarallo … Laurence Vichnievsky burst into my office and dragged me outside…. She took me to her chambers and passed me the phone, with the presiding judge of the court of criminal appeal on the line. A quarter of an hour earlier, she had tried to ring me. My phone had not rung, but she had instead been surprised to listen in live to the hearing of André Tarallo, the CEO of Elf-Gabon, taking place in the next room. My telephone had become a concealed microphone, usable simply by dialing my internal phone number.24

The monster Judge Joly was fighting was gigantic, pernicious and insidious all at the same time; it infiltrated all layers of French society up to the very top of the French government. As Judge Joly confided, the attempts at obstruction of justice that she encountered in the course of her investigation of the Elf affair “[make] the Republic of France look like a sham democracy where criminals have the arrogance of impunity.”25 In fact, if Sirven was able to elude French justice for three years, it is principally because the first international warrant for his arrest that Judge Joly had drawn had mysteriously vanished, and for two years the magistrate had no idea that her order to pursue Sirven was lost; so, in his international exile, Sirven had known all the time that the international police had no jurisdiction over him. Just after he was caught through the execution of a second warrant, Sirven felt betrayed by French authorities and Elf, and he threatened to drop 100 big names. Sirven’s threat did not materialize, and French political authorities let a sigh of relief as Sirven — who once stated that he had enough material to blow up the French Republic twenty times over26—finally chose not to speak and after six months in jail managed to secure his release on the ground of health. Unfortunately, Sirven’s silence buried invaluable information regarding Elf ’s criminal operations in Africa and the French government’s involvement in the undermining of democracy and the creation and perpetuation of misery in West Africa. As laments Judge Joly, [Our] investigation had also to take account of diplomatic immunity. The law protects heads of state from any petition. The personal accounts of monarchs, presidents elected for life or dictators supported by electoral manipulations are protected from the curiosity of judges. Money can come in and go out of their coffers with the assurance that no one will come and stick their nose into possible trafficking. All the same, the truth about the allocation of several hundreds of millions of francs given in cash to Alfred Sirven remained a mystery, because he did not wish to explain what he had used it for. We could not be sure, either, that the principal defendants were the sole beneficiaries of the embezzled funds. But they had chosen to take responsibility for the totality of the suspect movements of cash and we could go no further without their cooperation.27

Be that as it may, let it be known that even in the absence of any confession by Sirven and in the absence of any legal incarceration of immoral French political officials and corrupt African elites, Françafrique is a criminal organization, a “system

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of corruption created and encouraged at the highest level of the [French] Republic.”28 Top Elf executives, such as Sirven and Tarallo, as well as influential French political officials, such as former presidents Giscard, Mitterrand, and Chirac, and former foreign minister and president of the French constitutional council (first guardian of the French constitution, the utmost prestigious institution in the French Republic) Roland Dumas have acted in Africa, sometimes as petty thieves and often as international mafiosi. They have been deeply involved in the plunder of Africa, the assassination of African nationalist elites, and the cultivation of the misery of the African people. Behind their pompous rhetoric of democracy, behind their sanctimonious sermonizing of African leaders on the virtue of democracy and good management, they skillfully hid their true selves: They are criminals who, in the words of Verschave, have erected criminality into a functioning system.29 Their African base was Gabon; their most committed native informant was Omar Bongo Ondimba, the late Gabonese dictator. Gabon is France’s private hunting ground. For forty years, close police and defense agreements have grown stronger and stronger. Apart from Elf running their oilfields via offshore platforms in the country’s territorial waters, France has acquired a right of priority on the mining of Gabon’s uranium, which guarantees the lasting quality of her civil and military nuclear program and makes it the third atomic power in the world.30

Bongo was the quintessential black governor, the griot of France’s genocidal diplomacy. Bongo was perhaps Françafrique’s better trained griot, but he was far from being its only gesticulator. The palm for the most laughable of all the French marionettes in Africa would have to go to late Central African emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa. In his Napoleonic garb, Bokassa epitomized the black ego in his most pathetic quest for white approval.

Of Bokassa’s Pasty Dreams and White Bliss On September 20, 1979, at two o’clock in the morning, Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic was abruptly awoken with bad news by one of his ministers who had accompanied him to Libya to seek financial help from Qaddafi. A few months earlier, operatives of the French government of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, suspecting Bokassa of getting too close to Qaddafi, among other leaders unsympathetic to France, and thus of jeopardizing France’s hold on Central Africa and Chad, had infiltrated various Central African student movements and stirred up a number of social claims. The manifestations escalated gradually to a full-blown revolt that caused the Central African emperor’s unprepared and panicked security forces to arrest and torture hundreds of Central African students and even murder some of them. Seizing such a golden opportunity to chronicle one more case of the sempiternal “African barbarity,” some newspapers in France, known for their nearsightedness, their entrenchment in the French government of the moment, and their

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quest for cheap sensationalism, reported that children as young as eight were among those killed, and that Bokassa himself had participated in their beating and had even gouged a student’s eye with his imperial scepter. So a conveniently “outraged” President Giscard led an international chorus for an inquest into the matter on May 20, 1979, discreetly reassuring suspicious and reluctant African leaders unwilling to create a precedent for investigations of their own maladministration that the aim of the inquest in Central Africa was more to exonerate Bokassa than to precipitate his fall. In the meantime, however, Paris was rounding up an assortment of defectors from Bokassa’s regime. Bokassa’s ambassador to France announced his resignation. Then followed Bokassa’s prime minister, former president David Dacko, who, in a wire sent directly from the French embassy in Bangui, asked Paris to militarily support a coup the turncoats were standing ready to lead against Bokassa.31 Nevertheless, Paris was less enthusiastic to topple Bokassa before the result of the inquiry into the students’ deaths. The result of the investigation finally came, and before its August 16 public release, it was disclosed behind closed doors to Bokassa in Gabon by Gabonese President Bongo and an emissary of Giscard, in an attempt to force Bokassa to resign. Despite a devastating report stating that between 50 and 200 children, many who were of tender age, were beaten and killed,32 and notwithstanding the multiple maneuvers to compel Bokassa to give up power, the emperor would not leave his post. Giscard decided to use a combination of military and economic pressure to topple Bokassa. Economically, France cut all aid to Central Africa except humanitarian help. Militarily, to avoid a bloody clash between the French military and Bokassa’s faithful guards, and thus an international embarrassment, it was decided to wait until Bokassa was out of the country to fight a less committed imperial guard.33 Bokassa’s imperial guard, constituted essentially by Mbaika soldiers drawn from his native village, were not only the few Central African troops outfitted with live ammunitions, but they were also the most pampered soldiers and the best armed, in addition to being physically and psychologically trained to put their lives at stake for Bokassa.34 In the absence of the emperor, however, his imperial guards might not be very motivated to resist. So Paris decided to postpone any military action until Bokassa was out of the country. Meanwhile, however, a financial asphyxiation of the Central African Republic was well in progress. In addition to suspending all financial and material aids to Central Africa, Giscard ordered all the French banks to repatriate their capital from the Central African banks with which they were in joint venture. Overnight, the Central African Republic found itself on its knees. His coffers empty and incapable of ensuring the daily functioning of his country, Bokassa turned to Qaddafi for help. Bokassa requested an audience with the Libyan president and flew to Libya on Qaddafi’s invitation. Bokassa arrived in Libya on the night of September 19 and met with Qaddafi from 11:00 P.M. to midnight. Bokassa went to bed with the assurance from his host that a protocol of partnership would be signed between the two heads of

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state at 8:00 A.M. the following day, which would lay down Qaddafi’s commitment to finance the daily functioning of the vital services of Central Africa for the following two years, that is, until the country got fiscally stable.35 Central Africa possessed huge uranium, iron and diamond reserves and could easily jumpstart its finances in two years. These reserves had been exploited since 1966 by French and Swiss companies without any substantial returns for the people of Central Africa. This was an indisputable statement. However, if Bokassa was to be believed, the only compensation he received from the French and Swiss exploitation of his country’s diamond mines was a Swiss watch mounted with diamonds.36 This, on the other hand, was highly doubtful. It is evident that Bokassa and his cronies profited directly from the emperor’s corrupt dealings with the French and the Swiss to the detriment of the Central African ordinary people. Nevertheless, Bokassa’s inclination to seek new partners in this lucrative deal brought him French ire and financial trouble at home. Fortunately, Qaddafi had promised to help. However, six hours before signing his agreement with Qaddafi, Bokassa was warned by one of his ministers that a French military operation was underway against his government back home. Opération Barracudas was a 30,000-troop-strong occupation of all the neuralgic sites of Central Africa, from the capital Bangui to the most remote rural areas. The aim of Opération Barracudas was to overthrow the Bokassa government and put in place a government that would be unconditional friendly to Paris and untouched by the scandal of child killing that had brought much scrutiny on Giscard’s “strange” relation with Bokassa.37 According to Bokassa, Qaddafi suggested that he offer a fierce resistance to the French invasion. The Libyan leader was prepared to lend a hand with a few thousands troops. Bokassa refused, and perhaps wisely so. However, the reasons the emperor of Central Africa gave his host for his reticence to oppose the French invasion were laughable. He was, he said, an officer of the French army and a French citizen. France was his motherland, which he loved dearly. Therefore, under no circumstances would he point a gun at a French soldier, for this would amount to the greatest act of treason38— even when the French soldiers had their guns pointed at him. Instead, he would fly directly to France and speak personally to Giscard. After all, were they not, Giscard and he, the best of buddies— pardon, the best of relatives? So Bokassa ordered his private pilot to fly him to Paris. On their way, however, he changed his mind and decided to land in Morocco, a country with whose sovereign he maintained close relations. Unfortunately for him, his French pilots had already received orders from Giscard to take him to France. As soon as it entered French air space, Bokassa’s private plane was escorted by two French Mirages to the discreet military base of Évreux. Bokassa’s following was taken into custody and the emperor was ordered to remain on the plane. Under heavy guard, the Central African sovereign was stripped naked and searched down to his most intimate orifice. He was then ordered to put on his clothes, and he was kept on his private plane for four days and four nights, while negotiations were being conducted regarding a final land-

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ing place for him. Finally, on September 24, 1979, at 10 A.M., Bokassa was transferred from his private plane to a military DC-8 and flown to Houphouët in Abidjan.39 As a fresh student in Côte d’Ivoire in the early 1980s, we befriended one of Bokassa’s numerous wives’ brothers, himself a doctoral student in sociology at the Université d’Abidjan. One day, we had one rare opportunity to sit for a drink with the emperor at his residence of Indénié in Abidjan and listen to his interminable ramblings about his lost empire. It is from this Indénié residence, which he qualified as a luxurious incarceration in Abidjan that, four years after his destitution, Bokassa offered Chuzeville the filmed interview in which the embittered emperor made some scandalous revelations about his relation with Giscard and the latter’s betrayal. Given the French leaders’ frequent claims that they are unaware of the torture, money laundering, exploitation, and secular, economic and mental genocide that France has been conducting in Africa under the pretense of Franco–African cooperation, Chuzeville meant the film to educate them. For us, however, it is illustrative of the black ego’s senselessness. Giscard, as Bokassa recalled so naively during the interview, had first offered him the most beautiful example of bilateral “cooperation.” Giscard came to Bangui in 1967 on a private visit as France’s finance minister. This private visit did not preclude Bokassa from offering Giscard a very public reception, complete with a big banquet attended by foreign dignitaries, at the end of which the guest was offered expensive diamonds expressly selected for him from the best gems of the national diamond harvest. From then on, Giscard kept coming to the Central African Republic every year, and was presented with lavish gifts in diamonds until he became president of France in 1974. It was Central Africa — rather than Germany, as was the custom for every newly elected French president — that Giscard chose to visit on his first official trip as French president, a fact that Bokassa naively regarded as a strong assurance of love. Bokassa had shared not just the most public aspects of his life with Giscard, but even the most private ones. When on December 4, 1977, Bokassa decided to inaugurate himself emperor of Central Africa, Giscard went to great lengths to lend a hand and make the coronation of Bokassa I a success. The French navy marching band was flown to Bangui to play at the inauguration. The French defense office flew a battalion of French soldiers to ensure the protection of Bokassa, and the French government put 17 charter planes at the disposal of Bokassa’s guests. In gratitude for Giscard’s consideration, Bokassa granted the French president a private hunting ground in Central Africa, where the latter would go twice a year to shoot elephants and have their tails and ivory delivered to him on cargo planes. Giscard’s elephant tusks and tails were transformed into luxury items and sold for his profit in sumptuous European boutiques. Bokassa’s private villa in his village was Giscard’s frequent hideout, where he would show up often in the company of young women for drug revelry and sexual orgies. As revealed Bokassa, “il [Giscard] venait avec ses petites copines tirer dix jours chez moi”40 (he [Giscard] used to come with his little girlfriends for ten-day sex parties at my place). When in the aftermath of

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Bokassa’s fall the French media started their intoxicating operation, claiming that Bokassa was a cannibal and affirming without proof that human parts and babies were found in Bokassa’s refrigerators, they must certainly have been informed by Giscard; for Giscard, who had made the Bokassas’ home his second residence and who had had numerous meals there, both in their presence and alone as a privileged guest, must have consumed some human flesh, too, to be able to give his denigrating media so much unsubstantiated negative information about Bokassa’s alleged cannibalism. Many Central Africans were angered and felt personally insulted by the allegations of Bokassa’s cannibalism.41 When Bokassa was still an angel and not yet a baby killer, a civilized man and not yet a beast or an anthropophagus in France’s eyes, when he was still a source of wealth for France and French politicians and not yet an embarrassing burden, Giscard signed the Bokassas’ golden guest book and offered Bokassa that their relationship be more like a family bond. Giscard offered to be Bokassa’s “brother” instead of his mere “friend.”42 Here, one could easily imagine the black ego titillated to the core and stupidly nodding with enjoyment. At one time, said Bokassa, Giscard, who had his eyes on the empress of Central Africa, proposed to the emperor that they swap wives. Mrs. Giscard would spend some time in Bangui in the company of Bokassa, while the empress would stay in Paris with the French president. This exchange, Giscard explained, would signal to the French and Central Africans that the bilateral relations between Paris and Bangui were excellent. Bokassa foolishly accepted. Though Bokassa remained evasive as to whether he had any sexual relationship with Mrs. Giscard, he revealed during his filmed interview with Chuzeville, on the other hand, that his wife became Giscard’s mistress, was even impregnated by the French president and underwent at least one abortion to get rid of a compromising child by Giscard. As lamented Bokassa, “he [Giscard] took my wife, slept with her, and even got her pregnant.”43 In fact, in the aftermath of Bokassa’s arrest and confinement in Côte d’Ivoire, Empress Catherine was separated from her husband and was a frequent guest at the Élysée, where she entertained Giscard’s fetishism for dark and libidinous Africa. With the help of Giscard’s family members, Empress Catherine was also emptying the deposed emperor’s bank accounts and selling some of his properties. [S]he had emptied [Bokassa’s] bank account in Romorantin of its contents— 400,000 francs in all. She had also taken an undisclosed sum from his Swiss bank account and had helped herself to some of his most prized cars: two 1978 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadows, each of which was valued between 350,000 to 400,000 francs; a 1978 Daimler worth 150,000 francs; a Jaguar and several more.44

The Bokassa affair was one of Françafrique’s ugliest and most shameful moments. France’s mafia-like transactions in Central Africa were so scandalous that in an attempt to cover what really went on between French officials and the Bokassa government in Central Africa, the French army was ordered by President Giscard to strip Bokassa’s palaces of all their contents and store them in a military consignment

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in Orléans. Furthermore, every available document in the archives of the empire was removed and disposed of at an undisclosed location in France, as Giscard was bracing for a defense of denial and half-truths against Bokassa’s accusations. While Bokassa was at Evreux, his enemies were helping themselves with everything of value he had left behind in [Central Africa]. On the morning of Friday, 21 September, four puma helicopters of the Barracuda invasion force brought a squadron of paratroopers to Berengo. First, the soldiers raided the imperial residence and took away the coronation paraphernalia as well as quantities of cash, diamonds and [jewelry], the total value of which it is impossible to estimate. Then they sought out the government records stored in the Council of Ministers building nearby. Bokassa had been in the habit of keeping his personal papers in binders covered in green leather, and two hundred of these were seized at the Council of Ministers. Filing cabinets filled with other important documents were emptied — imperial decrees, memoranda, and a dossier of forty letters from President Giscard addressed to “mon cher parent” [my dear relative]. There were items of nostalgic nature too— a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings on the coronation and the emperor’s guest book. All day long, the Puma helicopters were busy transporting the imperial archives and treasures from Berengo to the French embassy in Bangui.45

Of all the dealings of Giscard in Central Africa, it was the “diamond affair” that created discernible waves in France. The story of Empress Catherine’s pregnancy and subsequent abortion was immediately dismissed as a sham. Racist white constituents do not like to think of their elected officials as indulging themselves with black women. So when such stories appear, they are first treated with shocked indignation and then dismissed as lies. A black elected official can easily be pictured desiring a white woman, because in the racist white’s imaginaire, all black men dream of possessing a white woman. On the other hand, the opposite is inconceivable. We shall recall the denials by both commoners and aristocrats which the allegations that Prince Albert of Monaco had a child with a black stewardess, an African woman of all people, generated. Were we not in the age of DNA, the prince would be under pressure never to come forward and admit his paternity, and the litigant would have certainly met with an ill-timed fate. We shall recall the outrage that greeted news of the Princess of Wales’s romantic relationship with Dodi Al-Fayed, the Arab heir, in England. British people had trouble imagining the milk-skinned Princess of Wales in the embrace of a dark-skinned Arab conqueror. In the United States, during the 1999 primaries, some Republican pundits had thought it ingenious to discredit candidate McCain with tales of his fathering a black child. McCain’s alleged flirtation with blackness is not what ultimately did him in, but the lingering effects of the charge contributed greatly to the Republican presidential contender’s campaign slump. So, Bokassa’s allegation that his wife was Giscard’s mistress hardly created a shudder in France. Bokassa’s claim was quickly dismissed as one more rambling by a psychologically unstable African dictator. On the other hand, it was highly probable, Central Africa being a diamond-rich country, that Giscard had received some of his “ex-brother’s” precious stones. Faced with inquiries regarding the stones he indubitably obtained from Bokassa, Giscard first rejected everything, and then alleged that these were second-grade diamonds of which he only made about 4,000 dollars, which he donated to the Central African Red Cross. The director of the Central

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African Red Cross maintained that her organization never received a cent from the French president. On October 10, 1979, the satirical French paper Le Canard Enchaîné published a signed correspondence by Bokassa, written on imperial letterhead, enjoining the Comptoir national du diamant to prepare a 30-carat diamond for Giscard. Days later, Le Monde gave weight to Le Canard Enchaîné’s scoop by dedicating a column to it. From then on, Giscard had no other choice but to mount a full, albeit failed, defense against Bokassa. The “diamond affair” was used by Giscard’s political opponents. The scandal contributed to Giscard’s defeat by François Mitterrand in 1982. France is obviously indefensible in its plunder of Africa. However, the greatest responsibility for Africa’s continuous poverty is ascribable to the black ego’s inferiority complex and his quest for assurance of white love. While Bokassa was dancing the waltz of love with Giscard, giving away millions of dollars in gifts to foreign officials, and indulging in excesses abroad and at home, the Central African people were living in utmost poverty, lacking even the basic necessities. To secure his political power, Bokassa relied on the loyalty of the army, which he bribed generously, and whose excesses and corruption he pretended to ignore. Though the Central African Republic’s army’s allocation was continually increased, Bokassa’s officers embezzled public funds with impunity and lower-rank soldiers were left to swindle and bully the masses. The flamboyant lifestyles of Bokassa’s corrupt collaborators, close friends and family members— the emperor had eight wives and more than 30 mistresses, each one with her own extravagant allocation — weighed down on the Central African Republic’s economy. Civil servants were often not paid for periods of time as prolonged as three to four months; the prices of basic necessities, such as meat, sugar and fuel, were out of reach for most ordinary people, and especially for the rural populations.46 Bokassa was obviously oblivious of his people’s welfare. Bokassa was the quintessential black ego in search of assurance of love. His $30-million coronation was mimicry and accumulation to the most obsessive degree. Bokassa crowned himself with a $5 million crown … accompanied by the strains of Beethoven, Mozart, and tribal drums. He ascended a two-ton gold encrusted throne and rode through Bangui streets in a refurbished antique coach pulled by specially imported white horses flanked by resplendently uniformed lancers. Trailing a 20-foot-long red-velvet cloak trimmed with white fur, he received as a symbol of office a 6-foot diamond-encrusted scepter, and while wearing a Napoleonic hat, later reviewed a parade that included both pygmy warriors and troops with Soviet weapons.47

Given his obsession with European pageantry and Napoleonic grandeur, the Central African emperor had certainly ingurgitated the truth according to Gobineau, who believed that the ugliest of human beings are to be found in Africa and that the most beautiful of men are exemplified by French kings and princes, including, of course, Napoleon.48 Bokassa’s pattern of megalomania, insatiability, irresponsibility, and mental instability was less an isolated case than a governing blueprint among African leaders, as Bongo would prove. To secure their economic and military interests, French

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political officials made Bongo the godfather of Françafrique in replacement of Houphouët, the late Ivorian president, initiator of the coinage. French officials encouraged and supported all of Bongo’s immoderations. Bongo was infatuated with Occidental life, which he cultivated with narcissistic intemperance. French officials and unscrupulous business executives convinced Bongo that his destructive, pathetic aping amounted to “authentic” Occidental ways. Elated, Bongo gave away his country’s resources and facilitated the ruin of other African countries for a place in the company of the neo-colonizer. Bongo’s tenure will be remembered by future generations of Africans as one of the most destructive of the African continent. The dictator of Libreville, by his unreserved support of Françafrique, has been one of the greatest enablers of France’s greedy officials’ human and economic genocide in Africa. The state of Bongo’s mental enslavement was irreversible.

4

Françafrique: The Longest Economic and Human Genocide Things are so rotten in the higher spheres of Françafrique that its players know it is irredeemably doomed, that the end is drawing nigh. For nearly fifteen years, warnings have been issued more than once, from Rwanda to Ivory Coast, including the tumultuous succession of Eyadéma in Togo. Boubacar Boris Diop1

A Black Concierge in Gabon In May 2004, president Omar Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, who until his death in 2009 had been the pet child of the twisted post-independence Franco–African liaison called Françafrique, met with President Bush in the Oval Office, in the context of what the White House characterized as President Bush’s “outreach to the continent of Africa.” This meeting took place despite the fact that the Bush administration had often criticized Bongo’s regime for systematic embezzlements of public funds and international development aid and for recurrent abuses of human rights. Later, allegations surfaced according to which, ten months before Bongo’s arrival at the White House, the Gabonese autocrat had paid Republican fundraiser and lobbyist Jack Abramoff 9 million dollars to facilitate his meeting with Bush. In Gabon, 9 million dollars would have gone a very long way in poverty reduction and development projects. With per capita wealth ten times higher than the average per capita income in Africa, Gabon is apparently a rich country. Yet, only the contrary is true. The very small population of Gabon (1.5 million people) makes the figures highly misleading. For instance, Gabon could only boast of 800 kilometers of asphalted roads in the 42 years of Bongo’s reign. This represents less than 20 kilometers of road for every year that Bongo remained in power. There are no travelable roads connecting Libreville, the capital, to the other cities of the country. Gabon’s main resource is crude oil, which accounts for 60 percent of the country’s income. Yet, at the height of Gabon’s oil boom in 2006, 40 percent of the Gabonese adult population was unemployed and 68

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more than 70 percent of the population of Gabon lived below the poverty line. Of Bongo’s country, Cameroonian author Mongo Béti once asked: “Where does Gabon’s oil revenue go?” In fact, much of Gabon’s oil revenue ended up in the multiple overseas personal bank accounts of the narcissistic dictator of Libreville. Boasting of rubbing elbows with world leaders was one of Bongo’s numerous distorted enjoyments. For Bongo, being captured in photos in the company of world leaders constituted convincing proof that his crooked politics met the approval of the “free world.” The dictator’s office in Libreville was decorated with pictures of all the presidents of the French Fifth Republic: General de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.2 These were the mementos of Bongo’s proud French connection. Bongo needed to complete his presidential picture collection with those of American presidents, the most prized trophies. For that, he was willing to shed 9 million dollars of his country’s geological revenues rather than use this huge amount of money, especially by Gabonese standards, to better the lives of his wretched people. A simple photograph of him posing with President Bush would grant him American sanctification of his corrupt politics. Bongo got to shake Bush’s hand in a meeting that was laden with the heavy scent of quid pro quo. The dictator of Libreville made sure that the photographs of him by the Oval Office fireplace chatting with his smiling and gracious host were circulated all over Gabon at the same time as criticisms of his dishonestly accumulated wealth were getting traction both at home and abroad. Indeed, over his 42-year-long reign, the Gabonese dictator had been cited in multiple corruption cases. However, efforts to pin him down had bumped against the various French governments’ wariness and had yielded no results for the simple reason that Bongo was the godfather of Françafrique in Africa, other less preponderant valets being Paul Biya, Sassou Nguesso and Blaise Compaoré. Indicting Bongo would risk exposing the involvement of every French government of the Fifth Republic in the network of criminality that Françafrique constitutes and, perhaps, would precipitate the subsequent release of France’s formidable grip on Francophone Africa. Keeping Bongo content and out of the judicial limelight, on the other hand, would ensure a smooth running of the system that guarantees the dictator, and many French officials, prosperity while keeping France’s balance of payment affirmative. Bongo’s megalomaniac lifestyle was supported by kickbacks he received from businesses operating in Gabon, and especially from oil companies like Elf and Total. Managing Gabon like a family plantation, Bongo diverted millions of dollars from the exploitation of the rich Gabonese fields of crude oil, manganese, uranium and timber into his private accounts in European banks. During the Elf trial, the company’s executives confessed that they deposited a yearly stipend of 40 million dollars in a Swiss bank account for Bongo, as a reward for permission granted to Elf to exploit Gabonese oil. Philippe Jaffre, chief executive officer of Elf, also confirmed that in 1995 Bongo and Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo received millions of dollars to convince Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha to grant Elf license for the exploitation of

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Nigerian oil. Abacha himself made 190 million dollars on the deal. Bongo was insatiable. Despite all the huge capital that Bongo accumulated through his shady deals, many of his purchases were directly paid with funds from the Gabonese Treasury. Around the cities of Paris and Nice alone, Bongo was reported to possess 33 properties of a total value upward of 130 million dollars. His numerous mistresses with extravagant lifestyles were maintained on public money. Those of Bongo’s 30 children not registered on the state payroll lived insolently on public funds. Bongo’s chief of staff was his daughter Pascaline and his defense minister was his son Ali (now president of Gabon), notorious for competing with his father on luxury sports vehicles collection. For his adversaries and a great majority of ordinary Gabonese, Bongo was a selfish and ruthless autocrat, a marionette of neo-colonialism. For French politicians and big multinational executives feeding on Bongo’s immoral governing methods, however, the dictator of Libreville was the guarantor of their continual prosperity, the black concierge of French interests to keep in power by all means. For all that Bongo meant to France, he had to be recurrently reelected. So, each time so-called presidential elections came around in Gabon, the electoral machine “made in France” was brought out and dusted, and “voters [were] multiplied, the minority [was] transformed in majority, defeat or deadlock [became] victories, and Bingo for Bongo!”3 Election rigging was such a casual occurrence in Gabon that Bongo’s French cronies did not even bother concealing their deception. In December 1998, Robert Bourgi, French lawyer and friend of Bongo, a self-proclaimed election observer, decided to flood Libreville with a team of French magistrates and lawyers whose mission was supposedly to monitor for fairness the presidential elections in Gabon for which Bongo was a candidate. Before leaving Paris, Bourgi sent a letter to Bongo, which said much about his proclaimed “neutrality.” Bonsoir Papa. … j’ai réuni vendredi l’équipe de magistrats et d’avocats, qui, dès le 2 décembre, sera sur place à Libreville. Je vous adresse copie de la lettre que j’envoie ce jour à l’ambassadeur de France à Libreville. Est-il utile de vous dire combien vous manquez à ce sommet France-Afrique ? … Je suis sûr que Jacques Chirac, en jetant un regard circulaire lors des réunions et des réceptions, doit se dire: “Mais est-il possible qu’Omar ne soit pas là, que nous puissions nous réunir sans lui…?” Allez Papa, vous nous reviendrez, et vous lui reviendrez à Paris en triomphateur des élections du 6 –12 –98…4 Good evening, Daddy: Last Friday I gathered a team of lawyers to arrive in Libreville by December 2. I am sending you a copy of the letter that I mailed to the French ambassador in Libreville today. Is it necessary to tell you how much you are missed at this France-Africa summit? I am sure that when he notices your absence at the meetings and the receptions, Jacques Chirac wonders: “But is Bongo really not here? Are we really meeting without him?” Well, Daddy! You will come back to us, and you will come back to him in Paris as the winner of the December 12 elections…

In early 2009, France’s honeymoon with Bongo seemed to be ending. French authorities announced a freezing of Bongo’s bank accounts in France and an inves-

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tigation of his assets, following a complaint by the French branch of Transparency International, which alleged that Bongo had redirected hundreds of millions of dollars of state public funds to his private accounts. Though in the past Bongo had brushed away this kind of preliminary investigation, that time, however, things looked so exceptionally serious that the dictator of Libreville made it clear to French authorities that if they did not back off, the 10,000 French nationals living in Gabon could face repatriation and French interests in his country could suffer. However, this threat also came at a time when Bongo was no longer his energetic self. In fact, on May 21, 2009, Spanish foreign minister Angel Moratinos confirmed rumors that Bongo was hospitalized in a Barcelonan clinic. The Gabonese dictator had been suffering from intestinal cancer. The announcement came a few months after the death in Rabat, Morocco, of Bongo’s wife Edith Bongo, daughter of Congolese dictator Denis Sassou Nguesso, and amidst investigations in France of the actual origins of the huge fortunes amassed by presidents Bongo, Nguesso and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. On June 10, 2009, Bongo’s death at Quiron Clinic in Barcelona was officially announced. In “ordinary” times, Mrs. Bongo would have passed away in a French hospital and the dictator of Libreville himself would have been surrounded by a swarm of attentive French doctors. France has ordinarily been the destination of ailing Francophone African leaders and their close collaborators, who have traditionally neglected to develop care centers that could merit the appellation of “hospital” in their own countries. In Africa, the commoners usually die at home or in ill-equipped shacks of infection and contamination that are pompously called hospitals, while the elites are pampered in European private clinics, not that European clinics keep the latter living for ever. Bongo’s choice of Morocco for his wife’s care and Spain for his own was symbolic. The Gabonese dictator intended to signal his displeasure with the Sarkozy government for allowing an impertinent investigative judge to probe his wealth and to even go so far as ordering a freeze of nine of his French bank accounts. In fact, Bongo, who like many African leaders had a very bad reading of historical events, had always thought of himself as an untouchable. The fall of Bokassa and Mobutu actually had not taught Bongo any lesson at all. The fact that throughout his dictatorship he was able to weather all the changes of the guards that took place in France since de Gaulle, the fact that he was able to quash every opposition at home thanks to the French intelligence services, and the fact that he had jailed or assassinated political opponents and participated in every shady deal organized at the highest level of the successive French governments had given Bongo the illusion of invulnerability; and until very recently, he had thought that this latest probe, like the ones that had preceded it in March 2007 and July 2008, would die in the egg. That time, however, investigating magistrate Françoise Desset’s persistence to push the case against Bongo so far as to obtain an injunction on the dictator’s bank accounts in France seemed to epitomize Bongo’s loss of both political and physical vigor. As Bongo lies peacefully in his grave, the assessment of his stewardship is demor-

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alizing. Many Gabonese citizens had hoped that with Bongo gone, Gabon would start to make up for lost time. They were mistaken. The August 31, 2009, presidential elections in Gabon looked more like the typical charade orchestrated by France than the democratic process expected by the Gabonese. Once again, the old voting machine made in Françafrique was taken out of retirement, dusted, and stuffed with fake numbers; when the results were proclaimed on September 3, 2009, as usual, it was Bingo for Bongo! Ali Bongo, that is. The son has succeeded the father, which augurs nothing optimistic for the Gabonese people and for Africa in general. The dictator’s son was reared in an 800-million-dollar palace and fed with the genetic poison of kleptocracy. He is inexorably bound to rehearse his father’s decadent governing ethics. Françafrique can rest assured, for it still has a few long years to live before its postscript is written. With Baby Bongo, Sarkozy might even have the kind of long-lasting honeymoon that his two immediate predecessors enjoyed with Papa Bongo.

Mitterrand, Chirac and Sarkozy: The More Things Change … In 1990, nine years after Mitterrand took function at the Élysée, French politics had not yet totally recovered from the disgrace of Giscard’s “diamond affair” which had been instrumental in bringing down the 23-year conservative supremacy in France. Giscard had been a debacle for Franco–African relations, and many Africans celebrated his defeat with the hope that an era of political responsibility would be inaugurated by Mitterrand, an era whose anticipated positive effects would be carried over to Africa. However, Mitterrand had been sluggish, if not dormant, in bringing about real change, and a cloud of suspicion was still hovering over French-Africa relations, which Mitterrand thought necessary to dispel. Eight years earlier, on December 9, 1982, a simple angry phone call from Bongo was all that it took for Mitterrand to buckle from his “intent” to reform Françafrique and concede to dismiss his young, impetuous and idealist cooperation minister, JeanPierre Cot, who had sworn to break away from the old, dishonest mode of doing politics in Africa. “We do not intend to finance anything for anybody; from this perspective, we are the party poopers,”5 Cot had declared, as a warning to those African dictators that were still expecting a continuance of Françafrique with the arrival of Mitterrand. Bongo felt indexed and telephoned Mitterrand, insisting that Cot be sanctioned if France wanted to maintain priority access to Gabon’s geological resources, notably crude oil and manganese. Mitterrand demanded his cooperation minister’s resignation. Cot’s dismissal was a strong signal that nothing in the Françafrique village was going to be disturbed. The practice of bribery, assassination and influence peddling that had up to then been the hallmark of Françafrique was to remain uninterrupted. Bongo signified it with his usual blackmailing phrase, “do you want me to give my oil to the Americans?” Less than two years after he took over

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the stewardship of France, Mitterrand disillusioned those in Africa who were ecstatic over his election by getting rid of his zealous cooperation minister, Cot, a sign that it would be business as usual. Yet aggressive change of the kind announced by Cot was what the majority of Africans wanted, and unless change really came, Mitterrand would be regarded as just the heir of scandal-beleaguered Giscard. So, on June 20, 1990, on the occasion of the 16th Conference of French and African Heads of State, François Mitterrand gave a speech in which he tried to reassure the African constituencies that had lost faith in him. In his speech of La Baule, Mitterrand introduced himself as a new breed of French politician, the leader that would redefine the old tradition of Franco–African relationship weighed down by corruption. After a display of false empathy for the plight of Africans, after fake objection to the deterioration of the terms of exchange that is so unfair to Africans and that keeps African countries in the swirl of poverty by swelling Africa’s external debt, and after rehearsing the worn-out discourse of Africa’s exponentially swelling populations that keep classrooms crowded and famine constantly lurking, Mitterrand, somehow, spoke to the majority of Africans disenchanted with France’s politics of propping up dictators. There was perhaps a time when money used to be spread with prodigality and without any control. I did not know that time. I mean that I was not in charge in those days…. When I realize, for instance, that the flow of capitals that go from the poor South to the rich North is more important than the flow of capitals that go from the rich North to the poor South, I see that something is wrong. Colonialism is not dead. I will always forbid a practice that sometimes existed in the past, and which consisted of France trying to bring change in domestic politics by way of plot or conjuration.6

In other words, a new sheriff was in town that was going to kill colonialism for good, apply the rule of law and fairness in the North/South relationship, and encourage democracy and accountability both in France and in Africa. So, Mitterrand urged his African counterparts to take the measure of the new age and to start implementing good governance in their respective countries. Democracy, he insisted, was “the inevitable path to travel.” France, he promised, would be there to accompany those who would choose democracy and the rule of law, but France would be more careful in distributing its aid to African countries, conditioning aid on social equality. The African dictators that were gathered on the occasion of Mitterrand’s speech had nothing to worry about. Mitterrand could not be serious, and they knew it. Having been in the machinery of French politics for such a long time, Mitterrand could not ignore the political and economic disturbances that implementation of democracy in Africa could generate in France. France thrives on crises in Africa. France creates crises in Africa, fans them, and spreads them like wildfire, in order to better exploit Africa in the years of instability that ensue by hiring itself back through the United Nations as crisis management agency in Africa. Those in Africa who had celebrated the defeat of Giscard and the end of the conservative majority’s 23-year-long reign did not have to wait for long to be disillusioned again. If Mitterrand’s dismissal of Cot was not a compelling enough indication that Mitterrand was not different from

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his predecessors, Mitterrand’s government’s direct participation in the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda would finally convince the skeptics that France’s politics of instability-manufacturing in Africa had a strong guarantor even in the Socialist Party. Indeed, in 1994, in a little over three months, about 800,000 Tutsi men, women, and children, a staggering 85 percent of the Tutsi population in the tiny country of Rwanda, were massacred by the Hutu majority of the country with the help of the Mitterrand government. The militia responsible for this genocide was the Hutu Power. This armed force, whose Anglophone designation was misleading because it was actually constituted by French-speaking soldiers, was supported before, during and after the genocide by the Françafrique machinery.7 French military officers supported and lent a hand to the perpetrators of one of the ugliest genocides of the twentieth century. For instance, in the thick of the Tutsi genocide, French captain Paul Barril was hired by the Rwandan Ministry of Defense to direct a training program for 30 to 60 members of the Hutu Power. The code name of the operation for which Barril received a stipend of 1.2 million dollars was “Opération Insecticide.” Given that the genocide of the Tutsi was publicly advertised as the extermination of the Tutsi inyenzi (Tutsi cockroaches), Captain Barril and France’s later claim of unawareness of the genocide would be indefensible. Furthermore, as has been published, at least until July 18, 1994, 15 weeks into the genocide, the chief of the military cooperation mission, French general Jean-Pierre Huchon, was constantly in touch with Rwandan colonel Cyprien Kayumba, the man in charge of weapon purchase for the Hutu Power. Based in Paris, Kayumba traveled to various countries and delivered 28 million francs’ worth of weapons to the Hutus. One of the weapon manufacturers, Dominique Lemonnier (manager of French DYL-Invest), directly implicated the French government before conveniently dying of a heart attack as he came out of a restaurant in Annecy, France. Weapon supplies to the Hutus continued throughout French socalled humanitarian Opération Turquoise and transited through Goma Airport, which was under French military surveillance. In fact, France’s Opération Turquoise, which Paris advertised as compassionate intervention intended to stop the massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus, was more like a covert mission with the purpose of getting the Hutu forces out of Rwanda as the political tides started to turn in favor of the Tutsis. Actually, Turquoise helped the Hutu forces to retreat with their weapons and to later participate in military training on a French base in Central Africa. Under the cover of Turquoise, French troops exfiltrated the presumed leader of the genocidal forces, Colonel Bogosora Theoneste, as well as Jean-Baptiste Gatete, chief of the interahamwe militia (a repression troop organized by former Hutu Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana).8 The Hutu elite forces trained in Central Africa by French militaries would later intervene in other African conflicts ignited by Françafrique, and more precisely in the conflict to reinstate Denis Sassou Nguesso in Congo-Brazzaville, of which we shall speak in this very chapter. Why was France so deeply involved in tiny Rwanda? After all, Rwanda was not

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as geologically rich as Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville or Gabon, for instance. The reasons for France’s involvement in Rwanda, as notes Verschave, were economic, strategic and sentimental. Economically, Rwanda was a vast field of cannabis for some French dignitaries and a crossroads for trafficking drugs and diamonds out of and weapons into war-ridden Zaire.9 As a result, the tiny country was curiously crowded with adventurers seeking facile and barely legal business opportunities. These opportunistic fortune seekers were mainly from France, but they also came from other Western countries. Militarily, France saw Rwanda as Françafrique’s gate toward the establishment of new bases in the Indian Ocean and an outpost from which to keep an eye on mineral-rich Zaire from the east side. So, gradually, France drove the Belgians out of Rwanda, just as they had evicted the Portuguese from Angola and the Spanish from Equatorial Guinea, in the constitution of a Latin-Françafrique opposed to the Anglophone commonwealth.10 France’s gradual entrenchment in Rwanda stemmed from a purposely misinterpreted military assistance agreement signed by Presidents Giscard and Habyarimana. Indeed, in July 1975, as big game aficionado French President Giscard arrived in Rwanda to take part in a special safari put together for him by Habyarimana, he signed an agreement for military assistance to Rwanda for which Habyarimana would receive 4 million francs per year in military aid.11 This was not a defense agreement like the ones signed with Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon or Senegal, for instance. However, as the French military presence in Rwanda intensified, France established a sort of tacit military defense agreement with the country, which the French were unabashedly called upon to honor against the FPR (Front patriotique rwandais), considered foreign because supposedly Anglophone. Certainly, the FPR, which had invaded Rwanda in 1990, originated from Uganda. It was formed by a group of Rwandan immigrants in Uganda who were being forced out of their host country after a 30-year-long sanctuary in Rwanda’s neighboring Anglophone country. Rwanda was a late German colony beginning in 1898. It became a Belgian colony in 1917. The Tutsi minority of the country was principally composed of farmers and cattle herders. The colonizers viewed the property-owning Tutsis as the obvious privileged class upon which they could rely for the subjugation of the Hutu majority; the colonizers exacerbated the already existing class division by selecting the Tutsis for education in Catholic schools and by making them the flag bearers of the new capitalist system in Rwanda, thus driving the Hutus further into poverty. By the end of the 1950s, Tutsi intellectuals’ pressing claims for justice and representation in the colony clashed with Belgian interests. To undermine the Tutsis, the bitter Belgian colonizers introduced majority representation rule, and a Hutu former seminarian, Grégoire Kayibanda, became the first president of Rwanda in 1962. An ensuing vindictive massacre of Tutsis by the Hutu majority forced 300,000 of the former to exile in Uganda. However, inter–Hutu power struggles also resulted in a military coup by Hutu army leader Habyarimana in 1973. Habyarimana not only continued the persecution

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of Tutsis, but he also went on a hunt for southern Hutus, whom he removed from key administrative posts. The exiled Tutsis formed the Alliance Rwandaise pour l’Unité Nationale (ARUN) in 1979, which in 1987 would become the FPR.12 When the FPR attacked Habyarimana’s army in 1990, former French President Mitterrand faked ignorance of the distinction between an agreement for military assistance and a defense agreement and ordered French troops directly into Rwanda in 1990 and 1993.13 Faced with a weakening Françafrique that was economically and politically degraded, a Françafrique visibly rendered obsolete with the surge of Nigeria, South Africa and some East African countries, a Françafrique increasingly regurgitated by African populations fed up with unpopular dictators propped up by France, it became obvious to Paris that to lose another battle to the supposed Anglophone FPR would amount to taking a fatal economic and political blow. Especially, it would amount to taking another defeat from British and Americans on the battlefield of strategic, economic and political interests; in the minds of French officials, despite the fact that Great Britain was geographically in Europe and closer to France, there was, indeed, a strange amalgamation of British and American interests and a certain obsession with the Anglophone/Francophone dichotomy. Paul Kagamé, the military chief of the FPR, was himself the son of an exiled Tutsi raised in Uganda. He spoke perfect English and went to college in America. For French officials, he was a pawn of the United States.14 French political strategists would not hesitate to argue that countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, Central Africa and Zaire were situated at the limit of Anglo-Saxon influence, of which Uganda — whose support for the FPR was undeniable — represented a crucial springboard. Furthermore, visited by specters of its defeats in Indochina and Algeria, France saw in the FPR, this Anglo-Saxon devil, many signs of the past. The FPR, fighting the Hutu majority with surprising discipline and with frequent terrorist tactics, was for French patriots reminiscent of the Algerian FLN or the Cambodian Khmers Rouges.15 In any case, had not the Rwandan President Habyarimana dubbed the Front Patriotique Rwandais with the sobriquet of the “Khmers noirs,” an epithet that French officials had absolutely no problem using publicly? In supporting the Rwandan government in its effort to exterminate the Tutsis, Mitterrand was determined to exorcise his own demons by avenging France against its Algerian and Cambodian apparitions in the Rwandan FPR. Furthermore, the Catholic Hutu leaders were spiritually closer to the French than their Protestant Tutsi counterparts. Most of the Hutu leaders came directly from Catholic seminaries. For all these reasons, and a thousand others, Mitterrand decided to spare France and its marionette Habyarimana a probable defeat by the FPR.16 Therefore, Mitterrand can be convincingly said to have actively helped the Hutus carry out genocide on the Tutsis. As noted Verschave, La décision de former les forces armées rwandaises (FAR), clairement politique, fut prise personnellement par François Mitterrand …. Les rebelles venus d’Ouganda pouvaient-ils représenter autre chose que le produit d’une manipulation des Anglo-Saxons ? Il fallait aider Juvénal, lui

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procurer armes et munitions, former une armée qui lui permette d’en finir avec ces importuns. L’armée [française] s’exécuta sans réserve, dans le droit fil des institutions et de la pratique de la Ve République.17 The decision to train the Rwandan armed forces, a visibly political one, was personally made by François Mitterrand…. Could the rebels from Uganda represent anything else but the product of manipulation by the Anglo-Saxons? It was imperative that Juvénal get some help, that he be given weapons and ammunitions; it was important that an army be trained, which would help him get rid of these troublemakers once and for all. The [French] army did that unreservedly, in perfect harmony with the institutions and practice of the Fifth Republic.

The Élysée’s military aid poured into Kigali at a vertiginous pace, at the rate of 200 million francs per year. Weapons were also bought from international suppliers to complement the French stock. A South African arms manufacturer, who made 86 million dollars of his 175-million-dollar profit from selling weapons to Rwandan authorities, admitted that the Rwandan government paid well and with cash. He then added that “lest [he] should lose [his] job, [he] would not disclose with what foreign currency [he] got paid.”18 The reader would easily surmise that it was to French currency the manufacturer was referring. Deciding to kill two birds with one stone, the French military also used Rwanda as a testing ground for new weapons and the Tutsis as guinea pigs. On top of the 20 million francs of weapons sold each year to Rwanda from the early 1990s, France also donated the Rwandan military a number of new, sophisticated military materials that needed testing, and which the 500 French paratroopers and the 150 military advisers in Kigali would personally try out on the Tutsis, on the Rwandan hilly terrain. As a French military authority confessed, “c’est vrai qu’en février 1992 on y est allé très fort. On a profité de l’occasion pour tester du matériel expérimental, des blindés légers de montagne et des hélicoptères de combat dotés d’une douzaine de roquettes de chaque côté.”19 (It is true that in February 1992 we were very hard. We use the occasion to test some experimental weapons, some light mountain tanks and some combat helicopters equipped with a dozen rockets on each side.) All this help sent to Habyarimana facilitated his regime’s programmatic elimination of the Tutsi minority. When in February 1993 the United Nations published its damaging report of crimes against humanity in Rwanda, the information hardly created a shudder in France and Belgium, the Western countries that were, in world opinion, most associated with Rwanda, and thus most attentive to what was going on there. Besides Mitterrand, Habyarimana had other powerful allies in Europe, who helped him embroider his image. King Baudoin of Belgium, the Catholic Church, and the very widely read Jeune Afrique magazine were among the supporters that helped dispel any suspicion of impropriety on the part of the Rwandan government and contributed to sanctifying the Rwandan president. In Paris, Mitterrand continued to unfold the red carpet for Habyarimana at the Élysée, and where the UN report charged Habyarimana’s regime with genocidal acts of frightening proportions, Mitterrand, in order to give himself some measure of good conscience, would only have

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this to say to his Rwandan guest: “I have heard of some exactions, of inacceptable things. I understand that your country is at war, but…”20 The successive French governments’ singular perception of the Franco–African relationships since de Gaulle betrays a certain denial, French authorities’ unacknowledged estrangement from the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity that supposedly constitute the foundation of the French nation. Like his predecessors,’ Mitterrand’s approach in Africa was in stark contradiction with his propounded values of democracy and good governance. Were it not for the butchery it enabled, the orphans it engendered, the economic and political backwardness it produced, and the ethical degeneration it created both in the French people and in the Africans, Mitterrand’s self-contradiction would be an act of buffoonery, a cause for great hilarity. French officials’ adventurous policies in Africa are too destructive for the African continent to be treated as mere comedy. France’s politics in Africa is a tragedy that must interpellate the world. While waiting for the world to wake up to Françafrique’s injustice in Africa, some nationalist leaders are taking actions against all odds. Kagamé of Rwanda is one of those audacious leaders. Eventually, when Rwandans overcame their national tragedy and undertook their painful process of reconciliation, it became clear that France had forever lost the confidence of this African nation. Mitterrand continued to show hostility to Kagamé’s government, especially as the latter had never been shy in sharing his view that France bears a direct responsibility for the genocide of the Tutsis. Kagamé had even created a special commission to collect evidence of France’s participation in the genocide, a work that a French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, had hoped to preempt by suddenly releasing his conclusion of a protracted eight-year-long investigation of the genocide. According to Judge Bruguière’s ineluctably biased and forestalling report, Kagamé was responsible for ordering the attack that brought down the plane of Habyarimana and killed the former Rwandan president, thus accelerating the genocide of the Tutsis by Habyarimana’s supporters. Bruguière’s report was in contradiction with some very credible investigation results, which established the responsibility of France in Habyarimana’s assassination. For Kagamé, Judge Bruguière’s report was nothing more than a smokescreen, though the French government vouched for Bruguière’s independence. The obvious participation of Mitterrand’s government in the Rwandan genocide and the French gesticulations to cover up their crimes in Rwanda by shifting blame on the victims finally sealed the fate of Françafrique in Rwanda. Kagamé turned his back on France and forged stronger alliances with other Western countries, especially Great Britain. Françafrique had taken an irreparable blow in Rwanda. One would think that Jacques Chirac, Mitterrand’s successor at the Élysée, would have learned from Mitterrand’s mistakes, that he would have endeavored to repair France’s image in Africa. It was not the case. The demons of greed were too wellseated in French politics to be so easily exorcised. The brightest of the French politicians were the most crooked ones, too; Chirac was to prove this proposition right.

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Instability in Africa was too powerful a stimulator of the French economy for Franco–African relations to be governed by scruples. Like his predecessor, Chirac was going to alienate other Francophone African countries from the Hexagon. In 2000, a socialist president got elected in the rich West African country of Côte d’Ivoire. Laurent Gbagbo’s appointment was the result of a gross miscalculation at the Élysée. In September 1990, France, which held the presidency of the International Monetary Fund, compelled late Ivorian president Houphouët Boigny to appoint an IMF functionary, Alassane Dramane Ouattara, as his prime minister. Côte d’Ivoire was heavily indebted to the World Bank/IMF, and, as a solution to getting the country out of debt, France insisted that Ouattara should be given carte blanche to implement the World Bank/IMF’s “curative” formula of structural adjustment. Ouattara’s three years in office proved very profitable for French businesses, albeit extremely disastrous for the ordinary people of Côte d’Ivoire. Ouattara was a personal friend of Martin Bouygues and a good student of the then godfathers of Françafrique (Bongo, Eyadéma, and Compaoré), whose counsel he had sought more than often and whose resource persons and lawyers he had also retained in many occasions.21 Under Ouattara’s precipitous and unrestrained privatization, French businessman Bouygues and his partner Bolloré, principally among French multinationals, obtained a number of important Ivorian public services (water, power, railroad, communication, and port) under their market value. They sometimes obtained these assets for a mere symbolic franc, while the Ivorian population slipped deeper into poverty, chiefly because of the economic measures that Ouattara implemented under the recommendation of the World Bank and the IMF. Ouattara alienated the rural populations by cutting government subsidies to farmers and put more families on the breadline by abruptly cutting off more than 10,000 employees from the state payroll under a government streamlining program. Ouattara reduced access to primary education by freezing the recruitment of new teachers. He undermined the quality of higher education by eliminating subsidized transportation, meals, and basic healthcare for students, and he increased child mortality and decreased life expectancy by eliminating free access to basic healthcare and preventative health through his imposition of fees on these services. Under Ouattara’s administration, French multinationals operating in Côte d’Ivoire thrived; they increased their dividends at the detriment of the Ivorian masses. Consequently, as the first president of Côte d’Ivoire was agonizing in a European hospital, Paris hoped that with Houphouët’s imminent death, Ouattara, the guarantor of France’s immoral capital accretion in Côte d’Ivoire, would be president. For Ouattara to be president in Côte d’Ivoire, however, would require a constitutional tempering that the opponents of Françafrique were not ready to accept. Article 11 of the Ivorian Constitution clearly stipulated that the president of the National Assembly would complete the mandate of the head of state in the event of vacancy of power. So, when on December 7, 1993, the ailing father of Ivorian political independence passed away, France’s attempt to impose Ouattara was strongly resisted by

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the adversaries of Françafrique, and Konan Bédié, in accordance with the constitution, became Houphouët’s successor. Once in power Bédié set about consolidating his presidency by implementing a number of populist measures that went against French interests in Côte d’Ivoire. He decided a land reform that was likely to strip French landowners of properties that they acquired in very dubious conditions. He announced an immigration policy that could redirect the huge migrant population from Mali and Burkina Faso, which had found better living conditions in Côte d’Ivoire, toward Europe, and especially toward France. Above all, Bédié’s zeal for reforms could force French businesses, used to getting every contract handed to them without contest by Ouattara, to henceforth compete against corporations from other countries. Most importantly, if left unchallenged, Bédié’s insistence that Ouattara’s Ivorian nationality was “doubtful” risked marginalizing the latter for good. Ouattara, who had attended an American university with a scholarship reserved for students of Upper Volta (today’s Burkina Faso), who had served at the BCEAO (Central Bank of West African States) as an Upper Volta representative, and who had entered the IMF as an Upper Volta citizen, was deemed not eligible by Bédié, whose electoral code reform demanded that candidates to the presidency be Ivorians, born of Ivorian parents. If left uncontested, Bédié risked disqualifying France’s chosen candidate to the Ivorian presidency and killing the only chance there was for Françafrique to carry on in Côte d’Ivoire. In December 1999, General Robert Gueï, who was army chief-of-staff during Ouattara’s administration, deposed Bédié in a coup that was widely decried as supported by France and carried out on behalf of Ouattara. Once in the presidential palace, however, Gueï refused to relinquish power to Ouattara —for he was expected to organize new elections without Bédié’s and his own participation, which would guarantee Ouattara’s victory. In his own unexpected bid for presidency, Gueï reiterated the question of Ouattara’s nationality, asking that the latter prove his Ivorian origin. Eliminated from the presidential contest, Paris’s preferred candidate watched from the sideline as Gueï and Houphouët’s longtime opponent Gbagbo, as well as a number of inconsequential candidates (Francis Wodié, Mel Théodore, and Nicholas Dioulo), vied for the October 22, 2000, presidential election. Gbagbo won with 59.36 percent of the votes despite Gueï’s attempt to manipulate the results. Gbagbo’s election announced an even more daunting future for French multinationals and for Françafrique in general. Gbagbo’s team, principally constituted of university professors, took command under the doctrine of Refondation (reconstruction), a political, economic, and social purgative project that would identify and correct the structural flaws of Ivorian society. Though Refondation was a holistic program of development, Paris construed it as an anti–French business project and set about undermining it. We shall reiterate for the readers Paris’s brutal sabotaging operation, which we have detailed elsewhere.22 In the night of September 19, 2002, about 650 rebels loyal to General Robert Gueï attacked both Bouaké and Abidjan from neighboring Burkina Faso while Gbagbo was in Rome to meet

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the Pope. Gbagbo refused a curiously precipitous French offer for political asylum in Paris, shortened his Vatican visit, and returned to his country to organize a response to the attack. The rebelsÕ operation was supposed to last five days maximum. They had hoped to seize power in a matter of minutes with shock and awe, force Gbagbo to exile, and put in place a new government…. However, they were ill armed and disorganized. Furthermore, they had misjudged the strength of mind of the Ivorian defense forces and their determination to safeguard the republican institutions embodied in the democratically elected head of state. The Ivorian National Defense Forces (FANCI) opposed a fierce and disciplined counter-offensive to the rebels. In a matter of hours, after the initial effects of surprise passed the FANCI cornered the rebels and reduced them to half. It was then that the commander of the French army in Cote d’Ivoire requested a cease-fire so that he could evacuate the French citizens and a few American nationals living in Bouaké. During the 48 hours allotted the French army, three Antonov-12 flew from Franceville (Gabon) to supply the rebels in armaments. Other planes and truck brought in weapons and mercenaries from Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the rebel force, which was previously estimated at a little over 600 troops, grew to 2500 mercenaries armed with Kalashnikovs and other weapons that had never been part of the Ivorian armory. The French army also supplied the mercenaries with sophisticated logistic and communication equipments that kept the insurgents always aware of the movements of the Ivorian defense troops. The French then retreated gradually leaving the rebels in charge with Eastern Europeans mercernaries as technical advisers. Once the rebels were well positioned, Paris then activated the international pressure machinery through the United Nations to obtain a resolution entrusting France with a peacekeeping mission in Cote d’Ivoire.23

Soon the masks fell, and the so-called impartial French peacekeepers turned into killers of bare-handed Ivorian youth protestors. As detailed by an international reporter on November 6, 2004, From our windows, we can see the protesters. It is 11:00 P.M. We can hear helicopters above the roof of our hotel. From the sky, the helicopters of the French army are shooting at the protesters. They are civilians. We can hear tracing bullets, loud grenades, and persistent machine gun blasts, causing panic in the crowd and forcing the protesters to retreat from the bridge. A few minutes later, the protesters return, but the helicopters are now positioned ahead of them and are shooting directly at the protesters again to cut their advance. Even isolated protesters are targeted. The few cars going south of the town are also shot at. As you can see the first car manages to get away, but the one following is not that lucky. The French helicopters made about thirty passages. For the four hours that the attack lasted, we did not witness a signle protester shoot back at the French helicopters. Silence returned at about 3:00 A.M.24

French soldiers massacred scores of young Ivorians without international opinion uttering a single objection. For the majority of Ivorians, it was clear that their relationship with France would never again be the same. To stress it, the Ivorian leaders lifted France’s economic preferential treatment and set about to do business with a variety of international investors (Chinese, Japanese, Canadians, South Africans, Americans, Iranians, etc.). Ivorian universities multiplied gestures of cooperation toward Anglophone institutions of higher education, and especially toward those in the United States. In August 2009, Blé Goudé, the leader of the young Ivorian patriots, realized a public relation success by getting American civil rights pioneer Reverend Jesse Jackson to come and address the Ivorian youth about struggle, freedom and hope. Following Mitterrand in Rwanda, Chirac had just lost Côte d’Ivoire. Sarkozy, his successor and new guarantor of an apparently agonizing Françafrique, had a thorny task ahead.

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As president Nicolas Sarkozy attended Papa Bongo’s funerals in Gabon, on June 16, 2009, he was far from imagining that Baby Bongo would succeed his father — although such was the plan being concocted at the Élysée. As he appeared from his stretch limousine to place a wreath of flowers on Bongo’s coffin, Sarkozy was booed by the gathered crowd at Bongo’s palace. His predecessor Chirac, who joined him, was also heckled by a crowd that chanted No to France! Sarkozy, go home! Chirac, go home! Times were changing. Françafrique was being burped out by the Gabonese people, its most faithful African constituency. Be that as it may, Sarkozy had a duty to fulfill, a tradition to uphold: Françafrique had to carry on, and he was to be its new skipper. Françafrique was equally a conservative and a socialist legacy that any French president had the duty to uphold and enhance. With Bongo’s death following the miserable performances of Mitterrand and Chirac in Africa, the task of safeguarding and increasing Françafrique’s assets appeared overwhelming to Sarkozy; this explained his nervousness and incivility toward President Gbagbo of Côte d’Ivoire when a journalist stuck a microphone under the French president’s chin and asked him what he thought of the upcoming November 2009 election in Côte d’Ivoire — an election that would in fact determine future of Françafrique in Africa. The French president totally lost his diplomatic cool — not that he had exhibited any sense of savoir-vivre since his arrival at the Élysée — and geared into attack mode. Sarkozy used the occasion to launch into a diatribe against Gbagbo, characterizing the latter’s commitment as untrustworthy. We know Sarkozy to be a usually ill-mannered person. As wrote Bruce Crumley, “even before his election as president, Sarkozy had secured a reputation as a man with a quick and nasty temper, sharp tongue, and obsession with coming out on top in verbal slap fights— particularly ones played out in public. Presidential aides regularly say that privately Sarkozy ‘has no time for diplomats, whom he considers wl — ers.’”25 Sarkozy’s vulgarity is legendary. This is the Sarkozy that once characterized Spain’s prime minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero as “not very clever,” thus prompting Ségolène Royal to write a letter of apology to the prime minister on behalf of France. This is the Sarkozy that, according to French paper Libération, had once described President Obama as “inexperienced, ill-prepared by advisers” and “not always up to standard on decision making and efficiency.” This is the Sarkozy who engaged in a locker-room name-calling contest with a French farmer that refused to shake his hand. This is the Sarkozy that called an anonymous heckler an “a-hole.” This is the Sarkozy that publicly referred to the poor immigrant populations of his country as “scum-from-the-slums to be removed with karcher.” This is the Sarkozy that showed up at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, with a speech he thought was progressive while he was only regurgitating the racist views of Gobineau and Levy-Brhul. This Sarkozy comes from a long line of French political leaders that have been reared to speak to Africans as their inferiors. This colonial small-mindedness we cannot expect to see gone overnight, and even at the dawn of the third

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millennium, the night of French racism is only at its sixth hour; French racism still has a long way to go before it gets diluted in the tides of global decency. France is after all the country where the promotion of a black journalist as news anchor is commented upon as a sensational event and where the election of a black mayor is in the order of the incredible. Sarkozy has been reared in a proud culture of bigotry — l’exception française? This, added to the personal demons he had to battle in the aftermath of Bongo’s death, made it difficult for him to be levelheaded. Sarkozy had much to be anxious about. On the day of Bongo’s funeral, Sarkozy’s usual lack of savoir vivre betrayed his deep worry for the future of Françafrique. With the deaths of Eyadéma of Togo and then Bongo, Françafrique was loosing steam in Africa. Sarkozy was elected at a time when France’s image in Africa was at its worst. Mitterrand and Chirac had left him some catastrophic diplomatic blunders to mend, and, belying his own campaign pledge, he had not been particularly successful at gaining the Africans’ trust. The disconsolate French president was in Libreville to bid farewell to the last true godfather of Françafrique, the political mafia that has kept France’s balance of payments positive for 50 years under the watch of presidents from the two main ideological leanings. Under Sarkozy’s watch, Françafrique had just lost its strongest African pillar, and the French president could not stand the name of Gbagbo, the latest debunker of Françafrique, at a moment when his mind was so preoccupied with brainstorming a possible replacement for Bongo. Gbagbo was the antithesis of Bongo. The latter had served Françafrique devotedly; the former has been an unabashed critic of Françafrique. Gbagbo’s overt denunciation of France’s genocidal politics, and his subtle but very sustained reminder to Sarkozy of his campaign promise to rethink the Franco–African relations and his sudden post-electoral lack of enthusiasm to live up to his promise to do away with the antiquated, corrupt and paternalistic politics and to institute a new, transparent, and mutually beneficial collaboration were starting to annoy Sarkozy, who viewed these comments as a lecture on sincerity; and they were. Indeed, in a campaign speech he delivered in the Beninese capital of Cotonou on May 24, 2006, then presidential candidate Sarkozy had promised to rethink the nature of Franco–African relationships, acknowledging that this relationship was outdated, because ridden with inequity, superiority and inferiority complexes, ambiguity, personalism, paternalism and condescension; these are, upon examination, only the least destructive aspects of Françafrique’s many evils, but ones that a French official could safely divulge in public. As Sarkozy declared, Il faut aujourd’hui refuser le poids des habitudes. La poursuite de relations fortes entre deux partenaires repose sur deux conditions de bases : une volonté commune et un respect mutuel…. Je crois indispensable de faire évoluer, au-delà des mots, notre relation…. Il nous faut construire une relation nouvelle, assainie, décomplexée, équilibrée, débarrassée des scories du passé et des obsolescences qui perdurent de part et d’autre de la Méditerranée…. D’abord, cette relation doit être plus transparente. Il nous faut la débarrasser des réseaux d’un autre temps, des émissaires officieux qui n’ont d’autre mandat que celui qu’ils s’inventent. Le fonctionnement normal des

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institutions politiques et diplomatiques doit prévaloir sur les circuits officieux qui ont fait tant de mal par le passé. Il faut définitivement tourner la page des complaisances, des secrets et des ambiguïtés. Il nous faut aussi ne pas nous contenter de la seule personnalisation de nos relations. Les relations entre des États modernes ne doivent pas seulement dépendre de la qualité des relations personnelles entre les chefs d’État, mais d’un dialogue franc et objectif, d’une confrontation des intérêts respectifs, du respect des engagements pris…. Nous voulons dialoguer sur un pied d’égalité, entre partenaires responsables. Notre relation doit être décomplexée, sans sentiment d’infériorité ni de supériorité, sans sentiment de culpabilité d’un côté ni soupçon d’en jouer de l’autre, sans tentation de rendre l’autre responsable de ses erreurs. A nous Français de renier tout paternalisme, d’exclure toute condescendance à l’endroit des Africains. Et surtout plus de respect.26 It is time to break with old habits. Strong relationships between two partners rest on two basic conditions: common wish and mutual respect…. I believe that it is indispensable, beyond words, to grow our relationship…. We must forge a new relationship, which is clean, complex-free, balanced, ridden of the repulsions of the past and of the obsolete ways that persist on both sides of the Mediterranean…. First, this relationship must be more transparent. We must purge it of the networks of another age, of semi-official emissaries who carry no other mandate but the ones they invent for themselves. The normal functioning of the political and diplomatic institutions must prevail over the semi-official circuits that have caused so much evil in the past. We must once and for all turn the page of partiality, of secrets and of ambiguities. We must also not satisfy ourselves with the exclusive personalization of our relationships. Relationships between modern nations should not rest solely on the quality of the personal relationships between heads of state, but on a frank and objective dialogue, on a confrontation of mutual interests, and on respecting of one’s word of honor…. We want to enter into a dialogue as responsible equal partners…. Our relationship must be complex-free, without sentiment of inferiority or superiority, without sentiment of guilt on one side or suspicion of being played on the other side, without the temptation to make the other responsible for one’s own mistakes. It is incumbent upon us, French people, to reject all forms of paternalism, to exclude all forms of condescension toward the Africans. And above all, more respect.

It would be enlightening to go over the last two sentences of this selected passage of Sarkozy’s speech. French is a “language of precision,” we have heard a thousand times from the proselytizers of Francophonie, and had the French president carefully re-read his speech, he would have realized that his true intention — not the disingenuous one he was conveying at the moment of the address, but rather the intention he wanted to conceal behind his gesture of connivance with the Beninese people — was in fact reverberating loudly. We shall take the liberty of rewriting these two sentences with their understood parallelism, and we shall submit that Sarkozy had no intention of rethinking Françafrique. What he really said in Cotonou, rewritten with the implicit parallelism — which we do not believe the French president to ignore — was the following: It is incumbent upon us, French people, to reject all forms of paternalism, to exclude all forms of condescension toward the Africans. And above all, [it is incumbent upon us French to exclude] more respect [toward the Africans]. Sarkozy had no intention of doing away with Françafrique, in spite of the fact that his speech sounded like the trial of Françafrique, with its criminal networks, its corrupt unofficial emissaries, its personalization of inter-state relations, and its denial of reciprocity. Perhaps, too, Sarkozy had actually carefully re-read his speech. Perhaps, beyond the decorum of his Cotonou campaign speech, Sarkozy was essentially reassuring French officials at home that Franco–African relations were bound to remain unchanged and that, should he be elected, business would be carried on as

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usual. Sarkozy proved it in March 2008 — as Mitterrand did in 1982 before him — when he demoted his minister of cooperation, Jean-Marie Bockel, for taking his Cotonou speech a little too seriously. Bockel was Sarkozy’s first minister of cooperation. Like Cot, Mitterrand’s unfortunate cooperation minister, Bockel was an idealist who thought that Françafrique, the 50-year-old machinery of French corruption, could be dismantled with just good will. On January 15, 2008, six months after he was appointed by Sarkozy, Bockel committed the sin of naïveté that in 1982 had cost Cot the Ministry of Cooperation. Le Président Sarkozy a tenu des propos forts, à Cotonou pendant sa campagne électorale, puis à Dakar lors de son premier déplacement sur le continent [africain]…. Il a appelé à une refondation de la relation entre l’Afrique et la France…. La rupture annoncée à Cotonou tarde à venir. Le poids des habitudes et aussi, il faut le dire, le poids des mauvaises habitudes. La préservation d’intérêts particuliers, la défense de quelques rentes de situations héritées d’un passé révolu perdurent. La Françafrique pourtant obsolète, pourtant moribonde, freine encore la refondation voulue par le président de la République.27 President Sarkozy said some strong words, in Cotonou during his campaign, then in Dakar during his first trip on the [African] continent…. He called for a restructuring of the relation between Africa and France…. The rupture announced in Cotonou is not happening because of the weight of habits, and let’s say it, of bad habits. The preservation of particular interests and the protection of some rents of situations inherited from a long-gone era persist. Françafrique, though obsolete, though moribund, still slows down the restructuring that the president wants to see.

Bockel believed that the restructuring of the Franco–African relationship of which Sarkozy spoke in his campaign address in Cotonou was still part of the French president’s agenda, an agenda which, he understood, was bogged down by reactionary forces that his authority as minister in charge of defining the orientation of development aid gave him the power to tame in the pursuit of a more equitable globalization. For Bockel, France’s cooperation with Africa needed to reflect the true values of France, which were forgotten by greedy profiteers engaged in lucrative but illegal dealings with African dictators. Bockel was convinced that France’s distribution of aid in the Third World should be subordinated to democratic principles both in France and in the aid-recipient countries. Traditionally, this had not been the case, and the fact that over the decades, some French officials had personalized their relationships with some African dictators, whom they propped up with tax payers’ money, reflected a crisis of morality in French political life. French politicians and businessmen had colluded with African dictators to pillage Africa’s resources to the disadvantage of ordinary Africans. Bockel called attention to the irony of plenty in Africa, whereby the countries of the continent that are geologically more endowed are also the most conflict- and poverty-ridden countries. The cooperation minister thus unequivocally suggested that the origin of this paradox of plenty lay greatly in French politicians’ unwillingness to do the right thing. Quand le baril est à plus de 100 dollars, et que d’importants pays producteurs de pétrole ne parviennent pas à se développer, la gouvernance est en question. Quand les indicateurs sociaux de ces pays stagnent ou régressent tandis qu’une minorité mène un train de vie luxueux, la gouvernance est en question. Que deviennent ces revenus pétroliers? Pourquoi la population n’en bénéficie-t-

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elle pas? Est-il légitime que notre aide au développement soit attribuée à des pays qui gaspillent leurs propres resources? 28 When the barrel rises to more than 100 dollars and some major oil-producing countries cannot develop, governance is at issue. When the social indices of these countries are stagnant or in regression while a minority lives in luxury, governance is at issue. Where do these oil revenues go? Why does the population not benefit? Is it legitimate that our aid to development be given to countries that waste their own resources?

Bockel estimated that for things to change in Africa, France would need to recognize that the African leaders’ bad governance, predatory practices, and waste of public funds, which slowed down development, were enabled by the cupidity of French politicians and businessmen. So, before lecturing Africans on good governance, he suggested that the greedy French profiteers should start by cleaning their own house. Pour pouvoir demander à l’Afrique une meilleure gouvernance, nous devons être nous-mêmes irréprochables. Ce n’est pas le cas. Je veux balayer devant notre porte, assainir la relation entre la France et l’Afrique. Je veux que cessent les interférences de ceux que le président Sarkozy a qualifié, à Cotonou, “d’émissaires officieux qui n’ont d’autres mandat que celui qu’ils s’inventent.” C’est une nécessité pour pouvoir tenir un discours exigeant aux Africains.29 To be able to demand better governance from Africa, we must be irreproachable; which is not the case. I want to clean our front yard; I want to clean the relationship between France and Africa. I want to stop the interferences of those people that President Sarkozy, in Cotonou, characterized as “semi-official emissaries who carry no other mandate but the ones they invent for themselves.” It is a necessity for holding a consistent discourse with the Africans.

Cleaning France’s front yard implied restoring ethics in French politics; it implied getting rid of the criminal machinery of Françafrique. This is why Bockel declared boldly to his collaborators and to the reporters present that “aujourd’hui, devant vous, je veux signer l’acte de décès de la Françafrique. Je veux tourner la page de pratiques d’un autre temps, d’un mode de relation ambigu et complaisant, dont certains, ici comme là-bas, tirent avantage au détriment de l’intérêt général et du développement.”30 (Today, before you, I will sign the death certificate of Françafrique. I will turn the page on practices of another age, on an ambiguous and indulgent mode of relations, of which some people, here as well as there, take advantage to the detriment of the general interest and of development.) The reaction to Bockel’s speech did not take long to arrive. Estimating that he was one of these dictators that Bockel alluded to, Bongo took umbrage and had his government issue a strong riposte to Bockel’s announcement in which one could read: [Le gouvernement gabonais] s’étonne de cette attitude … inacceptable quand on sait les avantages que tirent la France et les autres États occidentaux de leurs rapports économiques avec notre pays…. Si la France estime que l’Afrique lui coûte cher, il lui revient souverainement d’en tirer les conclusions sans être obligée de se justifier de façon aussi péremptoire. Car l’Afrique saura trouver assurément des partenaires plus respectueux de la dignité de ses peuples et de la souveraineté de ses États. The Gabonese government is surprised at this attitude … unacceptable when one knows the benefits that France and the other Western countries draw from their economic relationship with our country…. If France estimates that Africa is a burden, it is France’s sovereign right to draw this conclusion without feeling obliged to justify itself in such a discourteous way.

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Africa can certainly find partners that are more considerate of the dignity of its people and the independence of its states.

In an apparent reversal of ethical values the dictator of Libreville viewed Françafrique’s exploitative system as respectful of the African people’s dignity and sovereignty, whereas he understood Bockel’s call for good governance as offensive. Sarkozy might have agreed with Bongo. For when, as reported Le Monde on January 20, 2008, dictators Bongo of Gabon, Paul Biya of Cameroon and Nguesso of CongoBrazzaville called Sarkozy to collectively protest against Bockel’s New Year’s address, the French president saved face by reassigning his cooperation minister to Veteran Affairs in a move that was characterized as technical reshuffling on March 19, 2008. Françafrique is certainly losing ground, but it is still far from being dead. There remains an old guard as well as a new breed of African dictators who know that they owe the longevity of their autocratic regimes to Françafrique, and who are more than disposed to carry on Houphouët, Eyadéma and Bongo’s legacy. As notes Diop, “let us not forget the new friends [Sarkozy] will soon make: it is said that current young presidents and freshly designated heirs still in political infancy are bumping into each other at the gates.” With Bongo’s death, observers are unanimous that his fatherin-law Denis Sassou Nguesso, the dictator of Brazzaville, will step into his shoes as Françafrique’s new godfather. This will be both a way for Nguesso to pay his debt to the criminal organization that has helped him recapture his lost presidency and an insurance to carry on his ruthless regime, perhaps for another decade.

A New Capo for Françafrique In 1997, General Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville decided to make a comeback. He had ruled Congo-Brazzaville with the heavy fist of a dictator from 1979 to 1992. He was among a group of young revolutionaries that toppled the father of Congo-Brazzaville’s independence, Abbot Fulbert Youlou, eliminated the multiparty system in the country, and instituted a one-party socialist regime in August 1963, which was led by Alphonse Massemba-Débat. Five years later, Nguesso was once again among a group of renegades that ousted Massemba-Débat and replaced him with a young officer by the name of Marien Ngouabi. Under Ngouabi’s regime, Congo-Brazzaville had a Marxist-Leninist inclination. Despite their Marxist-Leninist leaning, the new leaders of Congo-Brazzaville remained under the strong control and tutelage of the very capitalist politico-militaro-financial French oil company Elf 31; that is until president Marien Ngouabi made two momentous mistakes: He attempted a rapprochement with his predecessor, and he disagreed with Elf ’s executives, whom he accused of bad faith in the execution of the oil exploitation contract the company signed with his government. In October 1976, without consulting Elf, Ngouabi raised oil taxes.32 In March 1977 Ngouabi was murdered by Sassou Nguesso, chief of the security services.33 Nguesso then promoted Jacques Yhombi

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Opango as president of Congo-Brazzaville for a short time, before jailing the latter in his own aspiration to the presidency. So, from 1979 to 1992, Nguesso ruled CongoBrazzaville in the perfect tradition of African dictators, as head of the unique political party, the Congolese Labor Party (PCT), and in excellent tandem with Elf. However, the very fleeting wave of multi-partism that swept Africa in the 1990s did not go past Congo-Brazzaville, and under multi-party system elections, the southerner Pascal Lissouba defeated Nguesso. The people of Congo-Brazzaville disavowed Nguesso in a 1992 election for his reign, riddled with murders, corruption and spoliation of public resources. An investigative commission would later impute Nguesso with hundreds of thousands of murders. During his 13-year dictatorship, Nguesso secured for himself a comfortable retirement package estimated at 1.2 billion francs, while the Congolese life expectancy was merely 51 years and only 50 percent of Congolese children were vaccinated against tuberculosis and 42 percent were protected against measles. Compared with Nguesso, whose dictatorship they had already experienced, Lissouba, the unknown newcomer from the World Bank, was to the Congolese people the lesser of two evils. So the Congolese overwhelmingly elected Lissouba, leaving Nguesso to ruminate on his revenge. Nevertheless, the years spent at the World Bank had taught Lissouba one of the prized values of this financial institution: maximum accumulation of profit; soon, Lissouba, too, entered Elf ’s bribery game, perhaps to reconstitute the state’s finances left broken by Nguesso, but most certainly to ensure for himself a huge fortune in the likeness of the leader that had preceded him. In collaboration with Elf ’s officials, Lissouba created a ghost financial company, the Congolese Financial Company (SFC), so reminiscent of the IFC of whose dealings he had been so much acquainted during the years he spent at the World Bank. Officially, Lissouba’s SFC was a bank for loaning money to small and medium-size companies. In reality, as an audit by Ernst and Young helped expose, the SFC was a private bank whose funds were utilized to pay for the services of French consultants working for Lissouba or to reward Lissouba’s friends in the French political circle.34 Furthermore, several loans accorded to Lissouba’s government by some international banks ended up in his private bank accounts or were used to support the political campaigns of French politicians from whom the Congolese president expected some favors. At home, Lissouba constituted himself a personal militia (the Ninjas) and started a hunt for his opponents while trying to squeeze Elf for a bigger share of the oil exploitation than had been hitherto accorded to the Congolese government by the French company. Under Nguesso’s dictatorship, only 17 percent of the Congolese oil production revenue was allotted to the state of Congo-Brazzaville by Elf; this arrangement was done with the understanding that Nguesso would rip huge personal kickbacks from the oil company, for the smaller was the state’s share the larger the president’s personal commission was to be. For Nguesso, it mattered little that the people of Congo-Brazzaville were crouching under the weight of poverty. What mattered was his and his family and close collaborators’ own well-being. So Nguesso will-

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ingly took part in Elf ’s economy of genocide in Congo-Brazzaville, living in insolent comfort amidst an ocean of desolation and famine. Nguesso was Elf ’s main man in the Congo. Lissouba was the man of the new circumstance. With Nguesso Elf exploited the Congo on the cheap. Elf ’s collaboration with Lissouba was starting to prove costly. Lissouba was willing to partake in Elf ’s game of corruption, but at too high a price, in the estimation of Elf ’s executives. Le président Lissouba a fini par obliger les compagnies pétrolières à quasi doubler la part du Congo dans les revenus de l’or noir, de 17 à 33%. Il veut aussi accroître la responsabilité du pouvoir congolais dans la gestion du pactole, par un accord de partage de production (un “partenariat”) plutôt que d’en rester au système de concession…. Selon Bernard Kolelas, [Sassou] a promis à Elf et à ses consœurs, dont l’Américaine Chevron, d’en revenir aux 17% et de laisser tomber le partenariat.35 President Lissouba succeeded in forcing the oil companies to almost double Congo’s share in the oil-generated revenues, from 17% to 33%. He also wants to increase the responsibility of the Congolese government in managing the oil revenue, through a production-sharing agreement (a “partnership”) rather than continuing the system of concession…. According to Bernard Kolelas, [Sassou] promised Elf and its sister-companies, including American Chevron, to come back to the 17% and do away with the partnership.

So, under Lissouba’s presidency, in the context of smaller profit margins than were hitherto allowed Elf, among other businesses, the executives of Elf, in perfect collusion with French political authorities, consented to helping Nguesso recover his presidential seat. In 1995, the Caisse française de développement (the French development fund) loaned 440 million dollars to Elf-Congo, much of which was diverted to supporting Nguesso’s comeback plans. In retribution, Nguesso had to forgive Elf ’s officials their tactlessness, including their financial support, albeit niggardly, of Lissouba. After all, as Elf ’s officials like to put it in private, “we are not sentimentalists. Our goal is to make money and it matters little with whom we make it.”36 In other words, it matters little how Elf makes money, as long as the company makes money. A successful return of the former dictator, who had promised Elf that he would resume the politics of economic genocide that prevailed during his first reign, spelled for Elf and for France enormous profits. During his 13-year dictatorship, General Nguesso had developed close ties with his militaries, many of whom he reorganized into a private army called the Cobras. On June 5, 1997, President Lissouba, who was well aware of Nguesso’s insurrectional intents, decided to move swiftly and arrest him. Lissouba’s haste fell within the strategies of Nguesso, who seized the opportunity to launch his loyal Cobras against the governmental forces. A bloody civil war erupted, which Nguesso, with the official unction of the French government and Elf, was poised to win. With the muscled and brutal help of Angolan troops in October 1997, Lissouba was theoretically defeated, and Nguesso took power. Nevertheless, the war did not end with Lissouba’s flight. Lissouba’s partisans kept resisting Nguesso’s coalition. The rallying to Nguesso’s militia was immediate. Nguesso was aided in his bloody bid to a second presidency by Central African, Sudanese, Beninese, Malian, Moroccan, and especially Angolan troops. From the compound of the French embassy in

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Brazzaville, contingents of white mercenaries were convoyed to help Nguesso’s Cobras. Aboard vehicles delivered by France, Nguesso’s heteroclite army raided the southern regions of the country, where much of Lissouba’s support was concentrated, systematically killing indiscriminately and burning. Elf executives, from the comfort of their European offices, continually sent Nguesso war materials and strategies as well as lists of inconvenient people to eliminate, as evidenced by this chilling memo seized during their investigation of the Elf scandal by Judges Joly and Vichnievsky from the safe of Colonel Jean-Pierre Daniel, chief of security at Elf: 23 avril 1991. Compte-rendu entrevue avec M. Tarallo … B. vient de voir Sassou et lui a proposé d’exécuter les opposants qui lui seraient désignés. Sassou vient de recevoir les pièces des blindés achetés par l’intermédiaire de M’Baye [directeur du renseignement gabonais]. Transport aérien de Genève à LBV [Libreville, Gabon], puis de LBV-Brazza.37 April 23, 1991. Minutes of meeting with Mr. Tarallo … B. has just met with Sassou [Nguesso] and wants him to execute some opponents whose names will be communicated to him. Sassou has just received the tank parts purchased through M’Baye [Gabon’s top intelligence officer]. Air transportation from Geneva to LBV [Libreville, Gabon], then from LBV-Brazza.

Tarallo was very close to Charles Pasqua, a former member of the National Assembly, collaborator and interior minister of Chirac in his years as prime minister. Tarallo was also very close to Chirac, leaving no doubt that he was acting on behalf of the French government. French political officials supported and oversaw Nguesso’s massacres of his own people, as evidenced by this account by Christine Deviers-Joncour, the girlfriend of Roland Dumas (Mitterrand’s minister of foreign affairs). One day, as Deviers-Joncour walked into Elf ’s top executive Alfred Sirven’s office, she was taken aback to hear Sirven order political assassinations and military takeovers in Congo-Brazzaville as casually as one would order a pizza for delivery over the phone. “Il faut garder les réserves, surprendre à tel endroit, attaquer à tel autre.” Je me suis aussitôt précipitée au Quai d’Orsay et j’ai mis Roland en garde : “Fred est en train de monter un coup d’état au Congo”…. Mais Roland a pris cela à la rigolade : Ne t’en occupe pas, m’a-t-il dit. J’ai alors compris qu’il était parfaitement au courant et que Sirven agissait avec son plein accord, si ce n’est à son initiative…. Roland Dumas nous l’a confirmé en tout point: “C’est vrai que Christine est venue me raconter cela et que je lui ai dit de ne pas s’en occuper. C’était Omar Bongo qui voulait écarter Lissouba pour remettre son beau-père Sassou-Nguesso en selle. Vous vous souvenez? Les armes transitaient par le Gabon.”38 “We must keep some reserves, surprise here, and attack there.” I immediately ran to the Quai d’Orsay and warned Roland: “Fred is preparing a coup d’état in Congo….” But Roland laughed it off: Don’t worry, he told me. I then understood that he was perfectly aware of what was going on, and that Sirven was acting with his approval, if not on his orders…. Roland Dumas confirmed all this to us. “It is true that Christine came and told me that and I advised her not to worry about it. It was Omar Bongo trying to get rid of Lissouba to put his fatherin-law back on the throne. Do you remember? The arms went Congo-Brazzaville through Gabon.”39

In case of the slightest doubt in the reader’s mind as to France’s support and involvement in the massacres that took place during Nguesso’s so-called pacifying operations in Congo-Brazzaville, here is what French president Chirac himself had to say about it:

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Je me suis réjoui de l’intervention de l’Angola au Congo-Brazzaville, pour la raison simple que ce pays était en train de s’effondrer dans la guerre civile, de s’autodétruire, et qu’il était souhaitable que l’ordre revienne. Il y avait quelqu’un qui était capable de le faire revenir, c’était Denis Sassou Nguesso. Il lui fallait un soutien extérieur pour un certain nombre de raisons, l’Angola le lui a apporté, la paix est revenue, les conditions de développement reprennent. Cette ville de Brazza qui était devenue martyre commence à se relever et Denis Sassou Nguesso s’est engagé à mettre en œuvre le processus de démocratisation dans un délai maximum de 2 ans.40 I was delighted about Angola’s intervention in Congo-Brazzaville, for the simple reason that this country was being destroyed by a civil war, and it was good that order be brought back. There was someone able to bring order back; it was Denis Sassou Nguesso. He needed external support for a number of reasons, Angola offered it to him; peace is restored; the conditions of development start again. This city of Brazza that was a martyr is living again, and Denis Sassou Nguesso has promised to start the process of democratization within 2 years.

Of course, Chirac’s selective memory omits to mention that on June 3, 1997, two days before the civil war that was imputed to Lissouba, under the French president’s own supervision, 25 tons of military materials left the Bourget for Congo-Brazzaville, weapons especially intended for Nguesso via Gabon. Nguesso did, indeed, receive his external help, as even today, besides the fact that France’s complicity is established, questions remain as to the participation of the United Nations in Nguesso’s barbaric coalition against southerners, principal supporters of Lissouba. Mi-juin [1999], les hélicoptères de combat du camp gouvernemental bombardent les populations de villes de Makabana, Sibiti, et de quelques villages environnants. Ce bombardement a été précédé par le survol d’avions peints aux couleurs de la Croix-Rouge et de l’ONU/PAM (Programme alimentaire mondial). S’attendant à recevoir de l’aide alimentaire, les habitants affamés sont sortis de la forêt et ont subi l’attaque à découvert. Les avions précurseurs ont-ils été “empruntés,” maquillés, détournés de leur objet? Et cet hélicoptère blanc siglé Elf qui aurait carrément bombardé deux villages début juin ? Ou ces deux hélicoptères bleus de “de la société Elf ” avec des sigles ONU/PAM sur la partie ventral, qui, selon les partisans de Lissouba, aurait attaqué Sibiti le 1er juillet 1999, envoyé une douzaine de missiles sur l’église protestante d’Indo et mitraillé des enfants? 41 Mid-June [1999], government combat helicopters are bombarding the cities of Makabana, Sibiti, and a few neighboring villages. This bombardment was preceded by airplanes painted in the colors of the Red Cross and the UNO/WFP (World Food Program). Hoping to receive some food supply, the hungry people came out of the forest and were attacked in the open. Were the precursory planes “borrowed,” repainted, diverted from their real objective? And what about this white helicopter with Elf ’s acronym that allegedly openly bombarded two villages in early June? Or these two blue helicopters of “Elf Company” with UNO/WFP acronyms on their bellies that, according to Lissouba’s supporters, attacked Sibiti on July 1, 1999, sending a dozen missiles on the Protestant church of Indo and bombarding children?

Apparently, Nguesso has benefited from a larger coalition than it would be proper to admit. As to the two-year democratization process that, in praise of Nguesso, Chirac announced, we shall note that Nguesso II has been in power in Congo-Brazzaville since 1997, and it is not democratically that his reign has lasted this long. Nguesso II’s administration of the Congo has been even more disastrous than the maladministration of Nguesso I. As if time were running out on him, Nguesso has decided to pump the country’s finances dry. This time, everyone in the Nguesso family went into business. Mrs. Nguesso Antoinette was into the national lottery. Nephew Willy Nguesso commanded 40 percent of Congo-Brazzaville’s maritime traffic, generating

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about 100,000 dollars per day. Nephew Edgar Nguesso was godfather of duty-free boutiques at Pointe Noire, Brazzaville, and the beach, in addition to being the administrator of the presidential domain. Not only was the money generated by these family businesses sent abroad in foreign banks, but so, too, was the money generated by the country’s natural resources. And when nothing was left in Congo-Brazzaville to pay the Congolese workers’ salaries, Nguesso decided to print counterfeit money. Durant l’été 1998, une officine bordelaise de fabrication de faux billets CFA a été démantelée par la police judiciaire. 200 milliards de faux CFA auraient été commandés pour le Congo-Brazzaville. Dans le port de Matadi au Congo-Kinshasa, un conteneur venu de France et à destination de Brazzaville a été saisi par les forces de sécurité. A l’intérieur, des monceaux de faux CFA. Selon l’opposition, ce trafic serait organisé avec l’aval du régime, et servirait à payer les fonctionnaires. On serait plus dubitatif si on ne savait que le faux monnayage a droit de cité en Françafrique, grâce notamment aux régimes “frères” du Tchadien Idriss Deby et de feu le Nigérien Baré Maïnassara.42 During the summer of 1998, a counterfeit CFA banknotes factory in Bordeaux was dismantled by the police. Two hundred billion of fake CFA francs were allegedly ordered for Congo-Brazzaville. In the port of Matadi in Congo-Kinshasa, a container coming from France and en route to Brazzaville was seized by the security forces. Inside it were piles of counterfeit CFA. According to the opposition, this traffic is organized with the approval of the government, and the money is used to pay the civil servants. One would be more skeptical if one did not know that the manufacturing of counterfeit money was a common occurrence in Françafrique, thanks notably to the “brotherly” regimes of Chadian Idriss Deby and Baré Maïnassara from Niger.

Dictators like Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville, Biya of Cameroon, Deby of Chad or Compaoré of Burkina Faso have gone too far with Françafrique to back up. Their hands are too heavily soiled and their consciences haunted by too many crimes for them to give up power and risk inquiries that will indubitably end with indictments. They are convinced that their only safety net is to die in the palace; a prospect that only the crooked politics of Françafrique can guarantee them. On the other hand, given France’s growing loss of esteem in Africa, the support for Françafrique stretching very thin among a better educated African mass, and the new globalization that spells Americanization for everyone, nostalgic France is bound to cling tightly to the last of the African dictators. Françafrique may still have a few more years before it, but not many. The tragedy is that in the last shudders of Françafrique, men, women and children will be frenziedly murdered, resources will be frantically wasted, poverty will grow, and Africa’s development will be held back another century. In the last shudders of Françafrique, the most nostalgic nation of all is bound to look elsewhere for new native informants, new methods for recruiting them. The financial institutions of world capitalism, notably the World Bank and the IMF, will be the places to grow Africa’s new native informants from a tender age and instill in them the poison of greed, predation and betrayal.

5

Capitalism and Neurosis If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury. Exodus XXII: 25 O ye who believe! Fear God, and give up what remains of your demand for usury, if ye are indeed believers. Al-Baqarah 2: 278

If the question of the partiality of the God of the Old Testament were a riddle, a puzzle to the mind, an inexplicable incongruity, then one could fairly say that Nietzsche, in the following lines, had already solved that riddle by giving an explanation of God’s startling support of the abusive commercial method of usury. [A] body within which … particular individuals treat each other as equal … if this body is living and not dying, it will have to treat other bodies in just those ways that the individuals it contains refrain from treating each other. It will have to be the embodiment of will to power. It will want to grow, spread, grab, win dominance, — not out of any morality or immorality, but because it is alive, and because life is precisely will to power…. “Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect, primitive society … it belongs to the essence of being alive as a fundamental organic function.1

Being primarily the God of the people of Israel before being the God of all people, it is not surprising that the God of the old covenant, who is omnipotent and foresees all events to come, and who has, in all common sense, not only prophesied but also written into life form the age of capitalism, should educate his people about capitalism’s fundamental law — exploitation of the alien — and warn them about the perils of self-exploitation. If then the essential process of life is “appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting,”2 it would seem inconsistent for Paul the Apostle, in his letter to the Ephesians, to hold the world of the old covenant as a world of immoral living, and to consequently reify Christianity as the locus of Jews’ salvation from a life of sins and disobedience of God. And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience … and were by nature the children of

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wrath, even as others. But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.3

It would seem, indeed, incoherent that in his letter to the Ephesians Saint Paul ask his fellow men to leave the world of the Old Testament and to embrace Christ’s covenant, which, by virtue of its principle of the unity of mankind, explicitly scorns exploitation of the other in the quest for profit. Yet, thinking things through thoroughly, nothing is really contradictory here. Saint Paul’s letter does not address itself to the question of the morality or immorality of usury as such, but rather to that of the common evil of humanity before conversion to Christianity, since, as Reverend John Wesley notes, the Ephesians were both Jews and Gentiles converted to Christianity.4 Paul the Apostle’s letter, thus, does not say that everything that was undertaken under the old covenant was sinful. Consequently, at least, some of the old Jewish habitus would be carried over into Christianity, as the new faith is, after all, the New Testament that “[got] pasted together with the Old Testament to make a single book, a ‘Bible,’ a book ‘in itself.’”5 The language of the New Testament, however, differs from the language of the Old Testament in that it is an appeal that addresses itself to Jews, Gentiles, and others. It is a language of universal brotherhood, a language of universality as opposed to the language of the Old Testament, which is one of partiality. Jews’ conversion to Christianity did not signify total desertion of Jewish habitus. Jewish mores were carried over and cross-fertilized with Christian customs. One of these Jewish mores, according to Marx, is usury, which helped put in place the infrastructure of modern capitalism. Modernity, with its economic form known as capitalism, it thus follows, is the result of a happy merger: the Jews’ flight from partiality to universality and the Christians’ dilution of universal brotherhood. In other words, and to speak like the Marx of “On the Jewish Question,”6 capitalism, the birth child of Judeo-Christian compromise, came to being when Christian universality and Judaic partiality merged into a larger partiality, when flight from Judaic partiality and quest for Christian universality only repeated the alienation of the subject, this time, by a partial entity pompously called modernity or capitalism. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice7 allegorizes in compelling form the creation of capitalism as we know it today. With Shakespeare, capitalism figures as a compromise between Judaism and Christianity. In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio, a rich Venetian merchant, is solicited by his dearest friend, Bassanio, who needs some money to go and court the rich and beautiful Portia. However, much of Antonio’s money is at sea, invested in his ships. So Antonio turns to someone he loathes on account of his unchristian faith and his repulsive commercial practices, Shylock the Jewish usurer. Shylock seizes this occasion to remind Antonio of all the humiliation the latter has put him through, to taunt Antonio, on this occasion, and to scheme the perfect revenge against this hater of Jews.

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Signor Antonio, many a time and oft In the Rialto, you have rated me About my money and my usances; Still I have borne it with a patient shrug, For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe. You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gabardine, All and for use of that which is mine own. Well then, it now appears you need my help You that did void your rheum upon my beard And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over your threshold Forget the stains that you have sham’d me with, Supply your present wants and take no doit Of usance for my moneys and you’ll not hear me.8

Shylock agrees to loan Antonio the money on the condition that he should take one pound of Antonio’s flesh in the event the debt is not settled by the due date. Antonio agrees to the terms of this rather bizarre contract, convinced that his ships would return on time with dividends and that he would be able to settle his debt with Shylock. Bassanio gets the capital he needs thanks to this strange bond and goes on to conquer rich Portia’s heart. Unfortunately for Antonio, all his ships are lost at sea, the deadline expires, and Shylock comes to him claiming his due, which, as stipulated in the loan agreement, is one pound of Antonio’s flesh to be taken from the breast area. Learning of his friend and benefactor’s misfortune, Bassanio rushes to his rescue with a coffer full of gold twice the amount due to Shylock; but Shylock wants none of this money. What he really wants is to humiliate Antonio. He insists on having one pound of Antonio’s flesh as specified in the contract. However, unbeknownst to Bassanio, his new bride Portia had come under the disguise of a doctor of law to confound Shylock. The situation is reversed when under Portia’s skillful intervention Shylock is found guilty of breaking the law of Venice and thus ordered by the highest magistrate of the city to surrender half of his fortune to Antonio, the other half to the State’s coffer and his life to the town magistrate. To demonstrate the grandeur of Christian ethics as opposed to Jewish morals, the magistrate pardons Shylock’s life and leaves it to Antonio to decide what he wants to do with his half of Shylock’s fortune. So, in what is to be understood as a Christian compassionate gesture, as opposed to Shylock’s Jewish rancorous attitude, Antonio decides to use his half of Shylock’s fortune not as confiscated property, but as a loan to be repaid with interest to the Christian young man who had taken away Shylock’s daughter as bride, thus guaranteeing a dowry to the daughter that Shylock had disowned as a punishment for running away with a Christian. So please my lord the duke and all the court To quit the fine of one half of his goods; I am content so he will let me have

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Globalization and the Seduction of Africa’s Ruling Class The other half in use, to render it Relinquish Upon his death unto the gentleman That lately stole his daughter — Two things provided more: that, for this favor, He presently become a Christian.9

Nevertheless, in so doing, Antonio alienates his own Christian faith, as he finally accepts the practice of borrowing with interest. Likewise, Shylock alienates his Jewish faith as he consents to becoming a Christian. This moment, the birth of capitalism, is for all parties alienating. It would be misleading, however, to broadly speak of capitalism as alienating. For Europe, capitalism was alienating only insofar as it demanded of its protagonists a certain reformulation of original faith. Judaism and Christianity had to give something up, respectively, exclusive partiality and inclusive neutrality, in order to merge into a new faith, that is, Judeo-Christian faith. Here stops the alienation for Europe, which is one of spirituality only. In all other aspects, as far as Europe is concerned, this was no alienation at all, but opportunity for enrichment and growth. The essential principle of capitalism, which is trade, but most importantly trade with preponderant benefits through usury, was retained and applied throughout all stages of the old globalizing enterprises from the transatlantic slave trade to colonialism and now to the “new globalization.” The real subject of the alienation that resulted from this merger of Judeo-Christian faiths was not Europe but the Third World in general and Africa in particular. In the oldest systems of globalization, as has been argued elsewhere, Africans figured marginally as providers of labor and raw materials. Their roles were meant to economically enhance the metropolitan powers.10

Allegories of Salvation: From Christ to the World Bank The new globalization that came of age with the end of the Cold War and the rapid progress in technology still presents very gloomy prospects for the Third World and for Africa particularly. As notes George Klay Kieh, Jr., [T]he “new globalization” has set into motion the second phase of neo-colonial domination, plunder, pillage and exploitation of Africa. Given its unbridled hegemony, the “new globalization” is rendering African states incapable of designing and implementing their own independent national development agendas, and controlling the various transactions— economics, etc.— that are taking place within their respective territories.11

This new form of globalization is being spearheaded by the Bretton Woods institutions embodied in the World Bank and the IMF. The two-headed monster stretching several city blocks in Washington, D.C., and whose tentacles reach every corner of the world, this progeny of unrestrained capitalism pompously called globalization, is today repeating the fundamental gesture of the mutant that birthed it, that

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is, the gesture of usury; perhaps because, as Nietzsche has insisted, partiality is in fact the truest affirmation of human nature, which a spirit of phony liberalism and guilt has tried to water down, only to reaffirm it, this time, in a more cowardly way. “[These] days, people everywhere are lost in rapturous enthusiasms, even in scientific disguise, about a future state of society where ‘the exploitative character will fall away … [exploitation] is the primal fact of all history. Let us be honest with ourselves to this extent at least!”12 To be at least honest with ourselves also supposes that we face Marx’s inquiry in “On the Jewish Question,” and especially that we face his conclusion with great scholarly quietude. This, however, is easier said than done, for, to take up any issue from a Marxist point of view, today, especially from the point of view of Marxist theorization of Jewish emancipation, demands of any critic a high level of temerity. The fact that every little writing of Marx and every single one of his relations have been looked through and poked at by critics too eager to demonstrate Marx’s alleged anti–Semitism, and thus self-hatred, has not escaped some scholars’ attention.13 This passionate condemnation of Marx has not always been propitious to advancing the scholarly debate, as it has often obfuscated the relevance of Marx’s thoughts, especially with the failure of the implementation, in the twentieth century, of Marxist ideologies. Perhaps it is also opportune, with the proven disappointment of aggressive capitalism today, to rehabilitate Marx, or at least to engage again with some of the issues that he raised. This, however, like the question of Marx’s anti–Semitism, is not what is at issue here. What is of concern to us at this time is to see how Marx’s view that Jewish bias was a vehicle for proto-capitalism and that modern capitalism was the synthesis of Jewish preferential treatment and Christian so-called neutrality, resulting in a partial universality, will inspire a critique of post-capitalism or globalization as rendered possible by the World Bank/IMF’s politics of fractional neutrality. This is precisely where we shall refuse to throw away the baby with the bathwater.14 Notwithstanding the refusal here to get into the debate of whether or not Marx was an anti–Semite, it is undeniable that Marx is relevant for a discussion that, far from being either a thesis on the Jew or on Judaism or a treatise on the Christian or on Christianity, is rather an attempt to understand the spirit of the World Bank/IMF insofar as this institution has introduced itself to the world, and to the Third World precisely, as the Big Other, the yardstick of salvation. Here lies the analogy between Paul the Apostle’s reification of Christianity as the locus of dis-alienation of the Jew and the World Bank’s pledge of emancipating the Third World. Both promises are couched, one might appropriately argue, in the principle of universal brotherhood, a brotherhood that in due course fails to come to fulfillment. Hoping for universal redemption, the Jew has fallen alongside a Judeo-Christian ethics of partiality. Hoping for universal brotherhood, the Thirdworldists have fallen compulsively alongside a post-capitalist principle of partiality, alienated as they are, as consumers of their own goods manufactured in Occidental factories, and victims of Western usurers.

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Marx’s metaphor becomes a very practical one when the question of the proclaimed neutrality of financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF is at issue. For, in what is the World Bank/IMF worldly? Where does its worldliness lie? If not only in the brazen fact that in the dialectic of the part and the whole, the economic interests of the part have overtaken those of the whole, and that the whole has henceforth become a part of the part and not the other way round? From this ethical perspective, favoritism has been elevated to the order of neutrality, which, in a Marxist logic, could be explicated as the synthesis of a confrontation between Judaic and Christian ethics of salvation. “Judaism and Christianity,” writes Mészáros, “are complementary aspects of society’s efforts to cope with internal contradictions [of capitalism]. They both represent attempts at an imaginary transcendence of these contradictions, at an illusory ‘reappropriation’ of the ‘human essence’ through a fictitious supersession of the state of alienation.”15 The identity of the Jew as partiality and that of the Christian as universality shall only serve here — in order to avoid all bigoted, and especially anti–Semitic recuperation — as metaphors borrowed from Marx’s understanding that “for an early realization of [capitalism], Judaism as an empirical reality only provided a suitable vehicle.”16 What then is the partiality of Judaism and the universality of Christianity; how is one to explain the spirit of Judaism without inviting all sorts of scapegoating? For, indeed, there has been much scapegoatism, and for centuries. Within the Christian community of the fifteenth century, for instance, the feud between Catholics and Protestants had to subside in order for a “greater evil” to be expurgated, that of the infidel Jewish neighbors who do not believe in the divinity of Christ. The most violent expression of Christian anti–Semitism, according to Theodore Hamerow, was stated by Luther in his 1543 denunciation, On the Jews and Their Lies. As writes Hamerow, after “describing the theological errors and distortions the Jews were guilty of, [Luther] went on to complain that ‘they let us work in the sweat of our brow to earn money and property while they sit behind the stove, idle away the time, fart and roast pears. They stuff themselves, guzzle, and live in luxury and ease from our hard-earned goods. With their accursed usury they hold us and our property captive.’”17 One could swear, Hamerow remarks, to be listening to Joseph Goebbels or Julius Streicher. The anti–Semitic discourse went so far as to see in the Jew an innate predisposition to usury. For Christian scholar Wilhelm von Dohm, it is the natural proclivity of the Jews for exploitation that brought them so much hostility from the world.18 Even the celebrated French philosopher Voltaire would not be left out of the anti–Jewish frenzy. For him, Jewish belief was the infamy to be crushed: “Écrasez l’infâme!” 19 One would be hard pressed, however, remarks Hamerow, to find in Marx’s writings this kind of essentializing of the Jew as evil. “Marx did not condemn the Jews collectively as a distinct religious or ethnic community. What he criticized was the ‘spirit of Judaism,’ which, while common among Jews, was also gaining many adherents among Christians.”20 So then, to return to our question, how is one to elucidate the spirit of Judaism

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without inviting all sorts of bigotries? By simply understanding the spirit of Judaism as that of capitalism, that is, as an ethos that permitted exploitation of aliens but not of brethren through the “most important vehicle of early economic expansion,” notably usury or saleability to the other. There seems to be inherent contradictions in God’s dictate that his people should not be submitted to usury by the fact that God recognizes the vile and exploitative economic method that usury is, but recommends that it be practiced on others but not on his people. “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as a usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.”21 This notion of Jewish partiality has been abundantly indexed as one more manifestation of the vengeful Jewish God, the God of “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”22 To be fair, this qualification of the Jewish God, though now a commonplace, cannot be without a rejoinder to the contrary, in the form of a similar indictment, a stronger indictment even, of the Christian God. Himmelfarb, for instance, insists that “the Jewish backwardness in the matter of hell is better than the Christian accomplishment. On the evidence of hell, the ancient formula of a merciful Christianity confronting a vindictive Judaism is wrong.”23 His argument is that Christianity, for which “if the faithful have little chance of bliss, infidels have none,” has been more descriptive about the fewness of the saved ones than Judaism has. He cites a dogma of “no salvation outside the Church” that goes as far back as the third century with St. Cyprian, and which was only revised in the seventeenth century. Himmelfarb goes on to rehearse, albeit synthetically, the hell to which the multitude is destined according to Joyce, and which differs only verbally from the Catholic Encyclopedia. It is a hell of “corpses putrefying into a jellylike mass of liquid … of brains boiling in the skull, bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, and eyes flaming like molten balls; nameless suffocating filth; fire kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the Godhead.”24 Thus, claims Himmelfarb in a feat of irony, “[T]he religion of the cruel and vindictive Jews knows nothing about the doom of the majority of the faithful to eternal torment. As for those who are not Jews, the standard doctrine is the Talmudic dictum: ‘the righteous of the nations of the world have a share in the world to come.’”25 This having been said, and pour revenir à nos moutons, we shall only argue, on the evidence of the question of usury as it has been featured in the Old Testament, and following Marx, that the idea of capitalist Europe, as it is accepted today by most people, is a derivation of an old Judaic understanding of economic practice and an old Christian understanding of universal brotherhood welded together in the form of the partial universalism of the West. The World Bank/IMF, this monumentalized Judeo-Christian economic power, claims universality. On the basis of what does it claim it however? The World Bank claims its universality on the basis of its saleability, the ability to sell to others with big returns. Who does the World Bank lend to

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and what are its lending schemes that so much bear the appearances of usury? Telles sont les questions. The World Bank unquestionably does not lend to its “friends.” The core states have not borrowed a cent from the World Bank since the end of World War II; since the creation of the International Development Association (IDA), this structure of the World Bank intended to lend money to the Third World, the World Bank has remained faithful to this credo that “if you would lend … money, lend it not to your friend. For when did friendship take a breed for barren metal from his friend? But lend it rather to your enemy, who if he breaks, you may with better face exact the penalty.”26 And the penalty, indeed, the World Bank, as intercessor for the core states, has exacted on Africa, so much so that Africa is today servicing a yearly debt of $14 billion to the friends of the World Bank; a debt that has been imposed on Africa by these friends of the World Bank through the most despicable methods; a debt that is systematically being deepened through the vilest shams.

Origin and Perpetuation of the African Debt Crisis When on June 6, 1988, president Julius Nyerere established a nexus between Africa’s debt crisis and the continent’s neo-colonial relationship with the West and suggested, consequently, that for Africa to get out of its economic disaster it would have to review the nature of that relationship, George Ayittey was quick to see in Nyerere’s answer an indication of African leaders’ lack of economic sophistication.27 Nyerere was perhaps economically deficient; on this particular issue, however, he superbly summarized the origin of Africa’s debt crisis. The scholarship on the origin of Africa’s debt crisis tends to locate this crisis in the 1970s when, in order to respond to the 1973 –1974 and 1979 oil price hikes, peripheral states turned to industrial countries for huge loans that were first accorded with low interest rates and very little, if any, guarantee for repayment. These lax lending and borrowing conditions further encouraged many African countries to borrow more for development programs that were either financially unsound or ill-managed, thus making it difficult for African countries to repay their debts to the foreign lending institutions, several of which were consequently driven to bankruptcy. By the time the 1979 oil crisis occasioned by the Iranian Revolution hit, African countries were faced with more conservative and reluctant lenders, higher interest rates, and the deterioration of the terms of exchange (higher prices for manufactured products from Europe toward Africa and lower prices for raw materials from Africa toward Europe).28 In the 1980s, under the guise of helping Third World or peripheral states in general get out of engulfing debts they had contracted from First World or core states, and allegedly get out of the cycle of poverty, the International Monetary Fund loaned money to the debtor governments with imposed Structural Adjustment Pro-

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grams (SAPs), which, at closer analysis, were only meant to further yield to the lending states the political and economic sovereignty of the defaulting states. The SAPs were intended to bring to their smallest degree debtor governments’ ownership and management of the means of production through sale to the private sector of state-owned companies, get rid of government-imposed price caps on agricultural products, devalue debtor countries’ currencies, reduce government subsidies of domestic consumption, reduce government power over capital flows, private and public investments and border control, implement policies that attract foreign investments, and eliminate protectionist regulations.29 The IMF/World Bank’s rationale for getting African states’ interventions off the management of state’s assets, and thus privatizing state-owned assets, was that private companies were more efficient at managing businesses. This argument, as Kieh, Jr., so appropriately pointed out, is erroneous. Clearly, the efficiency of a business entity is determined by a confluence of factors—“public good” versus “private good,” the management skills, accountability, etc. So, the private sector does not have the monopoly over economic efficiency. If this was the case, then what accounts for the myriad of cases of bankruptcy, “going out of business,” and “mergers?”30

In fact, one might add that the private sector has proven its limits with the current world financial crisis that is forcing states, both in the United States and in Europe, to come to the rescue of private companies with a number of measures that would have Karl Marx chuckle in his grave, inasmuch as it is precisely the ideological aversion for the Marxist form of government by the core states that occasioned the implementation of the Structural Adjustment Programs with their underlying free-market assumption. The failure of the capitalist system confirms the fact that, as has been noted by scholars, organizational, technical, and innovative resources are the cornerstone of sustainable development; and continued prosperity relies on effective management of these resources. So far, China and India seem to have effectively managed these resources— seem to have managed them better than the core states have — and the Chinese experience particularly shows that success is attainable even with government-owned or government-controlled companies.31 In fact, the imposition of SAPs on peripheral states was in response to an ideological shift among the major shareholders of the World Bank (i.e., the United States and Great Britain). The rise to power of the conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, respectively in 1979 in Britain and in 1981 in the U.S., strengthened conservative opinions against the welfare state. Consequently, the World Bank with its typical pro-big government policies of the time came under fire, especially in the United States, as constituting a problem rather than offering solutions. Conservatives in America claimed that the World Bank’s poverty reduction program, such as advocated by Robert McNamara, “represented giveaways, welfare programs, money wasted on projects of marginal rates of returns,”32 in sum, a risky activity for an institution that was first and foremost in the business of making money. Though not going so far as to implement the recommendations of his budget director David

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Stockman to reduce America’s contribution to IDA in half and to withdraw America’s pledge to the sixth replenishment share of IDA, President Reagan, nevertheless, scaled down the United States’ contribution to 27 percent in the sixth replenishment share from 31.2 percent in the fifth replenishment share. In the fiscal year of 1982, the U.S. only contributed $700 million to IDA out of $1,080 million pledged. For American conservatives, the Bank was influenced by a socialist line of thought that was not in the interest of the United States.33 A suspicious Reagan mounted a full attack on the financial institution, going so far as to ask that his Treasury Department review the necessity of the United States’ membership in the World Bank. Though the United States Treasury Department’s report justified the World Bank as a great supporter of American interests in the world, the fact that the United States and Great Britain were anti-big government strongly influenced the World Bank’s lending policies, which shifted from lending without strings attached to lending with the conditionality of structural adjustments.34 So, the call to get government off the back of the people, paradoxically, increased the World Bank’s control over the people’s business in peripheral states. Soon, the World Bank–imposed conditions for lending became the norms for most financial institutions, such as the IMF, the Club of Paris, and the Club of London. In order to get any loan from these institutions, lending states had to agree to the World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs by which the financial institutions anointed themselves as the saviors of the Third World while they were in reality impoverishing Third World countries. There was almost a religious dimension to SAPs: [Third World] countries had sinned by pursuing egalitarian and nationalistic policies. Now they were paying for their sins in the forms of staggering debt, recession and even economic collapse. However, all was not lost: they could get back on the road to salvation by adopting SAPs, whose short-term effects might be painful at first, but are the necessary price to pay for past indiscretion and future success. SAPs … met every creed of Judeo-Christian theology: sin of excess, propitiatory sacrifice (represented in the bloodletting of SAPs), salvation (return to economic growth). The World Bank was the high priest of this pro-free market secular theology.35

As has been exposed in several places, these measures were not meant to rescue the Third World. The real motives of the IMF/World Bank’s so-called salvaging measures are to be found elsewhere. The duplicity of the core states that push these measures through the Bretton Woods institutions is too flagrant for the justification they give for SAPs to be believed. While First-World farmers are heavily supported financially by their governments, in peripheral states the IMF/World Bank asks that agricultural subsidies be eliminated, all in the name of some pseudo-good governance. While public education is subsidized in the First World, the IMF/World Bank discourages subsidy of public education in the Third World and forces governments to surrender this very vital area of development to private companies. As reports Kieh, Jr., “In the current epoch of neo-liberal orthodoxy as is being enforced by the Bretton Woods Institutions— International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank — , the neo-colonial state in Africa is shrinking its already meager support for public

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education.”36 In fact, the real intent of the Structural Adjustment Programs was to have African states redirect the money that would be saved from cutting support to education, healthcare, public transportation, and other welfare services toward debt servicing. As a consequence, Africa spends 14 billion dollars yearly servicing a total debt of 200 billion dollars to the core states. Good governance had nothing to do with SAPs; for what then, as notes Jacques Mangala, is this conception of “good governance” that forgets that the legitimate right and welfare of the people are actually what matters? To restore some intellectual sanity to the good governance discourse, it is essential to assert that good governance is primarily a political imperative grounded on the concept of legitimacy. Good governance is about not only a government duly put in place by the people, but which stays in close touch with the needs of the people in the formulation and implementation of national policies. Good governance is not about mechanics of policies but their ends. Good governance in this sense is intimately linked to the pursuit of a democratic agenda, which seeks “ownership” by the people of reform and development program enunciated by the state/government.37

Let us insist that good governance has nothing to do with the Structural Adjustment Programs imposed on African states by the core states through the intermediary of the IMF/World Bank. Unashamed rapacious capitalistic instinct is indeed at the bottom of it all; and sometimes, the core states’ dishonesty is just too brazen to bear. As laments Gros, “[t]he World Bank often embraces popular causes, but typically uses (neo-liberal) instruments that undermine their achievement, and eventually abandons these causes altogether once the wind has died down or failure becomes evident. The Bank also has a tendency to be top-heavy (i.e., authoritarian), even in the pursuit of policies that require local participation or democracy, and, worse, even when the Bank rhetoric so proffers.”38 Gros’s indignation is not an isolate cry. In fact, and fortunately, not everyone in the core states is desensitized by the numerous cases of World Bank/IMF/core states duplicity and lack of good governance. We waste our money subsidizing the production of crops that then close off opportunities for people who have few alternatives. When U.S. and European trade negotiators jointly proposed that instead of the OECD lowering these production subsidies poor countries might shift to other activities, I personally felt they had crossed the line beyond which the normal diplomatic act of lying for your country becomes too shaming to accept.39

Speaking from both sides of the mouth is indeed the most stable characteristic of the World Bank, this institution that propounds to be the savior of the wretched. In the spirit of the World Bank’s legendary duplicity, has not Lawrence Summers, the chief economist of the World Bank in 1991, suggested in a memo that less developed countries be the permanent dumping ground of toxic wastes, because their populations are poor and would die of other diseases anyway? Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?… [T]he economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that…. Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City…. The concern over an agent that causes a one-in-a-million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going

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to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand.40

So, we must ask: Would it not, by ricochet, make sense that by the programs it imposes on the Third World, the World Bank keep under-five mortality rising, so that toxic waste dumping in Africa by core countries (shareholders of the World Bank) continue to be rationalized? All the lying disseminated by the core states through the amplifiers of the IMF/World Bank participates in the same effort of raping Africa one more time by obfuscating the real origin of Africa’s poverty. For, although the IMF/World Bank’s accounts of Africa’s poverty tend to emphasize such factors as the continent’s rampant cases of bad governance, its interminable civil conflicts, the lack of coastal access of most countries coupled with their bad neighbors’ economic policies,41 the ravages of AIDS among Africa’s human capital, the brain drain, a 40-plus-year-long political failure of African states, and Africa’s widespread corruption and its negative consequences for entrepreneurship,42 what is not often mentioned are the exogenous sources of Africa’s woes. For instance, the infamous 1981 Berg Report, whose recommendations were incorporated in the Structural Adjustment Programs, made light of the exogenous causes of Africa’s problems and only highlighted their endogenous roots;43 this selective amnesia typical of the Bretton Woods institutions has by now been indexed by many critics of the World Bank. The Berg Report played into the usual clichés of political instability and wars as the main causes of Africa’s woes. For Augustine Konneh, for instance, when it comes to conflicts in Africa, “the Western media’s usual portrayal of ‘tribalism’ as the major culprit is frequently an oversimplification of complex realities.”44 Konneh recognizes that, among other causes, such as regionalism, lack of fairness in the distribution of wealth and services, and political demands by marginalized groups, “outside intervention (especially encouragement by the superpower blocs during the days of the Cold War) often contributed to the outbreak of civil wars.”45 While astute, Konneh’s remarks hint that external instigation of civil conflicts in Africa has ended with the conclusion of the Cold War and the advent of the new globalization. Actually, with the end of the Cold War and the introduction of the new globalization articulated around the principle of capitalism as transcendental signifier, there is a subtle jostle for positioning among core states (mainly the United States, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, and France), semi-peripheral states (mainly Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea) and transitional states (the former Stalinist communist states of the Soviet Union, Central and Eastern European states, and mainly China), a shove for positioning whose shudders are greatly felt by the peripheral states of Africa. In this elbowing match between the titans, the United States is very much assured of its leading position, because, culturally speaking, globalization looks increasingly like the Americanization of the world. U.S. culture industry has not only conditioned America, but also the world, to accept Americanization as globalization. American food, movies, music, sports, dressing style, and consuming style have

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become the norms for everyone else to duplicate.46 The American-style shopping mall, despite its international pretenses, with its cloisters of international shops and food courts, is actually meant to design the public sphere as space of consumption of Americanism. “Whether directly exported by U.S. business interests or developed by multinational corporations to look like its U.S. prototypes, the international mall is often traceable back to U.S. funding, design, marketing sources or models.”47 Furthermore, the United States is the most influential member state of the machinery of globalization that the World Bank constitutes. By itself the U.S. totals more than 15 percent of the voting power within the World Bank, and the U.S. is the only country with veto power within the institution, which gives it the authority to shape world political and monetary policies.48 Of the semi-peripheral and transitional states, China seems well-launched to claim a spot among the core states, and France looks like the weakest link among the core states. Though Germany and Great Britain, for instance, are not fundamentally threatened at the moment, the same cannot be said of France, whose economic growth is closely tied to a somewhat unscrupulous exploitation of its former colonies. As notes Mbaku, “the francophone African countries, whose economies are further ‘integrated’ into the French economy through the currency union called CFA Franc Zone, exhibit an even greater level of dependence on their former colonizer…. This is a one-sided dependency that produces net benefits primarily for France and marginalizes the African countries.”49 In other words, France’s economy is greatly dependent upon exploitation of its former African colonies. For France to lose its grip on its former African colonies would mean total restructuration of the French economy, a restructuration whose success is far from being guaranteed in the context of the rapid rise of such aggressive states as China, South Korea, Brazil and India. So, of the core states, France is the most likely to surrender its position and leave the table of titans. This prospect spells trouble for Francophone countries, for, as has been noted elsewhere, “each time France [is] defeated, it [turns] to Africa or to the Caribbean with the most destructive designs to assuage its bruised ego and to rebuild its broken finances … in moments of political and financial distress at home crises are implemented abroad as possibility for Hexagonal improvement.”50 So far, the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, by some ingenious tour de main, have been instrumental at helping the troubled core states weather the successive political and financial storms by imposing political and macroeconomic regimes beneficial to the core states, albeit extremely destructive for the peripheral states. The mechanisms for twisting the arms of African states to make them, if not totally eliminate, at least drastically reduce their expenditure on social services are the infamous Structural Adjustment Programs, which 15 years after their implementation turned out to be a great calamity for Africa, though highly advantageous for the core states. The IMF/World Bank’s system of usury “ensures that the peripheral states remain in conditions of underdevelopment and subservience to the core ones. The multinational corporations complement the Bretton Woods Institutions

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by controlling private investment and technological flows. These two critical areas help enable the core states to continue the penetration and control of the peripheral states.”51 Here is the fundamental ethics of the global proselytizers of good governance. In fact, the IMF, the World Bank, and the core states of which they are representatives have much to learn about good governance before pretending to lecture the world. Mbaku is right to remark that “[d]espite the fact that the World Bank and the IMF have spent a significant part of the last decade preaching the benefits of democratic governance to African countries, their negotiations with the latter are anything but democratic.”52 Other critics go even further in this indictment of the Bretton Woods institutions. Arguing that the former colonizers do not really wish to see transparency and participatory governance structures to be successfully established in their former colonies, an accusatory finger is pointed at the non-state actors of globalization, the IMF/World Bank working on behalf of the core states to undermine democracy and perpetuate bad governance in Africa. “The moral bankers of the IMF and the World Bank, those who have become adept at moralizing the world about openness, transparency, and good governance, have lost all credibility … in the Third World, for they are the very ones who … have legalized corruption, nepotism, and coup d’états as the order of the day in the Third World.”53 For those who know the historical precedents of the IMF/World Bank/core states’ collusion for the prolongation of Africa’s debt, and therefore, for Africa’s loss of sovereignty, there is much credence to accord to these various indictments of conspiracy. The IMF/World Bank/core states’ scheme to get Africa deep in debt and to cause the continent to lose its self-rule to the European powers started long before the African independences and not just during the 1970s as most scholarships tend to suggest. In fact, by some cunning manipulation of which the core states and the Bank that represented them have the secret, the newly independent nations of the Third World owed millions to the World Bank, and thus to the core states, even before joining the institution. The Congo offers us a highly illustrative case, albeit not an isolate one. Taking advantage of the Congolese elites’ semi-literacy in matters of economics, the Belgian government of the late 1950s contracted huge debts on behalf of the Congo, using the country’s assets as collateral, just months before conceding independence to the Congolese people, thus leaving the Congo with huge debts to service even before the country entered the annals of history as an independent nation. Reporting on his first trip to Washington, D.C., Joseph Kasongo, first Congolese speaker of the house, had this to lament about. We arrived in Washington where we were officially welcomed with a nineteen-gun salute; we were given rooms in the presidential guest house, where all important guests stay. On the day of our arrival we were received by the American secretary of state…. We took the opportunity of asking to become members of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund…. We had also intended to choose this moment to ask for a loan. It was then that we discovered that Belgium had made a contract in the name of the Congo to borrow 120 million dollars…. We were told that of the 120 million dollars, Belgium had already received 79 million and was still

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to receive 41 million. We were told that we could not touch this remaining money, because Belgium had not yet given receipts to show how she had spent the 79 million she received. We were asked to pay back the advance. We replied that we had not had any of it, and were in serious financial difficulties which would make it impossible to do so. Belgium was supposed to have repaid 14 1/2 million dollars at the beginning of the previous August, but had not done so…. Both our wealth and our hard work had been exploited.54

Africa’s debt disaster is not a novel occurrence resulting from the two major oil crises of the 1970s though these events have greatly contributed to deepening it. Getting Africa in debt is part of a larger scheme by the Western powers and the World Bank, whose aim is to erode the political and economic autonomy of the continent in order to facilitate its takeover by the core states. As notes Gros, “one is almost tempted to conjecture that Third World countries were deliberately lured into borrowing first so their economies could be structurally adjusted later.”55 Yes, there is a vast conspiracy by the core states and the international political and financial institutions to occupy the African continent and control the exploitation of the huge African agricultural and geological resources. For anyone to deny this blatant fact in the name of political correctness would be to display an utter sense of disingenuousness. Let us not mention the most evident cases of barefaced lies and unashamed deceptions of the nineteenth century that have occasioned the occupation of Africa by the European powers. Modern history is inundated with episodes of betrayal of Africa by the United Nations and the international financial institutions. During the 1960s Congo crisis, for instance, it was the UN secretary general of the time, Dag Hammarskjöld, who helped deliver the Congo first to Belgium and later to the United States, while the Congolese expected him to play the role of an impartial arbitrator. Likewise, during the 2000 –2004 Ivorian political crisis, it is Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, who helped France succeed in its institutional coup d’état on Côte d’Ivoire after a French-supported rebellion failed in this West African country; and it is the World Bank and the IMF that, in order to punish the Ivorian legal government for attempting to break down an illegal rebellion, connived with France to financially suffocate the government of Côte d’Ivoire by putting it on quarantine, in the hope that it would finally agree to France’s predatory dictates.56 There is, indeed, a conspiracy by the core states to take over the African continent, which any thinker with the slightest scholarly honesty would have to recognize.

6

Modernization Theory and the Making of the Abandonment-Neurotic African The Villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard. But I will better the instruction. William Shakespeare —The Merchant of Venice1

One of Africa’s tragedies, an outcome of the successful cerebral entrapment of blacks by the colonial system, is the African elites’ investment in myths of ontological specificity. The tale of African essentiality was damaging in two ways: when it clothed and exhausted the social, political, economic, bureaucratic and encyclopedic lives of the Africans as well as when the latter, out of sheer embarrassment and resentment, compulsively sought to break out of the clad of Africanity, for whatever this concept had come to signify in the popular imaginaire. The first generation of African leaders, educated in European universities before the African independences, were fed, and later, in turn, fed the African schoolboy and general populations, with myths of innate racial differences that had no pertinence to the lived realities of blacks, albeit producing for them stultifying consequences. African political, social, literary, and artistic discourses were — and are still — inundated with overvaluation of racial essentiality fables, which were actually manufactured in the laboratories of European ethnologists of the early twentieth century. People like Maurice Delafosse, Henri Labouret, Robert Delavignette, and Leo Frobenius concocted the ontological specificity of blacks for the latter to consume. These ethnologists were eager to pioneer a specific African body of knowledge, different from a European body of knowledge, of which, they, as European scholars, would still remain the authorities. Delafosse, Delavignette, and Labouret, for instance, were colonial administrators as well as “scholars,” and their allegiance was clearly to the French colonial system that they served. The fact that their recognition of a specific African civilization became, against the general spirit of the time, a referenced discourse within the social sciences should not lead to complacent cheerfulness among African scholars. It is true that the central teleology of the Enlight108

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enment subsumed a blessed, messianic, civilized, and progressive Europe leading other backward peoples from the dark ages of humanity to the enlightened age of Civilization. Here, the idea of multiple civilizations was an incongruity. From this perspective, the works of proponents of alternative civilizations were antithetic to the Enlightenment’s teleological claim — the claim that Europe was the shepherd leading flocks of wretched souls toward the same and unique European destination. Yet, European social scientists like Delafosse and Labouret operated within the logic of white supremacy,2 which was ubiquitous in the very philosophy of the Enlightenment that these “researchers” seemed to contradict. Actually, these ethnologists were, as notes Gary Wilder, “the very … individuals who were elaborating the new rationality for colonial government”3 by instructing the graduate African students that were to later form the colonial African leaders, then the governing class of independent Africa. Senghor recalled that he and Damas were among the very few nègre intellectuals to read the work of Delafosse, Hardy, Labouret, and Delavignette and to formally study the new ethnology. He even claimed that the ideas of the French Africanists influenced him more than those in the more radical black newspapers circulating in Paris at the time. Senghor and Césaire were especially influenced by the writings of Leo Frobenius … whose work valorizing the history of African civilization and affirming the culturally integrated character of African societies paralleled the writings of Delafosse and Labouret. After reading a review of Frobenius’s History of African Civilization, Césaire bought a copy in 1936, which he then passed on to Senghor.4

Although the so-called innate racial proclivities developed by the European ethnologists should not constitute cause for merriment, they have endured, nevertheless, as intellectual nourishment for Afrocentrists. It has not always appeared obvious to Afrocentric consumers of the theory of the mytho-poetic African, such as created by Frobenius, and which has become the appendage of so many African writers and filmmakers, that Frobenius’s theory actually participated in the lobotomization of Africa as Europe’s other. Indeed, in 1921 Frobenius published a thesis that would later inspire the young African intellectuals of the Latin Quarter in Paris as they were articulating the arguments of the Negritude Movement. Frobenius’s theory, which he called the science of paideuma, posited that humans belonged either to the Ethiopian civilization (the civilization of the plant) or to the Hamitic civilization (the civilization of the animal). The fundamental differences between the Ethiopian and the Hamitic, Frobenius posited, were the following: The Ethiopian lives in total communion with nature, abandoning himself to the rhythm of life. The Ethiopian does not seek to control his natural environment, as he is one with this environment to which he totally entrusts his life. The Hamitic, on the other hand, believes that life entails a constant struggle opposing man to nature, a struggle from which man is to emerge victorious by submitting nature to his will, by transforming it to his vision. The Ethiopian and the Hamitic, as Frobenius conceived them, corresponded, respectively, to the native civilizations of Africa, America, and Asia on the one hand, and to the civilizations of

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Europe on the other. From Frobenius’s paideumatic perspective, the Ethiopian, with his propensity for reciprocal relationship with nature, is more ecologically conscious; whereas the Hamitic, with his controlling stance over nature, is less ecologically mindful, because more destructive. In fact, scholars like Frobenius continue to be celebrated among Afrocentrists in general. John Jackson, Runoko Rashidi, and John H. Clarke, for instance, as recently as 2001, praised Frobenius in their Introduction to African Civilization. As they write, “[one] of the few scientists who tried to tell the truth about the African past was the German anthropologist Professor Leo Frobenius.”5 Given how Afrocentrists today are enthusiastic about Frobenius, it should be understandable that his thesis be central to the works of black intellectuals of the early twentieth century. The first English translator of the French version of Frobenius’s work was W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the inspiring fathers of the Negro Renaissance and its Caribbean and African offshoots. Not surprisingly, in the late 1920s and in the 1930s, the founders of the Harlem Renaissance in North America, of Indigenism in Haiti, of Negrismo in Brazil, and of Negritude in French Africa and the Antilles had much to draw upon for the magnification of black pride. One of their recurrent themes was the presumed innate ecological consciousness of blacks; which they often liked to stress in sharp opposition to the alleged white proclivity for environmental destruction. Blacks, as ancient and pure as nature, nature with which they are one and the same, have witnessed the births, rises, and falls of many civilizations. For blacks in America the identification with nature was a symbol of beauty, fortitude, and indestructibility against slavery, which was whites’ attempt at denaturalization and “thingacization” of blacks. One of the signature poems of the Harlem Renaissance’s love affair with nature was Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,”6 written in 1921 when its author was merely seventeen. The poem was dedicated to, not surprisingly, W.E.B. Du Bois. In Hughes’s poem, as Baxter Miller notes so appropriately, the identification of the subjective “I” with such natural, ageless wonders as the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Congo, re-projects blacks into aboriginal consciousness.7 For Claude McKay, an immigrant from Jamaica, this aboriginal consciousness of peace and freedom is set off by the mere sight in New York of fruits from his tropical island, a sight which brings sentiment of nostalgia over a paradise lost.8 Like the blacks of the Harlem Renaissance, the exiled blacks of Haiti, sympathizers of the Indigenist Movement, as well as the blacks of the Antilles, members of the Negritude Movement, saw in an eventual connection with nature a link to Africa as locus of true identity and authenticity. One can read in Césaire’s poetry allusions to the Congo and to rivers that are reminiscent of those in Hughes’s poems.9 This naturalist standpoint was also in keeping with the teachings of Haitian physician, ethnologist, and activist Jean Price-Mars, who argued in his So Spoke the Uncle that displaced blacks and his Haitian compatriots particularly had rich, authentic cultural values originating in Africa, of which they had to be proud.10 Before PriceMars’s almost fatherly insistence that blacks of the Diaspora turn to Africa as the locus

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of their true ancestry, blacks’ sentiments, expressed in great part through their literary reproductions of European and Anglo-Saxon canons, were sentiments of inferiority and self-erasure. Following the publication of So Spoke the Uncle, with its denunciation of Lévy-Bruhlian overt racism consigned in Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures,11 a cohort of Haitian writers, among whom were Jacques Stephen Alexis, Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, and Thoby Marcelin, started to emphasize what they saw as the innate African awareness characterized by unity with nature and propensity for intuitive analogical thinking. Over the decades to come, a consistent effort by the first African intellectual leaders helped disseminate in African curricula what was considered a black way of thinking, feeling, and expressing oneself.12 Thus, a body of knowledge was consolidated, which established a general paradigm of a discursive North and an intuitive South that world artists, poets and writers could not wait to rehearse. Many of the Third World movements, of which Negritude is an example, have accepted the European conceit that only Europeans can think analytically; as a result of this many black and brown intellectuals have tended to deny their own analytical intelligence and retreat into “feminine” qualities of community, warmth, intuition and artistic creativity … which, interestingly, Gobineau was prepared to concede to the Blacks.13

This, of course, was the mental conditioning that the colonized underwent before the African and Caribbean independences. From the 1960s onward, the black colonized would be asked to think otherwise. Whereas in the past the black colonized was taught that becoming the other was impossible and that he had to stick closely to the demands of his ontological specificity, this time, he was told another momentous lie, namely that Fanon was wrong, that lactification is achievable, that becoming white is an attainable dream, provided he does not divert from the prescribed instructions of modernization. Indeed, the 1960s, with their driving modernization theory, witnessed clear efforts by Africans to turn the mythology of the Ethiopian man on its head. It was no longer fashionable to claim African originality on account of a certain propensity to communicate with nature. It was henceforth trendy to be modern and to live in harmony with the Occidental, to duplicate his mode of thinking and his environment. For French President Sarkozy, for instance, the black’s effort at reversal of identity has yet to be successfully completed. In sheer reproduction of the racist theses propounded in such French “great books” as Levy-Bruhl’s How the Natives Think or Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races, Sarkozy holds that Africa’s backwardness is ascribable to the black’s ontological difference. In a speech that could have been written in the nineteenth century, and which we could imagine the narrowminded, antiquarian French president composing from the creaking, cobweb-filled, eerie attic of some antediluvian French library, Sarkozy had this to say, among other abhorrent affirmations made on July 26 at Cheihk Anta Diop University in Dakar, where he was supposedly addressing the African youth in general: … je veux m’adresser à tous les habitants de ce continent meurtri, et, en particulier, aux jeunes, à vous qui vous êtes tant battus les uns contre les autres et souvent tant haïs, qui parfois vous com-

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battez et vous haïssez encore mais qui pourtant vous reconnaissez comme frères, frères dans la souffrance, frères dans l’humiliation, frères dans la révolte, frères dans l’espérance, frères dans le sentiment que vous éprouvez d’une destinée commune, frères à travers cette foi mystérieuse qui vous rattache à la terre africaine, foi qui se transmet de génération en génération et que l’exil luimême ne peut effacer…. La colonisation n’est pas responsable de toutes les difficultés actuelles de l’Afrique. Elle n’est pas responsable des guerres sanglantes que se font les Africains entre eux. Elle n’est pas responsable des génocides. Elle n’est pas responsable des dictateurs. Elle n’est pas responsable du fanatisme. Elle n’est pas responsable de la corruption, de la prévarication. Elle n’est pas responsable des gaspillages et de la pollution…. Le drame de l’Afrique, c’est que l’homme africain n’est pas assez entré dans l’histoire. Le paysan africain, qui depuis des millénaires, vit avec les saisons, dont l’idéal de vie est d’être en harmonie avec la nature, ne connaît que l’éternel recommencement du temps rythmé par la répétition sans fin des mêmes gestes et des mêmes paroles. Dans cet imaginaire où tout recommence toujours, il n’y a de place ni pour l’aventure humaine, ni pour l’idée de progrès. Dans cet univers où la nature commande tout, l’homme échappe à l’angoisse de l’histoire qui tenaille l’homme moderne mais l’homme reste immobile au milieu d’un ordre immuable ou tout semble être écrit d’avance. Jamais l’homme ne s’élance vers l’avenir. Jamais il ne lui vient à l’idée de sortir de la répétition pour s’inventer un destin. Le problème de l’Afrique et permettez à un ami de l’Afrique de le dire, il est là. Le défi de l’Afrique, c’est d’entrer davantage dans l’histoire. C’est de puiser en elle l’énergie, la force, l’envie, la volonté d’écouter et d’épouser sa propre histoire. Le problème de l’Afrique, c’est de cesser de toujours répéter, de toujours ressasser, de se libérer du mythe de l’éternel retour, c’est de prendre conscience que l’âge d’or qu’elle ne cesse de regretter, ne reviendra pas pour la raison qu’il n’a jamais existé. Le problème de l’Afrique, c’est qu’elle vit trop le présent dans la nostalgie du paradis perdu de l’enfance. Le problème de l’Afrique, c’est que trop souvent elle juge le présent par rapport à une pureté des origines totalement imaginaire et que personne ne peut espérer ressusciter. Le problème de l’Afrique, ce n’est pas de s’inventer un passé plus ou moins mythique pour s’aider à supporter le présent mais de s’inventer un avenir avec des moyens qui lui soient propres. Le problème de l’Afrique, ce n’est pas de se préparer au retour du malheur, comme si celui-ci devait indéfiniment se répéter, mais de vouloir se donner les moyens de conjurer le malheur, car l’Afrique a le droit au bonheur comme tous les autres continents du monde. Le problème de l’Afrique, c’est de rester fidèle à ellemême sans rester immobile. Le défi de l’Afrique, c’est d’apprendre à regarder son accession à l’universel non comme un reniement de ce qu’elle est mais comme un accomplissement. Le défi de l’Afrique, c’est d’apprendre à se sentir l’héritière de tout ce qu’il y a d’universel dans toutes les civilisations humaines. C’est de s’approprier les droits de l’homme, la démocratie, la liberté, l’égalité, la justice comme l’héritage commun de toutes les civilisations et de tous les hommes. C’est de s’approprier la science et la technique modernes comme le produit de toute l’intelligence humaine. Le défi de l’Afrique est celui de toutes les civilisations, de toutes les cultures, de tous les peuples qui veulent garder leur identité sans s’enfermer parce qu’ils savent que l’enfermement est mortel. I want to speak to all the inhabitants of this despairing continent, and particularly to the youth, to you who fought and hated one another for so long, who sometimes still fight and hate one another, but who nonetheless acknowledge each other as brothers, brothers in suffering, brothers in humiliation, brothers in rebellion, brothers in hope, brothers in the conviction that you have in a common destiny, brothers through this mysterious faith that links you to the African land, faith that is transmitted from generation to generation, and which not even exile can erase…. Colonization cannot be blamed for all of Africa’s current difficulties. It cannot be blamed for all the bloody wars that Africans wage against one another. It cannot be blamed for the genocides. It cannot be blamed for the dictators. It cannot be blamed for fanaticism. It is not responsible for corruption, prevarication. It is not responsible for waste and pollution…. The tragedy of Africa is that the African did not really enter history. The Africa peasant, who for millenniums, has been living according to seasons, whose ultimate principle in life is to be in harmony with nature, knows only the eternal return of time paced by endless repetition of the same gestures and the same speech. In this imaginary where everything is always repeated, there is no room for adventure or for the notion of progress. In this universe where nature governs everything, man escapes from the dread of history that haunts the modern man, but man remains motionless in the middle of an immutable world

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where everything seems written in advance. Man never thrusts himself into the future. It never occurs to him to get out of repetition to invent himself a destiny. Africa’s problem, allow me to say it as a friend of Africa, resides here. The challenge of Africa is to enter further into history; to gather the energy, the strength, the desire, the will to listen and to espouse its own history. Africa needs to stop repeating, to stop rehashing, to free itself from the myth of the eternal return and to understand that the golden age that it keeps regretting will never come back, simply because it has never existed. The problem of Africa is that it too often lives its present in the nostalgia of the lost paradise of childhood. The problem of Africa is that too often it judges the present in relation to a totally imaginary purity of origins that no one can dream to resurrect. Africa does not need to invent itself a more or less mythic past to bear the present but to invent itself a future with its proper means. Africa does not need to anticipate calamity, as if calamity were bound to be repeated indefinitely, but rather to give itself the means to exorcise misfortune, for Africa, like all the other continents of the world, is entitled to happiness. Africa needs to remain faithful to itself without remaining static. The challenge of Africa is to learn to accept its ascension to the universal not as a denial of itself but as an achievement. The challenge of Africa is to assume the legacy of all that is universal in human civilizations. Africa needs to take possession of human rights, democracy, freedom, equality and justice as the common heritage of all the civilizations and of all humans. Africa needs to take possession of modern science and techniques as the product of all human intelligence. The challenge of Africa is the challenge of all civilizations, of all cultures, of all peoples willing to keep their identity without shutting themselves off, because they know that shutting themselves off would be fatal.

Nations have the leaders they deserve. Even though African leaders continue for the most part to be forced upon the African people by the nostalgic former colonial powers, thus belying this maxim, in France at least this saying is factual. The French people have the leaders that they deserve; and the problem of France is to have chosen in Sarkozy a president that not only lacks basic civility but also has no knowledge of history. In fact, while Africans, in their resolve to freely choose the leaders that best represent their aspirations, have usually offered their chests to the bullets of their brutal former colonizers, while Africans have been tortured and assassinated for their rights to autonomy, citizens in the colonizing metropoles have always walked freely to the ballots to elect their representatives at the end of lengthy and pricey electoral campaigns. And each time, in France, a politically uneducated electorate has thrown its vote to insolent, narrow-minded, and bigoted leaders melancholic of a mythic glorious past. We believe to have amply shown by now that on the matter of taking refuge in the cultivation of nostalgia, in the rumination of antiquarianism, and in the celebration of mythic glories, France has no equal. We believe to have abundantly shown that today’s France is a miniscule idea that struggles to keep its bobbing head above the swirl of modern tides. France’s antiquated economy, we have amply shown, relies on the cult of the past: a colonial past, a mythic sartorial past, a mythic gastronomic past. France is a touristic brochure that has ceased to seduce a dejected French youth. France is an old fiction that only seduces those who still believe in fairy tales. The French youth has long turned its back on the mythologies of wine, cheese and baguette. And they are right, for this folklore has never put food on the table. We have, by now, amply demonstrated that each time a French person dips his toast in a bowl of hot chocolate, a nationalist government in the Third World has been brutally squeezed, a dictator has been installed, a genocide has been sup-

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ported, and an African child has been famished for this hot cocoa to have reached the French breakfast table. We have by now shown that, indeed, as de Gaulle had once suggested, France has no friends in Africa, but only interests. Sarkozy cannot speak as a friend of Africa. He is the continuator of an established terrorizing French policy whose machinery is strong enough without the French president’s adding the superfluous weight of his legendary insolence. Sarkozy’s long-winded speech cannot hide the fact that the source of Africa’s depressing conditions are first and foremost exogenous.

Modernization Theory and the Making of the “New Man” Modernization theory, the theory that undertakes to find the root causes of the Third World’s developmental “backwardness” in order to seek its solutions, is hampered by two structuralist fundamental flaws, ahistoricity and immanence.14 First, modernization theory assumes that history — or at least part of history — is irrelevant in explaining the underdevelopment of the Third World. Second, it assumes that there are no exogenous causes to the condition of the Third World and that everything that is happening in poor countries is of the doing of these countries and consequently, that it behooves them to change their situation by changing the nature of their temperament, by becoming new “men and new women,” in sum, by becoming European-like, irrespective of what might be happening around them. As outrageous as these presuppositions might appear, they have fueled a field of research that has gained many adepts since the 1960s. Even many of today’s development discourses still draw religiously upon the premises of modernization theory. One of development theorists’ persistent claims is that all that Africa needs in order for the continent to be on its path to development is to open itself to the core states, an argument that is often camouflaged under the veil of openness to free trade with the rest of the world; as if Africa’s borders were ever once closed to the rest of the world; as if trade, or at least honest trade, had ever existed between Africa and the so-called developed world. Africa, it has been convincingly shown in several studies, had economically and socially vibrant societies before the arrival of the Europeans, organized societies where occupational specializations and free and open commercial exchanges thrived and occasioned the birth of important cities with significant gold reserves, large agricultural outputs, and impressive metallurgical industry.15 If as has been argued by Paul Baran, high productivity in agriculture, emergence of an industrial labor force, occupational specialization and the accumulation of capitals were the preconditions for capitalism, that is, they constituted the prerequisites for “modernity” and thus wealth in Western Europe, then it is not an exaggeration to declare that Africa was well on its way to capitalism before its commercial encounter with Europeans in the sixteenth century. The term “commerce” as it relates

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to the relations between Africa and Western Europe will always need to be used with caution, as it is a very deceptive concept in the context of the colonial and postcolonial encounters. Baran recognizes that “commerce” actually serves as a pretext for the enrichment of Western Europe through the plunder of Africa. Commerce was subsequently a euphemism for the immoral exploitation of Africa. Western Europe [was] in terms of natural resources poorer and in terms of its economic development at the relevant time in many aspects more backward rather than more advanced than the parts of the world which were the objects of its commercial penetration. Hence the drive to procure tropical produce of all kinds (spices, tea, ivory, indigo, etc.) that could not be obtained nearby, hence also the efforts to import valuable products of oriental skills (high quality cloth, ornaments, pottery, and the like), and hence finally the wild scramble to bring back precious metals and stones that were in short supply at home. The resulting far-flung trade, combined with piracy, outright plunder, slave traffic, and discovery of gold, led to the rapid formation of vast fortunes in the hands of Western European merchants.16

The plunder of Africa by Western Europe, which has occasioned Europe’s industrial revolution, continues to be derided in certain milieus as having no significant import, and many scholars still prefer to date the development of Europe from socalled endogenous moments, such as the eighteenth-century economic and industrial revolution of England. To dismiss the “unilateral transfers” of goods from Africa to Europe as irrelevant to Europe’s growth is, according to Baran, an exercise of bad faith coupled with scholarly shortsightedness. There is a tendency among certain scholars to accord too much attention to the magnitude of these transfers in terms of “aggregate outputs,” while they should be paying attention to the way Western Europe’s overseas operations provided European countries with national incomes that multiplied their economic surplus.17 Yet again, one should not expect Europe to be contrite, and contrition is what Europe would seem to be showing were it to admit an exogenous contribution to its wealth. To acknowledge this would also amount to confessing that the poverty of Africa is not necessarily endogenous, but that it, too, is to be understood in light of some exogenous factors. Where European modernization theorists have been so busy explaining the development of Europe and the poverty of Africa in terms of immanent and, not surprisingly sometimes, innate proclivities— notice, for instance, W. Rostow’s assertion that some peoples lack “profit motives” and “rationality”18— such a confession would fall in the category of the sacrilegious. It serves Europe well to claim that it naturally detains the qualities conducive to development, so that it could dictate to the rest of the world how to create the new man that would show the way to development. In the case of the Third World, the solution to development as propounded by modernization theorists is “guiding third-world development through aid, investment, and example.”19 Aid would come as a compassionate gesture to Africa, a continent whose independences have failed to live up to expectations. Aid and investment, thus, would come as a rescuing gesture from Europe, a continent whose bosom Africa should not have left in the first place, and a continent which is, nevertheless, disinterestedly coming back with an extended helping hand. Example would come in the form of the instruction

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in the skills of development of African leaders. Those leaders, slated to put Africa on the path of development, will be educated on the principles of modernization as Sankaran Krishna summarizes them: 1. Understanding the world in scientific rather than spiritual or religious terms, and seeing it as amenable to human action and change rather than incomprehensible. 2. Having the capacity to defer enjoyment and consumption and rather invest and multiply one’s savings. 3. Having a tendency to evaluate oneself and others through achievement or accomplishment in the material world rather than through inheritance, family, caste or race. 4. Acting in a rational way to better one’s life and get the most out of interaction with others. 5. Being free of medieval prejudices against profit, interests, usury, commerce, or speculative investments.20 It is highly illogical that development attributes, such as rationality and profit motives, which are assumed by modernization theorists to belong exclusively to Europeans, could, at the same time, be successfully inculcated in a race not disposed to acquiring them. Europe, it has been noted, is not at its first illogicality.21 So it holds, from modernization theory’s perspective, that the leaders that will put Africa on the path to development are those that would surrender all that has been at the core of Afrocentrists’ claims for cultural specificity in reaction to Europe’s racism. These Afrocentrist claims, as put forth by the pioneers of the black renaissance, could be run through as follows: 1. Understanding of the world in intuitive and mytho-poetic rather than scientific terms. 2. A collective rather than individualist notion of being and a communal rather than private conception of means of production, work, and wealth. 3. Deference to elders, social rank, and family origin. 4. Perception of aggressive race toward private wealth accumulation as unprincipled and a view of usury as driven by rapacity and sense of exploitation. We have just argued that much of what modernization theorists propound as preconditions to development was already present in ancient Africa before Africa’s encounter with Europe, albeit within a collective rather than individualist scaffold of society. Modernization theory’s tendency to necessarily correlate development with capitalism, such as is clearly indicated by the subtitle of Rostow’s program for modernization —A Non-Communist Manifesto —betrays the discrimination against the communal. Modernization theories, as well-meaning as they might appear, have, as has been so discernibly noted by some scholars, undermined the masses’ capacity to take control of their own futures, exposing them instead to exploitative economic

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systems whose sole objective is profitability. Modernization theory, as put forth by Western experts, fails to recognize that in developing countries most people conceive development, not in an individualistic way, but instead, in a way that takes into account the mutual interests of the constituents of the community.22 Likewise, Vandana Shiva draws attention to an Indian paradigm of development that, though fulfilling for the people that use it, remains very much misunderstood by developers too busy aping “the West’s wasteful animal husbandry and dairying practices,” and especially American McDonaldization, excessively focused on profit at the detriment of well-being. Indian cattle provide more food than they consume, in contrast to those of the US cattle industry, in which cattle consume six times more food than they provide. In addition, every year, Indian cattle excrete 700 million tons of recoverable manure: half of this is used as fuel, liberating the thermal equivalent of 27 million tons of kerosene, 35 million tons of coal, or 68 million tons of wood, all of which are scarce resources in India. The remaining half is used as fertilizer. Two thirds of the power requirements of Indian villages are met by cattle dung fuel from 80 million cattle. To replace animal power in agriculture, India would have to spend about $1 billion annually on gas.23

The numbers are compelling. The system is efficient for the Indian people. It makes communalistic sense. It does not make individualistic and capitalistic sense, however, and so it is very likely to be easily scoffed away as prehistoric by proponents of Western modernization theory. This is the bias that is at the core of modernization theory;24 and it is that discrimination that has prompted the dismantlement of African communalistic societies via the introduction of unbridled pursuit of individual profit. Thus, the therapy proposed for Africa’s woes by modernization theorists is nothing new. Under the old globalization, that therapy had been applied to ancient Africa’s collective system of government, and it had proven extremely devastating. In fact, modernization theory, as advocated by the precursors of modernization during the old globalization, is at the basis of the very ill that today’s modernization theorists seek to heal. How then is one to understand this enthusiasm to prescribe to Africans a treatment which has already proven to do more harm than good? The old globalization took place under the auspices of Europe. The new globalization is taking place under the auspices of America. The new globalization, we have argued, is about the Americanization of the world. It is no longer just about colonizing Africa. For America, globalization is about the colonization of the world, including Western Europe. This time the old globalizer (Western Europe) is also in the crosshairs of the new globalizer (America) as colonizable space, and the implements that Western Europe had used to colonize the Third World are, this time, perfected by the United States and utilized with unforeseen power and conviction for an indiscriminate conquest of the world. In this grand scheme of Americanization of the world, Western Europe, whose position is ever more tenuous, is no less a pun than the Third World and can only pretend that it is still in the game, and that the patents of the implements of modernization still belong to Europe. Those among the French people who follow international news, and who are not exclusively fed with

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French media propaganda, grieve daily over President Sarkozy’s buffoonish contortions to convince ideologized French subjects that the United States take world policy advice from France. When U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld differentiates between “old Europe” and “new Europe,” it is of two competing ideas of Europe, two European spirits living side by side in the twenty-first century that he speaks. Old Europe is the Europe of the nostalgic mind. Old Europe cannot accept the fact that it is passé; old Europe wants to convince itself that it still matters, that its opinion still carries some weight on the international scale. Old Europe is the Europe of melancholy and rumination. New Europe, on the other hand, is the Europe that has come to terms with its real position as underling of the United States and has accepted that position of subordinate. New Europe, however, that is, the spirit of new Europe, is not the spirit of elites that rule Europe. Europe likes to be sold nostalgia, past glories, and promises of a return to the times of old grandeurs. So, the elites that rule Europe are nostalgic elites. Take France, for instance, what else is there to hold on to other than the good old baguette and fromage and the myth of romance, fashion, and gallantry? In other words, the old globalizer still wants to be in the globalizing game, and the old globalizer is right. In the context of the new jostle for positioning, the survival of the old globalizer depends on being in the game, and especially on playing the game with the psychological and material implements certified by America. It is only at this price that Western Europe can hope to survive. Psychologically and epistemologically, it implies that Western Europe should tweak its system of knowledge production and dissemination according to America’s— the ongoing strike in the French educational system is a result of Sarkozy’s manifest desire to Americanize the French school, and thus knowledge. Materially, it implies that everyday comfort should be sought in accordance with the American way of life — blue jeans, tennis shoes, fast food (or McDonaldization), rap, basketball, reality TV, fast cars, and big homes. In the perspective of the new division of labor and its trickled-down comfort, Western Europe supplies sub-contractors to American modernization and seeks to make of the Third World and Africa in particular what Europe is to America. Western Europe hopes to conquer Africa through the cooptation of abandonment-neurotic black leaders. The black elites sold to the idea of modernization have cultivated what is most depressing, most unconstructive in the philosophy of modernization. Soulless, undignified characters running away from themselves, but faithful slaves in shiny shoes and pricey suits dreaming of white bliss and exhibiting eternal imbecile smiles to their Western masters, the peddlers of modernization in Africa, the depersonalized African elites, have cultivated negativity to its highest coefficient, thus bankrupting the South and enriching the North. Indeed, “[t]he westernizing elites in whom modernization theorists placed their faith would not lead their countries out of backwardness. Rather … they were fifth columnists who conspired to keep their homelands poor. Though it appeared illogical, this strategy was shrewd: it impoverished most of the population but enriched the few who applied it.”25 The

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Central African Republic, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo Kinshasa, Côte d’Ivoire, to cite only these few, present interesting case studies to this effect.26 The Westernized abandonment-neurotic African leaders, who, in the name of Western rationality, are destroying the African continent, have in fact put rationality on its head. One would be hard pressed, nevertheless, to plead with them that there is no pride to gain from their conduct that plunders Africa for the benefit of the West; for the abandonment-neurotic blacks, to be validated in the company of the Western man, in his urban space or whatever that might be analogous to, matters more than the wellbeing of their own peoples.

The Imaginary Space of Modernity There is an insightful scene of Lawrence of Arabia,27 where, after a long and exhausting night trek across the most trying part of the Arabian desert, “the oven,” as it is called, the English character Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) and his Arab army, en route to seizing a Turkish stronghold on behalf of Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness), notice that Gasim (I.S. Johar), a travel companion, has fallen off his camel during the night and has gotten lost. Lawrence decides to go back and look for Gasim, against the advice of Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif ), who urges him to keep moving ahead; for, holds the latter, Gasim shall die by midday; his time has come; “it is written.” Sherif ’s surrender to time and his belief that history is a story that cannot be tempered with, and which shall unfurl like a scroll, according to a preset diagram, despite human intervention, enrages Lawrence, who is even more determined to go back and fetch the drifter, promising, instead, that he will retrieve Gasim from the deathly embrace of the desert sand and sun and bring him back as truly as that improbable outcome “is written in his mind.” Lawrence’s determination is rewarded. After enduring hours, he finds the lost traveler and brings him to camp amid the cheers of his previously skeptical companions. Sherif, who had advised Lawrence against going back, is forced to recognize that indeed, “for some people, nothing is written until they write it themselves.” To reward Lawrence for his audacity and triumphant defiance of fate, Sherif burns the hero’s British army clothes, offers him new noble Arab garments, and advises him to break away from his father’s name and choose himself a new name — El Lawrence; for, says Sherif, “he for whom nothing is written can invent himself a new tribe.” The dialectic between the Name-of-the-Father and the new name, or fate and mind, is the clash pitting chance to intelligence, destiny to volition, divine coercion to human enterprise, tradition (or premodernity) to the Enlightenment (or modernity). While the film has shown with much subtlety that the British mentality, and especially the British army mentality could be as rigidifying as a religious, superstitious mentality, a certain cinematic writing of the representative protagonists of this dialectic of faith and reason in Lawrence of Arabia might suggest that the respective

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loci of premodernity and modernity are the East and the West; in a more general grid, the film might suggest that superstition is Southern and reason is the Northern, or again that irrationality is Thirdworldist and rationality is Firstworldist. This last predicate has been abundantly cultivated in emancipatory discourses in plantation and colonial societies as affirmative. We are now too familiar with Senghor’s signature phrase emotion is black, and reason is Hellenic, a reproduction of European racist binaries,28 a biologism, which as has been argued in many places, originated from a European spirit of despondency over Western ethics, and gradually gathered steam with the popular dejection and intellectual objections over the two European wars. Senghor, as he acknowledges himself, was fed the myth of the emotional black by his white masters (Delafosse, Frobenius, Delavignette and others) and by his elders of the Negro Renaissance (Garvey, McKay, Countee Cullen). In appropriating this verdict, Third World emancipation heroes have only contributed to promoting the stigmatization of the Third World as exotic and backward. Thus, the West or anything that amounts to it is progressive, and the Third World or anything that is a synecdoche for it is regressive. This essentialist understanding of race — the fact that race might bear exclusive essential, ontological traits— has been one of Frantz Fanon’s main points of contention with the Negritude Movement. Fanon has sternly condemned Senghor’s conviction — defended through a succession of essays— that there is a particular mytho-poetic African personality, an incomplete personality, which could be fused with the particular analytical European personality — it, too, imperfect — in order to give a higher human, a universal man. For Senghor, this symbiosis is symbolized by the coming together of black blood and white blood, as indicated in several poems, such as “To New York”29 or “To the Music of Koras and Balaphon.”30 Fanon’s rejoinder to Senghor’s fragmented black man who is supposed to find wholeness by dissolving himself in a sort of Hegelian dialectic is expressed as the protest of an absolute and uncompromising black man. So Fanon writes, The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position. Still in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower.31

Yet, there is something paradoxically yearning in this Fanonian protest, which forebodes the condition of the post-independence black. Though Fanon was immeasurably lucid as to the perils of compulsive mimicry of the white that awaited the postcolonial black and even warned against those risks in a voice that mixed scientific acumen with prophetic vision, nonetheless what he said in this epistemological rejoinder, somewhat subliminally, was that reason is not the exclusive province of whiteness; he, too, a French-educated psychiatrist, was entitled to claim it; and thus, by virtue of the fact that he was entitled to claim reason, he claimed it. He proclaimed himself a man of reason first and of emotion last. So, this Fanonian protest rehearses

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the binary reason/emotion and the value judgments attached to each term of the equation. What it says is the following: “See how I, too, despite the color of my skin, and by virtue of my education, my social status, my mastery of your language and of your epistemology, see how I, too, can use reason”; this is also the reasoning of the black elites of postcolonial Africa eager to join, at least notionally, the club of whiteness, eager to pull themselves out of the quicksand of the emotional South and emancipate themselves on the shores of the reasoning North. The African elites did not deconstruct this colonial binary. They only sought to get out of the fold of emotion by mimicking whiteness to the excess: a case of neurosis, of pathological superfluity. Senghor, the poet of African beauty and emotion, was even more demonstrative in expressing his closeness to the world of the Occident, as, in his role of French grammarian, he would proudly declare, “j’enseigne le français aux Français,” (I teach French to the French), when he was not proudly declaiming in verses the distance which, by virtue of his French education, separated him from his backward ancestors.32 In his poetry, as has been noted elsewhere, “Senghor says it with no circumlocution: A world separates him from his giraffe-hunting ancestors. He is a man of refinement, a man of letters.”33 So, the outline of the progressive North and regressive South remained fortified. It is in keeping with the broad outline of the emancipated North and the backward South that critics have often compared living conditions in urban and rural spaces in the Third World along the axis of modernity versus tradition, tradition meaning here pre-modern. It is in keeping with this outline that the abandonment-neurotic African elites have sought to imitate everything Western by running away from themselves, by giving themselves away, by giving away their continent, whatever it takes to be in the good grace of the Chosen People. There is, in this approach, a tendency to suggest, in a sweeping gesture, that everything and everyone that inhabit the urban space are of the realm of modernity, and, consequently, that all things and all people that dwell in the rural space are of the realm of pre-modernity. This indiscriminate brushstroke can be highly misleading. Things ought to be nuanced, so that one should understand which attitudes in the Third World, irrespective of where one might dwell, impede progress and which ones are conducive to human development; for it is, indeed, as has been suggested in Lawrence of Arabia, more of attitude than of latitude and longitude that it is question here. Yet, many dwellers of big cities steadfastly cast a disdainful eye on country dwellers, thinking highly of themselves and seeing the latter as backward, on the sole ground that they live in the urban space and the latter in the rural space; as if the company of fast-moving cars and eyedazzling buildings alone could anoint them superior men. Perhaps these modern men would be very disappointed to learn that the term “modernity” has neither necessarily been associated with space nor connoted “better,” “freer,” or “more advanced.”

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Modernity as an Attitudinal Ethos Nietzsche, it was noted in the preceding pages, advocated a flight from the stultifying space of Western modernity. If modernity is not a space, where then lies Nietzsche’s space-surrendering gesture? According to Kant, modernity or Enlightenment is an attitude. “It is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage … [or] inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another…. Have courage to use your own reason!— that is the motto of Enlightenment,” Kant writes.34 The conditions of Kant’s admonition exist already in modernity. In fact, they are, in his view, what characterizes modernity. Modernity is the condition of “being of age,” of maturity, whereby a book no longer understands for one, a priest no longer has conscience for one, a physician no longer decides for one’s diet; but the condition whereby mankind decides for itself, makes use of its free volition, surrenders the realm of obedience for that of reason.35 This is, perhaps, as far as Kant can go in supporting Nietzsche, or shall we put it this way, as far as the latter can go in drawing upon the former; for Kant’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of modernity have much to differ about past this parallel. However, on the question of the attitudinal, rather than epochal or spatial nature of modernity, Kant and Nietzsche are joined by Foucault, too, who has this to say: I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least a set of features characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or less naïve and archaic “premodernity”…. Thinking back on Kant’s [“What Is Enlightenment”], I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by “attitude,” I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people, in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.36

Foucault then pauses on Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as “the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent,” but more precisely on Baudelaire’s suggestion that modernity is not mere contemplation of the fleeting present, but heroization of that present; the beauty of which Foucault finds in its irony — to love the present, perhaps, as much as the pathologist loves the dead body, to love the present as a work of art from which to produce a better man; to love the present so much as to be able to seize in the present what speaks of our political and social conditions; for it is only by comprehending that condition that one will be in the position to alter it. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects that reality and violates it…. This ironic heroization of the present, this transfiguring play of freedom with reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self … can only be produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art.37

That other “place” of heroization of the present, as Nietzsche had hitherto suggested, lies “beyond the North wind.” This is where one can identify a two-fold point of contention between Nietzsche — with certainly Foucault38— and Kant in the definition of modernity. Firstly, Kant qualifies the extent to which one is to exercise free will. He advocates a mechanistic obedience of public rules in the public domain, for

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the advancement of the collective interest, even if in private, one still disagrees with these rules and one expresses this disagreement in the public arena of scholarly debates. Thus, for Kant, a citizen could privately disagree with the notion of tax collection; as a scholar discussing in the public arena, that citizen could even write against the levy of taxes. However, in the public exercise of his citizenship, he is bound to follow the rules and he must acquit himself of his obligation as a taxpayer, so as not to undermine the collective interest of the community to which he belongs. Likewise, a priest might disagree with some of the views of his church and produce, therefore, scholarly rebuttals of these precepts; nevertheless, as a priest, he must continue to teach the principles upon which his priesthood rests.39 It is undeniable that the subject who complains about tax levy but keeps on paying his taxes may express his opinion against the state institutions that impose this burden on him and which he recognizes to be tyrannical, but he does not stop obeying them. Likewise, the priest who writes against the very precepts of the church to which he submits entirely is in no way really exercising free volition. Both the taxpayer and the priest still function within the realm of obedience. It is from this perspective that Nietzsche’s second point of contention is illuminated. The increasingly prescriptive and codified rules of modernity are conducive to falling alongside, to abdicating volition. Modernity is for Nietzsche an attitude whereby, under the illusion of developing on moral and civic grounds, volition submits to oppression. To be free, volition has to be exercised beyond the initial moment of prise de conscience that characterizes the scholarly critique. For the individual to be really free, Nietzsche would submit, his mere heroization of the present will not suffice; the individual must turn away from being a weakling in society to being a hero whose volition is in rupture with the social contract of modernity. The psychological space propitious to full exercise of free volition —for it is only a psychological space, and not a physical one, only attitude and not latitude — is beyond the stronghold of modernity. The affirmative marker accorded to modernity by Kant is turned on its head by Nietzsche, who sees modernity as a pejorative instance on account of its coercive, alienating gift. Nietzsche would be hard pressed, however, to make his case to certain African elites exuberant in the middle of others, content in their mere whatness, elites lacking the gumption to assume their futurality, elites surrendering their independence to their occidental masters and satisfied with their condition of mere modern slaves in shining shoes and silky ties. These abandonment-neurotic African elites are convinced that nothing is too precious to surrender in order to inhabit the urban space of the white; for they are the outcomes of a successful operation of lobotomy on the peripheral elite by the core educational system. For a chance to inhabit a space furnished with the amenities of the Occident, the black man has sold his soul, making himself a native informant, a corrupt peddler working to promote the interests of the center. The disease of the slavering black elites, we shall develop in the next chapter as the “Mamadou Syndrome.”

7

The “Mamadou Syndrome”: Disease of the Native Informant There is a strange quisling quality about their actions which should force us to ask whether [the African elites] are primarily African nationalists or modern slavers serving the West just as the slaving elites did centuries ago. They seem to be victims of a voluntary cultural servitude and of an economic insecurity which predisposes them to serve the West rather than Africa. What then are the mental conditioning and habits of consumption that so alarmingly unite their political and economic interests with those of their masters — the Western bourgeoisie? Chinweizu —The West and the Rest of Us1

In a previous chapter, we alluded to a Firstworldist conspiracy to control the resources of Africa through the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF. What then of the African intellectuals who are part of these international organizations alleged to systematize the takeover of Africa? Are they, too, part of the vast conspiracy to deliver Africa to the core states, some skeptics might ask? The answer is simple. Many of the black elites in these predatory international political and financial organizations are haunted by a desire for white bliss, a desire that keeps them in a state of psychic enslavement. They are no more than modern-day native informants who seem to understand the measure of emancipation in a total reversal, without transition, of Frobeniusian paideumatic paradigm. The consequence of this reversal of what it hitherto meant to be “authentically black,” the outcome of the desire to run away from “authentic blackness” as defined by Frobenius, with its double entendre of “primitivity,” “backwardness,” “savagery,” and “Neanderthalism,” was unconditional adoption of modernization theory. The black elites wanted to be “in the game,” even if it meant acting as native informants in the functioning of the game, a game that could be bureaucratically meandering and philosophically mystifying, as have shown Gros and Prokopovych in their schematization of the World Bank as both an open system organization and a closed system organization. The closed system organization is self-propelling and needs little external support…. Decisions in this type of organization flow from top to bottom…. Closed system organizations do not dismiss the external environment entirely, nor, however, do they assume that are they dependent upon it for survival. By contrast, an open system is capable of self-maintenance

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based on a throughput of resources from its environment, such as a living cell. An open system organization cannot survive without the external environment, which it uses to garner the “ingredients” it needs for its survival.2

Though managed as a closed system organization with top-down line of command, apparently impressing efficient actions aimed at arriving at a predetermined goal — neo-liberal, free market society — the World Bank is actually an open system organization. It depends for its functioning and financing on structures external to its immediate environment, such as the independent member countries that fund it, the borrowing governments on whose high interest payments it thrives, the multilateral development institutions (the UN, the IMF, the WTO) on whose policies it relies, the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have very scant understanding of its policies, but which the Bank uses when convenient as critical implements within borrowing countries, and last but not least, the individual local informants recruited within borrowing countries, trained at the school of the World Bank and excessively paid to translate to local populations in borrowing countries the policies of the World Bank, and when necessary to moonlight as advisers to Third World borrowing governments. The bureaucratic cumbersomeness of the World Bank, staffed with nearly 11,000 employees, makes of the Bank a meat market where decisions are actually not rationally made, as should be the case in a closed system organization, but rather left to the “pulling and hauling” of individual players wishing to be part of the lending game.3 To be part of the game is at least one thing that is understood by all the players in the grand mêlée that the Bank constitutes, as it is not just about playing the game, but mostly about winning it in the eyes of the Bank’s top management, and more precisely in the eyes of its most important shareholders, the core states; and to win this lending game is to have the Bank’s investments yield huge returns. In the Bank’s brouhaha, the struggle for personal success takes precedence over the success of any development program, as laments Berkman. I’ve come to believe that the disconnect between the intellectual fantasy world in which too many of the Bank’s economists live and the real world of Africa has largely contributed to the Bank’s failures there…. I’ve become convinced that much of the Bank’s aimless mission drift in Africa, and the rest of the world, has been due to its reliance on the leadership of a cadre of bureaucratic and academically oriented economists who have learned the rules of career progression and have risen accordingly in the system. Not because they have accomplished great things, but because they have played the game well in a system created by themselves.4

As far as the native informant goes, it would be to accord him too much credit to think of him as an intellectual or an academician that has created anything. Is not fantasy a condition of the neurotic? In the mit-dasein of the First World, the native informant lives in the fantasy of a thinker and a creator. Mindful, in the very least, of the superfluous effort that he must undertake — if ever this is to be understood as creation — in order to arrive at the level of jouissance afforded to the core state, the native informant has proven to be the most neurotic of all the players of the lending game, and the greatest defector, too. For, despite the high status he might have in the borrowing country on account

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of being appointed by the creditor/core state, the native informant has actually no name as far as the creditor/core state is concerned. For the core state, the native informant is a shadowy figure. He has nothing to his actif. The native informant is an interpreter, a translator, a peddler of core states’ culture to peripheral nations. The native informant is not paid to think. He is paid to execute. The native informant is not paid to create; he is paid to implement, to pitch a mode of thinking and doing business, that is, his master’s mode of thinking and doing business. The native informant is not paid to produce; he is paid to reproduce. The native informant is paid to walk in the shadow of the oppressor of his people. The native informant’s gestures and his words have nothing original. They are impersonations, mimicry. The native informant is still psychologically prisoner of the oppressor though he lives in a great mansion and drives a big shining car; he is still psychologically a colonized subject, enslaved in his inferiority complex. What is his affliction? Oliver calls it “debilitating alienation”5; we shall call it here the “Mamadou Syndrome.” Giorgio Blundo highlights the function of the ambiguous native informant in both the English and French colonial systems. In Nigeria (in particular after 1914 when the English officers no longer presided over the Native Courts), the court clerks used their position as legal experts and interpreters of the law to sell their expertise. They also exploited the labour of prisoners and made a name for themselves as usurers6… an indispensable cog in the [French] colonial administration machine, [the interpreters] were among the best paid auxiliaries and their salaries could be as high as those of French administrators in Europe.7

Soon after the abolition of the abhorrent practice of slavery that enriched Europe at an unimaginable rate became finally effective, warring European powers in dire need of revenues sought new excuses to put in place systems of exploitation of the Africans. Under the pretext of civilizing native Africans, the European powers reentered the African continent, parceled it, colonized it, and established colonial methods of inculcation of knowledge whose purpose was the uninterrupted looting of the colonies. Colonial education did very little to foster a spirit of independence in the educated colonized. On the contrary, placed for the most part under the alienating tutelage of a colonial clergy colluding with the colonial administration, the semiliterate colonized was educated to preserve the interests of the metropolitan states first and foremost and think of the natives’ interests in the very last resort. French and Belgian colonial educations were illustrative in that regard. In Leopoldian Congo, for instance, “Catholic missionaries … were in their great majority, corrupt clergymen, who had pledged total allegiance to Leopold. The missionaries’ interpretation of Belgian patriotism clouded their sense of duty to the spiritual cause”; the native elites’ “inexperience had been deliberately planned by the educational system in Belgian Congo in order to delay the Congolese’s emancipation.”8 Consequently, as Kieh, Jr., observes, “domestically, with very few exceptions, the newly emergent ruling classes within the various African states failed to deconstruct, rethink and democratically reconstitute the colonial state. Instead, they adopted the colonial state and its neo-colonial incarnation.”9 Trained to keep their

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gazes fixed toward the metropolitan state as the Promised Land and the metropolitan language as the quintessential language, the African elites have hardly been able to rid themselves of the slave mentality implanted in their subconscious by the colonial powers; so much that in the era of “new globalization” economic resources continue to be transported from Africa to the old metropolis “as natural and expected facts.”10 The system of usury, which helped put in place capitalism, continues to function according to its old principle of exploitation of the alien; though this time, in the “new globalization,” a shrewd method of training and recuperation of native informants by Western economic and political puppeteers seeks to bamboozle and blur the lines between the nearest and dearest and the alien.11 The core states’ route to unbridled wealth accumulation, to that thing called capitalism, is littered with pathological black subjects, abandonment-neurotics afflicted with the “Mamadou Syndrome”; diseased souls always ready to answer present to the call of betrayal. Robert Nugent made a documentary on the industrial operations of a multinational mining company in Guinea and the ensuing political, economic and social impacts on the native populations as well as the resulting effects on the physiography of the region. The End of the Rainbow12 features indeed the end of the idyllic Guinea that late Guinean author Laye Camara pictured in his 1956 autobiography as the land of mythic blacksmiths, of imaginative griots, of abundant harvests, of copious family dinners, and of an innocent and careless childhood existence.13 In Nugent’s documentary a native population of long-time farmers and gold miners is displaced from its ancestral lands by the government in order to make room for an industrial mining corporation that has signed a lucrative land-leasing contract with the governing class. As the mining company moves into the area, the local population is cheaply bought out and pushed away, further onto uncultivable lands; the region’s vegetation is indiscriminately cleared; the game disappears, and the little water there is to drink as well as the soil are contaminated by the chemicals used by the mining company to process gold. Although some itinerant young men are thankful to find stable, albeit low-paying, jobs with the company, for the majority of the local population, the elation that preceded the arrival of the corporation as purveyor of better living conditions dies fast. The multinational corporation soon becomes an antagonistic force to a disillusioned and starving local population that, against the government’s order, and despite the scores of soldiers protecting the corporation’s perimeters, descends at night to mine gold on the lands leased by the corporation. What this documentary on the new globalization reveals, and which might be tangential to the filmmaker’s objective, yet very telling for whoever wants to understand the kind of native cooperation that keeps Africa in the thick of poverty, is what we have identified as the “Mamadou Syndrome,” an affliction plaguing many African leaders. In Nugent’s documentary, of all the Africans working with the multinational corporation, the character Mamadou was the only one allowed to wear a red hardhat. Mamadou was a young Guinean with approximate French skills hired and promoted by the corporation to persuade the local populations not to undermine the

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objectives of the mining corporation. Mamadou’s red hat was the insignia of his high rank, as only white workers wore red hats; and the company went to great length to emphasize to him the special nature of the honor bestowed him through his red hat. He was not like the other Africans. He had a red hat and, therefore, was closer to the whites. However, this red hat he was to remove each time he went to speak to the locals, as it would identify him as a white and, therefore, render the locals mistrustful and uncooperative. For Mamadou, who would have liked to exhibit his red hat everywhere he went, this was a little disappointment. Nevertheless, Mamadou was still very proud of his red hat that made him “one of the whites.” So, he scoured the villages graciously interpreting for the locals the benefits of the company’s actions when he was not busy chasing the few audacious Guineans who, in search of gold, dared “infringe the law” and trespass the company’s property. When Mamadou came upon one of these “lawbreakers,” O with what zeal did he beat him, insult him, and curse him, before handing him over to the corporation that, in turn, after having roughened him up a little bit, handed him over to the soldiers to be beaten and locked up in one of the corporation’s sun-beat and suffocating containers. Mamadou is the symbol of the black turncoat weakening Africa for a piece of white jouissance. Mamadou is a mere house slave that needs to be indexed and denounced.

Indexing the Native Informant Today, the black elites bristle at the mere mention of modern “Uncle Toms”; as if the end of the transatlantic slave trade has also eradicated the instinct of preservation and the angst of isolation that made blacks in plantation societies accord exceptional priority to the growling of their stomachs and which caused them to betray other blacks and fall alongside “mainstream,” exuberant in a mit-dasein that is not their true Da-sein, settle in the facile luxury of whatness rather than striving for their true whoness. Yet, there are many modern slaves out there, many “Mamadous,” who, for a moment of comfort, are willing to betray the race and rationalize for their people the system of domination that keeps them in bondage. In the name of globalization, such flaws just must be hushed. For memory, one can only recall the firestorm that followed entertainer/activist Harry Belafonte’s interpellation of former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell — not that we are suggesting that Powell might be an Uncle Tom — when the latter declined an exceptional opportunity to make an appearance and speak against world discrimination at the United Nations conference on racism in South Africa. This is what Belafonte had to say of Powell on October 8, 2002, to radio host Ted Leitner in San Diego: “There is an old saying in the days of slavery. There are those slaves who lived on plantation, and there were those slaves who lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master. Colin Powell committed to come into the house of the master.” In a reaction to Belafonte’s comments, columnist Collin

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Levey wrote a few words that, if anything, at least have much to say about the “sacred cow” status that is bestowed upon blacks who “have arrived.” They are the symbols of a colorblind society, and therefore, can only draw praise and admiration, but no criticism. To take issue with them is in fact to betray the ideal of globalization. “Mr. Belafonte, after all,” Levey writes, “is the one who looks like a relic of a period when blacks were relegated to minstrel shows…. By any standard, Mr. Powell is the herald of a society becoming more colorblind by the year.”14 What Levey means is that globalization, with its resultant political correctness, will not allow the kinds of qualifications made of Powell. The idea of racial betrayal runs counter that of the global village and its superlative principle of boundary erasure. Globalization is happy to present a façade of collective interests whereby claims of national, racial or cultural specificities appear suddenly blasphemous. Yet, the daily frauds are here to remind us all that globalization has no intention of living up to this promise of universal brotherhood. Globalization is the latest stage of unrepressed capitalism, a savage capitalism that has had, since the slave trade and the colonization of Africa, to rely on a body of undignified native informants trained in the techniques of betrayal to perpetuate the West’s system of domination and pillaging of Africa. To put things in perspective, one will perhaps have to revisit the history of the World Bank as well as its fundamental principle of neo-liberalism.15 It is in the aftermath of the second European war, in 1946, that the World Bank was conceived. Originally, the Bank aimed at reconstructing the broken infrastructures of the war-torn nations of Europe and Japan, and its lending mechanism of the time, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), was, by its very designation, revelatory of the mission that it had assigned itself. The underlying assumption of the IBRD was that a modernized, free-market European society would stimulate European economy, encourage private local and foreign investments, the latter especially from the United States, and launch Europe into an era of fiscal and technological emulation, that is, into a more prosperous twentieth century for all countries. Of course, this fundamental ideology was mostly influenced by the country that was typically in charge of rebuilding Europe through its Marshall Plan, the United States. By the 1950s, Western European countries were no longer countries in need, and the reconstruction role of the IBRD was becoming obsolete. However, most former colonies of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, which had been sources of enrichment without returns for the colonizing powers before and during the European war, and which, on the occasion of World War II and its subsequent weakening of the colonizing powers, were gaining their independences, emerged in even direr conditions. These countries, which needed to be attended to, constituted for the World Bank a new clientele toward which new lending activities could be directed. Though Europe could be rebuilt in terms of its broken infrastructures, in these emerging countries, utter poverty was the common lot, and infrastructures were nonexistent, because they were never developed by the colonizing powers in the first place. These countries found themselves lagging behind in the most basic

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areas, such as agriculture, education, healthcare, water treatment plants, road construction, etc. So, as palliative late addition to remedy the problem of the newly independent countries of the Third World, a new lending instrument, the International Development Association (IDA) was created in 1960, whose aim was to make longterm loans (up to 40 years) to the poorest countries that, unlike the European countries, needed everything built from scratch rather than repaired. Development lending to poor countries saw its highest level of activity during the McNamara presidency at the World Bank (1968 –1981) under what became known as the poverty reduction program of the Bank. Nevertheless, the United States, as the most influential country of the World Bank, remained focused on its underlying neo-liberal ideology, even when it came to the IDA; moreover, from the 1960s and 1970s onward, a small number of European countries and Japan, faithful to the United States, were well enough sold on the idea of the free market to make the World Bank the operative structure of American brand of capitalism within their own zones of influence, thus transforming the world Bank into an apparatus of dominance. In Theory, the World Bank is owned by 184 member countries, in practice a small number of countries exert considerable influence over the Bank. This is because regular operations at the bank devolve to a 24-member board of executive directors, of whom 5 come from the countries with the largest Bank’s shares— U.S., UK, France, Germany and Japan — and represent these countries, even though none has borrowed from the Bank since World War II…. The World Bank, in other words, is politicized and is not, therefore, strictly a bank.” 16

The five powerful are, therefore, on the board of directors as a matter of prestige, to make friends, punish enemies and influence policies.17 One of the controlling tools used by the five powerful to be in command of policy in the borrowing states is conditionality lending. Conditionality lending consists of breaking loan disbursement in several tranches, each contingent upon borrowing governments’ explicit agreement to specific conditions laid out by the World Bank. From this perspective, future disbursements become incentives for complying with the conditions of the previous disbursements. Conditionality is contradictory to the World Bank’s much heralded motto of “good governance,” as it leaves very little, if any, room to borrowing governments to have meaningful internal development policy discussions or to redirect aid according to new national imperatives. Because it tends to impose on notionally sovereign governments projects of which they have no ownership, conditionality is disaster-prone; in most cases, it has failed. Some critics see four main causes to the failure of conditionality: 1. The overriding importance of domestic political factors as determining long-run policy changes; 2. the failure to consistently carry out reward and penalties; 3. serious problems of implementation; and 4. the influence of external shocks undermining governments’ ability to respect commitments.18

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Being as manipulative as the Bank that seeks to control their internal policies, African governments in dire need of aid have agreed to the Bank’s reforms/sold reforms to the Banks only to break their promise once in possession of the funds, aware “[o]nce the initial tranche of loan has been made available, Bank staff have a strong incentive to make the loan ‘work.’ This is partly because their own success depends on effectively managing aid disbursement and partly because punishments which [are] imposed by the Bank for failing to meet conditions imposed by the Bank lack moral legitimacy. The threat not to make subsequent tranches available therefore has relatively low credibility, and the Bank learns to accept partial success.”19 Though threats have constituted a great part of the game the World Bank/IMF plays with its borrowers, threats alone have not been able to bend foreign governments to the will of the five powerful. Threats alone, in the end, are likely to generate suspicion and rebellion. Unsuspecting, persuasive methods have to be found that would make the African governments more acquiescent to the big five predatory methods. Recruiting and training collaborators among the local populations have always proven to be efficacious methods since the times of the “first globalizations.” During the transatlantic slave trade, trained Africans chased and captured slaves for Europeans. During colonization, trained Africans raided villages in punitive expeditions to preserve the interests of the colonial administration. For instance, during the Leopoldian regime in the Congo, Leopold II played the “ethnic card” to perfection by using tribal differences to his advantage. “In fact, the fierce Bangala people [of Upper Congo] were preferred as capitas [Leopold’s army of natives led by white officers], and they were encouraged to rape, torture, kill, and cannibalize recalcitrant Congolese’s family members. This was all part of the Divide and Rule policy…”20 Likewise, in the theater of the “new globalization,” trained Africans can still betray their people if paid a good price. In the modern world, the reward just needs to be raised a little bit more. Occidental universities could be sites of recruitment of marionette native informants, and they have been. “Too many mainstream American academics moonlighted as consultants to the emerging governments of the Third World, the World Bank, and major research organizations … or had their former students reach the highest echelon of state power in their respective countries for the coincidence between modernization theory and Bank policy to have been just that (coincidence).”21 So, while it is convenient for critics to list a catalog of woes plaguing the African continent, it would also be fair to investigate the enabling factors of these woes. Far from a witch-hunting program, African modern slaves in three-piece suits and shining shoes ought to be identified, denounced, and shamed for what they are: enablers and perpetuators of the Occidental domination of Africa. This conversation should be an integral part of Africa’s search for solutions to its problems. Just as collaborators of the Nazi system were denounced and shamed, just as traitors of the French Resistance were exposed and humiliated, just as insider black infiltrators working on behalf of the South African apartheid system were indexed for who they were when

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discovered, Africa’s traitors working under the cover of globalization ought to feel the pressure of shame and disgrace, for their crimes are no lighter, no more excusable than those of the black sovereigns and merchants who built their fortunes on the slave trade. The moral affliction of the abandonment-neurotic black elites that work for the perpetuation of the Occidental system of domination is no longer a personal matter when it undermines the future of a whole continent. Furthermore, this neurosis is far from discriminating on the basis of age; and Levey cannot be any more mistaken when she states that “Mr. Belafonte is 75 and belongs to an America that is rapidly receding into the past.”22 Age has nothing to do with it, as the younger minds could be as corruptible, if not more cowardly, than the older ones. If time is irrelevant, space is even less relevant when it comes to the affliction that keeps the black leaders psychologically trapped in slavery. Would it not have been great if the passing of the deficient autocratic leaders afflicted by inferiority complexes such as Bokassa and Bongo were heralding Africa’s new dawn, an age when a new generation of African men and women, confident, energetic and conscientious, could once and for all place the continent on its path for genuine development? Would it not be great for Africa if the “old Negritude” that Césaire so emphatically decried were dead for good? Would it not be wonderful if the new millennium were signaling the coming of the new black man and woman who, with “a great display of brains,” could “force the vitelline membrane” that separates him/her from himself/herself and could psychologically “[leave] timid Europe which collects and proudly overrates itself ?”23 Unfortunately, there is a new brand of African liberals, who, like the old agents of Western international imperialism, have a special job to do: To spread the liberal ideology in Africa, to maintain a black front there for a neocolonial world order run by the West, to administer the neocolonial African territories for the West, and to restore the imperialized status quo if any genuinely African nationalist regime should storm its way into power anywhere in Africa … though they advertise themselves as serving Africa, they operate in an environment, with a mentality, and under conditioned attitude and direct advice that all tend to yield policies that primarily serve the neocolonial powers, policies that often are in direct opposition to the genuine interests of the African peoples. Conditioned by a pro-western miseducation, they see their class interests as tied to those of their imperialist masters, and they readily abandon the interests of their people to protect those of their class.24

Today, the Bretton Woods institutions through the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF are striving to impose some black apostles of Western economic liberalism everywhere in Africa in order to re-colonize the continent and better control its resources. In some places the positioning of the house slaves in pressed coats and shining shoes has been undertaken without many difficulties, as a bamboozled African community has been persuaded to accept these traitors and applaud their almost messianic appointments. In other places, like in Côte d’Ivoire, the people were able to see through the masquerade. The messenger has been simply returned to his masters with a message that says “no, but thank you!” However, the price for this impertinence has also been heavy to bear.

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Alassane Ouattara: The Black Domestic from the IMF When despite all the imperial manipulations aimed at imposing Alassane Ouattara to the Ivorian people as the savior from the IMF he was exposed as a fraud and as a miseducated imperialist pun and, therefore, cast off, the punitive expedition that befell the people of Côte d’Ivoire was heavy in blood.25 France’s, and to some extent Washington’s, obstinacy to impose Ouattara on the Ivorian people as a progressive leader was of the most illegitimate claims. Ouattara was not the progressive technocrat his Occidental masters wanted to represent to the world. Ouattara was in fact an inexperienced and visionless politician, a public-fundembezzler and a brutal autocrat who, as the prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire between 1991 and 1993, cut short the spring of democracy. Technocrate de la finance alors engagé au gouvernement pour redresser la situation économique du pays, sans passé ni vision politiques, il a été promu ministre en novembre. Il a géré très vite la réalité du pouvoir qui a échappé au vieil Houphouët-Boigny, très affaibli par la maladie et souvent à l’étranger … Alassane Ouattara qui n’a pas hésité à recourir à la violence pour gouverner et briser l’élan démocratique, notamment en février 1992, a bien essayé de se maintenir à la tête de l’État…. [De retour au FMI après son échec], il veut y redorer son blason de technocrate audessus de la mêlée et faire oublier ses méthodes expéditives à l’encontre de la démocratie.26 A finance technocrat working at the time to get the country’s economy back on its feet, without any past political experience or vision, he was promoted to prime minister in November. Very quickly, he managed the power reality that has escaped the old Houphouët-Boigny, very sick and often overseas…. Alassane Ouattara, who did not hesitate to resort to violence to govern and to arrest the democratic leap, particularly in February 1992, did try to remain in power as head of state…. [Back to the IMF after his failure], he wants to restore his image as a technocrat there above the fray and make people forget his brutal methods against democracy.

In fact, as we have shown, it did not take long for Ouattara’s insurrectionary instincts to resurface through the bloody rebellion that he dealt the Ivorian people in November 2002. Having failed to seize power by rebellious means, Ouattara seems resolute to go through the legitimate electoral process that he has hitherto shunned. However, the rebels that he has armed are still holding on to their weapons, which, should he lose the coming elections set for mid–2010, augurs some more violence. The World Bank and the IMF’s shareholders are observing what is going on in Côte d’Ivoire with a keen interest. France’s visceral dislike of Ivorian nationalist Laurent Gbagbo has grown tenfold with the latter’s resistance to all the low blows dealt him, first by Chirac and now by Sarkozy. Laurent Gbagbo does not fit the mold of France’s black governors as represented by Bokassa, Bongo I, Compaoré, Biya, Nguesso or Ouattara. As observes the French Socialist representative, Labertit, Laurent Gbagbo, l’historien, l’intellectuel, seul universitaire chef d’État avec Abdoulaye Wade dans l’espace francophone d’Afrique et dont l’élection a surpris, fait désordre en Françafrique … il veut fonder les rapports de partenariat entre la France et la Côte d’Ivoire sur la base d’un véritable respect mutuel…. En matière économique, et même dans le cadre d’une économie sociale de marché dont il se réclame, cela se traduit par la mise en cause des pratiques de monopole étrangement prisées en Afrique par les chantres du libéralisme.27

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Laurent Gbagbo, the historian, the intellectual, the only scholar who, besides Abdoulaye Wade, is a head of state in the Francophone African space and whose election surprised many observers, disturbs Françafrique. He wants to base the partnership between France and Africa on genuine mutual respect…. On matters of economy, and even in the context of social market economy to which he claims to belong, this implies a re-evaluation of the monopoly practices that are strangely valued in Africa by the champions of liberalism.

Ouattara, France and the other core states know, is affected with the inferiority complex that causes the African petite bourgeoisie to “pander to Western opinion.” Ouattara, they know, is on a binge for praise. Ouattara was reared to seek approval from the West, and he would do anything to please the West and to avoid the West’s reprimand. On the other hand, he has been exposed by the people as a vile politician that is more concerned about protecting the interests of his imperialist masters than ensuring and safeguarding the welfare of the Ivorian people, a people that has vowed never to bend to the imperialist pressure. This sets the stage for another Ivorian calamity. One can only hope that with the departure of Kofi Annan, this other black apostle of Western imperialism, the United Nations will be genuinely attentive to monitoring and preventing any subversive activities no matter their origins.

Kofi Annan and the Globalization of Kleptocracy In 1997 the world and Africa in particular greeted with much elation the appointment of the first sub–Saharan African, Ghanaian Kofi Annan, as head of the United Nations. Annan even received some praise and enthusiastic wishes of success from very unlikely supporters. Then senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, John R. Bolton, who would later become one of Annan’s fiercest critics, had this to say of Annan’s “win” over Tanzanian Salim A. Salim. “The winner, Kofi Annan, was certainly preferable to Salim. Virtually all Annan’s career has been within the UN system, frequently in management and personnel positions. Few know the ‘system’ better than Annan. He is therefore in the best possible position to deliver on reform, for bureaucratic trials, jargon and obfuscation are not likely to distract him if he is engaged. From January 1, 1997, forward, the world can judge his performance.”28 Could it be that the “system” to which Bolton was referring was what Stefan Halper named the United Nations’ “unholy trinity of waste, fraud, and abuse,”29 for indeed the world got to judge Annan and the verdict was resoundingly depressing? Truly, “a kleptocratic culture of non-accountability at home was transferred to the world body.”30 Annan managed the United Nations as a traditional Ghanaian village chief would manage his family plantation, that is, with no regard to transparency and good governance, but rather with particular propensity for nepotism, dereliction, and corruption. Under Annan’s predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, corruption, which was rampant in the United Nations, was thought to have reached its peak. However, Annan,

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who had been waiting for years in the antechamber of power, in the shadow of Boutros-Ghali as under-secretary general of the United Nations, was going to prove the critics of his boss wrong even before he had his chance to preside over the destiny of this most money-hungry institution. In a feat of pathological perfectionism Annan was going to take corruption to its uppermost eruption and claim for himself the palm of the world’s shadiest official. For Annan, how better could he claim the center of capitalism than to accumulate capitalism’s most valued assets, that is, money? So, when under his auspices the United Nations had the opportunity to administer the Oil-for-Food program, a program with a capital five-fold the United Nations’ own budget, Annan sought illegal means to hoard as much as he could of these funds either directly or indirectly. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, the United States had imposed a series of trade embargoes on the Saddam regime. However, as is well known, sanctions imposed on despots have generally been circumvented by the governing classes they are meant to squeeze and have usually brought hardships on the ordinary people. To prevent this pattern from repeating itself in Iraq, the sanctioning authority allowed Iraqi oil to be sold, provided that the takings of the sale should be managed by the United Nations and utilized to buy food and humanitarian supplies for the people of Iraq and to fix the destroyed infrastructures of the country. In 1996, Kofi Annan was charged by Boutros-Ghali to administer the Oil-for-Food program, which was spasmodic at the time. Among the expert brokers that Annan brought in to make the program effective were his own son Kojo Annan and infamous Robert Mugabe’s nephew Leo Mugabe. Within seven years, the Annan dream team for the management of the Oil-for-Food program was able to reorient and embezzle billions of dollars with the complicity of Saddam, and this grand theft “would have succeeded without a hitch had not Saddam Hussein’s regime been overthrown and the Oil-forFood program been transferred in all its mysterious splendor to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.”31 Of the 67 billion dollars that the export of oil generated between 1996 and 2003, Annan’s head of humanitarian program, Benon Sevan, before retiring to his 1.5-million-dollar mansion in New York, was able to report “31 billion in supplies of food and medicine delivered to the Iraqi people, leaving $8.2 billion in humanitarian goods still to be delivered…. $3 billion had gone in development funds to rebuild Iraq.”32 What of the rest? Well, in this age of digitized information, the United Nations internal managers/investigators for the Oil-for-Food program were sorry to inform the world that with the bombing of Baghdad by the coalition troops, important documents pertaining to the program got lost — as if the headquarters of the United nations were located in Saddam’s personal palaces; as if the United Nations, this over-budgeted institution, were still keeping records on first-century scrolls. In fact, “[t]he Oil-for-Food scandal is a potent indictment of the way business is done at the UN Secretariat. It represents the ongoing impeachment of the UN system, a symbol of continuing massive corruption involving the theft of close to $11 billion in revenues…. In fact, this recent scandal is not an aberration at the UN. It forms

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part of a pattern that can be considered the norm.”33 Where else than at the United Nations and the World Bank, these cradles of world corruption, could the native informant fulfill his dream of tending exponentially toward the glittering center of white bliss? Where else than there could he accumulate the fastest possible that which allows him to mark his difference from the bottom billion crouching in the rural poverties of Africa and Asia? Where else than there could he amass the necessary assets that would make him a modern man in the urban space, in the company of the white? Annan’s attitude is symptomatic of the black elites’ perfectionist superfluity.

Modernity or the Courage to Use One’s Own Reason One assertion upon which Kant, Nietzsche and Foucault would agree despite their many points of contention is that to be really free, one ought to have the courage to use one’s own judgment. What the African elites lack most is the courage to use their “own reason.” This, despite how modern they like to think of themselves, has actually kept them in an age of pre-modernity. The African governing class is in its great majority constituted by marionettes; and string-puppets, we know, cannot think for themselves. They dance to the rhythm of whoever pulls the strings. So do most African elites, dancing to perfection at the pull of the strings. Perfection is the operative word, for indeed, the marionette African elites are pathological perfectionists. It would have been affirmative that the elites be perfectionist to the cause of nationhood, that they be devoted to safeguarding national dignity. Instead, they are pathological perfectionists; that is, they have misidentified the measure of perfection to be whiteness just as they have mistaken the measure of imperfection to be blackness. Because of this misidentification the black elites run compulsively — as true as compulsion is another symptom of neurosis—from themselves toward accumulation of the symbols of whiteness in the hope of tending maximally toward whiteness. In so doing, they actually impoverish their living environment while enriching the living environment of the Occident. It is their proximity to the center of oppression that makes the black elites neurotic subjects. Black in the thick of exclusive whiteness, placed at the heart of white paradise yet constantly indexed as a devil burning of all the fires of heathen, the black man, and mostly the black African man, has been ruminating his desire for vraisemblabilisation, for imitation, for sameness, for too long to act rationally. Fanon’s admonition that the national elites be kept in check for there to be any hope of safeguarding national consciousness against the perils of sabotage is well indicated. The elites, who are closer to the center of oppression, are the most affected; they are the most alienated. The equation between neurosis and alienation in Fanon’s work has by now been well developed. Emmanuel Hansen, for instance, has devoted lengthy pages to detailing the implications in Fanon’s use of the terms neurosis and alienation.33

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Fanon’s thesis is as relevant today, in the post-plantation and post-independence societies of the Caribbean and Africa, as it was half a century ago. For the black estranged from himself through colonial experience, first, and later, in a more disguised way, in a more subtle way, through the promises of globalization, whiteness constitutes the lack of desire. The black’s every desire is desire for whiteness, white aesthetics, white economy, white politics, white culture, white environment. Even the black/Afrocentrist theorizations of freedom, Negritude, Creolity, Kwanza appear sometimes trite, buffoonish, reactive, vain, and empty. These Afrocentrist theorizations could be real actualization of black self only if one considered the black self to be a big firing ball of anger, of teeth-gnashing “I am as beautiful as you” or “I am greater than you.” The promise of globalization to do away with social injustices and to usher in a more inclusive human society erected on the foundation of reciprocity has only delivered, for Africa, unmet expectations and more depression. Global culture has recuperated and reworked the alienating iconographies of colonialism that have been so successful at ripping the black off himself, of dismembering him. The human jungle continues to be elsewhere, in the heart of blackness. The National Geographic Society has not diverted from its objectives of titillating First World’s curiosity glands with oddities of “strange places.” On the contrary, technological advances in the encapsulation of images have only offered the National Geographic Society more resources to excavate the miseries of the Third World, to index into the wrinkled face of a prematurely aged Indian farmer or into the vacuous eyes of a pot-bellied, red-haired, famished African child the proof of divine repugnance; and in this, the National Geographic Society has found itself a plethora of competitors lured into the business of oddity production by the facile dividend of cheap sensationalism that goes by the pompous appellation of “reality TV.” And what is presented as presumably “real” is a gang of First World adventurers in search of adrenaline rush — already highly inebriated by the prospect of appearing on television and possibly making a career in much-coveted Hollywood — running disrespectfully through Third World airports, shouting discourteously at cashiers, taxi drivers, and government workers, and shedding tears of compassion at the sight of abject poverty at carefully selected sites. What is presumably “real” is a gang of Firstworldists on a remote island having no other activity but starving themselves to recreate the daily experience of the Thirdworldist; and when by some accomplishment that ends up being as vain as their reason for taking part in this idiotic masquerade, one member of the gang is recognized as having surpassed the others, his reward is usually food, which lacks so much in the Third World, and a night in a nice hotel suite, away from this manufactured “heart of darkness.” What is “not real,” however, and which will never be used as a synecdoche of America or the Western world, which shall never be the subject of the National Geographic Society and its imitators, are the thousands of poverties in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Louisiana, and on the lawn across the street from the World Bank, in Washington, D.C. After all, there is something true to retain from the manufac-

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tured imageries of the Third World; these imageries say more about their creators and indulgers than about the people and places of the Third World they are meant to stigmatize. What they show is the pretention of slow-minded Firstworldists claiming that, by virtue of the side of the equator from which they look at the rest of the world, their brains have undergone great mutations and have separated them from the rest of a lobotomized, wretched human lot. Nevertheless, as false as these competing images of the First World and the Third World may be, their debilitating effects on the black man are real. They are effects of dismemberment, of pathological superfluity. In the 1970s, critics like Wole Soyinka and Chinweizu asked if the black French intellectuals’ excessive eulogization of blackness was not actually betraying the African’s sublimation for a white object of desire. Contemporary events seem to prove them right. The black African’s superfluity is the outer manifestation of greater subcutaneous malaises, an epidermal insecurity expressed sometimes explicitly, often obliquely.

The Black Ego’s Epidermal Malaise Pieterse once wrote that “the world which adults shape for children reflects the logic of the adults’ world. It is no wonder that it is no easier being black in the children’s world than in the adults’ world.”35 Indeed, it has not been easier for the children of post–Senghorean Negritude being black in the world that Senghor has shaped for them. Blackness, so excessively chanted by the authors of Negritude, was actually a hymn they never fully committed to. The African masses were not duped by the intellectual griots’ rehashed eulogy to blackness, especially when the latter turned so easily to slobbering over anything white or European soon after they have closed their rhymes complimenting Africa and praising blackness, and especially black woman. Senghor was the quintessential duplicitous Afrocentrist poet, and the damages of his infectious infatuation with whiteness are only starting to be felt, of which African women are the most affected victims. According to Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, there are two preponderant tenets to African feminism as has been proposed by anthropologist Filomina Chioma Steady. These are self reliance through female network and survival strategies.36 This could be explained by the fact that in the postcolonial and post-plantation societies of Africa and the Caribbean, characterized by the black man’s ever-increasing quest for upward mobility, not just through adoption of Western stance, but most importantly through accrual of Western signata, of which the milky white woman is the quintessence, the black woman finds herself in greater vulnerability and in greater need of partnership and original adaptation modes. Networking and surviving thus imply for black women identifying appropriate economic, political and social niches where their inputs really make a difference insofar as they change social practices, and sharing with other women information about the availability of these niches and the means

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of accessing them, of remaining successful in them and passing them onto younger black women. Younger women relying on the experience of older ones, women empowering one another by redefining social practices, by exchanging success recipes and by stretching the line of kin are survival methods that already existed during slavery, and which Terborg-Penn, among others, identifies in the literature of slavery in the United States and the Caribbean.37 More contemporary occurrences of these tenets of African feminism have been identified in the literature of Francophone women writers. Ivorian Fatou Keita’s Rebelle,38 for instance, tells of the story of Malimouna, an African girl, who runs away from her village community in order to avoid clitoridectomy and forced marriage and finds herself in a complicated web of adventures that take her to France and years later back to her native country, where she organizes women against societal systemic abuses. In her struggle for self-emancipation and for liberation of women in general, she finds support from a variety of sources, both masculine and feminine. Nevertheless, most of Malimouna’s allies betrayed her at the end. Malimouna’s attempt at interracial union with Philippe Blain, the French director of a learning institute who allowed her access to higher education, failed. She could not stand his Eurocentrism. Her alliance with the various white women for whom she worked failed, because they could not help regarding her as a threat to their domestic spaces, and her alliance with black men also fell short, as the latter were too keen on preserving their patriarchal privileges. It is from black women that Malimouna found the ultimate strength to confront and defeat the abusive patriarchal system. Where African men have seen upward mobility to be in transcultural, transracial alliances, Keita seems to suggest that as far as African women are concerned, only self-reliance would lead them to true emancipation.39 A more unorthodox, even eccentric occurrence of self-reliance and shared survival strategy could be identified in African women’s apparent epidermal malaise, which, paradoxically, ought to be read as black women’s re-positioning strategies, the adoption of new gender roles or the effacement of old boundaries in the theater of the new globalization. In effect, there has always persisted, in the griotic discourse, a phallocratic line of flight, which continues to generate new paragons of virtue, as it moves. Because of its versatility and its insidious characteristic, this device, which governs the essential of the discursive practice in West Africa, undermines any veritably femino-centric operation of individuation. Under the assumption that black women’s happiness is necessarily linked to black men’s pleasures, that is, that as long as black men are happy, black women, too, are happy, the self-proclaimed griots of post-colonial Africa have devised for women some measures of happiness that actually betray their own anxieties about the relation between race and beauty. When interracial relations were frowned upon, African poets sang the beauty of blackness in order to live in conformity with the social interdictions that structured their lives. When interracial contacts became more tolerable, African thinkers of the Negritude movement displayed a certain lyrical haziness which, after all, was not that ambiguous, as it promoted an

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idea of white femininity and Europe as superlatively attractive. Held up in the Negritude “poetics of race” that was nothing more than the declamation by the abandonment-neurotic African elites of softer versions of the Aryanist theses, black women opted for solutions that would literally de-emphasize the melanin content of their skin and make them more approachable to their fleeing brothers mystified by white beauty. If it is not possible to turn white, black women will choose to alter their skin complexion, to give it a less hideous appearance, to make it more beautiful. They will choose to bleach it. Yet, hardly is it started than this coping strategy by African women, which seeks to bring back the abandonment-neurotic black man’s erring gaze, compromises itself in re-producing and legitimating social conditions constituted by men to benefit men. It could be argued that the phenomenon of skin bleaching in which many African women invest considerable sums of money and high hope, just as women’s uninterrupted oscillation between weight loss and weight gain, is to be understood, strangely enough, within women’s logic of perturbation of men’s will-to-structuration and within a rational effort to collapse the social restrictions that men have erected on the basis of specific responsibilities conferred to the masculine and the feminine sexes. Nevertheless, this feminine mutiny already prefigures a lack. It is a rebellion that is too often agented with the masculine machinery, and which, finally, leads women to the rehearsal of gestures that they have sought to exorcise. When the self-proclaimed griots of the Negritude Movement also decided to inaugurate themselves directors of consciousness, they defined for the black man, and especially for the black woman, ways of being, of thinking and of living their Negritude, that is, their blackness; and it was the literature of Negritude that first sanctified the virtues of the ideal black African woman. Her color, hitherto represented by white supremacists and Aryanists as deathlike, was celebrated by the Negritudinists as life, and her form, until then viewed as ugly, became beauty itself. 40 Over time, descriptions of the black woman as offered by the modern griots turned more exotic, even borrowed stylistic gestures of colonial literature. In a subliminal after-effect, the black woman was unveiled in a strange dichotomy: Soukeina and Isabelle. Soukeina, dark like the fierce and indomitable African continent that she personified, was enigmatic, pure, fertile, robust, predominant, and equally threatening; and the exotic mystery that surrounded her aroused in men an inexplicable will to penetration and possession. Was it not essential that she who would give life to the black Overman be obscure and indomitable? On the other hand, was it not crucial that she be broken by the black man, so that in her womb could be anchored the seed of life, of black life? Songolon, Sundiata’s mother, the legend tells, resisted the King of Mali for months and conceived only when she fainted under the threat of the King’s knife and became less combative.41 Even today, the daughters of Songolon continue to surrender to the threat of the knife before bearing the black man’s child; although the ritual of capitulation is this time, by way of connivance, entrusted to women themselves, who carry it on with a masculine coldness—clitoridectomy. While

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women are busying themselves keeping a watchful eye on one another for the black man and perpetuating their own servitude, the black man can turn to establishing new criteria of appreciation, which the black woman, once again, will seek to duplicate as soon as the black man has canonized them. In his quest for new challenges, it is to the antithesis of Soukeina, that is to Isabelle — or anything that amounts to her — that the griot now turns; for the black ego swears his bewilderment: of Soukeina and Isabelle, he can no longer tell which one is his sister and which one is his foster sister. After having composed panegyrics to Soukeina, after having reified her sufferings and her bruises as the true tests of womanhood, of motherhood, the black ego, now bedazzled by Isabelle, pleads dementia praecox.42 Isabelle, the antithesis of Soukeina, sensual, tender, vulnerable, unconquered, preserved in her femininity, is the image that henceforth haunts the black ego’s nights and towards whom he stretches his begging heart soon after he closes the last chapter of his book of authenticity that forbids lactification.43 The hoax would not last long. The Senegalese have seen their leaders’ infatuation with whiteness, are even wondering if it is not the only ticket to upward mobility. Moreover, new brands of griots, with a less academic, less hermetic verb, expose the duplicity of their elders: Soukeina, no matter how many lyrics the abandonmentneurotic black egos have written for you, no matter how much they have sung your beauty, now is the time for you to open your eyes; for what really matters today is that you be “une go chawarma … mince, mince … teint clair … fille à papa … toujours sexy” (a chawarma girl … very lean … light skinned … a little rich girl… always sexy).44 In this satire, Ivorian singer Tevecinq analogizes the new African feminine beauty to the chawarma, a Lebanese roll, similar to the Mexican burrito, and which is very popular in Côte d’Ivoire. The chawarma, of a pasty color, has undergone a price hike and a reduced baking time with the international food crisis, though it has decreased in length and diameter. This has paradoxically made it the prized fast food of the Ivorian elites. Tevecinq suggests that the new beauty canon for the African woman has switched from dark and curvy to light and skinny. So correct is Tevecinq’s observation that today some celebrated griottes —O monumental oxymoron! Is there such as thing as a griotte? Is there such a thing as a mother tongue? Has not the discourse of the mother already been invested by the authority of the phallus?— Tevecinq’s observation is so correct, we were saying, that some celebrated griottes now parade their newfound beauty on African television screens. Whoever has spent an hour watching a Malian television program will certainly remember this advertisement. The scene is set in an exclusive restaurant in Bamako. Diners are eating and chatting discreetly. Then Babani Koné, a diva of Malian music and the most celebrated griotte of the country, enters. She is, to use Tevecinq’s terms, a true “go chawarma.” She is skinny, artificially light-skinned, exaggeratedly made up, her hairdo completed with blond extension, her look sexy. Her entrance is not inconspicuous. A man sitting at a table with an attractive, dark lady cannot help venturing a question: “Excuse me, Madam,” he hails the giotte in Bambara, the local

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language, “what is the secret to your beauty?” Babani turns to him and sees all the diners, who had suddenly stopped whatever they were doing, suspended at her lips. She has a message for them. They are waiting for her to deliver the secret of universal beauty. So, the petitioned griotte starts advertising a whole line of cosmetic products known for their skin bleaching properties, as the diners nod with satisfaction. The phenomenon of skin bleaching ought to be understood within the logic of a society that has placed high value on skin color. Despite the jaded slogans claiming the beauty of blackness served by pseudo-Afrocentrists, young African women are constantly learning from their elders that “light complexion” is more prized. They have seen their elders’ colorist biases in the domestic and professional spaces, and they have understood that if blackness is a state of damnation, feminine blackness is a condition of double-damnation. Psychologically, skin bleaching is a will-to-passage from a stage of invisibility to that of visibility. It is a strategy of effacement of the traumatic boundaries that mark the zones of privileged and underprivileged. It is an attempt to erase the precincts of societal compartmentalization so that the process of reciprocal recognition can finally take place on a plane field. It is a committed struggle for survival, a struggle to reach out to the new state of grace designed by the modern griots. The African woman, who is exposed every day to colorism, this social discrimination based on the level of melanin in one’s skin, when in her struggle for recognition, she takes possession of the most immediate weapons at her disposal (skin bleaching products), has little to worry about the clinical discourses that tend to psychoanalyze her. Even when they are not aware of the medical danger that the abrasive skin bleaching products represent, the African women who use them cannot pretend to ignore the curious gazes that follow them whenever they walk by, exhibiting their spotted, striped or speckled epidermis. They know that this minor humiliation is a worthwhile price to pay, for in a few months, the plane of recognition will even up as their skin color becomes more or less uniform. Is it not to the peril of one’s life that freedom is acquired? Notwithstanding the legitimacy of the black woman’s struggle for recognition, her weapons seem designed to reinscribe her to the center of her oppression by the black ego.

The Black Ego’s Ecological Oblivion Today, one cannot help wondering what has happened to Frobenius’s Ethiopian man of which the African intellectuals of the 1930s inaugurated themselves heralds. The African man heralded by Frobenius as the watch guard of the world’s natural resources and to whom the young Afrocentrists of yesteryears were so passionately attached seems to shrug out of resignation at the environmental calamity that he has helped create, and which is progressively drowning him. As laments Wafula Okumu, “the [African] land has been degraded, the forests are disappearing, the biological diversity of the fauna and flora is declining at an alarming rate … the soil, water,

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and air are being polluted; garbage is an eyesore in virtually all the urban centers; and the health of the people is threatened by hazardous toxic waste dumping.”45 The black continent is on the brink of ecological disaster, and the African elites seem oblivious of the calamity that is threatening to engulf Africa. At each of their too frequent visits to Europe paid by African taxpayers, the African leaders marvel at the beauty of European cities, at the cleanliness of the streets, at the shady parks, and at the orderly lives there. They scour European shops, filling their suitcases with designer suits, shoes, ties and perfumes. They tour car dealerships and choose the fastest and most luxurious machines to occupy the spacious garages of their immense villas back home. At the end, they return home having established no meaningful contacts, but their eyes filled with awesome sights. They return home to wear their designer suits and shoes in the filth that surrounds them. They return home to drive their powerful, luxury cars on the pothole-filled dirt paths that they have failed to develop, and when death surprises them at the bend of these death traps that they call “roads,” they pass away in the hospitals which, too busy filling their pockets with embezzled money, they have failed to equip. The black elites, too, and not just the commoners, die of their greed and shortsightedness.

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Lessons from the East: India’s and China’s Experiences with Liberalism The developing world is headed towards a cataclysmic transition and an integral constituent of this is the ascendency of India and China on the front line of the global economy…. It would be wonderfully convenient if developing countries had before them, at this point in time, a universally applicable development model. This is not the case, but we could be close to the evolution of a paradigm that could provide practical and effective solutions for the ills confronting contemporary developing countries. Piya Mahtaney —India, China and Globalization1

Milton Himmelfarb once wrote, “If you wanted a theme around which to organize a modern Jewish history, honor could be that theme.”2 The modern Jew, Himmelfarb holds, would rather remain a stiff-necked Jew than bend to any principle he does not believe in.3 Indeed, there is a quintessential element in the history of all peoples, an attitudinal element, and not an innate disposition, that has placed these peoples where they are, at a particular stage of their modern history. Where that attitudinal element has been propitious to significant growth, one could argue that it ought to be preserved and built upon as the foundation for future development. Where, on the contrary, this central attitudinal factor has significantly impeded expansion, it conversely ought to be surrendered and its contending dynamic, perhaps, explored as a new beginning for growth. Himmelfarb’s sentence has the particularity that it fuels curiosity; it suddenly urges one to want to come up with some sort of attitudinal gauge whereby to explicate the modern histories of other peoples, just as we attempt to understand the condition of modern Africa. So, as the rise of the Orient has become the scholarly curiosity of the twenty-first century, we, too, are compelled to try to understand what in the attitude of the Oriental has contributed to this rise and whether Africa has lessons to learn from what has been described by some as China and India’s “selective liberalism.”4 India and China differ in many instances; but they do have much in common, too, and this odd Asian couple, given its particular experience in liberalism, might have many lessons to teach Third World countries, and those of Africa particularly, on strategies of economic and social growth. China’s soar into the sphere of indus144

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trial countries started with Chairman Mao Zedong’s January 1958 unveiling of his ambitious development objective, the Great Leap Forward (GLF). The aim of the GLF was to outperform England in 15 years in steel, iron, and other major industrial products, then, 25 to 30 years after surpassing England, catch up and outperform America. Trying to understand the various changes that China has undergone since Mao’s promise is for the scholar both an exhilarating and a daunting task that will take him through a labyrinth of reform acronyms, economic programs, party associations, collective formations, and governing styles.5 On the other hand, discussing whether these goals have been met or not would seem like conjecturing on the sex of angels, given the long and impressive way that China has traveled. Around 1949, China was one of the poorest countries on earth with very limited natural resources. Ninety percent of the Chinese population was poor and was toiling in a very archaic agricultural and handicraft industry. An overwhelming 80 percent of the Chinese adult population was illiterate. The GLF was intended as a program of intense state control of the means of production, leading to high-speed economic development. Consequently, all private financial institutions in China were made joint state-private ownerships when they were not already state-owned. “In order to realize the leadership of the state on the entire national economy, in which rural economy dominated, the state had to establish its control over rural economy.”6 Millions of private farmers were organized into larger collective entities easily manageable by the state, leading to large-scale production. By 1952, the Chinese grain output grew by 43 percent as compared to 1949. By 1957, one year before Mao’s projected date to outgrow England industrially, China had more than satisfied all of its economic projections. Yet, despite China’s recognition that agriculture was the main stake of the country, there was nonetheless an explicit development policy whereby emphasis was put on industry to lead agriculture, and therefore, the city to lead the countryside. By 1952, China’s industrial output grew 149 percent, which confirmed the role of the countryside as supplemental to the city. As notes Cheng, before 1992, priority was accorded to heavy industry and both “the countryside and agriculture [became] a subsidiary sector, which must provide surplus to support heavy industry,”7 keeping the farmers, the largest segment of the Chinese population, on the margin of development and in abject poverty until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. India, like China, was a poor, principally agricultural country for decades after its independence from England. When the British left India in August 1947 after centuries of occupation and abusive exploitation, they did indeed leave a country that they had kicked back “into the dark ages by crushing farmers with stiff taxes and blocking the export of Indian textiles and other products. The invaders plundered the treasury and made off with fine jewels,” of which one of the largest diamonds in the world (the 105-carat Koh-I-Noor) is shamelessly adorning the Queen of England’s crown.8 From the early eighteenth century to 1947, India’s importance in global trade dropped from 25 percent to a mere 1 percent.9 India was a country that had to recreate everything for its prosperity. However, India’s path out of backwardness was one

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that would first be dictated to its leaders more by political/ideological stratagem than by economic wisdom. Indeed, a bad management of the days preceding independence both by the country’s local leaders and by the British colonizers had led Indians to turn against one another on the ground of religious appurtenance, Muslims murdering Hindus and Sikhs on the one hand, and Hindus and Sikhs slaughtering Muslims on the other hand. The result was the splitting in two of a once-unified country, with Muslim Pakistan to the west and Hindu and Sikh India to the east, and the biggest human migration, as former compatriots, henceforth eager to reach out to the place where they would be in security on account of their religion, passed one another on foot, by donkey, by bike or by train, en route to either India or Pakistan. “Over a million people perished over three months: trains carrying thousands were blown up; villages were set ablaze; men, women, and children were mutilated and strung from trees; fathers murdered their own children and then killed themselves; brothers killed their sisters and mothers to protect them from the rapes that were as common as the murders.”10 Hardly had the chaos of partition been overcome and independence celebrated than the beautiful Muslim kingdom of Kashmir, which had against all expectations decided to remain within India, became a bitter point of contention between Pakistan and India, the former claiming that Kashmir was, by its religious affiliation, a natural constituent of its territory. Incidentally, Pakistan borders communist China and Russia. In the context of the Cold War Pakistan was of particular importance to the United States. In order to have an importance ally next to these two communist giants, the U.S. befriended Pakistan and supported its claims on Kashmir at the United Nations. To counter Pakistan’s powerful backing, Nehru had no other choice than to rush into the crushing embrace of America’s sempiternal enemy, the Soviet Union; and so, “until the 1980s, India marched to the Kremlin’s tune in an era now labeled as India’s ‘Soviet Tilt.’ Moscow effectively stifled the Indian economy.”11 Though a number of reforms undertaken in the 1950s and 1970s were meant to put India on the path of industrialization and high-speed development, and to a certain extent even succeeded in making India one of the most industrialized countries in the Third World,12 the real turning point for India’s economy came with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The fall of the Soviet Union encouraged India to open its socialist market to external economies. The lesson that India learned from its socialist system was that “anti-poverty policies would not have much success if growth rates were not increasing and the impediments to growth were rather obvious.”13 From then on, India was going to define its economy in a growth-oriented framework, which was somewhat antithetical to the kind of redistributive socialism that had hitherto defined India’s economic ideology. Among other reorganizations, the Indian government decided to • ease the restrictions of the entry of the private sector into certain areas hitherto exclusively dominated by public sector units,

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• reduce import barriers, • de-license some industries, including coal, motor vehicles, sugar and steel, and • eliminate price and distribution control of cement and aluminum.14 India’s economic awareness was, in matters of timing and drive, rather evocative of China’s. Indeed, when on December 8, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Western hemisphere interpreted this event as the world’s total rejection of communism. For China, however, the analysis was quite different. The main lesson that China drew from the collapse of the Soviet Union was that economic performance was the bottom line, and that a system with a poor economic performance was likely to be unseated by a discontented people. So, on a February 1992 journey to the Southern regions of the country, Deng Xiaoping made a speech to the Chinese people which emphasized the preponderance of economic development. China was going to rethink its whole economic policy, open up to the world, and adopt an economy of liberalization, albeit à la chinoise. The Chinese post–Stalinist economic decision implied rejection of the highly centralized system that was at the core of the Stalinist myth of high-speed economic development. It implied introduction of a socialist market system that would both support and rely on the contribution of the rural industry. In fact, Chinese leaders were not shy of claiming that the market economy system was not the exclusive invention of capitalism. Therefore there was no shame for China to embrace the market economy system and develop quickly.15 Nevertheless, within a socialist framework, market economy as envisioned by China still intended to privilege public and collective ownership; and individual and private economy were only meant to intervene as supplement to development. In rural China, where farmers were still very poor, labor force was excessive and agricultural development was slow, the Chinese government had big plans. They were going to use Township and Village Enterprises to fully integrate the country into the national industrialization plan, improve the rural populations’ conditions, move the rural labor force surplus from agricultural to non-agricultural industry, and optimize agricultural output for export, thus “realizing national industrialization, constructing rural markets and towns, reducing gradually the difference between town and country, consolidating the alliance between worker and peasant and government grass-root units and promoting the political economic and social stability and development of [the] country.”16 While China had chosen to develop through manufacturing, India, on the other hand, had elected to develop through services. Both countries were in fact trying to make the most of their respective deficiencies while taking full advantage of their strong points. One of the explanations offered as regards India’s underdevelopment when compared with China’s is that China’s extremely centralized and rigid political organization made it easier for the country to direct resources and implement policies. India, on the other hand, was hampered with its too enthusiastic prehen-

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sion of political democracy, which outfitted the country with an excessive number of political parties, 42 at the turn of the century, 17 of which had only 1 seat in parliament. The huge number of political parties was a factor in resources distribution and an impediment to policy implementation.17 Bad resource orientation and inefficient policy execution, in addition to centuries of exploitation, have kept India’s infrastructures extremely underdeveloped. To make matters worse, India’s economy was highly regulated. For instance, obtaining a single license required of businessmen and businesswomen months of begging and cajoling government bureaucrats.18 As a consequence, Indian private entrepreneurs were better off tackling soft projects than heavy infrastructure building ventures, especially given the country’s low level of savings and almost inexistent inward foreign direct investment. So India chose the path of services, a market that India’s colonial linguistic legacy — the fact that English is a language spoken worldwide — and its huge population — which provided an abundant and cheap labor force — made it easier to conquer. As India oriented its industry toward software, China chose to go hardware. In 2003, services accounted for 33.1 percent of India’s GDP, while industry contributed 52.3 percent of China’s GDP.19 Today, China produces 2⁄3 of the world’s photocopiers, microwave ovens, DVD players and shoes; the Chinese produce 2⁄5 of the personal computers and 1⁄2 of the personal cameras in the world. China has also made its mark in infrastructure building, bridge and road construction, power distribution and telecommunication networks. India, on the other hand, has specialized in IT consulting, call centers, computer chip design, engineering, drug research, and information dissemination.20 The lesson from these two experiences is that the Orient started to rise to power the moment it was able to identify its antitheses, to clearly understand what they meant for its own survival, and to work at forcing them to reconfigure a less crudely partial universality that took into consideration the interests of the Orient, too. These antitheses were at first defined primarily in religiousideological terms and only secondly in ideological-economic terms. Later, they were gradually shaped more in economic-ideological terms and less in religious ones. China and India are known for their spiritual effervescence. This spirituality has not been without any influence on the political and social organizations of these two Asian countries.

9

Palliative: Toward a New Development Paradigm for Africa For it is not true that the work of man is done That we have no business being on earth That we parasite the world That it is enough for us to heel to the world Whereas the work has only begun And man still must overcome all the interdictions wedged in the recesses of his fervor and no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength. Aimé Césaire1 Everything has been plundered, betrayed, sold out, The wing of black death has flashed, Everything has been devoured by starving anguish, Why, then, is it so bright? Anna Akhmatova2

Africa: A Future Still So Bright Africa’s wretchedness comes, albeit not entirely, at least in large part, from Africans having put too much faith in their rapports with the Western countries. The development deficit of Africa, as we have by now sufficiently demonstrated, finds its root source more in the continent’s debilitating rapport with the West than in endogenous causes. The Western powers, through a swarm of institutional and organizational artifices, have designed their commerce with Africa in such a way as to continuously make the African continent the injured party of the laughable agreements they signed with the corrupt and/or semiliterate African leaders. Given the existing trend, Africa is en route for political, social and economic annihilation. Nonetheless, there is no reason that despair should set in yet. Africa’s future is still salvageable. In fact, despite the brutality, the plunder, and the betrayal of which Africa has been victim for centuries, Africa’s future remains bright. Africa is still among the custodians of the world’s largest geological resources and human capital. Africa can get out of its quagmire provided it gives itself the proper leaders to launch the correct connections and reorient its development policy. Africa’s brighter future 149

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will be realized only at the cost of dramatic change. For Africa to get out of its drought, it will have to rid itself of the scents of the West, of the slave mentality that still haunts a great part of its elites, institute reciprocal rapports with the Orient, and particularly take China and India as development paradigms. Here is a proposition that could be considered blasphemous in certain milieus, as any scholar daring to venture that Africa should take China and India as models of development will certainly be rejoined by one of these social scientists, concrete subjects of ideology, sold to the sovereign unity of Western episteme, that neither China nor India are developed countries, and that he/she should instead look elsewhere, in Western Europe or in America precisely, for examples to emulate. The world pullulates with men and women with trounced historical memory, and such a riposte can only come from one of these amnesic men and women; for India and China are no less developed than they were after their encounters with the Western powers. These two Asian countries are only emerging from the predicament in which Europe had plunged them for centuries. Concerning the black continent, the Western European states have proven over several centuries that they are not the friends of Africa. Each time an opportunity was offered Western nations to show their good faith through reciprocal commerce with Africa, they have generally turned out to be slave dealers, robbers, exploiters, crooks, and usurers. It is high time Africa stopped looking at the Western European states as their exclusive friends. It is high time Africa started seeing the Western European states for what they have proven to be over five centuries of encounter: bleeders of Africa and profiteers of Africa’s torments. Compared with Europe, the United States of America is a relative newcomer in doing business with Africa, and it has a tremendous opportunity to show the people of the African continent that it really seeks a relationship of reciprocity and mutual respect with them. Unfortunately, in the short time that America has commercially engaged Africa, it has shown the world that it could be, if not more, at least as conniving and destructive as Western Europe. What the world needs to know is that Africans may be poor — and by whose fault, we might ask?— but they are neither intellectually deficient nor lacking in honor; unlike most of their corrupt leaders and the abandonment-neurotic native informants that are looting the continent in collusion with predatory Western multinationals and governments, most Africans are a proud people that would not humiliate themselves; and they should not. Africans should resolve to trade with those countries that would understand the history of their humiliation and struggles. India and China are two of these countries, and their economic takeoff in the face of so many uncertainties and so much contention makes them fitting examples of fortitude and success for Africa. Furthermore, it is less by the size of their growth than by the rate of that growth that China and India fascinate. Experts speculate that if the current trend of growth rate and policies in China and India are maintained, India’s economy will surpass Japan’s in 2032 and China will surpass the United States by 2041— though in these two coun-

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tries, per capita increase will remain well below that of the United States.3 Without pouring excessive faith in these kinds of extrapolations, it is evident, nevertheless, that, against all odds, China and India have made great strides toward economic development. It is also evident that for these emergent countries the road to travel looks much brighter than the road already traveled. Africa ought to follow China’s and India’s examples. On this, we are in agreement with Mahtaney, who notes that from a standpoint of applicability, China’s model of economic liberalization is more suitable to contemporary developing countries than the route of “quick-fix liberalism,” which was pursued by Eastern Europe and some of the Latin American countries. It is not that the lack of democracy in China is a positive feature but the fact that it did not attempt to transplant, with instantaneous policy change, a system that worked in an almost divergent macroeconomic environment in its own economy proved advantageous.4

Mahtaney’s remarks are compelling, even though questions remain whether Western countries which, against their own propounded principles of social equality, connive with Third World dictators to plunder Third World countries and maintain the populations of these countries in utter poverty really deserve to be called democratic countries. Questions remain whether against the background of the politics of France, for instance, in, say, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, and Rwanda, to cite only these few, France really deserves to be considered a democracy; for, we shall, once again, recall these words by Judge Joly, who notes that France’s proclivities for political and economic genocide in the Third World make “the Republic of France look like a sham democracy where criminals have the arrogance of impunity.” On the matter of democracy, a country like France would be very quickly short of arguments in lecturing China. By many standards, as we have shown, France is not more democratic than China.

Trade, but Fair Trade All experts agree that China’s and India’s respective economies took off the moment these two countries decided to liberalize trade, ease restrictions on enterprises, lift control over individuals, and open their markets, first to internal competition, and then, cautiously and gradually, to external competitions.5 China’s and India’s particular experiences give credence to the widely held conviction that what stimulates growth is competition, and competition’s strongest inhibitor is trade barrier. For more than forty years, as notes Collier, peripheral states enjoyed the protection of tariffs. Though these tariffs guarded the peripheral states from aggressive external competition coming from the core states, they have, on the other hand, accomplished very little in stimulating domestic markets. Consequently, what really kept the limited domestic firms alive was the burden of inflation borne by the ordinary people.6 In independent Africa, it is well known that the domestic enterprises that were kept alive by trade barriers belonged, incidentally, to nationals of the former colonizing countries. It is also a fact that these trade barriers were in their great

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majority legacies of the colonial system, meant to protect the economies of the metropolis. Consequently, as soon as these barriers began to constitute a hindrance for the metropolis, international demands that they be removed became increasingly imperative. Trade barriers and regulations in Africa did not really benefit Africa, because they were not meant to. They were indirect instruments of protectionism for the Western-owned companies that did business in Africa.7 As experts predict that Africa needs to mature toward a 7-percent annual growth in order to reverse its poverty trend in the next fifteen years,8 it becomes imperative that Africa should courageously face external competition rather than take cover behind trade barriers that in most cases have been supportive of corruption; and some of the defunct regional integrations that, in attempts to copy the successful model of the European Union, have proliferated in African states must give way to really daring, benefit-yielding global trade; for indeed, “[trade] is generated by differences and the big opportunity for low-income countries is to trade with rich countries…. Within a group of poor countries there simply are not sufficient differences to generate much trade … regional integration between poor countries generates divergence instead of convergence.”9 If trade is the operative word for development theorists, fair trade, that is, trade as non-coerced exchange of goods between two or more commercial partners, should be the predominant model for development players. Unfortunately, this has not been the case, and a bamboozled Africa has come to develop great suspicion against the core states that have shone by their legendary duplicity, a duplicity which, in a more diplomatic language, Collier has characterized as “policy incoherence” before qualifying it more negatively, out of countenance.10 The core states’ commerce with Africa was never meant to promote development in Africa. The core states have never engaged in fair trade with Africa. What they call trade are “unilateral transfers of wealth,” outright plunders or plunders that are “thinly veiled as trade.”11 This is why Africa should be very careful not to complacently delve into unprotected trade with the core states. Before Africa undertakes a full-fledged liberalization, Africa must follow the example of China and India and start at the level of endogenous competition. Domestic, in-house liberalization should precede full-blown liberalization with its assault of foreign buyouts.

Privilege Endogenous Liberalization First Despite the fact that trade liberalization and openness to competition are widely believed by experts to constitute one of the principal factors of growth, nonetheless, trade liberalization should not be approached with the blindness and naiveté that Africa has too often displayed in this matter. There is an inexperienced belief that, in sub–Saharan Africa, where small informal industries requiring a low level of skills occupy most of the private local entrepreneurs, whereas sophisticated skills-demand-

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ing industries remain the provinces of foreign investors, foreign investments are the magic wand for creating “the missing middle” in industrialization. “Foreign investments have the role of a sort of magic medicine in the new industrialization plans that many African countries have been developing within the framework of the World Bank structural adjustment programmes.”12 This messianic outlook on foreign investments propagated by the World Bank and adopted by many sub–Saharan African governments tends to spread the artificial wisdom that joint foreign-local industrial ventures would be the ideal nurseries whence a local entrepreneurial bourgeoisie could spring. As demonstrated by Navaretti’s study of Côte d’Ivoire, it is misleading to think that joint foreign-local industrial ventures would necessarily be propitious to the development of a dynamic local entrepreneurship by way of gradual transfer of skills and decision-making. The idea of an entrepreneurial class being nurtured and gradually growing under the shadow of foreign capital appears to be wishful thinking…. A virtuous pattern of learning by doing, that would be strengthened by foreign investments in joint ventures, will take place only when there is a determined and capable local counterpart: Autonomy cannot be achieved by osmosis.13

In fact, the predominant importance of foreign interests in joint ventures will tend to “limit learning by doing and the development of indigenous skills.” The profit-driven technologies of foreign industries allow little time and patience to train local workers for high-level positions, and expatriates will have little motivation and few incentives to delegate decision-making to locals. Furthermore, because foreign firms are more likely to be managed according to strategies defined abroad or in the home country, expatriate managers will more likely trust their compatriots than they would local workers, which would limit the transfer of decision-making and technologies to local workers. In other words, it is undeniable that in sub–Saharan Africa “the [World Bank’s] objective of reducing the presence of the public sector in industry [will always clash] with the extreme weakness of a formal private sector, because of the scarcity of local financial resources and capabilities,”14 thus the necessity for a level-headed liberalization policy and thus the primordial role of government in the liberalizing enterprise. China and India, we believe, have given Africa enlightening paths to follow in this regard. Trade liberalization should be undertaken with much vigilance and levelheadedness. In the case of China’s and India’s respective experiences, it could be argued that regulations have not always carried only negative effects on growth. On the contrary, a certain level of protectionism and regulations has been propitious to shielding sensitive sectors of the economy from predatory foreign investors, to judiciously identifying regions of the country and sectors of the national economy that need more stimulation than others, and to promoting a strong middle class ready to compete with external investors before are dismantled the levees against the voracious multinational corporations that cannot wait to submerge Africa. In China, for instance, rural industrialization, which constitutes one-half of the

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country’s industrial output, and which is the secret to China’s industrial miracle, is entirely owned by the country’s farmers.15 Farmers’ ownership of rural industrialization would not have been possible under unbridled liberalization and without some level of government intervention that had discouraged savage individual profitdriven capitalism, encouraged collective ownership, outfitted the Township and Village Enterprises (TVE) with logistic means, set growth targets for rural industries, and utilized rural industries as means for correcting regional economic disparities and reducing city and countryside discrepancy. China was able to achieve success in these various areas by a mandate of the central authority to government departments to formulate policies barring discrimination against TVEs and purging favoritism toward state-owned enterprises in matters of contracts and procurement. As an important constituent of China’s planned national industrialization, China central authority, through government departments, made sure that • TVE industries development relies on local resources, such as on-site transformation of agricultural products, development of natural resources (mining, energy, construction materials), commerce, service, handicraft, transportation, and traveling; • TVEs’ acceleration and competition with state-owned enterprises are facilitated; • Talented people and university and college graduates are supported and encouraged to develop TVEs rather than undermined with heavy formalities and nepotism; • Technicians, retirees and research institutions are encouraged and supported to serve for TVEs during their leisure time; • Special loans are established for TVEs; • People who make significant contributions to TVEs are recognized and rewarded.16 Before 1992, foreign direct investments (FDIs) in China were limited and only concentrated on textile products and light industries. Commerce, finance, and insurance, for instance, were forbidden to FDIs.17 When the Communist Party of China Central Committee finally requested the opening up of the country’s regions to foreign investments, China had already made a full assessment of its needs, had a relatively high level of savings, and was ready and strong enough to diversify its partnership rather than cave in to the demands of intransigent core countries. Though FDIs were allowed in the country, China, nonetheless, established preferential zones for FDIs in particular areas identified as needing more development, such as Beijing, Shangai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Dalian, Qingdao, and five special economic zones. In these areas, preferential provisions were made available for foreign-funded enterprises.18 It thus appears that as regards openness, China is not different from any other

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industrialized country. No industrialized country has ever opened its borders to uncontrolled trade, and no industrialized country has ever opened its environment to either internal or external businesses without restrictions or regulations. Likewise, China has sought to protect its sensitive state-owned enterprises and orient FDIs to targeted areas. Obviously, China’s alleged “highly regulated” economic and political environment has not prevented the proliferation of European and American businesses in the country. The rhetoric about China’s highly regulated economic environment could sometimes strike as too puffed up. It looks rather like bullying gestures by the core states, which are intended to intimidate China into doing what the core states would be unwilling to do at home. So far, China has not budged in response to the coercion to open its economic environment to uncontrolled capitalism, and there is little chance that it do so in the future. Nigeria, for instance, has provided us with telling illustrations of what happens when, too hurry to accumulate foreign exchange, states fail to implement internal regulations prior to the arrival of greedy multinational corporations that are driven by the allure of maximum returns. Remarking on Nigeria, Terry Lynne Karl makes a disheartening revelation: peripheral countries that are rich in oil and minerals do worse in their development than those that do not have oil or minerals. In mineralrich countries, the core states’ multinationals descend like vultures concerned with no other issue but maximum wealth accumulation. There, multinationals connive with country officials to siphon the country’s wealth, leaving the masses in extreme poverty. A country like Nigeria, which has been sitting on rich oil fields since the early 1960s, still has 70 percent of its population living below the poverty line, while a minority of overfed government officials roams impudently in the company of multinational CEOs and core states’ government officials. In the early 1990s, Shell’s destructive operations in Nigeria were being challenged by the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), a non-violent movement organized by late Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa. Shell’s extraction of oil in the Niger Delta area had caused environmental degradation in the region. The Ogoni people’s livelihood and living condition were disrupted by Shell’s unregulated oil exploitation. Fishing areas, farmlands, and drinking water were contaminated. Extreme poverty lurked: malnutrition and infant mortality rates skyrocketed. So, Saro-Wiwa organized his people to force Shell to be more environmentally conscious. “I do not want any blood spilled,” Saro-Wiwa advised his followers, “not of an Ogoni Man, not of any stranger among us. We are going to demand our rights peacefully, non-violently, and we shall win.” Apparently, the MOSOP was winning against the oil giant, for, in May 1994, a memorandum sent from the internal security forces in the Ogoni region to the Nigerian military sounded a panicky alarm. “SHELL OPERATIONS STILL IMPOSSIBLE UNLESS RUTHLESS MILITARY OPERATIONS ARE UNDERTAKEN FOR SMOOTH ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES TO COMMENCE.” It was paradoxical that “ruthless military operations” should be the precondition for “smooth economic activities.” Months after the memo was received, the Nigerian mil-

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itary ruthlessly attacked several Ogoni villages, killed villagers, and destroyed homes. Saro-Wiwa and his close collaborators were arrested, tried in a kangaroo court and executed on November 10, 1995. This was a punitive expedition ordered by Shell in connivance with the Nigerian dictatorship, which was a partner in the oil extraction business.19 Had a minimum of strict internal regulations existed to which local businesses had to learn to conform before the arrival of Shell in Nigeria, Shell would not have considered the need to support a ruthless dictatorship and obliquely engage in human rights abuses in order to operate successfully. Dictatorships endure in Africa because they are often supported by powerful multinational corporations from the core states which, in the absence of regulatory measures in peripheral countries, prefer cheap bribes to expensive humane operations. Following China’s example, Africa ought to implement a certain level of governmental intervention, which would protect sensitive sectors of the economy, such as the environment, healthcare, education, power, water, and communication, until such time when a trained body of local investors is able to vie for stakes against external competitors. These local investors should be in great part constituted by a body of middle class and not, as is too often the case in Africa, by a tiny body of ministers, CEOs and government workers who have built their fortune on embezzled public funds and corruption. The example of Côte d’Ivoire, where the middle class is mainly constituted by corrupt government officials and shady party leaders, is an indication that when the middle class’s interests do not lie in transparent regulations, even attempts to bring about institutional changes beneficial to the country could unleash direct violent interventions by the core states and their multinational corporations supported by their militaries, the latter are always ready to respond to the call of business operatives. In fact, as has been noted by Rowe, the imperial pattern indicates that military interventions do not precede trade negotiations. It is the other way around. It is usually when the idea of free trade as propounded by the metropolis in its relation with the colony fails that the military intervenes to force its application or simply removes and replaces unforthcoming nationalist leaders with lethargic marionette leaders. Military force is thus held in reserve, not out of humane considerations, of course, but primarily for reasons of practicality and economy, while the imperial power promotes trade agreements— either for raw materials or finished products— with the appearance of favorable and equitable terms to both colonizer and colonized. It is only when the illusion of free trade is shattered that military force is required to reimpose imperial order, when the appearance of free trade can be resumed, under whose guise what in fact usually occurs is demonstrably inequitable exploitation of natural and human resources of the colony.20

In 2002, the socialist government of Laurent Gbagbo in Côte d’Ivoire experienced this pattern of “free trade imperialism” when it attempted to divorce itself from the corrupt Western perception of development that is grounded in the “assumption that the only way to move to a market economy is to sell the state sector … the quicker the better,”21 and which, under Prime Minister Ouattara’s auspices, had permitted the reckless sale of strategic state-owned enterprises to French

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predatory speculators. Gbagbo had called his reform program aimed at correcting the structural flaws that slowed or impeded progress in his country, and thus undermined social growth, Refondation. Economically, among other resolutions, Refondation wanted to review the terms of renewal of a number of conventions ceded to France multinationals under their market values by the Ouattara government, conventions the clauses of which French firms had hardly abided by, and which were to fortunately come to expiration around 2004. Among these were the exploitation of Côte d’Ivoire Telecom conceded to France Telecom, the exploitation of Côte d’Ivoire’s power (EECI) and water (SODECI) companies conceded to the Ouattaras’ friends Bouygues, the exploitation of the Abidjan-Niger railway system conceded to the Ouattaras’ friend Bolloré, and which, in violation of the terms of the contract, was in dire need of modernization. Refondation also meant reassessing some construction contracts by which French firms were fleecing the Ivorian economy by overpricing their services. For instance, the contract of a third bridge to be built in Abidjan was ceded to the French Bouygues, although a Chinese company (COVEC) would build the same bridge for 1⁄3 of what the French asked for, and would even accept part of payment as exchange in coffee and cocoa.22

These announced reforms did not meet the assent of the class of corrupt Ivorian elites that had grown fat by benefiting from a lack of transparency and shady deals; but most of all, Refondation did not meet the endorsement of French businesses. Refondation would have forced French multinational corporations to compete against Chinese, South Africans, Japanese, Americans and Indians. In the context of the jostle for positioning among the core states, Refondation rendered France’s position even more tenuous. So, in the night of September 19, 2002, a French-supported rebellion struck Côte d’Ivoire with rare cowardice and unforeseen force. The rebellion was ultimately contained by the loyalist army. However, the episode was for many a reminder that a country whose elite class is built on the perpetuation of corruption is less likely to successfully implement growth reforms. Fanon had warned against this kind of betrayal by the abandonment-neurotic black.

Promote Legality Through a Strong Middle Class President Gbagbo of Côte d’Ivoire likes to tell an interesting allegory about the carelessness with which African countries, instead of denouncing the Westernfinanced destabilization of their neighbors, have actually been complicit in escalating and taking advantage of these troubles. In Gbagbo’s story, as is not unusual, two brothers have a squabble. Instead of seeking ways to reconcile, one of the brothers calls on God to punish his sibling. “What do you want done to your brother exactly?” God asks the petitioner. “I want you to remove my brother’s eyes; I want him blind,” the plaintiff replies. “I will take your brother’s eyes out, but for that you have to be willing to lose one eye, too,” God explains. “I am willing to lose one eye,” the plaintiff replies, “as long as my brother loses both eyes.” So, God gives the petitioner his wish. He takes one eye from the complaining brother and removes both eyes from his sibling. This parable is meant to

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illustrate how successful the colonial policy of divide and conquer has been in Africa and how far Africans have been willing to go to see their neighbors suffer so they can profit from their neighbors’ distress. Gbagbo was evidently referring to the negative roles his counterparts in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Gabon played in helping the Chirac government organize the Ivorian crisis and carry out the squeeze on his administration; but he was also referring to African leaders’ roles in other regional conflicts, such as the protracted Congolese “civil war.” So Africa needs to give itself leaders for the twenty-first century. This in itself is not an easy task, in fact it is the most difficult task of all, as the core states, engaged in their own struggle for positioning, are more than ever resolute to co-opt party leaders, corrupt academics and trade union leaders, bribe journalists and business managers, beguile NGO organizers, and bribe the army to topple politicians that are not working necessarily for the interests of the core states first. The core states have a pattern of destabilization. African academics, activists, politicians, journalists, and clergy people, in collaboration with academics, journalists, and clergy people from around the world who are against injustice, should constitute permanent pressure groups that identify the signs of destabilization and mobilize against it whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head. Usually, in preparation for the core states’ campaigns of constitutional coup d’état in peripheral states, politicians, conservative academics and the conservative media start their name-calling game. The core states have a battery of names for the leaders that they do not like and whom they are preparing to depose. They call them fascists, communists, xenophobes, anti-white, anti–Western, populists or terrorists; and they have also a series of names for the corrupt native marionettes that they plan to use as replacements for those that will be deposed. They call these marionettes “most formidable opponents,” “leaders of the oppressed,” “Western-educated politicians,” “martyrs,” so on and so forth. In prelude to the constitutional blow dealt to Côte d’Ivoire by France, the strategy was to make Alassane Ouattara the natural leader of the Muslims and Northerners of Côte d’Ivoire; and Ouattara himself, whenever caught redhanded in identity fraud, would only have one sentence in his defense: They hate me because I am Muslim and from the North. Is Ouattara a leader of the Muslim North as he likes to claim when it fits his purpose? Not so fast seem to say those who know him. In a private note sent to his friend Guy Labertit, Renaud Vignal, former French ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire, mocks Ouattara’s claim that he is a Muslim. “Commencée à 18h 15, notre conversation, en plein ramadan, n’empêche pas le maître de maison, avant la rupture du jeûne, de faire honneur aux canapés de foie gras et de boire deux whiskies bien tassés.”23 (Our conversation, which started at 6:15 P.M., in the middle of Ramadan, did not prevent the master of the house, before the break of fasting, to honor the canapés of foie gras and to drink two straight whiskies.) African watch groups should be organized, groups which will be able to discern with much lucidity in which cases the epithets the West attributes to some political actors really apply and where they are just smokescreen hiding diabolical designs. This goes to the core of what kind of middle class Africa ought to have, for a mid-

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dle class that only sees its interests in illegitimacy will participate in the promotion of illegitimacy. Africa’s middle class should consequently be constituted by people whose interests lie in legitimacy and transparency, for these people will defend tooth and nail the permanence of transparency and legality. Just as corruption kills growth by illegitimately enriching only a few people, and the worst people in society, real growth thrives in environments of legality by uplifting many people, and the best kind in society. An environment that is conducive to real growth will, consequently, be conducive to the creation of a middle class committed to legitimacy and opposed to subversion of the legal system.

Defragment the Political System One of the factors which, according to experts, have kept India lagging behind China in the race for development is India’s excessive number of political parties. Those observers that are struck by this demographic giant’s proportionally justifiable twenty-party coalition should consider the hundreds of parties that have mushroomed in tiny African states such as Cameroon, Senegal, or Côte d’Ivoire, to cite only these few. Democratization in Africa has too often been understood as the creation of a political party at every street corner, in every quarter, in every wealthy person’s home or around the ego of every popular singer or soccer player. The anarchical proliferation of political parties in Africa is motivated by an opportunistic drive. War-ridden African nations have been known to settle conflicts by the formation of “national unity” governments around power-thirsty incumbent leaders rather than organize free and fair elections. Since national unity governments are usually staffed with party leaders, irrespective of the size of their constituencies, opportunistic politicians and businessmen have seen the creation of parties as a way to have a minister position and thus an opportunity to share in the loot of national resources. As notes Vicky Randall, “[t]the struggle for legislative seats is to gain majority status but also, especially in the case of smaller parties, the attention of the executive.”24 Moreover, these party leaders, who have no genuine concern for where their country is headed, have constituted the greatest filibusters of the political process, taking the already imperfect system hostage until their petty personal demands are satisfied. The more political parties there are the less chance there is for consensus to be reached on policy adoption and implementation. The excessive number of political parties in Africa is cause for corruption and development fragmentation. Is it not curious that the plethora of political parties in Africa is exogenously funded by individuals whose own political system allows for limited numbers of parties? This is because sub–Saharan African political parties are oblique megaphones for external interests. Because opposition parties in Africa are usually urban parties with bad representation in the rural areas where most of African countries’ populations reside, these parties have very few due-paying members and must, consequently, rely on external

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donors for their funding.25 These external donors, for the most part interest groups, use the indebted political parties to disrupt the democratic process in Africa, an observation that has led some proponents of single-party systems to contend that the old single-party rules that dominated Africa’s political landscape in the aftermath of decolonization were more efficient, because they were less prone to encourage politicization of the administration, expensive campaigns, and corruption. As shows Blundo, this assumption is belied by history.26 Nevertheless, it is also undeniable that African political parties have been more busy dealing in personalism, regionalism, ethnicism, patronage, clientelism, and violence than promoting national growth. Within the framework of national unity governments, political party leaders have usually battled to retain the administration of ministries with significant budgets, and they have successfully managed to cripple effective power and resource redistributions, siphoning public resources for their party members and for the enrichment of their close collaborators. For instance, before Ouattara’s RDR maneuvered to get Ahmed Bakayoko appointed as minister of Post and Telecommunication in a government of national unity, Côte d’Ivoire could boast of having the best postal service in West Africa, and one of the best on the continent. Today, with Bakayoko’s maladministration, his petty arguments with postal workers and his redirection of public funds to his party’s coffers, getting a piece of mail successfully delivered across the country amounts to a miracle. Without subscribing to the view that single-party rules are more efficient or more democratic than multi-party systems, when it comes to political parties in Africa, less is more. Given their plethoric number, the compound abuses by the political parties undermine democracy consolidation and continuity in Africa. The number of political parties in sub–Saharan Africa ought to be trimmed down to its bare minimum. What number is an adequate number and by what process should political parties be limited? It would not be undemocratic at all, we believe, for states to set up a number of constituents proportionate to the voting population to be reached by each political organization before that organization could be given voice as a party. After all, this process is already in use, and without much indignation, in several countries that claim to be at the forefront of democracy in the course of determining which organizations are to be funded or allowed right of appearance at political debates. This is a question that any electoral commission can be given authority to settle. It goes to the core of Africa’s development. It goes to the core of Africa’s real growth, which has for too long been hampered by the myriad of corrupt political parties and NGOs. Like political parties, NGOs in Africa have been judicially proven to be financed by outside interests and to serve for the destabilization of African nascent democracies. In Congo-Brazzaville, for instance, one of these socalled humanitarian associations funded from without has held a significant role in the impediment of democracy. Michel Pacari avait aussi monté sa propre association « humanitaire », Congo-Renaissance. De source judiciaire, cette « ONG » a été financée par Coopération 92, une société d’économie mixte

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du département des Hauts-de Seine présidé par Charles Pasqua. A son tour, elle a aidé des mouvements de sécession de l’enclave de Cabinda, le mini–Koweït angolais au sud de Pointe-Noire…. « Au Congo, confesse son épouse Chantal, [Pacari] a financé les campagnes électorales des trois prétendants, il était sûr de gagner. Il n’était jamais mandaté officiellement, mais là-bas, chacun savait qu’il représentait la France et que sa parole valait une signature ». Peu avant la guerre civile de 1993, il aurait envoyé une cargaison d’armes à l’une des factions sous couvert de … ballons de football.27 Michel Pacari had also set up his own “humanitarian” organization, Congo-Renaissance. From judicial source, this “NGO” was financed by Coopération 92, a semi-public company from the department of Hauts-de-Seine, presided over by Charles Pasqua. This company helped some secession movements from the enclave of Cabinda, the Angolan mini–Kuwait south of Pointe-Noire…. “In Congo,” his wife Chantal confesses, “Pacari financed the political campaigns of the three candidates; he was sure to win. He was never officially mandated, but over there, everyone knew that he represented France and that his word had power of signature.” Just before the 1993 civil war, he was rumored to have sent a cargo of weapons to one of the factions under the designation of … foot-balls.

Political parties and NGOs have to be trimmed down to defragment the system; they have too often enriched the few to the detriment of the many. A program that seeks to uplift the many and not just the few is by definition a legal program. Africa’s many are first and foremost in the rural sector; they constitute 80 percent of sub–Saharan Africa’s population. Africa’s true middle class ought to be gradually built from the rural sector through a program of rural development.

Restore the Rural Sector to Build Up Capitals Though India and China could be regarded as models of development for Africa to emulate, as economic partners, they could also constitute challenges to Africa. The demographic size of China and India and their early start in the development paths that they have chosen could make it hard for African states to compete against them. Would not the field be already too crowded by the time Africa reaches its industrial cruising speed? Would not Africa reach its industrial peak even before it begins its industrial revolution? As has argued Richard Heeks, “countries like India, Singapore, and the Philippines arrived on the export scene many years ago. They have already developed the requisite skills, contacts, policies, and infrastructure that are so lacking in Africa. As a result, these established players will continually consolidate their position whilst squeezing out potential African newcomers.”28 In other words, “turn off your stove, for your neighbors are cooking today!” Were Chinese industrial revolutionaries listening to Heeks, they would not even have bothered to start their industrial takeoff. Were Indians listening to him, the thought of entering the software competition would not even have visited them. If Africans were taking Heeks seriously, they would just confine themselves to supplying the West with raw materials. Yet again, those of us who urge Africa to emulate China and India do more than recommend to Africa that it reproduce exactly what these two countries produce

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today. For Africa to emulate China and India implies, instead, that Africa should draw upon first the ethos and determination, and then the institutional arrangements and provisions that have help propel these two countries into the industrial age. Indians have not always been self-assured software creators and China has not always been the factory of the world. At one time, Chinese and Indians, too, were neurotic subjects seeking to run as far away from themselves as possible. At one time, they, too, had suffered from the dis-ease of lactification, and it is undeniable that even today many Chinese and Indians still wish to whiten the race both psychologically and physically. The chip of self-hatred that colonialism implants in the brain of the colonized does not wear out that easily. The merit of the great majority of Chinese and Indians is to have overcome the debilitation of colonialism and to have understood that the West, which at one time had treated them as sub-humans and taught them to hate themselves, is not invulnerable. And so they fought hard for their independences under charismatic leaders (Mao for the Chinese and Nehru for the Indians). Then, as they freed themselves from the clad of oppression, they understood that the West could also be beaten at its own game; so they started working at it gradually, by looking back first. Their very powerful diasporas— 55 million overseas nationals for India and 20 million overseas nationals for China — looked back by bringing capital, technology, and consumers to their respective countries. China and India are gradually beating the West at its own game, with no rancor, but with an ethos of yearning for knowledge and improvement, respect for diversity, and reverence for truth. That growth is not the exclusive province of one people, of one race, is the new truth. The new battle is the battle of development and not of armament. China redirected its industry from the heavy industry of weaponry production to light and medium industry and confined its once-excessive army to just one million men, which for its demographic size sends a message to the world that it has irreversibly turned its back on confrontation. India finds the strength for this new battle of development in an age-old Hindu ethos. From plundering [the riches of Indian society] to converting Hindus through torture, from using divide-and-conquer tactics to destroying the liberal Indian psyche by creating a slaveand-servant mentality, the foreigner largely used and abused Indian hospitality. Yet India harbors neither rancor nor revenge…. While the essential Hindu ethos of respecting diversity and revering truth gives Indians the courage to make contact with many cultures, this drive to be rid of the pains of the past allows a Hindu to make fresh beginnings with a light mind and loving heart. More than making money, this is the Indian’s real joy: perfecting his role in the world, by raising his personal spiritual high-jump to greater and greater heights.29

Africans, too, possess this yearning for knowledge and improvement. Every day, thousands of young Africans brave the desert sun and the treacherous seas to seek education and better living conditions in the West. Many make it there, and many also perish trying to make it there. They have against them the worst hand that could be dealt to a human being: centuries of epidermal prejudice. This prejudice shuts borders to the Africans more violently than borders could be shut to any other people. Yet, like the proverbial camel through the eye of the needle, they make it to the

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land of the other; and once there, they are too exhausted to look back, too disheartened to go back to this wretched land that they have left, to the wretched land that has become the paradise of Western arm dealers and mineral poachers. Yet, it is only by looking back that they would transform Africa. It is by looking back that young Indians and Chinese have started to pull their respective countries from their wretchedness.30 So by suggesting that Africans look at India and China, what we are also suggesting is that they look at the way the ethos of yearning for improvement and resilience that they share with the Chinese and the Indians has been used by these two peoples in their quest for growth. The field of industrial creativity is infinite, and the young educated Africans ought to be able to look back and develop for the world, but on behalf of their continent, the industries of tomorrow. They do have the intellectual resources for that; and much fortunately, too, they do have the natural resources for building up the level of savings that is needed to construct the infrastructure that will help launch Africa’s industrial transformation. One factor that helped China and India develop fast was their ability to mobilize capital and establish initial levels of savings. For China, high levels of savings came through great agricultural output. The foundation of China’s industrial revolution actually was realized through the improvement of agriculture and the restoration of the rural economy, which started long before the 1990s. From 1949 to 1952, China set about restoring the rural economy by improving agricultural output. This huge campaign of restoration led to the improvement of farmers’ living condition. Over these three years, farmers’ income grew by an average rate of 30 percent. Farmers’ average daily consumption per capita increased. Rural electricity consumption swelled dramatically. Millions of farmers got out of illiteracy thanks to a mass antiilliteracy campaign. As farmers’ condition got better, they increasingly became consumers of domestic goods, and they contributed to the stabilization of the national economy and created the foundation for the national economic restoration.31 China’s per capita income and growth rate continue to increase and to impress observers.32 Improvement of the rural sector has allowed China to mobilize a huge quantum of resources from its domestic economy.33 This experience should hail Africa.

Consolidate the Legacy of Granaries Most African governments are quick to state the significance of agriculture in their countries’ economies. Yet, as this crucial constituent of the economy remains vulnerable to the devastation of unpredictable natural elements such as drought, parasite invasion, and forest fires, little is done by African states to alter the predictable variables of agriculture. African states must restore their investments in agriculture and improve agricultural development in such a way as to better the condition of the rural populations, which in good times and bad times have constituted the backbone of Africa’s economy. This is important in two ways. Firstly, if in addi-

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tion to importing manufactured goods Africa were to import agricultural goods, and particularly provisions of sustenance, on a large scale, the result for Africa’s economy and social fabric would be catastrophic. Africa needs to be self-sufficient in the vital sector of nutrition. Secondly, as has been the case elsewhere, agriculture could help garner much needed capital and shore up the level of savings that is essential for industrial takeoff. For African agriculture to play this role, however, it will need to be reorganized. Too many farmers in Africa continue to work on tiny strips of land with very limited or archaic implements. The state ought to encourage farmers’ organization into larger collectivized entities and, against the one-sided and hypocritical recommendations of the WTO, the World Bank, and the core states that agricultural subsidies be eliminated, the state ought to openly support these collectivized entities by outfitting them with tools, grains, shoots, fertilizers, and irrigation systems, in order to help them increase their outputs. State intervention is of crucial importance, especially in areas where private operators have failed to fill the void after the World Bank/IMF forced African states to stop subsidies. African states have a moral responsibility to resume or start support of social services in rural areas. This includes supporting healthcare, education, electrification, water supplies, roads and communication services, environmental education services, and also recreation services, all things that would smooth the discrepancy between village and city, improve life in rural areas, and contribute to greater agricultural output. Furthermore, the state ought to facilitate credit lines and loans to farmers, make farmers’ alphabetical as well as financial literacy a priority and encourage savings and responsible consumption by farmers. One of the greatest and most rewarding challenges that states will face in making agriculture relevant is doing one thing that only states can do best, i.e., restoring gender fairness in agriculture, adopting and implementing what could be called “affirmative action in agricultural policy.” African women have been working in agriculture, and especially in food crops, since the dawn of ages, since before the aggressive orientation of agriculture toward market economy; and yet they have rarely been owners of the means of production. Men have. This unfairness has even been exacerbated by the Bank’s forced Structural Adjustment Programs in Africa, a fact that Sean Redding notes so observantly. “The structural adjustment policies were supposedly gender neutral; they did not specifically target either women or men. But precisely because the policies were gender-neutral, they tended to favor men over women, because it was men who had the kind of international contacts, the kind of access that allowed them to get … aid.”34 Affirmative action in agricultural policy will therefore have to address the issue of land ownership by women and their access to alphabetical/financial literacy, aid, and credit, especially as even sustenance agriculture is so market-driven. Although total ownership by women of sustenance agriculture has been attained in some areas in Africa — we are thinking, for instance, of the “marché gouro,” the collectivized entity of the Gouro women from the Oumé region of Côte d’Ivoire that supplies both the local markets and some international

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markets with a variety of vegetables— where sustenance agriculture is run from top to bottom by women, such achievements are rare and precarious without state intervention. In formulating policies to correct gender bias in agriculture, the state will be fulfilling, through the restoration of agriculture, one of its major responsibilities, that of smoothing social inequities. Furthermore, women make up the largest portion of the African rural population, and it would be contradictory that any program propounding to ameliorate the condition of the rural masses remain indifferent to systemic bias against women or contribute to deepening the injustice against women. In preparation for their industrial revolution, it is in the interest of African states to transform women into consumers and savers. The empirics of money management plainly show that when they have control of their money, women are better consumers, longer-lasting (bank) clients, and better savers than men. States will find in women great allies in their endeavor to garner capital for their industrial takeoff. Although they do not always have easy access to land ownership, African women, especially in rural areas, like many Indian women,35 have huge savings wrapped up in property, such as expensive cloths (Kente, Adingra, bazin, and wax pagnes) and minerals (especially gold, silver, and diamonds, to a lesser degree). Women wear them for adornment, offer them at baptismal ceremonies and at marriages, do up their dead with them, and even sometimes bury their love ones with them. African banks have to start tapping into these assets for savings by offering women cash for savings accounts. This will require banks to get involved in financial literacy programs in the rural areas.

Promote Women’s Entrepreneurship It is in the African states’ interests to attend to the well-being of African women in the rural sector if they really intend to include women as full participants in the development effort. Traditionally, poverty reduction programs have seldom concerned themselves with the particular well-being of women, as governments assume instead that within the same household the notion of well-being is understood indiscriminately by men, women and children. In fact, studies carried out in five rural districts of Uganda among 180 people, half of whom were women, showed that on the meaning of well-being, women’s priorities differ markedly from men’s. When asked to evaluate their own well-being and that of their neighbors within a particular village in relation to the impact of an agricultural support program, the women informants’ answers revealed that women’s perception of well-being goes beyond mere wealth. Women’s understanding of well-being also includes social, health, emotional and physical considerations including their decision making ability, source of income, access to land, animal ownership, husband’s contribution toward meeting household expenditures, relationship with polygamy, social assets and education,36 which will require of governments specific interventions rather than one-size-fits-all programs.

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From the perspective of attending to women’s well-being, African governments should encourage African women’s entrepreneurship. Women are unanimous that their well-being is partly tied to their ownership of the means of production and of asset generation as well as to their control over wealth. A way for women to own their money and decide how to spend it is to make them business owners. Contrary to men’s businesses, women’s businesses usually require less startup capital. Yet, as note Elsje Dijkgraaff, the gender-stereotyped values of banking staff generally make it difficult for women to obtain the little capital necessary to start a business, and to achieve the economic autonomy that is “a major instrument in redressing the gender imbalance of power in relationships with relatives, family and partners.” 37 Women’s entrepreneurship will necessarily be an excellent development partner for African governments as it is proven that though women’s businesses start smaller than men’s, they tend to grow faster, they are less prone to bankruptcy, and they provide healthier working environments, by their success in balancing work and family, their support of employees’ lives, their low-key environment, and their little emphasis on unbridled competition among employees. Furthermore, women’s businesses tend to hire more women, thus reducing the gender apartheid in the professional sphere. Governments must therefore help in the creation of women’s businesses by making available credit lines for prospective women entrepreneurs, sensitizing loaning institutions to their gender biases, recognizing successful businesswomen and encouraging them to mentor new women entrepreneurs, and along with chambers of commerce, promote women as serious business agents and educate them in the mastery of the new indispensable business tool, that is, E-commerce.38

Transport to Collect Foreign Exchange Sub-Saharan Africa holds many of the world’s natural resources. In fact, Africa’s wealth is one of the reasons why the continent has never known sustained periods of peace. Legality is of crucial importance here, especially as much of Africa’s reserves are now being exported illegally under the cover of the multiple conflicts whose origins are mostly exogenous. Today, much of the Congo’s and Côte d’Ivoire’s diamond, gold, and wood that is being taken out of the countries by mercenary-speculators escapes the control of these two countries’ legitimate governments. In the confusion of the civil unrest in Côte d’Ivoire, a country like Burkina Faso, for instance, which has never planted a single shoot of coffee or cocoa because it does not have propitious soil for that kind of agriculture, has mysteriously become a cocoa and coffee exporter. Attracted by the natural reserves of Africa, and relentlessly seeking new ways to loot these reserves, the core states, in collusion with some African leaders, have set up instability, supported dictators, and stirred up internal conflicts in Africa in order to plunder the continent in the ensuing mayhem and lack of real institutional organization. Within the framework of sovereign institutional planning, African

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states should, in a first stage, and for a relatively limited period, legally transport, that is export, agricultural and mineral commodities in order for the accumulation of foreign exchange to take place and for investment capital to be garnered. This temporary intensive export of raw materials presupposes that African states should not tie themselves to foreign speculators through long-lasting agreements. This also implies that African states should have well-defined investment schemes of foreign exchange so as to be ready to launch into the second phase when time comes.

Transformation to Equilibrate the International Terms of Exchange The next phase in Africa’s economic revolution concerns the shift from merely transporting to transforming. The phase of transformation will start the state’s process of intense industrialization. In fact, despite the deterioration of the terms of exchange decried by most African governments, very little effort has been undertaken on their part to move their countries’ economies from exporting raw commodities to transforming them on-site. By and large, African countries continue to be Western countries’ suppliers of raw materials. Although a number of African countries have attempted to diversify their economies through industrialization, many of the new industries have been confined to food processing. When it comes to mining, for instance, African minerals (oil, diamond, gold, silver, bauxite, manganese, and more) continue to be extracted in Africa and transformed in Western countries. Furthermore, the little industrialization there was took place under the auspices of stateowned enterprises, which were dismantled in the 1980s under the Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs. Nevertheless, some countries like Côte d’Ivoire or Senegal were able to put in place some kind of vertical diversification whereby paper, plywood or furniture are being exported in lieu of wood, textiles instead of cotton, and leather instead of hide. Africa should seek to accelerate the diversification of its light industry beyond food processing. African governments should, unapologetically, despite the threats of the core states and the World Bank/IMF, support the creation of light industries in Africa unless they choose to surrender this essential sector to foreign speculators and thus surrender the continent to a new form of colonization. There are sectors of light industrialization that should have logically been dominated by Africa, had African governments been lucid enough to invest aggressively in them. Take, for instance, the pharmaceutical industry. The African continent has always had the richest vegetal varieties, and for centuries Africa’s plants and roots have been effectively used in traditional pharmacology. There is a traditional pharmacological expertise in Africa that unfortunately has not been tapped into; so much so that today, Africa is the greatest supplier of plants, roots and nuts to Western pharmaceutical laboratories that are more concerned with developing medications targeting European illnesses

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than finding solutions to the plethora of tropical diseases. It is for them a matter of “dollar and sense.” The little research that is undertaken on tropical medications by private European pharmaceutical companies yields a variety of drugs that are out of reach for the financially strapped African populations. In the meantime, unscrupulous European enterprises are seeking to have total ownership of African plants by taking patents on these plants. This great danger to Africa’s biological resources has generated a neologism as much as a fair amount of outrage, albeit very little from African scientists and lawyers. Biodiversity … is Africa’s richest asset. The knowledge its people have developed over centuries on the properties of plants, seeds, algae and other biological resources is now coveted by scientists for medicinal, agricultural and other purposes. Biopiracy is the theft of biological matter, like plants, seeds and genes. In the absence of laws regulating access to these resources, pharmaceutical, agrochemical and seed multinationals exploit Africa’s biological wealth and obtain rights of intellectual ownership to the resources and knowledge of the communities. Multinationals make huge profits from African biodiversity but do not share these with the communities who discovered, kept and transmitted the knowledge, activists argue.39

This particular aspect of the deterioration of the terms of exchange is literally killing millions of African children, women and elderly. It is high time that African governments woke up from their stupor and protected the resources of the continent by mounting strong legal oppositions against this newfound European piracy. In its industrialization campaign, Africa should start a vast program of pharmaceutical research for the purpose of developing an array of cures specifically targeting tropical diseases. This should be part of a conscious promotion of human capital development by African states.

Develop Human Capital Africa’s very young population is a potentially expanding consumption base that ought to be tapped into through a variety of social development programs. As things present themselves now, Africa has the highest unemployment rate and the highest infant and maternal mortality rates. Unless African governments undertake efforts to vigorously reverse this trend, the continent will not be able to tap into this potential favorable demographic and will, therefore, miss its development train. The kind of forced and precipitous liberalization that was promoted in Africa under the auspices of the World Bank and the IMF is the wrong liberalization for Africa. It was not meant to help develop the continent. It was rather intended to further enrich the core states and their rapacious multinational corporations by weakening economic, but above all, social development in Africa. Asking African states to suspend their government expenditures on healthcare, education, water distribution, and infrastructure building is a recipe for waning social development; yet, there is a correlate between social development and economic growth for the very simple reason that neglected, unskilled, uneducated, and physically and emotionally unfit human

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capital will not help a state develop. On the contrary, it will be a burden to the state. “Sustained growth,” as observes Mahtaney “entails that [a country] needs to make faster and longer strides in the realm of improving … social development.”40 So, African governments will need to create employment, but most importantly a population fit to work. How can states create employment, ensure healthcare to the public and outfit workers with professional skills at a reasonable cost all at the same time? States can achieve this by marrying agriculture with industrialization.

Marry Industrialization with Agriculture through Decentralization Industrial expansion in Africa should not be undertaken at the expense of subsistence agriculture, and vice versa. Subsistence agriculture, as we have already mentioned, is vital for Africa’s daily survival; it should be mechanized to ensure a high level of productivity. However, mechanizing agriculture will indubitably create an excess of labor in the agricultural sector, which could go on to augment the poor, undernourished and unhealthy populations. The surplus labor resulting from agriculture mechanization could be accommodated by industrialization as the latter develops. This is why industrialization should be decentralized in such a way that within the same region agriculture and industry work hand in hand, industry relying for its development on the resources of the region, and the regional as much as the national consumer base and agriculture relying for their development on the consumer base that industry brings in. Industry and agriculture should work hand in hand in such a way that industry and agriculture feed on one another, become consumers of each other’s output. As has been noted, if successful, this reciprocal patronage between agriculture and industry in the rural area will help raise wages in both sectors and give rise to a vibrant service sector that will further absorb the surplus of agriculture and industry. “Through mutual linkages between agriculture and nonagricultures, a virtuous circle of development may emerge, with greater agricultural output leading to more non-agricultural activity and greater non-agricultural output in turn acting as a stimulus for agriculture.”41 In due course, both agriculture and industry will ultimately have to privilege specialization. This also will be a successful program of decentralization that will solve the question of overpopulation of the few African cities that have traditionally hosted industries. For this virtuous circle of development to actually materialize, it is imperative that African governments recognize and support the development of rural non-agricultural activities, which has not often been the case because of the traditional perception of rural economies as exclusively resting on agriculture.42 It is a fact that the neglected rural non-agricultural sector that comprises such occupations as transportation, manufacturing, construction, mining and various types of services is a vibrant sector in its own way. If seriously tapped into, this non-agricultural sector

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has the potential of leading to better distribution of employment and income and to overall geographical equality.43 The common pattern of industrial development in sub–Saharan Africa, which has mainly concentrated on large-scale industries in big cities, has traditionally benefited a reduced number of persons to the detriment of the larger population, and it has also increased the burden of overpopulation on the very few industrial cities that have drawn people in search of employment. The failure by governments to recognize the non-farming industrial sector in rural regions has resulted in the backwardness of this segment of activities. As Bagachwa and Stewart show, rural non-agricultural industries continue to be excluded from formal credit, and their main sources of capital remain family support and personal savings. Only in very rare cases (1 percent) are these industries funded by formal credit. Family generally constitutes the source of labor for these industries. Skills are usually acquired from other craftsmen and the lack of functional literacy among the workers makes it difficult for them to keep financial records and to distinguish between business expenditures and household expenses. The sources of technologies for rural industries are often inadequate, archaic and inefficient. For instance, traditional blacksmiths are likely to use tools they have manufactured themselves, such as stone anvils, goatskin bellows, wooden and clay pipes, etc., traditional grain milling industries are likely to use wooden mortars and pestles, and rural breadmaking industries are likely to operate with mud-burnt brick and hand-operated equipment. Furthermore, these industries are extremely labor intensive, and the products that they yield, though compatible with the income level of the consuming rural populations— and also because of this very fact — remain inferior in quality to those produced in urban areas. They lack uniformity and have shorter longevity.44 Sub-Saharan Africa’s rural non-agricultural industry “contrasts poorly on most counts with Asian rural industry” mainly because of policy biases against agriculture in Africa. “Policy biases against agriculture … hurt the rural non-farm sector, and policy changes favouring agriculture would assist it.”45 Agriculture and industry ought to grow and specialize under the ambit of governmental support and incentives. As agriculture and industry develop by transforming on site, and as their labor surplus goes into services, such as catering, leisure, hospitality, tourism, art, creative enterprises, healthcare, etc., more rural populations will be retained in rural areas, for there will be more incentives for these populations to seek success in their own environments than to migrate to the urban districts. While agriculture and industry will be promoted under the ambit of government, services, on the other hand, will be born out of individual entrepreneurial initiatives. Services, too, will seek to specialize, and will occasion the emergence of private skill-formation centers, professional schools, and the like, thus liberating government from some of its expenditure obligations in the area of human capital formation. This is saying liberalization will come progressively on its own no matter what. However, for this liberalization to be advantageous to the people, it has to be preceded by a level of government intervention.

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Enfranchise Oneself from Greedy Cosigners The World Bank, the IMF, the Club of Paris and the Club of London are not philanthropic organizations. There are in the business of making money, and especially of producing maximum dividends out of minimum, and preferably no, investment. These financial organizations are the loudspeakers of the core states. It is in the interest of the core states and their multinational corporations that the peripheral states, which in the international division of labor have been slated as raw material providers, remain undeveloped; and the core states do work hard for the role of the peripheral states to remain unchanged. It is a mistake for African leaders to believe that when France or Great Britain, for instance, sponsors African countries for an IDA loan, these countries do it for the simple reason of world courtesy. These sponsorships are nooses around the neck of the African states that the core states tighten or loosen given the direction of the political wind, that is, given their own interests. The core states are usurers. Their friendship is always interested and conditional, and their loans and aid packages are poisoned gifts that African countries ought to collectively reject. It is understandable that foreign investors should seek to draw maximum profits from their investments in Africa. On the other hand, it should also be expected that African states would demand the maximum earnings for the exploitation of their resources by foreign multinationals. These two positions are not irreconcilable, and they should constitute the foundations upon which foreign investors and African governments conduct their negotiations. However, when multinational corporations from Western countries operate in Africa, they tend to bully African states to submission through economic blackmailing and threats of military invasions; for indeed, “[w]henever a powerful state intervenes to invade a weak state, one can be sure that some private investors from the powerful state, unhappy about their returns in the weak state, have directly or indirectly triggered the military intervention.”46 Western multinational corporations have often blindfolded, gagged, and tortured African leaders in the dungeons of Western jouissance. Though, for some inexplicable reasons, most African leaders seem to have enjoyed their servitude, their unexpected proclivities have been depressing for the African masses. For the welfare of the people they are accountable to, African governments ought to get out of their losing rapport with the West. This can only happen if African nations first place themselves in propitious conditions for rejecting Western countries’ poisoned gifts of aid and loans. African states have to develop their own investment funds and enfranchise themselves from the abusive and exploitative “friendship” that they have maintained with the core states since their very first encounters with the latter. African states should make it their mid-term objective to leave the Bretton Woods institutions, these rapacious organizations that prosper by cultivating misery in Africa. Théophile Obenga is right when he says:

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Ces institutions ont-elles été créées pour résoudre la misère africaine ?… Elles n’ont pas été créées pour cela. Les États-Unis, aujourd’hui, ont un budget déficitaire. Pourquoi ils ne s’endettent pas auprès de la Banque mondiale, qui est à 5 minutes de la Maison Blanche? Mais les États-Unis se sont tournés vers la Chine pour s’endetter. Pourquoi la France déficitaire … ne s’endette pas auprès de la Banque mondiale. Elle aussi est allée frapper à la porte des Chinois. Et ils nous demandent de nous rabattre à la Banque mondiale. Ces institutions respectables n’ont pas été créées pour nous. Nous devons simplement quitter la Banque mondiale parce qu’elle a apporté la pauvreté en Afrique. Avec le FMI, [La Banque mondiale] est contre le développement de l’Afrique. Il n’y a que celle-ci à ne pas le comprendre … les experts de ces institutions, les plus corrompus de la terre, le savent.47 [Were these institutions created to bring a solution to Africa’s misery? They were not created for that. Today, the United States has a budget deficit. Why does the U.S. turn to China instead of borrowing money from the World Bank, which is only five minutes away from the White House? Why does money-strapped France knock at the Chinese’s door instead of borrowing from the World Bank? And they ask us to go to the World Bank. These respectable institutions were not created for us. We should simply leave the World Bank, because it brought poverty in Africa. In collusion with the IMF, [the World Bank] works against Africa’s development. Africa is the only one that has not understood it yet … the experts of these institutions, the most corrupt in the world, know it.]

To enfranchise themselves from the usurers that the World Bank and the IMF are, African states, along with other developing countries, should agree to apportion a small part of their annual commodity export revenues to a collective development account from which member states could be loaned money for their development projects. Such an account could also help member states establish strong credit for getting loans, no longer from the core states, which have given enough proof of their insincerity, but this time from such transitional states as China. This idea is not novel. President Gbagbo from Côte d’Ivoire is an indefatigable herald for the creation of what he calls Fonds de Garantie et de Souveraineté, which is essentially the same concept. The reader will certainly notice that in the solutions that we have just proposed to the development problems of Africa, we have avoided mentioning the dwelt-on question of Africa’s overpopulation, except to recognize that African cities are being overburdened by an exodus from the rural centers. Let it be known that we do not believe that Africa is overpopulated, and therefore we do not believe in the solutions often propounded by Western experts, which demand that African countries reduce their population size. Overpopulation is not what has kept Africa lagging behind. Lack of genuine exchange of technology and of industrialization is. From this perspective, we concur with Chinweizu who writes that when on the excuse of saving the environment, it is suggested that we perhaps ought not to industrialize, when on the excuse of reducing pressure of population on resources we are urged to control our populations, we ought to be thoroughly skeptical and have not just second, but even tenth thoughts on the advice we are given … the world may be overpopulated as a whole; but is Africa overpopulated with respect to what its resources, if used entirely in Africa, could support at some decent but not wasteful level of consumption?48

Africa’s poverty ought to end, and it can if the global discrepancy is readjusted in such a way that, instead of giving the West a monopoly on the “ingredients of sur-

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vival,” those who have actually been at the source of the supremacy of the West are given control over the resources that they produce to that effect. The West should not be afraid of Africa’s success. It is not a matter of taking away from the West what it has. It is just a matter of allowing Africa to use whatever resources nature has granted it to genuinely pull itself out of poverty. A strong Africa is necessarily in the interest of the West, too.

Conclusion

Shifting the Center of Development Thinking To adjust development thinking in the perspective of making it pertinent to the “bottom billion,” that is to say, to the Third World, means to rethink the so-called universal rationality in which globalization is couched. This means to deterritorialize the tree of globalization from its taken-for-granted Western core and to shake it so as to force it to disseminate its fruits in all corners of the world, thus prompting, if not an equal distribution of world resources, at the very least, an equal probability of growth for all people. We have wanted this book to do just that: to shift the taken-for-granted axis of development thinking and to offer alternative development thinkings governed by justice. Justice, however, is a notion that should appeal more to our ethical imagination than to our political, ideological and financial one. Yet too often, the current EuroAmerican-centric ideology of globalization has privileged pecuniary interests over moral considerations despite its vociferous claim of universal fairness— even though, as we have demonstrated in chapter six, in the “new globalization,” Western Europe, the old ruthless globalizer, often appears vulnerable to phagocytosis by its historical offspring, America. Be that as it may, the rationality of globalization rests on a Euro-American presumption of political and economic well-being that is informed by a signifying practice — a practice of giving meaning to things so that they retroactively make sense — that is proper to the West. This signifying observance, though apparently hermetic and unquestionable, nevertheless contains numerous ambiguities that can be — and ought to be — probed in the pursuit of a more impartial world. For centuries, Western Europe and its offspring, America, have organized the various scientific, political, economic, bureaucratic and ethical-religious disciplines that govern the lives of their peoples around a central order of discourse, a fundamental ideology that subsumes the primacy of individual interests over collective welfare: capitalism. Overvalued as the essential organizing principle in Western societies, capitalism successfully established the tyranny of the few that birthed it over the majority that endured it, mythologizing the rise to power of these few as epic and grandiloquent and mystifying their callous authority, their voracious appetite for 174

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profit accumulation and their take-no-prisoner moral code as measures of accomplishment. The greedier the progenitors of capitalism got, the more capitalism itself became a state of grace to be arrived at, and the more its principles were propagated in all ideological institutions—family, school and church being the preponderant ones— as honorable principles. As the seventeenth-century slave traders grew prosperous in Europe and America from their dishonorable commerce, their sullied views and morals progressively became the standards to uphold, and it did not take long for their distorted sense of ethics to become the object of desire for most Europeans. The first capitalists of Western European and American societies established a center lodging a prominent minority, a center to which the marginalized majority could hope to belong someday only by surrendering its principles to the values of capitalism. For many on the periphery of capitalism, the way to reach out to the center of Euro-American capitalism was to voluntarily marginalize themselves geographically. Thus, in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference, many of them joined the crews of commercial ships toward the colonies; many enrolled in the foreign legions that would crush indigenous resistances in the colonies; many joined the colonial administrations that were to organize the power structure of the metropole in the colonies; and many others just packed their few belongings and left for the colonies, betting everything on good fortune. All, however, were resolute to strike gold and return in a few years to the center as nouveaux riches. In the colonies, this heteroclite body of Euro-American adventurers, outfitted with the distorted moral principles of the rapacious center, rehearsed the center. The center’s attitudes became their attitudes, its values their values, and its suppositions their suppositions; but worst of all, the other, the colonized, became the object on which these mystified fortune-hunters would test their efficiency. The colonies became the site of evident racism, a racism whose preponderant organizing principle was profit accumulation. In the European scramble for unbridled wealth accumulation, racism was merely a means to the end. Racism allowed elimination of the dark other in the capitalist quest for profit; but above all, in that quest, racism allowed and rationalized commoditization of the other. A racist ideology developed in Europe and in America by a center eager to confuse the marginalized European and American masses on the real source of its economic and political power was transferred in the colony by the bamboozled adventurers and applied with expert efficiency. In the metropole, it was convenient for the center that the masses should believe that political and economic powers were attainable by any constituent of “God’s chosen race,” provided this constituent would abide by the center’s order of discourse as a natural ideology come down from the divine authority. A crooked clergy fattened by rapacious capitalists rationalized the supposed link between the gospel and the capitalist discourse of uncontrolled wealth accumulation. While the milky skin of the European was a virtual authorization to paradise, the colonized’s dark complexion was the divine declaration of his eternal

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damnation; but above all, it was the sign of the colonized’s divine assignation: He was to slave for the white. The black colonized became the other’s other, the other of the Euro-American capitalistic center’s other. The various independence struggles in the colonies had profound meaning for the colonized as well as for the colonizer. Colonization, be it direct as the one instituted by the French or indirect as the English model, intended to deprive the native both materially and mentally. The primary aim of colonization was to siphon resources from the colonies toward the metropole; however, for this dispossession to take place without any hitch, the native had to be placed in a frame of mind to accept the ideology of domination. In the colonies, the colonial school — usually run by the colonial clergy — the colonial administration, and the colonial armies either persuasively or repressively produced and maintained the subaltern conditions of the native and even went so far as to teach the native to reproduce these conditions in the absence of supervision. In this context, the independence movement, sought to restore the native to himself by demythologizing the white and by demystifying his power. These movements were considered subversive by the colonizers, who resisted them and went to great length to undermine them with the help of some native informants trained in the art of self-mortification. Africa’s biggest challenge today is to grow in spite of the sabotaging acts of the nostalgic former colonizers assisted by their swarm of self-destructive native informants. This challenge is significant, as it amounts to displacing the frame of reference that informs the judgments of the African elites. Colonization was not just about draining off wealth from Africa; it was also about physically beating the African in the fields and on the worksites, and mentally beating his brain to pulp in the colonial schools and churches in order to outfit him for the maintenance and perpetuation of the ideology of Western dominance. This enterprise of alienation worked so successfully that the first leaders of the newly independent African countries— many of whom are still in power today — govern their nations in the interest of the former colonizers. Whenever the Western frame of reference has been challenged by a few farsighted nationalists, whenever these nationalists have rallied enough support to imperil the Western influence on their countries, they have been simply eliminated by native hit men on the payroll of the rapacious Western interests, when their programs have not been sabotaged and their countries literally sacked and set on fire to confirm the propagated notion by a racist and self-centered West of the inability of blacks to govern themselves. Despite the danger of obliteration, a few audacious African intellectuals have not hesitated to challenge the presumed natural center of globalization with its implied hegemonic agenda. This book hopes to contribute to their struggle for respect by demonstrating that the presumed center is not the necessary center, and that the center is inherently contradictory insofar as it has failed to uphold the very values upon which rests its assumed centrality. On the matters of freedom, equality, good governance, accountability, and above all, on the matter of democracy, the presumed center has demon-

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strated its vulnerability. The presume center is indefensible. Globalization, the presumed center’s heralded means to universal brotherhood, is a mere hoax. For Africa to develop, it is globalization, the centrality of Western hegemony, which it needs to rethink, as have the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

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Chapter Notes Introduction

Chapter 1

1. Colonel Afrifa, quoted and discussed in Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 358 –59. 2. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté III: Négritude et civilisation de l’universel (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 81, 85. 3. K. Martial Frindéthié, Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture, Politics and Theory (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009). 4. William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice.” In Complete Works of William Shakespeare. 245 –74 (Glasgow: Collins, 1994), Act II Scene 1. 5. Frindéthié, Cinema, 170. 6. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), originally published as Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952). 7. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), originally published as Les damnés de la terre (Paris: François Maspéro, 1961). 8. Frindéthié once stated that today’s “exaltation about Frantz Fanon could strike as excessively reflective.” His admonition that one come back to Fanon, today, certainly does justice to Fanon and, without any shred of a doubt, to Fanon’s followers. See The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 77. 9. See, e.g., Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 10. Mark Doyle, “Bongo’s 40 Years Ruling of Gabon,” available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk /2/hi/africa/7115420stm (accessed on 6-4-2009). 11. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté IV: Socialisme et planification (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 277.

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 2. As held Aristotle, Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above the state … the individual, when isolated, is not selfsufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature. See Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapter 2 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 7.

3. See Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 4. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 40. 5. Ibid., 110 –11. 6. Ibid., 169. 7. Ibid., 111. 8. Ibid., 40. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici (Amherst : Prometheus Books, 2000), 4 –5. 10. Ibid., 6, 79. 11. See, e.g., Alessandro Tomasi, “Nihilism and Creativity in the Philosophy of Nietzsche,” in Minerva — An Internet Journal of Philosophy 11 (2007). http://www.mic.ul.ie/stephen/vol11/Nietzsche.pdf (accessed on 01-23-2009). 12. See Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 3. 13. Ibid., 60. 14. Property was European “to the extent that,” as notes Talal Asad, “European appropriated, cultivated, and then lawfully passed … on to generations of Europeans as their own inheritance” the world that, according to Lockean logic, “God gave the men in common … for their benefit.” See “Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe

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Represent Islam?” In The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, edited by Anthony Pagden, 209 –27 (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 2002), 216. 15. David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and its Opponents (New York : Free Press, 1998), 432–35. 16. Ibid., 261. 17. Ibid., 504. 18. See Asad, 214. 19. See Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 129. 20. Robert Sinnerbrink, “We Hyperboreans: Platonism and Politics in Heidegger,” in Contretemps: An Online Journal of Philosophy, vol. 3, July 2002, 161. Also available at http://www.usyd. edu.au/contretemps/3July2002/sinnerbrink.pdf (accessed 01-23-2009). 21. David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (McGill’s-Queen’s University Press, 2007), reviewed by Peter Poellner, University of Warwick, in Notre Dame Philosophical Review, http:// ndpr.nd. edu / review.cfm?id=15005 (accessed on 01-24-09). 22. See Peter Poellner’s review of David Owen’s Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (McGill’sQueen’s University Press, 2007), in Notre Dame Philosophical Review, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review. cfm?id=15005 (accessed on 01-24-09). 23. See Fanon, The Wretched, 4. 24. See Frindéthié, Black Renaissance, 17–32. 25. Floyd W. Hayes, “Fanon, Oppression, and Resentment: The Black Experience in the United States,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, edited by Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renée T. White, 11–23. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996). 26. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “The Genealogy of Morals,” in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), 186. 27. Ibid., 186 –87. 28. See Fanon, The Wretched, 89. 29. See Fanon, Black Skin, 222. 30. Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Mind, translated by J.B. Baillie (London: Allen and Unwin, 1910). 31. Ibid., 229. 32. Philip J. Kain, Hegel and the Other: A Study of the Phenomenology of the Spirit (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), 41–42. 33. Hegel, 108. 34. Ibid., 110. 35. Ibid., 106. 36. Fanon, Black Skin, 221. 37. Ibid., 79. 38. See Nietzsche, Good and Evil, 27, Aphorism 20. 39. The notioan of language as gift, especially as unwelcomed gift, as a donation that comes with

heavy, lingering debt or responsibility, is a recurrence in Derrida and Lacan. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” In Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 40. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 203. 41. Fanon, Black Skin, 60.

Chapter 2 1. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 24. 2. My emphasis. 3. Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, Adrian Collins (New York: Howard Fertic, 1967), 150 –51. 4. Incidentally, in speaking about the prototypes of European beauty, Gobineau associates social class to physical endowment and temperament. “From the almost rudimentary face and structure of the Pelagian and the Pecheray to the tall and nobly proportioned figure of Charlemagne, the intelligent regularity of the features of Napoleon, and the imposing majesty that exhales from the royal countenance of Louis XIV, there is a series of gradations,” he writes. 5. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 2. 6. Stoler, 23 7. Quoted in Pieterse, 41. 8. Pieterse, 42. 9. Trost, 64. 10. Ibid., 65. 11. Ibid. 12. Quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, 169. 13. Derek Hook, “Fanon and the Psychoanalysis of Racism.” London: LSE Research Online. Available at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/2567. Available in LSE Research Online: July 2007. 14. Fanon, Black Skin, 159. 15. Ibid., 166. 16. Ibid., 170. 17. Lynn Dorland Trost, “Western Metaphysical Dualism as an Element in Racism,” in Cultural Bases of Racism and Group Oppression: An Examination of Traditional “Western” Concepts, Values and Institutional Structures which Support Racism, Sexism and Elitism, edited by John L. Hodge, Donald K. Struckmann and Lynn Dorland Trost (Berkeley: Two Riders Press, 1975), 65. 18. Livingstone, Linvingstone’s African Journal 1853 –1856 Vol. 1, edited and with an introduction

Notes—Chapter 3 by I. Schapera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 177. 19. Quoted and discussed in Stoler, 115 –16. 20. Quoted in Pieterse, 47. 21. Michel de Montaigne, “On Cannibals,” in Selected Essays, edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2007), 125. 22. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785 –1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 204. 23. Montaigne, “On Cannibals,” 127. 24. John Carlos Rowe, “Culture, US Imperialism and Globalization,” in Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism, edited by Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schuller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 37. 25. Jordan, 7. 26. Ibid., 8 –9. 27. Gobineau, 122–23, 126. 28. Genesis 9: 18 –27. 29. Pieterse, 44. 30. Quoted and discussed in Jordan, 23. 31. Gobineau, 118. 32. Bernal, 242. 33. Trost, 62. 34. Bernal, 88. 35. Herodotus, The Histories, a new translation by Andrea L. Purvis, edited by Robert B. Strassler, with an introduction by Rosalind Thomas (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007). 36. Quoted in Bernal, 242. 37. Ibid., 244. 38. Bernal, 141–42. 39. Ibid., 86 –90. 40. Ibid., 91. 41. Herodotus, 6.54 [trans. p. 449]. 42. Ibid., 2.182 [trans. p. 203]. 43. Ibid., 4.147 [trans. p. 340]. 44. Ibid., 2.49 [trans. p. 139]. 45. Ibid., 2.171 [trans. p. 198]. 46. Quoted in Bernal, 103. 47. Ibid, 116 –17. 48. Pieterse, 23. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 24. 51. Ibid., 25. 52. Montaigne, 125. 53. Herodotus, 2.50 [trans. p. 141]. 54. Pieterse, 30. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 35. 57. Ibid., 19. 58. Ibid., 67. 59. Stoler, 25 60. Livingstone’s Missionary Correspondence 1841– 1856, edited with an introduction by I. Schapera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 4 –5.

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61. Ibid., 5. 62. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, edited by Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 51. 63. Paul S. Landau, “An Amazing Distance : Pictures and People in Africa,” in Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, edited by Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 3. 64. Frindéthié, Cinema, 183. 65. Patrick Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa 1880 –1985 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1988), 61. 66. Ibid., 100 –103. 67. Ibid., 60. 68. Maurice N. Hennessy, The Congo: A Brief History and Appraisal (New York: Praeger, 1961), 68. 69. See Frindéthié, Cinema, Chap. 9.

Chapter 3 1. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, White Slaversand the African Elite (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 389. 2. Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, translated by Steven E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 68. 3. Peg O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2002), 34. 4. Steven C. Ward, Modernizing the Mind: Psychological Knowledge and the Remaking of Society (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 10. 5. Ibid., 11. 6. Ibid., 19. 7. Frindéthié, Cinema, 171. 8. Hayden White, “The Westernization of World History,” in Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate, edited by Jörn Rüsen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 112. 9. Marion, 69. 10. Pierre Laniray, François-Xavier Verschave, l’homme qui voulait soulever les montagnes (Paris: Éditions les Arènes, 2006), 121. 11. François-Xavier Verschave, Noir silence: qui arrêtera la Françafrique? (Paris: Éditions les Arènes, 2000), 266. 12. François-Xavier Verschave, “Defining Françafrique.” Available online at http://survie. org/francafrique/article/defining-francafriqueby-francois (accessed on 7-29-2009). 13. Laniray, 105. 14. Ibid., 106. 15. Verschave, “Defining Françafrique.” 16. Laniray, 109. 17. Eva Joly, Justice Under Siege: One Woman’s Battle Against a European Oil Company, translated

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by Emma Kemp (London: Citizen Press, 2006), 25. 18. Laniray, 110. 19. Ibid., 119. 20. Ibid., 46. 21. Ibid., 2. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 4. 24. Ibid., 66. 25. Ibid., 66. 26. Ibid., 97. 27. Ibid., 116. 28. Ibid., 30. 29. François-Xavier Verschave, Noir silence: qui arrêtera la Françafrique? (Paris: Éditions des Arènes, 2000), 278. 30. Joly, 48. 31. Brian Titley, Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 121. 32. Ibid., 122–23. 33. Ibid., 123 –24. 34. Samuel Decalo, Psychosis of Power: African Personal Dictatorships (Gainesville: Florida Academic Press, 1998), 227. 35. Bokassa, video interview with Lionel Chomarat and Jean-Claude Chuzeville, Abidjan, March 1981. Available online at http://www.ufcto go. com/Video-Bokassa-l-entrevue-interdite1628.html (accessed on 10-11-2009). 36. Ibid. 37. Bokassa himself acknowledged the oddity of his rapport with Giscard See the video interview with Chuzeville. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Titley, 136. 42. Bokassa, video interview with Chuzeville. 43. Ibid. 44. Titley, 144. 45. Ibid., 136. 46. Decalo, 229. 47. Ibid., 231. 48. Gobineau, 150 –51.

Chapter 4 1. Boubacar Boris Diop, “Why Africans Should Take Offense at Nicolas Sarkozy’s Speech (in Dakar),” translated by El Hadji Moustapha Diop, in PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness 6, 2007. 2. Rapahaëlle Bacque, and Pascal RobertDiard, “A Bongo, la France reconnaissante,” in Le Monde, 06-11-2009. 3. Verschave, Noir silence, 201. 4. Ibid. 5. http://www./express.fr/ actualite/monde/

afrique/l-ecart-de-jean-Pierre-cot_498726. html. 6. François Mitterrand, Speech of la Baule, June 20, 1990. 7. Verschave, Noir silence, 93 –94. 8. Ibid., 97–98. 9. François-Xavier Verschave, Complicité de génocide? La politique de la France au Rwanda (Paris: Éditions la Découverte), 11. 10. Ibid., 12, 14. 11. Ibid., 35. 12. This historical synopsis relied on Verschave’s Complicité de génocide? 13. Ibid., 37. 14. Verschave, Noir silence, 319. 15. Verschave, Complicité, 65. 16. Ibid., 14. 17. Ibid., 37. 18. Quoted in Verschave, Complicité, 37. 19. Ibid., 36. 20. Ibid., 75. 21. Verschave, Noir silence, 267. 22. For an elaborate discussion of France’s recent involvement in Côte d’Ivoire, we recommend K. Martial Frindéthié, Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture, Politics and Theory (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009). 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Bruce Crumley, “Sarkozy’s Comments on Leaders Draw Shock, Denial,” Saturday April 18, 2009. Available at http://www.time.com/time/ world/article/0,8599,1892375,00.html. 26. Speech given by Nicolas Sarkozy in Cotonou, May 24, 2006. 27. Jean-Marie Bockel’s New Year’s address to his staff, January 15, 2008. Available at http:// www.lagauchemoderne.org/gauche-moderne/discours/je-veux-signer-lacte-de-deces-de-la-franca frique.html (accessed on 2-1-2008). 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Verschave, Noir silence, 46. 32. Ibid., 46 –47. 33. After a protracted investigation he led, Captain Pierre Anga concluded that Nguesso was Ngouabi’s murderer. As a punishment for this damning revelation, Nguesso confined Anga to his village of Owando. Later, a heavy military operation ordered by Nguesso and orchestrated by then French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac (who, unbeknownst to François Mitterrand, sent in some French DGSE agents and a French Transall to transport the Congolese militaries) meant to quell an alleged rebellion in Owando resulted in the massacre of several hundreds people and the capture and execution of Pierre Anga (See Verschave, Noir silence, 48). 34. Ibid., 58. 35. Ibid., 55.

Notes—Chapter 5 36. Ibid., 62. 37. Quoted in Verschave, Noir silence, 51. 38. Ibid., 52. 39. The problem with Dumas’s account was that Lissouba was no longer in power at that time. He had been ousted by Nguesso’s coalition in October 1997. Sirven was certainly ordering the elimination of Lissouba’s supporters. 40. Quoted in Verschave, Noir silence, 16. 41. Verschave, Noir silence, 30. 42. Ibid., 69.

Chapter 5 1. See Nietzsche, Good and Evil, Aphorism 259. 2. Ibid. 3. Epistle to the Ephesians, Chapter II. 4. John Wesley, The Works of the Reverend John Wesley, A.M., Vol.5 (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, 1839), 542. 5. Nietzsche, Good and Evil, Aphorism 52. 6. Marx, “On the Jewish Question.” 7. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 3. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., Act IV, Scene 1. 10. See, e.g., K. Martial Frindéthié, Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture, Politics and Theory (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), Chapters 8–9. 11. George Klay Kieh, Jr., George Klay, “Introduction: From the Old to the New Globalization,” in Africa and the New Globalization, edited by George Klay Kieh, Jr. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 7. 12. Nietzsche, Good and Evil, Aphorism 259. 13. As Andrei Shapiro so observantly points out, “[T]here is a trend amongst Jewish thinkers to rummage around in the rich sources of Marx’s expressions against people of Jewish origin with whom he circulated, and to hold this record up as the background against which Marx’s attitude towards the Jewish question is interpreted.” See “Marx on the Jewish Question,” http://www. wzo.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=888 (accessed on 12-20-2008). 14. As wrote Shapiro, “[I]n the case of Marx, those who adopted [the approach of blind condemnation], seem to have taken revenge on a traitor and a lost cause, and have failed to penetrate the depth of Marx’s arguments and his intellectual contribution to the problem in question.” 15. István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1972), 30. 16. Ibid. 17. See Theodore S. Hamerow, Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 7. 18. Ibid., 10 –11.

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19. Ibid., 11. 20. Ibid., 19 –20 21. The Old Testament, “The Book of Exodus,” XXII: 25 22. Ibid., XXI: 23 –25. 23. Milton Himmelfarb, Jews and Gentiles, edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York : Encounter Books, 2007), 203. 24. Ibid., 199 –200. 25. Ibid., 199. 26. Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. 27. George B. Ayittey, Africa Betrayed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 310. 28. E. Geske Dijkstra, The Impact of International Debt Relief (London: Routledge, 2008), 13–15. 29. John Mukum Mbaku, The African Debt Crisis and the New Globalization,” in Africa and the New Globaliation, edited by George Klay Kieh, Jr. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 29 –50. 30. See Kieh, Jr., “The New Globalization,” 14 –15. 31. Piya Mahtaney, India, China and Globalization: The Emerging Superpowers and the Future of Economic Development (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 180 –82. 32. Robert L. Ayres, Banking on the Poor: The World Bank and World Poverty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 75. 33. Ibid., 231–32. 34. See Gros and Prokopovych, 22. 35. Ibid. 36. George Klay Kieh, Jr., “The State in Africa,” in Africa and the New Millennium, edited by George Klay Kieh, Jr. (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008), 79. 37. See Jacques Mangala, “State Sovereignty and the New Globalization in Africa,” in Africa and the New Globalization, edited by George Klay Kieh, Jr. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 113. 38. See Gros and Prokopovych, 18. 39. Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York : Oxford University Press, 2007), 159 –60. 40. Quoted in Vandana Shiva, “Mad Cows and Sacred Cows,” in Feminist Post-Development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-colonialism and Representation, edited by Kriemild Saunders (London: Zed Books, 2002), 189. 41. See, e.g., Collier, 17–75. 42. See, e.g., Mbaku, “The African Debt Crisis,” 29 –30. 43. See, e.g., Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: The IMF, The World Bank and their Borrowers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 144, and Gros and Prokopovych, 27. 44. See Augustine Konneh, “Civil Wars in Africa,” in Africa and the Third Millennium, edited by George Klay Kieh, Jr. (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008), 243.

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45. Ibid. 46. George Klay Kieh, Jr., “The New Globalization: Scope, Nature and Dimensions,” in Africa and the New Globalization, edited by George Klay Kieh, Jr. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 15. 47. Rowe 39. 48. See Gros and Prokopovych, 8. 49. John Mukum Mbaku, “Economic Development in Africa,” Africa and the Third Millennium, edited by George Klay Kieh, Jr. (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008), 122. 50. See Frindéthié, Cinema, 115 –16. 51. Kieh, Jr., “The New Globalization,” 18. 52. See Mbaku, “The African Debt Crisis,” 33. 53. Frindéthié, Cinema, 166. 54. Georges, Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila (London: Zed Books, 2002), 285. 55. See Gros and Prokopovych, 16. 56. See, e.g., Frindéthié, Cinema, chapters 8 –9.

Chapter 6 1. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. 2. See, e.g., Benoît Hazart, “Orientalisme et ethnographie chez Maurice Delafosse,” in L’Homme, vol. 38, issue 146, 1998, pp. 265 –68. Also available online at http://www.persee.fr/web/ revues/home/prescript/article/hom_0439 –4216_ 1998_num_38_146_370469. 3. See Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-state (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 155. 4. Ibid., 156. 5. John G. Jackson, Runoko Rashidi, and John Henrik Clarke, Introduction to African Civilizations (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 2001), 292. 6. See Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of River,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Alain Locke, with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad (New York : Atheneum, 1992), 141. 7. R. Baxter Miller, The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989), 56. 8. Claude McKay, “The Tropics in New York,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Alain Locke, with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 135. 9. Aimé Césaire, “Notebook of a Return To the Native Land,” in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, translated with introduction and notes by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press), 51. 10. Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l’oncle (Imprimerie de Compiègne, 1928), translated in English by Magdaline W. Shannon as So Spoke the

Uncle (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1983). 11. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris: F. Alcan, 1922), translated by Lilian A. Clare as How Natives Think (London : Allen and Unwin, 1926). 12. See Frindéthié, Black Renaissance, 32. 13. Bernal, 404. 14. I note with the disappointment of having been preceded, but with much exoneration, that I am not the first one to make this argument. John Rapley had mentioned the structuralist bent of modernization theory in his Understanding Development Theory and Practice in the Third World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 15. 15. See Frindéthié, Cinema, chapter 8. 16. Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review, 1957), 139. 17. Ibid., 142–43. 18. Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 50 –51. 19. See Rapley, 17. 20. Sankaran Krishna, Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-first Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 10. 21. See, e.g., Allen Carey-Webb, “Other Fashioning: The Discourse of the Empire and Nation in Lopez de Vega’s El nueve mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colon,” in Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, edited by René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 425 –51. 22. See, e.g., Patience Elabor-Imudia, “Participatory Research: A Tool in the Production of Knowledge in Development Discourse,” in Feminist Post-Development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-colonialism and Representation, edited by Kriemild Saunders (London: Zed Books, 2002), 227. 23. Vandana Shiva, “Mad Cows and Sacred Cows,” in Feminist Post-Development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-colonialism and Representation, edited by Kriemild Saunders (London: Zed Books, 2002), 184. 24. Note the sub-title of W.W. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1968). 25. See Rapley, 16 –17. 26. As we have shown in Chapter 3; but see also Samir Amin’s Le développement du capitalisme en Côte d’Ivoire (Paris: Minuit, 1967), and Frindéthié’s Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture, Politics and Theory (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009). 27. Lawrence of Arabia, in English, Arabic, and Turkish, directed by David Lean (UK, 222 minutes), 1963.

Notes—Chapter 7 28. See Wilder, 246. 29. Léopold Sédar Senghor, The Collected Poetry, translated by Melvin Dixon (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1991), 87. 30. Ibid., 17. 31. Fanon, Black Skin, 135. 32. See Léopold Sédar Senghor, The Collected Poetry, translated by Melvin Dixon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 102–103. 33. See Frindéthié, The Black Renaissance, 72. 34. Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in Immanuel Kant Philosophical Writings, edited by Ernst Behler, with a foreword by René Wellek (New York: Continuum, 1986), 263. 35. Ibid. 36. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 39. 37. Ibid., 41, 42. 38. Foucault’s latest position as regards modernity might have changed since his indictment in Surveiller et punir of modernity as the consecration of European dogmatism, despotism, binarism, and intolerance. Nevertheless, in “What is Enlightenment,” Foucault still does not offer modernity his full endorsement. He remains on the fence, on the boundary of inside and outside modernity. As he writes, in “What is Enlightenment,” the critical ethos “…implies, first, the refusal of what I like to call the ‘blackmail’ of Enlightenment…. It even means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative…. The philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection [à la Nietzsche]. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers” (42, 43, 45). 39. Kant, 263.

Chapter 7 1. Chinweizu, 355. 2. See Gros and Propkopovych, 40 –41. 3. Ibid., 48. 4. See Steve Berkman, The World Bank and the Gods of Lending (Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2008), 20. 5. See Kelly Oliver, 27. 6. My emphasis. 7. Giorgio Blundo, “Corruption in Africa and the Social Sciences: A Review of the Literature,” in Everyday Corruption and the State: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa, edited by Giorgio Blundo and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, with N. Bako Arifari and M. Tidjani Alou, translated by Susan Cox (London: Zed Books, 2006), 42. 8. Frindéthié, Cinema 197–98. 9. See George Klay Kieh, Jr., introduction to

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Africa and the New Globalization, edited by George Klay Kieh, Jr. 1–11 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 6. 10. Frindéthié, Cinema, 124. 11. For an elaborate discussion of Africa’s betrayal by native informants, see Frindéthié, Cinema, 130 –224. 12. See Robert Nugent, director, The End of the Rainbow (52 minutes, 2007, Australia/France/ U.S.A). 13. See Laye Camara, L’Enfant noir. 14. Collin Levey, “Slipping Appeal: What Is it About Colin Powell That Drives Harry Belafonte Bananas?” from the Wall Street Journal Opinion Archives, October 17, 2002. Available online at www.opinionjornal.com/columnists/clevey/?=110 002479. 15. For an instructive history of the World Bank, see, e.g., Christopher L. Gilbert and David Vines’s The World Bank: Structure and Policies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Gros and Prokopovych, as cited above. 16. See Gros Prokopovych, 7. 17. Ibid., 77. 18. See Raul Hopkins, Andrew Powell, Amlan Roy and Christopher L. Gilbert, “The World Bank, Conditionality and the Comprehensive Development Framework,” in The World Bank: Structure and Policies, edited by Christopher L. Gilbert and David Vines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 289. 19. See Christopher L. Gilbert, Andrew Powell and David Vines, “Positioning the World Bank,” in The World Bank: Structure and Policies (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000), 59 –60. 20. See Frindéthié, Cinema, 196. 21. See Gros and Prokopovych, 10. 22. See Collin Levey, “Slipping Appeal: What Is it About Colin Powell That drives Harry Belafonte Bananas?” from the Wall Street Journal Opinion Archives, October 17, 2002. Available online at www.opinionjornal.com/columnists/clevey /?=110002479 23. Aimé Césaire, “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,” in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 59. 24. Chinweizu, 355. 25. For a full discussion of the Ivorian situation see Frindéthié, Cinema, chapter 8. 26. Guy Labertit, Adieu, Abidjan-sur-Seine: les coulisses du conflit ivoirien (Autres Temps, 2008), 24 –25. 27. Ibid., 54. 28. See John R. Bolton, “The Creation, Fall, Rise, and Fall of the United Nations,” in Delusions of Grandeur: The United Nations and Global Intervention, edited by Ted Galen Carpenter (Washington, D.C.: CATO Institute, 1997), 55.

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29. See Stefan Halper, “Systemic Corruption at the United Nations,” Delusions of Grandeur: The United Nations and Global Intervention, edited by Ted Galen Carpenter (Washington, D.C.: CATO Institute, 1997), 128. 30. Ibid., 132. 31. For an elaborate account of the Oil-forFood scandal see Pedro R. Sanjuan, The UN Gang: A Memoir of incompetence, Corruption, Espionage, Antisemitism, and Islamic Extremism at the UN Secretariat (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 148 –60. 32. Ibid., 155. 33. Ibid., 154, 160. 34. See Emmanuel Hansen, Frantz Fanon: Social and Political Thought (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977). 35. Pieterse, 167. 36. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Through the African Feminist Theoretical Lens: Viewing Caribbean Women’s History Cross-Culturally,” in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, edited by Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1995), 4. 37. Ibid., 5. 38. Fatou Keita, Rebelle (Abidjan: NEI, 1998). 39. For an elaborate discussion of Rebelle see Frindéthié, The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), chap. 8. 40. Senghor, “Black Woman,” in The Collected Poetry, 8. 41. See Dani Kouyaté’s beautiful film Keita: The Heritage of the Griot. 42. Senghor, “To the Music of Koras and Balaphon,” in The Collected Poetry, 17. 43. This is an allusion to Fanon’s hypocritical criticism of Mayotte Capecia in Black Skin, White Masks. Obviously, Fanon, who was married to a white woman, identified desire for lactification in everyone else but himself. 44. Tevecinq (Ivorian singer), Les gos chawarma (song). 45. Wafula S. Okumu “The Tragedy of the African Environment,” in Africa and the Third Millennium, edited by George Klay Kieh, Jr. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008), 207.

Chapter 8 1. See Piya Mahtaney, India, China and Globalization: The Emerging Superpowers and the Future of Economic Development (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 15. 2. Milton Himmelfarb, Jews and Gentiles, 18. 3. Ibid. 4. See Mahtaney, 12. 5. Given the scope of this study, space will not permit us to delve exhaustively into the various

stages of China’s economic development. An excellent study to this effect is Shi Cheng’s China’s Rural Industrialization Policy: Growing Under Orders Since 1949 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), a volume upon which this study has greatly relied. 6. See Cheng, 12. 7. Ibid., 5. 8. See Vinay Rai and William L. Simon, Think India (New York: Penguin, 2007), 84. 9. Ibid., 87. 10. Ibid., 88. 11. Ibid., 91. 12. See Mahtaney for more details. 13. Ibid., 19. 14. Ibid., 21. 15. See Cheng, 236. 16. Ibid., 238. 17. See Peter Enderwick, Understanding Emerging Markets: China and India (New York: Routledge, 2007), 23. 18. See Vinay and Simon, 92. 19. See Enderwick, 133. 20. Ibid., 29 –32.

Chapter 9 1. Césaire, 77. 2. Anna Akhmatova, “Everything Has Been Plundered,” in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited by Roberta Reeder (Boston: Zephyr Press, 1992), 279. 3. See Enderwick, 33. 4. Mahtaney, 161. 5. See, e.g., William H. Overholt, The Rise of China: How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993); Shi Cheng, China’s Rural Industrialization: Growing Under Orders Since 1949 (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Peter Enderwick, Understanding Emergent Markets: China and India (New York: Routledge, 2007), and Piya Mahtaney, India, China and Globalization: The Emerging Superpowers and the Future of Economic Development (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Vinay Rai and William L. Simon, Think India (New York: Penguin, 2007). 6. See Collier, 164 –65. 7. As has shown Frindéthié, In French Africa and the Caribbean, a number of protectionist schemes set up by France were meant, not to enrich the colonies, but instead to profit France’s economy. Furthermore, in the case of a country like Côte d’Ivoire, for instance, as a result of the unbridled liberalization of the early 1990s, 27 per cent of the assets of Ivorian enterprises are today French-owned; 240 subsidiaries and more than 600 companies belong to French businessmen;

Notes—Chapter 9 which represented 68 percent of direct foreign investments in Côte d’Ivoire. In this context, it is easy to surmise who will benefit from any protectionist measure. See Frindéthié, Cinema, 124 –26, 133. 8. See Mbaku, “The African Debt Crisis,” 29. 9. See Collier, 164. 10. Ibid., 160. 11. See Baran, 142. 12. Giorgio Barba Navaretti, “Joint Ventures and Autonomous Industrial Development: The Magic Medicine? The Case of the Côte d’Ivoire,” in Alternative Development Strategies in SubSaharan Africa, edited by Frances Stewart, Sanjaya Lall, and Samuel Wangwe (New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 402. 13. Ibid., 422–23. 14. Ibid., 402. 15. See, e.g., Cheng, 2. 16. Ibid., 241. 17. Ibid., 252. 18. Ibid., 253. 19. See Crude Impact. 20. Rowe, 42–43. 21. See Overholt, 73. 22. See Frindéthié, Cinema, 155 –56. 23. Quoted in Labertit, 185. 24. Vicky Randall, “Political Parties in Africa and the Representation of Social Groups,” in Votes, Money and Violence: Political Parties and Elections in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Matthias Basedau, Gero Erdmann and Andreas Mehler (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007), 87. 25. Ibid. 26. See Blundo, 50. 27. Verschave, Noir silence, 61. 28. See Richard Heeks, “Building Software Industries in Africa,” August 16, 1996. Available at http: // www.africa.upenn.edu/ Acad_Research/ softw_heeks.html (accessed on 11-3-2009). 29. See Rai and Simon, 96 –97. 30. Ibid., 93. 31. See Cheng, 31–32.

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32. Mahtaney, 180. 33. Ibid., 182. 34. See Sean Redding, “Structural Adjustment and the Decline of Subsistence Agriculture in Africa.” http://www3.amherst.edu/~mrhunt/ womencrossing/redding.html (accessed on 5/10/ 2009). 35. See Rai and Simon, 69. 36. Akello Zerupa, “Inquiries into Women’s Perceptions of What Constitutes Their WellBeing,” in Unpacking Globalization: Market, Gender and Work, edited by Linda E. Lucas (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 117–25. 37. Elsje Dijkgraaff, “Women Entrepreneurs: A Challenge to a Gendered Economy,” in Unpacking Globalization: Market, Gender and Work, edited by Linda E. Lucas (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 253. 38. Ibid., 255. 39. Janice Limson, “Focus on Biopiracy in Africa,” in Science in Africa. Available online at http: //www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2000/september/biopiracy.htm. 40. Mahtaney, 139. 41. M.S.D. Bagachwa and Frances Stewart, “Rural Industries and Rural Linkages in SubSaharan Africa: A Survey,” in Alternative Development Strategies in SubSaharan Africa, edited by Frances Stewart, Sanjaya Lall, and Samuel Wangwe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 145. 42. Ibid., 149. 43. Ibid., 145. 44. Ibid., 156 –59. 45. Ibid., 181. 46. Frindéthié, Cinema, 137. 47. See Théophile Obenga, “Nous devons quitter la Banque mondiale parce qu’elle a apporté la pauvreté en Afrique,” interview by Freddy Mulumba Kabuayi, July 7, 2008. Available online at file://C:/Users/Frindethie/Desktop/Nous-devonssimplement-quitter-la.htm. (Aaccessed on 8-62009). 48. Chinweizu, 485.

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Index Abacha, Pres. Sani 69, 70 abandonment-neurotics 8 –10, 13, 15, 18, 31, 119, 121, 125, 127, 132, 140, 151, 157 Abidjan 63, 80, 157, 182n35, 185n26, 186n38 Abramoff, Jack 68 Adam 40 Adingra 165 affirmative resentment 27 African Union 10 –11 Africanity 108 Afrifa, Col. Akwasi 8 –9, 179n1 Afrocentrist 116, 137–138 Agenor 41–42 Ahmadu (state) 48 Aigyptos 41–42 Aischylos 14, 42 Akhmatova, Anna 149, 186n2 Alabama 137 Albany 179n1, 190 Alexandria 43 Alexis, Jacques Stephen 111 Algeria 56, 76 alienation 13, 16 –17, 22, 25 –26, 29 –31, 94, 96 –98, 126, 136, 177, 183n15, 192 Althusser, Louis 30 Amasis 42 American Congress 54 Americanization 92, 104, 117 Amherst 179n9, 187n34, 192 Amon 43 Ancient Greece 41, 181n22, 189 Anglo-Saxon 55, 76, 111 Angola 37, 58, 75, 91 Annan, Kofi 107, 134 –135 Annan, Kojo 135 Annan dream team 135 Annecy 74 Antilles 110 antiquity 14, 25, 41, 43, 180n14, 189, 192 anti–Semitism 24, 97–99 Antonio 94 –96, 183n26 Arab 24, 65, 119 Argos 41, 43 Aristotle 179n2, 189

ARUN (Alliance Rwandaise pour l’Unité Nationale) 176 Aryanism 32, 34, 140 Asad, Talal 25, 179n14, 180n18, 189 Asia 18, 38, 40, 45, 109, 129, 136 Asian colonies 33 Athena 42, 181n22, 189 Ayittey, George 100, 183n27, 189 Bagachwa, M.S.D. 170, 187n41, 189 Bakayoko, Ahmed 160 Bamako 141 Bamiléké (people) 57–58 Bangala 131 Bangui 61–66 Baran, Paul 114 –115, 184n16, 187n11, 189 barbarian 44, 60 Barcelona 71 Barril, Paul 74 Barthes, Raymond 30 Bassanio 94 –95 Baudelaire, Charles 122 Baule (la) 73, 182n6 bazin (cloth) 165 BBC 18, 179n10 Beijing 154 Belafonte, Harry 128 –129, 132, 185n14, 185n22, 191 Belgium 48 –49, 75, 77, 106 –107, 126, 191 Belos 41 Benin 83 –84, 89, 191 Berengo 65 Berkman, Steve 125, 185n4, 189 Berlin Conference (1884 –1885) 48, 175 Bernal, Martin 38, 41–42, 181n22, 181n32, 181n34, 181n36, 181n38, 181n46, 184n13, 189 Best, George 40, 54 Béti, Mongo 69 Bible 41, 94 Blundo, Giorgio 126, 160, 185n7, 187n26, 189 Bockel, Jean-Marie 85 –86

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Bogosora, Theoneste 74 Bokassa, Empress Catherine 64 Bokassa, Emperor Jean-Bedel 15, 60 –66, 71, 132–133, 182n3, 182n35, 182n37, 182n42, 193 Bolton, John R. 134, 185n28, 189 Bongo, Ali (son of Omar) 72, 82 Bongo, Pres. Omar Ondimba 10, 15, 60 –61, 66 –72, 79, 83, 86 –87, 90, 132–133, 182n2, 189 Bongo, Pascaline (daughter of Omar) 70 Bourgi, Robert 70 Boutros-Ghali, Broutros 134 –135 Bretton Woods institutions 10, 15, 96, 102, 104 –106, 132, 171 BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) 11, 177 Brouard, Carl 111 Bruguière, Jean-Louis 78 Burkina Faso 10, 58, 80, 92, 158, 166 Bush, Pres. George W. 3, 68 –69 Camara, Laye 127, 185n13, 189 Cameroon 10, 57–58, 87, 92, 151, 159 Camper, Pieter 38 Canaan 40 Canard Enchaîné (le) 66 capitas 131 Carthage 43 Central Africa 60 –65, 74, 76 Central African Republic 11–12, 60 –63, 119 Césaire, Aimé 27, 109, 132, 184n9, 185n23, 186n1, 189 Chad 11–12, 60, 92 Cham 40 Cheng, Shi 145, 186n6, 186n15, 186n5, 187n15, 187n31, 189 China (experience with liberalism) 144 –148 Chinweizu 51, 124, 138, 172, 179n1, 181n1, 185n1, 185n24, 187n48, 189

196 Chirac, Jacques (President) 58, 60, 69 –70, 72, 78 –79, 81–83, 90 –91, 134, 158, 182n32 Christ 24, 43, 94, 96, 98 Christendom 14, 24 –25, 39, 43 Christianity 23 –24, 40, 48, 93 –94, 96 –99 Chuzeville, Jean-Claude 63 –64, 182n35, 182n37, 182n42 Clarke, John Henrik 110, 184n5, 191 clitoridectomy 139 –140 Club of London 102, 171 Club of Paris 102, 171 Cold War 57, 96, 104, 146 Collier, Paul 151–152, 183n39, 183n41, 186n6, 187n9, 189 colonial discourses 5 colonial education 14, 47–48, 126 colorism 142 communism 147 Communist Party of China Central Committee 154 Compaoré, Blaise 10, 69, 79, 92, 133 conditionality 102, 130, 185n18, 190 Congo-Brazzaville 10, 15, 74 –75, 87–92, 119, 151, 160 Congo-Kinshasa 75, 92 Conrad, Joseph 47, 181n62, 189 Cot, Jean-Pierre 72–73, 85 Côte d’Ivoire 48, 63, 79, 81–82, 107, 133, 156 –158, 160, 164, 167, 172, 184n26 Cotonou 83 –86, 182n25 Cournot, Michel 36 Creolity 137 Cullen, Countee 120 Dacko, Pres. David 61 Dahomey Kingdom 48 Dakar 48, 83, 85, 110, 182n1, 190 Dalian 155 Danaos 41–43 Da-sein 21–23, 128 Deby, Pres. Idriss 92 de Gaulle, Gen. Charles 54, 56 –57, 69, 72, 78, 114 Delafosse, Maurice 16, 108 –109, 120, 184n2, 190 Demeter 42–43 Denard, Bob 58 Deng, Chairman Xiaoping 147 Derrida, Jacques 30, 180n39, 190 Desset, Françoise 71 Deviers-Joncour, Christine 90 Dijkraaff, Elsje 166, 187n37 Dionysian ethics 23 –42 Diop, Boubacar Boris 87, 182n1, 190 Dioulo, Nicholas 80 Dominitian (Emperor) 43 Doyle, Mark 18, 179n10

Index Du Bois, W.E.B. 110 Dumas, Roland 60, 90 Egypt 14, 38, 41–44 Elabor-Imudia, Patience 184n22, 190 Elf 56 –60, 69, 87–91 Élysée 11, 64, 72, 77, 79, 82 endogenous liberalization 18, 152 England 8 –9, 23, 34, 65, 115, 145 Enlightenment 14, 24, 33 –34, 39, 109, 120, 122, 185n33, 185n36, 185n38, 190, 191 Epaphos 41 Ephesians 93 –94, 183n3 Equatorial Guinea 71, 75 Ethiopia 44 Ethiopianism 44 ethnicism (political parties and) 160 Euphrates 110 Europa 41–42 European body of knowledge 46, 108 European consensus 33 European Union 11, 25, 152, 180n14, 189, 192 évolués (Congolese) 49 Évreux 63, 65 Eyadéma, Gnassingbé 58, 68 –69, 79, 83, 87 Fanon, Frantz 2, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26 –31, 36, 111, 120, 157, 179n6, 179n6, 180n23, 180n25, 180n28, 180n29, 180n36, 180n41, 185n31, 186n34, 186n42, 190 FAR (Forces Armées Rwandaises) 76 Farrington, Constance 179n7, 190 FedEx 17 FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) 76 Foccart, Jacques 57–58 Foucault, Michel 122, 136, 185n36, 185n38, 190, 192 FPR (Front patriotique rwandais) 75 –76 France-à-fric 56 Francité 49 Freeman, John 46 Frobenius, Leo 16, 108 –110, 120, 124, 142 Gabon 10, 15, 18, 58 –61, 68 –72, 75, 81–82, 87, 90 –91, 119, 151, 158, 179n10 Garvey, Marcus 120 Gatete, Jean-Baptiste 74 Gbagbo, Pres. Laurent 80 –83, 133 –134, 156 –158, 172 Georgia 3, 127

Germany 3, 18, 63, 104 –105, 130 Ghana 8 –9 Giscard (d’Estaing), Pres. Valéry Georges 60 –66, 69, 72–73, 75, 182n37 GLF (Great Leap Forward) 145 Gobineau (de), Arthur 32, 39 –40, 82, 111, 180n3, 180n4, 181n27, 181n31, 182n48, 190 God 37–38, 40 –41, 48, 55, 93 –94, 99, 157, 179n2, 179n14 Goebbels, Joseph 98 Goma 74 Gorée 48 Goudé, Blé 81 Gouro (collectivized women market) 164 Great Britain 8, 18, 32, 53, 76, 78, 101–102, 104, 105, 171 Greece 23, 41–43, 181n22, 189 Gress, David 24, 180n15, 190 griot 60, 141, 186n41 Gros, Jean-Germain 5, 103, 107, 124, 183n34, 183n38, 183n43, 184n48, 184n55, 185n2, 185n15, 185n16, 185n21, 190 Guadeloupe 48 Guangzhou 154 Guillaumat, Pierre 57 Guinea 11, 127 Guinness, Alec 119 Gulf War 135 Guyana 48 Habyarimana, Pres. Juvénal 75 –77 Hadrian (Emperor) 43 Haiti 110 Halper, Stefan 134, 186n29, 190 Ham 40 –41 Hamerow, Theodore 98 –99, 183n17, 190 Hamitic civilization 109 –110 Hammarskjöld, Dag 107 Hansen, Emmanuel 136, 186n34, 190 Harlem Renaissance 110, 184n6, n8, 191, 192 Hauts-de-Seine 161 Hayes, Floyd W. 27, 180n25, 190 Heeks, Richard 161, 187n28 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 21, 26, 28 –30, 32, 180n30, 180n32, 180n33, 190 –191 Heidegger, Martin 13, 21–23, 26, 29, 179n1, 179n4, 180n20, 190, 192 Hellas 44 Hennessy, Maurice N. 49, 181n68, 190 Herodotus 14, 41–44, 181n35, 181n41, 181n53, 190 Himmelfarb, Milton 99, 144, 183n23, 186n2 Hollywood 137 homo ferus 44

Index homo sylvestris 44 Hottentot 44 Houphouët, Pres. Boigny Félix 49, 56, 63, 67, 79, 87, 133 Huchon, Pierre 74 Hughes, Langston 184n6, 184n7, 191, 192 Hume, David 32 Hutu Power 74 –75 IDA (International Development Association) 100, 102, 130, 171 Inachos 41 India’s experience with liberalism 144 –148 Indochina 56, 76 interahamwe militia 74 inyenzi 74 Iranian Revolution 100 Iraq 54, 135 Islam 25, 180n14, 189 Isokrates 43 Israel 93 Jackson, the Rev. Jesse 81, 110 Jackson, John G. 184n5, 191 Jaffre, Philippe 69 Jamaica 34, 110 Japan 3, 104, 129 –130 Japheth 40 Jesus see Christ Joal 49 John the Baptist 44 Joly, Eva 56 –59, 90, 151, 181n17, 182n30, 191 Judaism 24, 94, 96 –99 Kadmos 41–43 Kagamé, Pres. Paul 76, 78 Kain, Philip J. 28, 180n32, 191 Kant, Immanuel 122–123, 136, 185n34, 185n39, 191 Karl, Terry Lynne 155 Kashmir 146 Kasongo, Joseph 106 Kayibanda, Pres. Grégoire 75 Kayumba, Cyprien 74 kente 165 Kieh, George Klay, Jr. 4, 101–102, 126, 183n11, 183n29, 183n30, 183n36, 183n37, 183n44, 184n46, 184n49, 184n51, 185n9, 186n45, 191, 192, 193 Kigali 77 Koh-I-Noor 145 Kolelas, Bernard 89 Konaré, Alpha Omar 10 Koné, Babani 141 Konneh, Augustine 104, 183n44, 191 Krishna, Sankaran 116, 183n44, 191 Kush 43 Kwame N’krumah (President) 8 Kwanza 137

Labouret, Henri 16, 108 –109 Lacan, Jacques 13, 21, 30, 180n39, 180n40, 19 Landau, Paul 47, 181n63, 191 Le Canard Enchaîné 66 Leitner, Ted 128 Lemonnier, Dominique 74 Leopold II (King) 131 Levey, Collin 129, 132, 185n14, 185n22, 191 Levy-Brhul, Lucien 82 Libreville 18, 67–71, 83, 87, 90 Libya 41, 44, 60 –61 Lindos 42 Livingstone 37, 45 –47, 180n18, 191 London 102, 171 Long, Edward 34 Louisiana 137 Ludovici, Anthony M. 179n9, 192 Luther 98 Mahtaney, Piya 144, 151, 169, 183n31, 186n1, 186n4, 186n5, 186n12, 187n32, 187n40, 191 Makabana 91 Mali 10, 80, 140, 158 Mangala, Jacques 103, 183n37, 191 Mao, Zedong 145, 162 Marcelin, Thoby 111 Marion, Jean-Luc 51, 181n2, 181n9, 191 Markmann, Charles Lam 179n6, 190 Marshall Plan 129 Martinique 48 Marx, Karl 13, 94, 97–99, 101, 186n6, 186n13, 186n14, 191, 192 Marxism 30 Massemba-Débat (President) 87 Matadi 92 Mauritania 11 Mbaika (people) 61 Mbaku, John Mukum 105 –106, 183n29, 183n42, 184n49, 184n52, 187n8, 191 Mbasogo, Pres. Teodoro Obiang Nguema 71 McKay, Claude 110, 120, 184n8, 191 McNamara, Robert 101, 130 Mel, Théodore 80 Mészáros, István 98, 184n15, 192 Miller, Baxter 110, 184n7, 192 Mirgeler, Albert 24 mit-dasein 21–23, 36, 126, 128 Mitterrand, Pres. François 60, 66, 69, 72–74, 76 –78, 81–83, 85, 182n6, 182n32 Mobutu, Sese Seko 71 Mohammed 44 Le Monde 66, 87, 182n2, 189

197 Montaigne (de), Michel 38, 181n21, 181n23, 181n52, 192 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat 32, 38 Moratinos, Angel 71 Morocco 62, 71 Moröe 43 Moscow 146 Moses 44 Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) 155 Mugabe, Leo 135 Mugabe, Pres. Robert 135 Napata 43 Napoleon Bonaparte 66, 180n4 National Geographic Society 137 Navaretti 187n12 Nazi 131 Negrismo 110 Negritude 9, 19 –20, 109 –111, 120, 132, 137, 138 –140, 179n1, 192 Nehru, Prime Minister Jawaharlal 146, 162 new Europe 118 New Testament 94 New York 110, 120, 135 Ngouabi, Pres. Marien 87 Nguema, Pres. Obiang Teodoro 71 Nguesso, Pres. Sassou Denis 10, 69, 71, 74, 87–92, 134, 182n32 Nice 70 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 13, 21–32, 93, 97, 122–123, 136, 179n9, 179n11, 179n12, 180n19, 180n26, 180n38 Niger 92, 155, 157 Nigeria 3, 76, 126, 155 –156 Nile 42, 110 Noah 40 North Carolina 137 Nubia 43, 44 Nugent, Robert 127, 185n12, 192 Nyerere, Pres. Julius 100 Nyobé, Um Ruben 57 Obama, Pres. Barack Hussein 82 Obenga, Théophile 171, 187n47 Occidentalism 49 Oil-for-Food 135, 186n31 Okumu, Wafula 142, 186n45, 192 old Europe 118 Old Testament 93, 94, 99, 183n21 Oliver, Kelly 13, 126, 179n9, 179n3, 185n5, 192 Olympio, Pres. Sylvanus 58 Opération Barracudas 62 Opération Insecticide 74 Opération Turquoise 74

198 Orléans 65 O’Toole, Peter 119 Ouattara, Alassane Dramane 79 –80, 133 –134, 157–158 Oumé 164 Oval Office 68 –69 Overman 22–23, 140 Owen, David 25, 22, 180n21, 192 Pacari, Michel 160 –161 Pakistan 146 Paris 11, 57, 61–62, 64, 70, 74, 76 –77, 79 –81, 102, 109, 171 Pasqua, Charles 90, 161 Paul the Apostle 93 Philippines 58, 161 Pieterse, Nederveen Jan 44 –45, 138, 180n7, 180n8, 181n20, 181n29, 181n48, 186n35, 192 Poellner, Peter 25, 180n21, 192 Pompeii 43 Portugal 44 Poseidon 41 Powell, Andrew 185n18, 185n19, 190 Powell, Colin 128 –129, 189n14, 189n22, 191 Prester, John 43 Price-Mars, Jean 110, 184n10, 192 Prokopovych, Olga 124, 183n34, 183n38, 184n48, 184n55, 185n15, 185n16, 185n21, 190 Ptolemy 39 Pythagoras 43 Qaddafi, Pres. Muammar 10, 60 –62 Qingdao 154 Rabat 71 Rainer, Prince Albert 65 Randall, Vicky 157, 187n24, 192 Rashidi, Runoko 110, 184n5, 191 Reagan, Pres. Ronald 51, 101–102 Red Cross 65, 66, 91 Redding, Sean 164, 187n34 Reunion 48 Roman Empire 24, 43 Rome 23, 27, 41, 80, Rostow, Walt Whitman 16, 115 –116, 184n18, 184n24, 192 Roumain, Jacques 111 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 32, 38 Rowe, John Carlos 38, 156, 181n24, 184n47, 187n20, 192 Royal, Ségolène 82, 180n4 Rufisque 48 Rumsfeld, Donald 118

Index Russia 11, 146, 177 Rwanda 12, 57, 68, 74 –78, 81, 151, 182n9, 193 Saddam, Hussein 135 St. Cyprian 99 St. Louis 48 Salim, A. Salim 134 San Diego 129 Sankara, Pres. Thomas 58 Saracens 43 Sarkozy, Pres. Nicolas 69 –72, 81–87, 111, 113 –114, 182n25 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 155 –156 Saussure (de), Ferdinand 30 Schmitt, Carl 24 Schuller, Malini Johar 181n24, 192 Sem 40 Sembène, Ousmane 49 Senegal 10, 49, 75, 82 Senghor 159, 167 Sevan, Benon 135 Shakespeare, William 39, 94, 108, 179n4, 183n7, 184n1, 192 Shangai 154 Sharif, Omar 119 Shell 10, 28, 29, 155 –156 Shiva, Vandana 117, 183n40, 184n23, 192 Shylock 94 –96 Sibiti 91 Sidon 43 Sikhs 146 Singapore 104, 161 Sinnerbrink, Robert 25, 180n20, 192 Sirven, Alfred 58 –60, 90, 183n38 Smith, Annette 184n9, 185n23, 189 Smith, Frederick W. 17 Songolon 140 South Africa 76, 128 South Carolina 137 South Korea 104 –105 Soviet Union 105, 145 –147 Soyinka, Wole 138 Stambaugh, Joan 179n1, 190 standpoint development 10, 12, 17–18 Stanley, Morton 45, 181n21 Steady, Filomina Chioma 138 Stewart, Frances 170, 187n12, 189 Stockman, David 102 Stoler, Ann Laura 32–33, 46, 180n1, 180n6, 181n19, 181n59, 193 Streicher, Julius 98 Structural Adjustment Programs 2, 101–105, 164, 167 Sundiata, Keita 140

Tarallo, André 56 –60, 90 Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn 138 –139, 186n36, 193 Tevecinq 141, 186n44 Thatcher, Margaret 101 Thebes 43 Tianjin 154 Togo 68 –69, 83 Touré, Babani 141–142 Touré, Samory 48 Touré, Toumani 10 Turkey 25 Tutsi 15, 57, 74 –77 Tyre 41–42 Uganda 75 –77, 165 United Nations 5, 8, 16, 54, 56, 73, 77, 81, 91, 165, 107, 124, 128, 132, 134 –136, 146, 185n28, 186n29, 189, 190 United States 2–3, 10, 17–18, 54, 66, 76, 82, 101–107, 117–118, 129 –130, 135, 139, 146, 150 –151, 172, 180n25, 190 Upper Congo 131 Verschave, François-Xavier 55 –56, 60, 75 –76, 181n3, 181n7, 181n9, 181n12, 181n14, 181n15, 181n18, 181n21, 181n31, 181n33, 181n37, 181n40, 181n41, 191, 193 Verson 49 Vichnievsky, Laurence 56, 59, 90 Voltaire 38, 98 von Dohm, Wilhelm 98 Wade, Abdoulaye 10, 133 –134 Ward, Steven C. 53, 181n4, 193 Washington 96, 106, 137, 184n10 Wesley, the Rev. John 94, 183n4, 193 White, Hayden 181n8, 193 White, Renée T. 180n25, 190 White House 68, 172 Wilder, Gary 109, 184n3, 185n28, 193 Wilkens, Albertus 37 Winckelmann, J. 41, 54 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 52 Wodié, Francis 80 Yhombi, Pres. Opango 87–88 Youlou, Pres. Fulbert 87 Zapatero, Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez 82 Zerupa, Akello 187n36, 193 Zeus 41