Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945-1960 1800348401, 9781800348400

Citation preview

Past Imperfect Time and African Decolonization, 1945–1960

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 74

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DEREK SCHILLING Johns Hopkins University

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 61 Joshua Armstrong, Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel 63 Lucas Hollister, Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction 64 Naïma Hachad, Revisionary Narratives: Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts 65 Emma Wilson, The Reclining Nude: Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin 66 Margaret Atack, Alison S. Fell, Diana Holmes, Imogen Long, Making Waves: French Feminisms and their Legacies 1975–2015 67 Ruth Cruickshank, Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Re-thinking with Case Studies from Post-war French Fiction

68 Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, Lydie Moudileno, Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France 69 Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan, What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th and 21st-century French Literature and Thought 70 Erin Twohig, Contesting the Classroom: Reimagining Education in Moroccan and Algerian Literatures 71 Keith Reader, The Marais: The Story of a Quartier 72 Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy, Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond 73 Lia Brozgal, Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961

PI E R R E - PH I L I PPE F R A I T U R E

Past Imperfect Time and African Decolonization, 1945–1960

Past Imperfect

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2021 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2021 Pierre-Philippe Fraiture The right of Pierre-Philippe Fraiture to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-80034-840-0 (cased) ISBN 978-1-80034-546-1 (epdf) Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements vii Prelude: ‘L’Âme nègre doit sortir des musées’

1

Introduction 19 Aims and Objectives of Past Imperfect 19 Breakdown of Book

23

Chapter I: ‘Pasts and Futures’ 33 The Imperialization of Time

36

Salvaging the Relics

50

Africa’s ‘Present Past’

57

Chapter II: ‘Things’ African Art and Its Commodification

93 99

‘Forces’ and ‘Life’

104

Africa’s Difference

115

‘Lost Arts’ …

123

… And Reprised Arts

130

From Les Statues meurent aussi to It for Others 137 Chapter III: ‘Words’ 145 African Babble

148

Cheikh Anta Diop’s Glottopolitical Project

173

vi

Past Imperfect

Chapter IV: ‘Customs’ 201 Colonial Ruination

210

Cutting the Past: On Clitoridectomy

223

African Prophets and Reprises

238

Conclusion: ‘Decolonization: A Work in Progress’

261

Bibliography 275 Index

307

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

I would like to dedicate this book to Alison and our two daughters, Manon and Ella. Time flies: oui, ces fameuses mouches temporelles! And to thank the following people for answering my queries or inviting me in the past few years to present, discuss, or write about some of the material included in this book: Dorthe Aagesen, Ana Lucia Araujo, Yolanda Aixelà Cabré, Jean Copans, John Drabinski, Grant Farred, Axel Fleisch, Marie-Aude Fouéré, Charlotte Gran, Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard, Maëline Le Lay, the late Alain Ricard, Ana Lúcia Sá, Rhiannon Stevens, and Jennifer Yee; the two anonymous readers for their useful comments on the manuscript; my colleagues on the European Research Council Project ‘African Philosophy and Genre’: Michelle Clarke, Chantal Gishoma, Albert Kasanda, Benedetta Lanfranchi, and Alena Rettová; Anders Sune Bergh for allowing me to reproduce his photograph of Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s Krigeren for the front cover of this book. My editor, Chloé Johnson, for her patience and responsiveness. The production editor, Siân Jenkins. My gratitude goes as well to Kate Courage from the Warwick University Library; and to the librarians of the Vere Harmsworth Library at Oxford: Johanna O’Connor, Jane Rawson, Martin Sutcliffe, and Judy Warden. I would also like to thank the University of Warwick and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures for their continuous support and for granting me a study leave which allowed me to bring this project to a close. This book was completed in July 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the climate of racial insurrection generated by George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. As it deals with the decolonization of the humanities in francophone Africa, Past Imperfect is also about

viii

Past Imperfect

issues that have hitherto not been resolved and whose roots are to be located in our colonial past. I have been fortunate enough to be able to discuss the ongoing legacies of this present past with my current PhD students, Matthew Allen, Sky Herington, Rebecca Infield, and Orane Onyekpe-Touzet; and with several cohorts of Warwick undergraduate students on modules such as ‘Colonial Memory’, ‘Slavery and After’, and ‘Postcolonial Literatures in French’. It would be impossible to name them all, but I am grateful to them for their insights and enthusiasm. Finally, a special thought for Julia and Ken Franklin – for everything, and much more: we have been missing you.

Prelude ‘L’Âme nègre doit sortir des musées’1 Prelude

The words ‘rupture’, ‘end’, but also ‘beginning’ best capture how the post-Second World War era was experienced in France and its colonies. The creation of the United Nations, an organization which set out to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’, promote ‘faith in fundamental human rights’, and ‘practise tolerance’, cast serious doubt over the future of the colonial project. 2 Behind its generous principles, however, the Charter of the UN continued to maintain a clear distinction between its fully accredited members and the ‘peoples’ – the word ‘colony’ was avoided in this document – having ‘not yet attained a full measure of self-government’. 3 UN members responsible for administering ‘non-self-governing’ and ‘trust’ territories were enjoined ‘to ensure, with due respect for the culture of the peoples concerned, their political, economic, social, and educational advancement, their just treatment, and their protection against abuses’.4 What is interesting in this process is that the various imperial powerhouses – whether in Paris, London, or Brussels – whilst under the explicit obligation to implement measures to ‘develop self-government’, were still expected to decide whether or not the ‘peoples’ for whom they were responsible had attained the necessary ‘advancement stages’ to shape and determine their own political futures. 5 In other words, the political initiative firmly 1 The adjective nègre, although very pejorative now, was used until the immediate post-war era to describe that which was regarded as being authentically African or black. 2 ‘Preamble’ of the ‘Charter of the United Nations’: https://www.un.org/en/ sections/un-charter/preamble/index.html [accessed 3 April 2019]. 3 ‘Charter of the United Nations’, Chapter XI (article 73): https://www.un.org/ en/sections/un-charter/chapter-xi/index.html [accessed 3 April 2019]. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

2

Past Imperfect

remained with the administering powers; and even though the latter were accountable to the UN General Assembly, 6 the terms under which they operated in overseas territories had not substantially changed since the creation of the League of Nations after the First World War.7 If they pledged to act as the facilitators of self-determination, they often failed to listen – or they simply paid lip service – to the political demands of ‘dependent’ peoples. This increasingly insistent focus on self-determination nevertheless transformed the meaning of, and scope for, anti-colonialism. Hitherto, opposition to colonialism had remained a peripheral phenomenon that never gained enough momentum to destabilize colonial administrations. Although the interwar period was marked by violent responses to French colonialism, not only in France, 8 but also in the colonies (the examples of Dahomey and Indochina come to mind), critics such as René Maran and Kojo Touvalou were militating for the improvement of the colonial regime rather than for its dismantlement.9 French intellectuals like André Gide and André Malraux operated on analogous premises. Their brand of early anti-colonialism, and their desire to speak on behalf of exploited locals, remained overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Gide’s Voyage au Congo did not depart from the evolutionist principles that had fed physical anthropology for three generations;10 in La Voie royale,11 Malraux, who had previously fought for the rights of Indochinese people – notably by creating, in 1925, the short-lived Saigon-based newspaper L’Indochine enchaînée12 – makes a shocking case for colonial ‘domination and loot’.13 6 Evan Luard, A History of the United Nations: The Age of Decolonization, 1955–1965, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 176. 7 See Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 87–95. 8 Pap Ndiaye, ‘Présence africaine avant “Présence Africaine”. La subjectivation politique noire en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, Gradhiva, 10 (2009), special issue ‘Présence Africaine. Les conditions noires: une généalogie des discours’, pp. 64–79. 9 Ibid., p. 69. 10 André Gide, Voyage au Congo. Carnets de route (Paris: Gallimard, 1927). 11 André Malraux, La Voie royale (Paris: Grasset, 1930). 12 See Raoul Marc Jennar, Comment Malraux est devenu Malraux: de l’indifférence politique à l’engagement (Perpignan: CapBear Éditions, 2015). 13 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994 [1993]), p. 251.

Prelude

3

The Charter of the UN does not quite break away from the spirit that had inspired Gide, Malraux, and many other proto-anti-colonialists. It argues that the colonized deserve ‘just treatment’ and ‘protection against abuses’. But it still maintains that their independence hinges on the imperial powers’ ability to determine their stage of ‘advancement’ and plot their future on an elusive line of progress. The paradox here is that the ‘UN Charter envisioned the eventual self-government of colonized peoples [whilst] it also affirmed European colonial rule as legitimate’.14 This tension, however, fuelled a new type of anti-colonialism. The prospect of self-rule, in the realms of politics, but also, as will be examined in this book, in those of culture and thought, significantly dented the idea that the colonized had to remain forever at the receiving end of the colonizer’s generous humanitarianism, guardianship, advocacy, and curatorship. This model of colonial assistantship did not disappear after the Second World War – indeed, it has survived until today – but more than ever before the colonized were seen and, even more importantly, saw themselves, as producers of objects and conceptual systems. From Léon Gontran Damas’s and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s attempts to anthologize non-hexagonal francophone poetry15 to the creation of Présence Africaine, the immediate post-war era paved the way for the development of a wide-ranging archival and exegetic enterprise in which African ‘producers’ – again in the realms of politics, thought, and culture – would increasingly occupy centre stage. In 1948, Le Musée vivant published a special issue entitled ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’ [1848 Abolition of Slavery – 1948 Visibility of Black Culture]16 and dedicated to the ‘problèmes culturels de l’Afrique noire’.17 This little-known publication captures the tension of an African field which, whilst still under French and European tutelage, is determined to lay down the critical basis of its 14 Wilder, Freedom Time, p. 94. 15 Léon Gontran Damas, Poètes d’expression française, 1900–1945. Anthologie (Paris: Seuil, 1947); Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ‘avant-propros’ by Charles-André Julien, preface, ‘Orphée noir’, by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: PUF, 1948). 16 Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948). All translations in this book are mine unless otherwise stated. Whenever possible I shall use the English translations of the main texts analysed in this book. 17 Ibid., p. 1.

4

Past Imperfect

Cover page of Le Musée vivant

own future. Published under the aegis of the Association Populaire des Amis des Musées (APAM), a cultural organization close to the Musée de L’homme which would from its creation 1936 hold anti-fascist and

Prelude

5

anti-colonial views,18 this special issue was co-edited by Madeleine Rousseau, the noted but little-studied curator, museologist, ‘avid collector of “tribal” materials’,19 and cultural activist, 20 and by Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese historian who, in 1948, was still completely unknown. The approach adopted by the contributors relies on specific temporal assumptions and, to refer to an idea developed by David Scott in a book examining C.L.R. James’s thought, on a tendency to develop ‘narratives of overcoming’ and ‘to tell stories of salvation and redemption [depending] upon a certain (utopian) horizon toward which the emancipationist history is imagined to be moving’.21 The cover page of this special issue (see previous page) would seem to lend itself to this redemptory model: the title does not appear as a continuous segment (‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’) but is interrupted by the photo of an African statue occupying the bulk of the space available on the page. As a result of this layout, the two dates, opposed and yet connected by this African artefact, appear as the identifiable moments of a progressive timeline which, from the Second to the Fourth Republic, had been marked by the utter dismissal but also gradual recognition of African art and culture in the West. Via temporally connoted terms such as ‘tradition’, ‘heritage’, and ‘renaissance’, this special issue is also characterized, as will be analysed now, by a tendency to either define the Africa/ Europe couple in oppositional terms or seek their complementarity. In a prefatory address of a few sentences, Richard Wright, a writer who would be celebrated by French anti-colonial existentialists and observe post-war Paris at close range, 22 praises Le Musée vivant for 18 Ruth Bush, Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization 1945–1967 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), p. 33. 19 Elizabeth Harney, ‘Constellations and Coordinates: Repositioning Postwar Paris in Stories of African Modernisms’, in E. Harney and Ruth B. Phillips (eds), Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 304–334 (p. 311). 20 See Danielle Maurice, ‘Le musée vivant et le centenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage: pour une reconnaissance des cultures africaines’, in Ana Lucia Araujo and Anna Seiderer (eds), ‘Passé colonial et modalité de mise en mémoire de l’esclavage’, special issue of Conserveries mémorielles, 3 (June 2007), pp. 69–83, https://journals.openedition.org/cm/127 [accessed 5 April 2019]. 21 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 8. 22 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2012), p. 125. See also, among many other publications, Mamoun F.I. Alzoubi, Richard

6

Past Imperfect

devoting this issue to the ‘astounding art of Africa’ and bringing the attention of its readers to a ‘culture’ which ‘cannot be allowed to perish under the yoke of imperialism’ and be ‘neglected’ any longer. 23 Wright even goes as far as arguing that Europe has now become dependent on Africa: ‘we must realize that Europe needs Africa perhaps more desperately than Africa needs Europe, for it is among these pre-industrial millions of people that the impulse to live and be is to be found in all its original purity’. 24 This short endorsement speaks volumes about Wright’s lack of concrete knowledge of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa and also reveals ‘his inability to question his teleology of modernization’. 25 By 1948 – as will be examined later in this book (see Chapter IV on Georges Balandier) – Africa had already been deeply industrialized and urbanized and, in fact, this modernity became one of the major angles through which the continent would henceforth be analysed by African and Western commentators. Wright’s argument regarding Africa’s ‘original purity’ of course does nothing to break away from traditional exoticism and his is a rather sweeping statement even though he would a few years later – at the first congress of black writers and artists at the Sorbonne in 1956 – reject ‘holistic’ definitions of black culture, 26 and be the proponent of ‘anti-essentialism’. 27 On the other hand, his focus Wright and Transnationalism: New Dimensions to Modern American Expatriate Literature (New York: Routledge, 2018). See ‘Richard Wright’s Black Power: The Writer as a World Citizen’ (Chapter I), where Alzoubi develops this existential dimension. 23 Richard Wright, ‘Preface’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), p. 3. 24 Ibid. In English in the original followed by a French translation. 25 Kevin Gaines, ‘Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana: Black Radicalism and the Dialectics of Diaspora’, Social Text, 19.2 (2001), 75–101 (p. 75). 26 Bennetta Jules-Rosette, ‘Conjugating Cultural Realities: Présence Africaine’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 14–44 (p. 34). 27 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), p. 149. In his account of his journey to the Gold Coast in the summer of 1953 – Black Power: A Record of Reactions in Land of Pathos (New York: Harper, 1954) – Wright would, however, express his ‘disdain […] for the folk cultures of peoples of African descent’, a view which, according to Kevin Gaines (in ‘Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana’), has ‘clouded his legacy’ (p. 75).

Prelude

7

on Africans’ ‘impulse to live and be’ is most certainly a reflection of current debates on Africa’s dynamic and vital ontology initiated across racial divides by thinkers such as L.S. Senghor and Placide Tempels. Michel Leiris’s approach in ‘Message de l’Afrique’ is less definitional, less absorbed by what Africa is supposed to be – the ethnically determined ‘Africanité’ of Africans28 – than by what it might decide to become. The continent, as he puts it, ‘marche à sa propre découverte’ [is marching towards its own discovery]. 29 Leiris is keen to stress that Africans will have to exercise their freewill, as ‘hommes’ – the existentialist connotation of the term should not be underestimated – to put in place the conditions under which their future will materialize. And, in this development, he argues that it would not be proper for the former masters30 to ‘jouer les directeurs de conscience’ [act as spiritual guides]. 31 This short account is the product of Leiris’s own practice as an Africanist ethnographer and scholar at the Musée de L’homme and reflects his attempts, since the publication of L’Afrique fantôme, 32 to undermine ‘the assumption that self and other can be gathered in a stable narrative coherence’. 33 He cautiously intimates that the ‘human sciences’ have contributed to a less ‘paternalistic’ investigative framework and helped researchers of his generation to study non-Western subjects with ‘un minimum d’objectivité’. 34 Thus, he distances himself from Wright and from the belief, entertained by Gobineau in his 1853 Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (and subsequently rehearsed by generations of writers from Baudelaire to Apollinaire and Sartre), 35 that the black race was the source of a pure and original aesthetic sense (‘la source d’où les 28 Michel Leiris, ‘Message de l’Afrique’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (1948), 5–6 (p. 6). 29 Ibid., p. 5 30 ‘Ces blancs qui se posaient encore en maîtres absolus il n’y a pas si longtemps’ [those whites who, not so long ago, still regarded themselves as the absolute masters]. Ibid., p. 6. 31 Ibid., p. 6. 32 Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme. De Dakar à Djibouti (Paris: Gallimard, 1934). 33 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 173. 34 Leiris, ‘Message de l’Afrique’, p. 5. 35 On this genealogy, see Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 88–90.

8

Past Imperfect

arts ont jailli’ [the source from which the arts sprang forth]. 36 Gobineau contends here that certain skills and attributes – he focuses on artistic imagination and reason in the passage swiftly alluded to by Leiris – are to be found in some races but not in others. Artistic genius, he argues, is primordially ‘Melanian’ but, when not kept in check by reason and allowed to become ‘complete’, this genius ‘confine à la folie’ [borders on madness]. 37 If the black race is the source of artistic power (indeed this ‘source’ is said to be ‘cachée dans le sang des noirs’ [hidden in the blood of the blacks]), it is also, Gobineau argues, ‘étrangère aux instincts civilisateurs’ [foreign to civilizing instincts]. 38 Leiris, who alongside Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Métraux was involved in the UNESCO-driven effort to combat racism, 39 evidently did not adhere to this racial and colonial hierarchy and in Race et civilisation he would expose the pseudo-scientific theses formulated by figures such as Gobineau and Vacher de Lapouge.40 Whilst being characterized by an analogous ambition, ‘Message de l’Afrique’ also focuses on mutual aesthetic influences between Africans and Westerners in art, music, and literature and, as such, this short essay translates a clear intention to situate contemporary Africans (but also Caribbeans and African Americans) against the background of a dual heritage, that of slavery and (colonial) oppression; and to implicitly comment on the significance of the two key dates – 1848 and 1948 – selected by Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop to frame this debate on the contemporary significance of African culture. Africa, contends Leiris, was once a ‘magasin à esclaves’ [a slave shop] but has, despite (and since) 1848, continued to be the target of predatory ventures.41 Leiris also argues that Africans have retained an ability to establish a more direct (unmediated, symbiotic) connection with their environment. This positive assessment is not condescending, however, but used to highlight Western shortcomings at a time ‘où les progrès les plus nets semblent décidément s’accomplir dans l’art de détruire comme dans 36 Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie de Paris, Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1884 [1853–1855]), p. 359. See also Leiris, ‘Message de l’Afrique’, p. 5. 37 Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, p. 359. 38 Ibid. 39 See Christopher Johnson, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 110. 40 See Michel Leiris, Race et civilisation (Paris: UNESCO, 1951). 41 Leiris, ‘Message de l’Afrique’, p. 5.

Prelude

9

celui de contraindre et de torturer’ [where the most obvious advances seem decidedly to be accomplished in the art of destroying as in that of oppressing and torturing].42 Thus, Leiris suggests that Europeans would do well to listen to Africans: les noirs, une fois conquise l’égalité réelle avec ceux qui finiront pas cesser de se croire les dépositaires patentés de la seule vraie culture, auraient une leçon à faire écouter.43 [once they have achieved equality with those who will no longer believe that they are the designated custodians of the only genuine culture, black people will have a lesson to tell]

Madeleine Rousseau’s interventions in this special issue are also driven by a desire to identify the main features of African imagination in art and music. Although a prolific author, Rousseau has largely been ignored by scholars of cultural anti-colonialism and negritude. Her work falls largely under the cultural activism of the APAM, of which Le Musée vivant was the main publication.44 The APAM was created under the patronage of the ethnologists Paul Rivet, Georges-Henri Rivière, and Jacques Soustelle, three figures who would play an important role in the study and dissemination of non-Western cultures in France. Rivet was, alongside Marcel Mauss, the main instigator behind the launch of the ‘Science de l’homme’ [the science of man] at the Institut d’ethnologie and the first director of the Musée de l’Homme at the time of its creation in 1937;45 Rivière played a key part in the overhauling and democratization of ethnographic museums in the interwar period;46 and Soustelle was also involved, as assistant director, in the running of the Musée de l’Homme.47 The APAM was set up with a view of democratizing culture. This project prioritized museums as it was thought that they had the power of becoming ‘instruments d’éducation collective’.48 And that they would, in the spirit of the soon-to-be-elected Front Populaire, 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 I shall mainly rely here on Maurice’s ‘Le musée vivant et le centenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage’. 45 See Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 46 Ibid., pp. 107–108. 47 Ibid., p. 141. 48 Madeleine Rousseau, cited in Maurice, ‘Le musée vivant et le centenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage’, p. 70.

10

Past Imperfect

offer the masses ‘un enseignement concret par un contact direct avec la réalité’ [a concrete education through a direct contact with reality].49 The aim here was therefore to dislodge elitist culture (and its ‘idolâtrie du livre’ [worship of literature])50 from its pedestal and promote present and directly observable cultural facts, artefacts, and phenomena that the general public would be able to access easily. The Comité d’honneur of Le Musée vivant reflects the journal’s ambition to mobilize culture for political purposes and, if the phrase was obviously not used at the time, to ‘widen’ cultural ‘participation’. Alongside famous figures – Aimé Césaire, Paul Eluard, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, and Le Corbusier – this honorary committee also included museum curators, a prominent trade unionist (Henri Raynaud, a leading figure of the Confédération générale du travail), educationalists, civil servants, and the Sorbonne professor André Aymard, a noted classicist who, incidentally, also supervised Cheikh Anta Diop’s doctoral thesis. Madeleine Rousseau’s various articles in the special issue resonate with the anti-colonial line – ‘l’ouverture sur les cultures extra-européennes’ [the openness to non-European cultures]51 – that had been advocated by the APAM and the Musée de l’Homme since the late 1930s. In ‘La Philosophie des nègres’ [The Philosophy of the Blacks], Rousseau provides a précis of Placide Tempels’s famous essay on La Philosophie bantoue52 (see Chapter II of this book) and argues that his conception of the ‘vital force’ is key to understanding not only sub-Saharan African societies but also their artistic imagination and creative energy. 53 For all its supposed novelty, Tempels’s interpretation of Bantu philosophy did little to renew the debate on the ontological exceptionality of primitive cultures and there is absolutely no doubt that the Belgian missionary, despite his genuine ambition to look sympathetically on his Congolese parishioners, was Gobineau’s intellectual heir: ‘Speaking of Africans, Tempels wrote for Europeans – not a philosophical dialogue with blacks

49 Ibid., section 6, Édouard Dolléans cited by Danielle Maurice. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., pp. 71–72. 52 Placide Tempels, La Philosophie bantoue, trans. from Dutch by Antoine Rubbens, preface by Alioune Diop (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1949 [1945]). 53 Madeleine Rousseau, ‘La Philosophie des nègres’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), 9–12 (p. 9).

Prelude

11

but a mystifying monologue for whites’. 54 I shall nuance this point in Chapter II, but suffice to say at this stage that Madeleine Rousseau’s adherence to Tempels’s arguments has a tendency to trap African artistic imagination in its Africanity for, as she categorically remarks, ‘Tempels nous offre une philosophie cohérente qui règle tout le comportement du nègre’ [Tempels provides a coherent philosophy which determines the negro’s behaviour in its entirety]. 55 Tempels’s conceptual system, she contends, is so compelling that it can be applied to historically remote civilizations such as ancient Egypt but also to all ‘civilisations pré-industrielles’. 56 The conflation of what is temporally and geographically far – contemporary cultures are deemed to be living relics – is a common trope of evolutionist thought and the expression of what Johannes Fabian named ‘allochronism’ or ‘denial of coevalness’. In this temporal model, the Other’s present (or contemporaneity – ‘coevalness’ being the translation of Gleichzeitigkeit) and co-presence are denied. 57 The ethnically deterministic stance advocated by Tempels shaped the ‘invention’ of Africa in the post-war era to such a degree that ‘many African scholars as well as many European Africanists have found it difficult to free themselves from the false models of colonial codified African “tradition”’. 58 It also triggered polarized interpretations of sub-Saharan African cultures as exemplified by the contributions of Auguste Verbeken and Cheikh Anta Diop in the special issue of Le Musée vivant. Verbeken was a colonial functionary in the Belgian Congo but also an expert in literature. 59 His ‘La Poésie nègre du Congo’ [Black Poetry of Congo] is a subtle, sympathetic, if predictably Eurocentric account of African orature.60 What is particularly interesting 54 Andrew Apter, Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 22. 55 Rousseau, ‘La Philosophie des nègres’, p. 9. 56 Ibid. 57 Johannes Fabian, Time and Its Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects, with a foreword by Matti Bunzl (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 [1983]). 58 Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in Eric Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1983]), pp. 211–262 (p. 212). 59 See https://mukanda.univ-lorraine.fr/s/mukanda/item/6908 [accessed 6 January 2021]. 60 Auguste Verbeken, ‘La Poésie nègre du Congo’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), 13–18.

12

Past Imperfect

here is Verbeken’s defence of indigenous purity and contention that any transcription of this oral corpus into written French would undermine its integrity and produce a ‘bastardized’ version of the original: Ce serait une œuvre bâtarde […] Les noirs lettrés imitent servilement l’Européen dans ses [sic] écrits […] Mais ces morceaux n’enrichissent ni la littérature française ni la littérature indigène […] Je pense que si l’on veut contribuer à maintenir et développer l’art oral indigène et sauvegarder […] l’héritage intellectuel et esthétique des populations congolaises, il faut protéger […] le style indigène contre les influences destructrices.61 [It would end up being a bastardized work (…) Black writers slavishly imitate the Europeans in their writings (…) But these pieces enrich neither French nor indigenous literature (…) I think that if we want to help maintain and develop native oral art and safeguard the intellectual and aesthetic heritage of the Congolese people (…) the indigenous style must be protected against destructive influences]

This statement confirms the letter and spirit of the UN Charter for, here too, the colonial administrator appears as the gatekeeper, 62 the protector, and the advocate of ‘non-self-governing’ peoples whose traditions and styles – the temporal implications of this balancing act will be examined in this book – need maintaining and developing. In ‘Quand pourra-t-on parler d’une renaissance africaine?’ [When Will it Be Possible to Talk of an African Renaissance?], Cheikh Anta Diop shares Verbeken’s fear of cultural miscegenation as he argues, at the very outset of his article, that African traditions have been damaged by ‘contamination européenne’.63 Here, as in most of his writings on language, culture, and mythology (as will be examined in chapters II and III), Cheikh Anta Diop reverses the racialist hierarchy (white vs non-white) that had prevailed in biology-inspired discourses on cultural hybridity since the nineteenth century.64 Overall it must be said that assimilated blacks were held in suspicion by post-war anti-colonial 61 Ibid., p. 17. 62 See Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). 63 Cheikh Anta Diop, ‘Quand pourra-t-on parler d’une renaissance africaine?’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), 57–65 (p. 57). 64 See Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 116–117.

Prelude

13

activists and that their ambivalent status – Sartre famously referred to ‘Graeco-Latin Negroes’ as ‘walking lies’ in his preface to Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre 65 – would invariably conjure up notions of deception, deviation, and betrayal. Cheikh Anta Diop’s call for an African ‘renaissance’ was motivated by a genuine project of intellectual decolonization. The future-orientated dimension of his work heralds other African thinkers such as V.Y. Mudimbe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and their own attempts to lay down the basis of future linguistic and conceptual independence. For Ngũgĩ, this article by Cheikh Anta Diop constitutes a milestone for the Senegalese was one of the first African intellectuals to link the revalorization of African languages to the intellectual emancipation of the continent.66 Writing in 2009, Ngũgĩ declares, however, that the linguistic renaissance that Cheikh Anta Diop had advocated in the special issue of Le Musée vivant has not yet taken place. Nonetheless, he is keen to add that the word ‘renaissance’ captures the epistemological revolution experienced by contemporary Africa: The European Renaissance involved not only exploration of new frontiers of thought but also a reconnection with the European’s memory, the roots of which lay in ancient Greece and Rome. In practice, this reconnection involved disengagement from the tyranny of hegemonic Latin and discovery of European’s own tongues. But it also required a massive and sustained translation and transfer of knowledge from Latin and Greek into the emerging European vernaculars, including English. A great deal of intervernacular translation of current intellectual production also took place among the then-emerging European language – for instance, from French into English and vice versa. The African keepers of memory could do worse than usefully borrow a leaf from that experience.67

Cheikh Anta Diop’s article, however, is also concerned with what African cultural producers should and should not do. What is at stake in this ‘renaissance’ is the purity of their Africanity and the romantic tendency, on Diop’s part, to use a strict and timeless criteriology to measure this authenticity and advocate a return to what African culture is: 65 J.-P. Sartre, ‘Preface’, in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 2001 [1961]), p. 7. 66 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009), pp. 121–129. 67 Ibid., p. 123.

14

Past Imperfect Sans sous-estimer […] la valeur de ces écrivains africains de langue étrangère, a-t-on le droit de considérer leurs écrits comme la base d’une culture africaine? […] ce que le nègre ne pourra jamais exprimer sans cesser de parler une langue étrangère, c’est le génie de sa propre langue. 68 [Without underestimating (…) the value of these foreign-language African writers, do we have the right to consider their writings as the basis of an African culture? (…) what blacks will never be able to express without ceasing to speak a foreign language is the genius of their own language]

The special issue of Le Musée vivant goes beyond romantic ideas regarding the ‘genius’ of African culture, however. In an article co-authored with Olivier Le Corneur, ‘Quels sont les styles de l’art nègre?’ [What Are the Styles of Black Art?], 69 Rousseau seems to move away from Tempels’s prescriptive spatio-temporal order and timeless Africanity. Indeed, Rousseau and Le Corneur refuse to abide by the analytical grid underpinning recent examinations of African art by acknowledged specialists such as Carl Kjersmeier70 and Marcel Griaule.71 They contend that these two authors have, in the name of spatial and ethnic criteria, neglected crucial historical factors inasmuch as their books ‘mettent sur le même plan les œuvres anciennes […] et les œuvres récentes’ On ne veut pas tenir compte du facteur temps quand il s’agit de l’art nègre, comme si cet immense continent était stagnant depuis l’origine […] nous prétendons qu’une statue réaliste d’un roi Shongo – vieille de quatre ou cinq siècles – n’appartient pas à la même civilisation que le masque Ba-Kuba créé il y a cinquante ans […] même si les deux œuvres ont été trouvées au même endroit.72 [do not distinguish old works (…) from recent works (…) Their authors fail to take into account the time factor when it comes to black art, as if this huge continent had been stagnant since the beginning of time (…) we

68 Diop, ‘Quand pourra-t-on parler d’une renaissance africaine?’, p. 58. 69 Madeleine Rousseau and Olivier Le Corneur, ‘Quels sont les styles de l’art nègre?’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), 23–29. 70 C. Kjersmeier, Centres de styles de la sculpture africaine, trans. by France Gleizal (Paris: Éditions Albert Morancé, 1937). 71 Marcel Griaule, Les Arts de l’Afrique noire (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1947). 72 Rousseau and Le Corneur, ‘Quels sont les styles de l’art nègre?’, p. 24.

Prelude

15

maintain that a realistic four- or five-century-old statue of a Shongo king does not belong to the same civilization as the Ba-Kuba mask created fifty years ago (…) even if the two works were found in the same place]

For Le Corneur and Rousseau – and an analogous view (as analysed in Chapter I) would be advocated by Georges Balandier, Frantz Fanon, and even Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s – anthropologists’ obsession with tribal characteristics runs counter to the production of historical truth. Although it might be convenient, taxonomically speaking, to refer to a Ba-Kuba/Ba-Shongo stylistic continuum, this does not make much historical sense because this ethnic group, like any other human community, evidently did not remain static from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Le Corneur and Rousseau regret the ethnologists’ bad faith and their insistence on the ‘maintien de l’ordre ancien’ [preservation of the ancient order]: Attitude curieuse de ceux qui voudraient prolonger – même artificiellement – la durée d’un ordre condamné parce qu’ils n’ont pas encore eu le temps de l’étudier et qu’ils redoutent de le voir disparaître trop vite.73 [The surprising attitude of those who would like to prolong – even artificially – the duration of a condemned order because they have not yet had the time to study it and fear that it will disappear too quickly]

In another contribution, ‘La Musique et la danse en Afrique occidentale’ [Music and Dance in Western Africa],74 Rousseau further challenges this notion of cultural status quo and argues that Pendant les 325 ans qui se sont écoulés depuis que les premiers noirs ont débarqué en Amérique la musique africaine a changé plus profondément que notre musique entre Palestrina et Schoenberg. [During the 325 years since the first blacks landed in America, African music has changed more deeply than our music between Palestrina and Schoenberg]

Elsewhere, Rousseau contends that the existing scholarship on Africa proves that ‘de moins en moins l’Afrique paraît différente de nous’ 73 Ibid. 74 Madeleine Rousseau, ‘La Musique et la danse en Afrique occidentale,’ in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), 21–22.

16

Past Imperfect

[Africa seems less and less different from us].75 She also argues that Africa’s history is as ancient as that of Europe and that the period of decadence – ‘nuit’ [night] – experienced by sub-Saharan Africa in the past few centuries, although precipitated by the colonial expansion, is by no means exceptional but the product of repeatable historical laws that have also affected other civilizations.76 Although there is a strong focus on Africa’s Africanity in this volume of essays, there is also a tendency to consider the Europe-Africa couple from the point of view of their complementarity (and even resemblance). In ‘Rencontre de l’Europe avec l’Afrique’ [Europe’s Encounter with Africa], Rousseau suggests that Tempels’s Bantu philosophy and Sartrean existentialism share a number of characteristics.77 The Bantu’s dynamic conception of the universe rests on the assumption that all things and all beings – humans and animals but also dead ancestors and the living – are active participants in an all-encompassing network of vital forces influencing one another. For Sartre, existentialism is a philosophy of action whereby humans define themselves through choice and commitment. Paraphrasing an argument famously put forward by Sartre in L’Existentialisme est un humanisme,78 Madeleine Rousseau states that ‘le geste d’un homme engagé engage l’humanité’ [the action of a committed man commits humanity];79 and with regard to this intersubjective dimension of Sartre’s thinking, she remarks that ‘on peut reconnaître là une sorte d’équivalent du principe de l’interaction de la philosophie bantoue’ [we can recognize here some degree of similarity with the principle of interaction as found in Bantu philosophy].80 Beyond this resemblance – a dynamic conception of human ontology – Rousseau argues that for Sartre ‘man’ is a supreme agent who has ‘une plus grande 75 Madeleine Rousseau, ‘En marge de l’histoire ancienne de l’Afrique’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), 19–20 (p. 20). 76 Ibid. 77 Madeleine Rousseau, ‘Rencontre de l’Europe avec l’Afrique’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), 35–40 (p. 38). 78 Ibid., p. 38. 79 See Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, presentation and notes by Arlette Alkaïm-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1996 [1946]), p. 64. 80 Rousseau, ‘Rencontre de l’Europe avec l’Afrique’, p. 38.

Prelude

17

dignité que la pierre ou que la table’ [more dignity than a stone or a table].81 And Rousseau immediately adds: Pour les Bantous aussi l’homme est la force suprême de l’univers, mais ils ne négligent pas, pour autant, l’interaction qui le rend solidaire de tous les éléments du monde.82 [For the Bantu, too, man is the supreme force of the universe, but they do not neglect, however, the interaction that makes him integral to all the elements of the world]

There, according to Rousseau, lies the ultimate lesson of humility to be learnt from this historical encounter with Africa and Bantu philosophy: scientific reason cannot explain everything and ‘man’, in Europe and in Africa, is part of, rather than above the world. In his own contribution, ‘Le Nègre dans le monde moderne’ [The Black in the Modern World], Jacques Howlett reaches a very similar conclusion and puts Europe and Africa in a relation of ‘coevalness’ (or contemporaneity). Howlett was Alioune Diop’s close collaborator on the editorial board of Présence Africaine. In this capacity, he significantly shaped the intellectual conditions under which African philosophy would be received in the West after the Second World War.83 Howlett makes the case for a new type of modernity which, whilst benefiting from science and technology, would also be fed by what he calls African ‘innocence’.84 This term is clumsy and does little to promote the idea – systematically refuted until the Second World War (as will be demonstrated in this book) – that Africans and Westerners were temporal equals, that is, linked by a relation of temporal copresence. On reflection, however, this terminological clumsiness appears to be the product of a period where well-intentioned advocates of equality and emancipation were still trapped in the evolutionist discursivity of the Third Republic. Sartre’s lexis in ‘Orphée noir’, for instance, bears witness to this ambivalence.

81 Ibid. Unacknowledged by Rousseau but borrowed from Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, p. 30. 82 Rousseau, ‘Rencontre de l’Europe avec l’Afrique’, pp. 38–39. 83 On Howlett and Alioune Diop, see Philippe Verdin, Alioune Diop: le Socrate noir (Paris: Lethielleux, 2010), p. 152. 84 Jacques Howlett, ‘Le Nègre dans le monde moderne’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, special issue of Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), 52–53 (p. 52).

18

Past Imperfect

However, it must be added that Howlett was probably not quite satisfied with the word ‘innocence’, as demonstrated by his addition of a footnote to qualify this lexical choice: ‘J’appelle “innocence” [l]a faculté encore intacte de participation avec le monde’ [I call ‘innocence’ the still unadulterated capacity of participation in the world].85 This is an important addendum which, I would argue, veers from the belief that the African lifeworld is synonymous with primitiveness. Howlett regards this ability to participate in the world as an alternative to Western reason and a tool to attenuate the latter’s ‘détachement abstrait’ [abstract detachment].86 What is at stake here, and this also applies to Madeleine Rousseau and, in fact, to most of the contributions of this special issue of Le Musée vivant, is the connection between reason and progress in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: ‘le progrès pléthorique est le prélude de la régression, et vraiment à être trop raisonnable, la raison, si l’on peut dire, perd la raison’ [an excess of progress leads to regression, and when it is too reasonable, reason, so to speak, loses its reason].87 For Howlett, the idea that ‘l’âme nègre doit sortir des musées’ [the black soul must come out of the museums] goes a long way to capturing the mood inaugurated by the post-war era.88 This book, as I shall explain in the Introduction, will examine the temporal implications of this ‘coming out’.

85 Ibid., p. 53 n. 3. 86 Ibid., p. 52. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid.

Introduction Introduction

Aims and Objectives of Past Imperfect Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945–1960 aims to analyse the factors responsible for the emergence of what Georges Balandier, the French sociologist and Africanist, called ‘the colonial situation’ in an eponymous article published in 1951.1 In this groundbreaking publication, Balandier focuses on late colonialism and, in the wake of Max Gluckman’s socio-anthropological research on the South African racial context, 2 proposes to decolonize French Africanism. Balandier argues here that colonialism is not a static system and that its main actors, the colonizers and the colonized, are part of a sociological totality underpinned by the concept of ‘culture-change’. 3 This premise – the inherent dynamism of the colonial situation involving the interaction of individuals situated on both sides of the racial divide – provided the basis for an historicization of cultural anthropology, and paved the way for the gradual refutation of the idea that Africans had to be studied through the essentialist prism of tribal and ethnic timelessness. This book will thus explore the ubiquitous presence of a progress-based historical model developed during the modern era and promoted by the advocates of colonialism. It will also ascertain how 1 Georges Balandier, ‘La Situation coloniale: approche théorique’, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 11 (1951), 44–79. 2 Max Gluckman, Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand (Manchester: Manchester University Press/The Rhodes-Livingston Institute, 1958 [1940]). 3 As developed by Bronislaw Malinowski in Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1938).

20

Past Imperfect

and why this linear and mechanistic conception of time – a ‘hierarchical ordering and control of the world […] based on technologies of temporal calculation’4 – became increasingly challenged by alternative temporalities in the period after the Second World War. This study is driven by an ambition to situate the intellectual exceptionality of the post-war era and highlight the fact that it was characterized by radical experiments in the arts and humanities. That said, it will also be demonstrated that the period 1945–1960 remained haunted by the ‘long nineteenth century’ and its developmentalist discourses whereby sub-Saharan Africa – its history, artefacts, languages, and customs (the four ‘scenes’ privileged in this study) – was still regarded as a ‘figure of lack’5 awaiting Western guardianship. Progress, then, will be scrutinized to discover how and why Africa remained a ‘not-yet’ to be superseded by, and completed in, the (colonial/Western/Christian/ Marxist/capitalist) universal. This wide-ranging exploration will draw upon Reinhart Koselleck’s examination of modern temporality in Futures Past, 6 and, more generally, benefit from the critical insights of scholars engaged in what has been named ‘the temporal turn’.7 It will also be predicated on a postcolonial methodology and, as such, rely on authors such as V.Y. Mudimbe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’, Achille Mbembe, Felwine Sarr, Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu, or Alain Ricard to assess the Eurocentric framework of this period. Given its interdisciplinary nature, Past Imperfect will favour studies where the postcolonial approach is used to examine African history, memory, and historiography, art from sub-Saharan Africa, African linguistics and translation studies, and anthropology. This book, whilst privileging time as a major biopolitical technology, will consider the international context in which political and cultural decolonization unfolded and examine how certain supranational bodies such as the UN (see the UNESCO-led General History of Africa collection) contributed 4 Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 1. 5 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, with a new preface by the author (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 [2000]), pp. 40–41. 6 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1983]). 7 See Thomas M. Allen (ed.), Time and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Introduction

21

to the dismantlement of the ethno-nationalistic principles on which imperialism had hitherto been relying. Past Imperfect will also offer a detailed examination of the French context, in Afrique Occidentale Française and Afrique Equatoriale Française, whilst providing some transcolonial focus on the Belgian Congo. It will map out the factors responsible for the gradual dismissal of Francocentric and Eurocentric universalism within journals and agencies like Présence Africaine and the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire in an environment coinciding with the predominance of existentialism and the timid rise of African philosophy. This reflection will aim to account for the epistemological possibilities of the ‘colonial situation’ (as conceptualized by Balandier) and assess the conditions that enabled but also impeded cross-racial collaborations between European and African intellectuals and scholars – e.g. Balandier, Cheikh Anta Diop, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Théodore Monod, and Placide Tempels – operating in the immediate post-Second World War era. This period was marked by attempts to write African history anew8 and a tendency, on the part of French and francophone intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Alioune Diop, Fanon, Sartre, and L.S. Senghor, in addition to those mentioned above, to draw analogies between the Holocaust, the slave trade, and recent colonial history in Africa. This process, which reflected the UN’s efforts to legally enshrine in its Charter notions of genocidal violence and crime against humanity in the wake of the Nuremberg trials (1945–1946), was reinforced, as suggested in the ‘Prelude’ to this book, by the centenary of the abolition of slavery (1948) and by the extensive intellectual activity that accompanied that anniversary in France. The climate of mournful remembrance elicited by these events had a decisive impact on the development of the ‘colonial situation’ and the constitution of a community of politically committed Africanist scholars (often influenced by Marxian explanatory grids) eager to challenge the exclusive basis of humanism; and, in turn, excavate the deep-seated legacy of colonial alienation and its nefarious consequences on African historiography (Chapters I, II, and III), curatorial practices and the study of African material culture (Chapters I and II), language policies 8 See Pedro Monaville, ‘A History of Glory and Dignity: Patrice Lumumba in Historical Imagination and Postcolonial Genealogies’, in Matthias De Groof (ed.), Lumumba in the Arts (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020), pp. 62–77 (p. 68).

22

Past Imperfect

(Chapters III and IV), and daily life customs and religious rituals (Chapter IV). The main authors examined in this book are all driven by an ambition to use scholarship to challenge some of the Eurocentric assumptions of the ‘colonial library’ (Mudimbe).9 They are representative of a more inclusive – i.e. dialogical – Franco-African community of scholars and therefore part of the sociological process described by Georges Balandier in ‘La Situation coloniale’ where interactions across racial and social divides were expected to trigger methodological change and novel intellectual insights. The encounter between French scholarship and sub-Saharan Africa was gradually institutionalized and this process of institutionalization was accelerated during the Third Republic with the creation of the various museums mentioned in this book and the emergence, in the early years of the twentieth century, of ‘Africanism’, of which Maurice Delafosse became one of the most prolific representatives. The period (and the authors) under consideration in Past Imperfect bore witness to the consolidation of this institutionalized framework after the Second World War. They were all members of the various scholarly agencies (publishers and university departments) mentioned in this study – the Centre d’Études africaines de la VIe section de l’EPHE (later EHESS), the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, the Musée de l’Homme, ORSTOM (later IRD), and Présence Africaine. As such, they were able to shape the new research priorities of the post-war era and contribute to the emergence of a more internationalist agenda, the influence of Anglo-American anthropological literature on Balandier’s early work being exemplary of this process. The intellectuals analysed here benefitted from this new climate which, whilst offering a better status to African scholars, remained steeped in Third Republic prejudices. Paradoxically, authors like Cheikh Anta Diop, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, and Amadou Hampâté Bâ would often draw upon the colonial library to advocate their own epistemological liberation. Georges Balandier’s publications are symptomatic of this period of transition. Like other historians of (post)colonialism in Africa,10 9 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1988), p. 175. 10 See the work of Frederick Cooper, Ann Laura Stoler, Alice Conklin, but also Jean Copans, Benoît de L’Estoile, Jean-Pierre Dozon, and Michel Agier (whose contributions are commented upon and acknowledged in this book).

Introduction

23

I am of the view that his interventions were crucial and that his reflection on the nature of the colonial situation opened new avenues for the study of Africa (and urban Africa in particular) and had the effect of decolonizing cultural anthropology by moving it away from strict ethnic categories, as noted by Frederick Cooper: By the early 1950s, anthropologists were introducing concepts like ‘social situation’, ‘social field’, and ‘social network’ to emphasize that Africans did not live within a bounded universe, but created new patterns of social and cultural relations as they moved into different sorts of places. Africans were not merely molded by being ‘urbanized’; they were bringing something to the city as well as weaving together the city and country in different ways.11

My intention here is not to establish equivalences; it is to highlight overlaps but also tensions and points of friction between figures who marked the development of African studies in the post-war era. Breakdown of the Book Chapter I, ‘Pasts and Futures’, will focus on temporality and establish how and why African thought (and thought on Africa) was reconfigured in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War. This discussion will be shaped by some of the concepts and metaphors used by Koselleck in Futures Past. This reliance, however, remains loose and necessarily analogical for Koselleck’s complex disquisition on the making of modern Germany has, prima facie, nothing to do with Africa and decolonization. Its focus on ‘temporalization’ – i.e. the Heidegger-inspired idea12 that ‘past and future must be relocated with respect to each other’13 – possesses nonetheless a high degree of transferability. Over the years, Koselleck’s exploration of historical time has appealed to some postcolonial, memory studies, and Africanist scholars such as Berber Bevernage and Chris

11 Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 118–119. 12 Keith Tribe, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1983]), pp. viii–xx (pp. x–xi). 13 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 4.

24

Past Imperfect

Lorenz,14 David Scott,15 Gary Wilder,16 Axel Fleisch, Rhiannon Stephens,17 and Amy Allen, who, in The End of Progress, relies on Koselleck’s definition of historical progress.18 Building on Robert Young’s heuristic premise in White Mythologies,19 Allen conducts here an examination of the way in which some contemporary thinkers – Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth (all from the Frankfurt School), and Michel Foucault were, at a ‘theoretical level’, implicated, on account of their conception of history and progress, ‘in the very imperialism that [they] condemn politically’. 20 Koselleck’s examination of modernity and shifts from eschatological time to ‘modern time’ (or Neuzeit) can also be used as a loose template to explore a fundamental question regarding colonial modernity, its demise but also contemporary resurgences: ‘How, in a given present, are the temporal dimensions of past and future related?’21 These two entities – the past and the future – became the tools for implementing cultural, political, and, increasingly, identitarian projects, and advocate the merits (or otherwise) of tradition and progress. The first part of this chapter will examine what Harry Harootunian names the ‘imperialization of time’22 and, by way of V.Y. Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa, study how colonial capitalism (and the modern concept of progress) 14 See the excellent Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking Up Time: Negotiating the Borders Between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). 15 See David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), and David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 16 See Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 17 Axel Fleisch and Rhiannon Stevens (eds), Doing Conceptual History in Africa (New York: Berghahn, 2016). See my own contribution to this volume: Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, ‘An Untimely Concept: Decolonization and the Works of Mudimbe, Mbembe and Nganang’, pp. 213–236. 18 Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 7–8. 19 Robert J.C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990). 20 Allen, End of Progress, pp. 5–6. 21 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 3. 22 Harry Harootunian, ‘Remembering the Historical Present’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (Spring 2007), 471–494.

Introduction

25

was at the same time promoted and delayed by Christian missionaries posted in the Great Lakes region. 23 The second part will explore French curatorial practices from the late nineteenth century onwards and demonstrate that African artefacts, whilst being the instruments for keeping Africans in an ahistorical zone, provided the colonized with arguments – and ‘adversary’ tools24 – to reconfigure their relationship to past(s) and future(s). In the subsequent part, I shall analyse, via Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Race et histoire 25 and Joseph Ki-Zerbo’s ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, 26 the factors responsible for transforming the methodological and disciplinary premises of African history at a time when the notion of ‘crime against humanity’ was being mooted by the UN. The final part of the first chapter will focus on Georges Balandier’s article ‘La Situation coloniale’, and situate this significant statement against Griaulian anthropology (and its tendency to de-historicize ethnic identity) and the existentialist and intersubjective focus on the ‘lived experience’ of the ‘social actors’ (the colonizers and the colonized) partaking in the colonial situation. Chapter II, ‘Things’, will focus on the 1953 film essay Les Statues meurent aussi directed by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Ghislain Cloquet, and focus on the way in which this work generates a debate on African pasts and futures. The first part of this chapter will examine the functionalist dimension of the film by way of Leo Frobenius, 27 but also L.S. Senghor’s ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ (1939). 28 As aesthetic functionalism became part and parcel of negritude’s identitarian arsenal, I shall explore here the way in which Les Statues resonates with Tempels’s La Philosophie bantoue and Cheikh Anta 23 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 24 See Peter Fritzsche, ‘The Ruins of Modernity’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders Between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 57–68 (p. 61). 25 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire (Paris: UNESCO, 1952). In this book, I shall mostly refer to the translation of this text: Race and History, also published by UNESCO in 1952. 26 Joseph Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, Présence Africaine, 5.16 (1957), 53–69. 27 See Leo Frobenius, Atlantis: Volksmärchen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas, 12 vols (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1921–1928). 28 Republished in Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté, I. Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 22–38.

26

Past Imperfect

Diop’s L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire, 29 two essays predicated on this functionalist premise. The film’s main postulation – that African art constitutes a rigorously ordered whole – closely reflects Tempels’s argument that Bantu philosophy was reliant on the all-encompassing power of the vital forces. Les Statues also pursues Diop’s pan-Africanist agenda and the idea that Africa’s cultural unity is the product of a long historical process initiated in ancient Egypt. Beyond this functionalist viewpoint (which will be discussed further in Chapters II and III), the film, as shown in the second part, also reflects the existential climate of the 1950s and offers an implicit analogy between the colonized – described by Sartre and Fanon as the colonizer’s ‘being-for-others’ – and African artefacts defined by the colonialist gaze, a point which will be further scrutinized via Georges Balandier’s ‘Les Arts perdus’. 30 The subsequent part will assess the long-term legacy of Les Statues and I shall turn here to V.Y. Mudimbe’s exploration of African art in ‘Reprendre’, 31 a piece examining the tensions between traditional and contemporary art in sub-Saharan Africa and the reprise of traditional techniques and motifs by contemporary artists. The final part of this chapter will be dedicated to Duncan Campbell’s It for Others, 32 the art and essay documentary which was awarded the 2014 Turner Prize. Interestingly, It for Others presents itself as a quasi-reprise of Les Statues. Campbell refers to the collections of artefacts employed by Marker et al. to illustrate the culturecidal dimension of French colonialism. At the same time, he deplores the commodification of art in late capitalism but also, and as importantly, posits the enduring validity of the Fanonian/ Sartrean legacy in the world now. Campbell, who was denied access to the British Museum, where he had intended to film the original Beninese sculptures featured in Les Statues, also develops a critique of the way in which contemporary and postcolonial museums curate African objects. 29 Cheikh Anta Diop, L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire. Domaines du patriarcat et du matriarcat dans l’antiquité classique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1982 [1959]). 30 Chapter 4 of Georges Balandier’s Afrique ambiguë (Paris: Plon, 1962 [1957]). 31 ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Art’, in Susan Vogel (ed.), Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (Munich: The Center for African Art and Prestel, 1991), pp. 276–287. Adapted and republished (under the same title) in Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa, pp. 154–208 and The Mudimbe Reader, ed. by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Daniel Orrells (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), pp. 200–216. 32 It for Others, dir. by Duncan Campbell (2013).

Introduction

27

In this discussion, he raises the much-debated issue of their dubious acquisition and delayed repatriation. This contentious question was reignited by Emmanuel Macron’s insistence, in his 2017 Ouagadougou speech, that African objects should be repatriated to Africa within the next five years. 33 Chapter III, ‘Words’, will focus on the language question and on some of the measures implemented by colonial administrations in West and Central Africa to master African languages (notably via the publication of bi- and multilingual vocabularies and glossaries) and promote the expansion of Europhone languages in sub-Saharan Africa. In the first part of this chapter, I shall focus on the writings of nineteenth-century and Third Republic figures such as Louis Faidherbe, 34 Onésime Reclus, 35 and Maurice Delafosse 36 and determine how their views on African languages reinforced imperial ‘glottophagia’. 37 The temporal, and indeed ‘allochronistic’, dimension of this exercise cannot be underestimated for these figures continued to advocate a hierarchical and developmentalist vision of languages. In this discussion, it was postulated that African languages were lagging behind their ‘Aryan’ and ‘Caucasian’ (‘inflecting’) counterparts. The period under scrutiny also bore witness to the emergence of the so-called évolué African intelligentsia who, whilst mastering French to facilitate their own development within the colonial cultural apparatus, were keen to celebrate indigenous cultures and the richness of African vernaculars. In the second part of this chapter, I shall focus on two significant representatives of this tendency. First, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, the Malian novelist and essayist who was instrumental in promoting West African Islam (in Fula and Hausa rather than Arabic) with the support of benevolent, but still ‘glottophagic’, French mentors such as Théodore Monod, the director of the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, and Marcel Cardaire, the colonial administrator with whom Bâ co-published (rather than co-authored) his book on the Sufi sage Tierno 33 See Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Restituer le patrimoine africain (Paris: Philippe Rey/Seuil, 2018), a book commissioned by the French president to assess the feasibility of this wholesale repatriation. 34 Louis Faidherbe, Essai sur la langue poul, grammaire et vocabulaire (Paris: Maisonneuve et Cie, 1875). 35 Onésime Reclus, France, Algérie et colonies (Paris: Hachette, 1886 [1880]). 36 Maurice Delafosse, Esquisse générale des langues de l’Afrique, et plus particulièrement de l’Afrique française (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1914). 37 Louis-Jean Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme. Petit traité de glottophagie (Paris: Payot, 1974).

28

Past Imperfect

Bokar. 38 I shall then, in a second and much longer development, return to Diop and analyse his first major essay, Nations nègres et culture. 39 Like L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire (see Chapter II), this book is premised on the idea that sub-Saharan African cultures have developed from an ancient Egyptian ‘cradle’ located in the Upper Nile and inhabited by black rather than Mediterranean white Africans. Diop employs this Egyptocentric thesis to compile an Egyptian-Wolof vocabulary and make the case, in a move prefiguring Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work on the role of Gikuyu in an independent and post-English language Kenya,40 for the decolonization of linguistic practices in West Africa. The last part of the chapter will appraise the long-term legacy of Diop’s attempt to favour Wolof against French (and a Senghorian conception of francophonie) and explore the significance of Boubacar Boris Diop’s Céytu translation project. Chapter IV, ‘Customs’, will examine the significance of Georges Balandier’s Afrique ambiguë (1957). This book reflects Balandier’s own attempt to emulate Lévi-Strauss and Leiris who, as argued by Vincent Debaene in Far Afield, produced ‘not only a scholarly study of the people they lived with but often a second book as well, a more “literary” work that did not adhere to the canonical forms of the scholarly monograph’.41 This chapter will thus ascertain how this autobiographical narrative – and, particularly, its analysis of the Westernization of Africa – resonates with the author’s other scientific production in the immediate post-war era.42 Balandier’s wide-ranging exploration of contemporary Africa, and recurring attempts to 38 Amadou Hampâté Bâ and Marcel Cardaire, Tierno Bokar. Le Sage de Bandiagara (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1957). 39 Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations nègres et culture. De l’antiquité nègre égyptienne aux problèmes culturels de l’Afrique noire aujourd’hui (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1979 [1955]). 40 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986). 41 Vincent Debaene, Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature, trans. by Justin Izzo (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 4. 42 Alongside numerous articles published in Présence Africaine, Les Temps Modernes, and Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, see also Balandier’s two voluminous monographs Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire. Dynamique des changements sociaux en Afrique centrale (Paris: PUF, 1955) and Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires (Paris: Armand Colin, 1955).

Introduction

29

anticipate the future of the ‘Third World’,43 is invariably concerned with temporal issues and with the claim that, despite its constitutive inequality, the ‘colonial situation’ (see Chapter I) provided some scope for ‘coeval’ encounters between the colonizers and the colonized. In the first part of this chapter, I will examine the way in which Balandier analyses issues of progress and (under)development whilst deploring the environmental ravages of tin mining in Jos (British-ruled Nigeria) and praising indigenous pre-industrial know-how. This discussion will focus on the notions of ‘slow violence’ and ‘imperial debris’ as defined, respectively, by Rob Nixon44 and Ann Stoler.45 The second part will examine Balandier’s assessment of colonial alienation and focus on the cultural dispossession wrought by colonialism. Alongside some of his contemporaries – especially Frantz Fanon and Octave Mannoni – Balandier regrets the all-encompassing effects of colonial guardianship on indigenous customs and rituals. In this regard, I shall pay attention to his defence of FGM – clitoridectomy as practised among the Kono of Guinea – and locate his position within the post-war relativist reappraisal of indigenous gender and reproduction politics. Although firmly on the side of the promoters of heteronormativity and gender dimorphism (a point sanctioned by some myths as demonstrated by Marcel Griaule in Dieu d’eau),46 Balandier’s support of this practice is also a response against the argument, disseminated by Christian missionaries, that excision was an expression of barbaric primitivism. Balandier approaches this ritual as an anthropologist and praises its ability to foster societal cohesion. In this debate, he also shows that customs and rituals, like traditional artefacts and cultural canons, are not immune to contextual factors and are thus likely to be subjected to transformations and reprises. The final part of this chapter will focus on the significance of some Christianity-inspired messianic movements such as Matswanism and Kimbanguism, both borne out of the clash between Kongo and Fang mythological systems 43 Georges Balandier (ed.), Le ‘Tiers Monde’. Sous-développement et développement, preface by Alfred Sauvy (Paris: PUF, 1956). 44 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 45 Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruinations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 46 Marcel Griaule, Dieu d’eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli (Paris: Les Éditions du Chêne, 1948).

30

Past Imperfect

and missionary proselytism in Central Africa. In this analysis, I shall return to the language question and, by means of what Chantal Zabus called ‘glottoplitics’,47 ascertain the limited effects of French assimilation among partially Christianized locals. I shall also examine here the role of translation as an instrument used by semi-assimilated intellectuals to counter cultural dispossession, reappropriate their own vernaculars, and challenge the hegemony of the colonial/biblical Ur-text. Although Past Imperfect straddles the boundaries between scholarship and imagination, there is no doubt that it focuses much more extensively on issues pertaining to history and social anthropology as all the main thinkers examined here were involved in the shaping (and the Africanization) of these disciplines in the period leading to the political decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa. The focus on cultural artefacts is less pronounced even though Chapter II, with its examination of Les Statues meurent aussi, offers a reflection on creativity and the production of a cultural artefact (the documentary itself) inspired by African(ist) aesthetic discourses and ideologies. Overall, there are only a few references to literary works in this book.48 This was a conscious decision on my part but one that does not exclude passing references to African novelists, Chapter III and its exploration of postcolonial translation in contemporary Senegal being the most visible attempt to deal with the (sometimes evolutionist) legacies of francophonie in West Africa and France itself. This priority notwithstanding, I believe that this focus on temporality would be of interest to scholars of African literature since the intellectual context described in this book was also experienced by African creative writers from the French and Belgian colonies. In a recent book, Pheng Cheah argues that postcolonial literatures have a role to play in creating a world – what he calls ‘worlding’ – which is not reducible to the spatial logic inaugurated by imperial territorial expansion and consolidated by colonial teleology and later 47 Chantal Zabus, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 48 Recent studies focusing on decolonization and African fiction (and thought) include: Jane Hiddleston, Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014); Ruth Bush, Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization, 1945–1967 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016); and Phyllis Taoua, African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Introduction

31

globalization. Global capitalism, like colonialism before it, ‘incorporates peoples and populations into the world-system by tethering them to Western modernity’s unrelenting march of progress and capitalist time and violently destroying other worlds and their temporalities’.49 It is my argument that some of the authors examined in this book deliberately disrupt the ‘imperial discursive cartography’ established by Africanism. 50 ‘These processes’, suggests Cheah, ‘which include canonical literature, are a form of epistemic violence that shapes how colonized subjects see themselves’ and continue to see themselves ‘after decolonization’. 51 The ‘Prelude’ to this book, which partly focuses on a special issue of Le Musée vivant, demonstrates that the memory of slavery (and the reality of colonialism in 1948) was used as an opportunity to generate debates between creative writers and scholars/activists. But, of course, this distinction between the creative and the scholarly is a little misleading as it does not reflect the postures adopted by figures like Leiris (L’Afrique fantôme), Lévi-Strauss (Tristes tropiques), 52 or indeed Balandier (Afrique ambiguë), who deliberately broke the code of their respective disciplines to engage in literary examinations of their own autobiographies. This engagement, in turn, contributes to ‘the opening of other worlds’, 53 an operation which, according to Cheah, equates to challenging the aforementioned ‘imperial cartography’ by giving meaning to the world and arguing that it is ‘not governed by a single unifying principle but is instead the effect of overlapping and frequently conflictual processes of world-making that issue from different local, national and regional sites’. 54 This link between scholarship and creative writing is one of the implicit threads of Past Imperfect. Indeed, some of the temporal issues highlighted in this book apply to fiction writers’ ability to ‘reworld’ the world of the subalterns as argued by Cheah55 in his reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. 56 Although the context is different, one cannot fail to identify powerful analogies between India and neocolonial 49 Cheah, What Is a World?, p. 19. 50 Ibid., p. 8. 51 Ibid. 52 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955). 53 Cheah, What Is a World?, p. 36. 54 Ibid., p. 59. 55 Ibid., see ‘Memory of the World: Literature as a Power of Reworlding’ (chapter IX). 56 Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (London: HarperCollins, 2004).

32

Past Imperfect

Africa for both are ‘threatened with destruction by the alignment of global flows of funds for world heritage preservation, environmental and ecological movements, global capitalist interests, and economic development’. 57 Writers like Mongo Beti/Eze Boto, Ferdinand Oyono, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, or Cheikh Hamidou Kane would invariably explore the ambiguity of an Africa torn between its indigenous ‘space of experience’ and a modern ‘horizon of expectation’ to use the loose opposition developed by Koselleck to describe the shift from the Ancien Régime to modernity. This anxiety did not disappear in the subsequent period (1960–1990) but was accompanied by a tendency to reflect on the consequences of neocolonialism as explored by novelists such as Ousmane Sembène, Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Bâ, and Ahmadou Kourouma, among others. This period was also characterized by the emergence of narratives – Sony Labou Tansi’s production being the most spectacular example of this trend – in which the notion of time as a tool to measure human history (and African pasts, presents, and futures) disappeared altogether. The subsequent period (1990–) has continued to display similar features but has also been marked by the proliferation of testimonial narratives focusing on Africa’s recent present (notably in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide) but also by the publication of novels – by such authors as Tierno Monénembo58 and Léonora Miano59 – delving into the African historical past or envisaging counterfactual and/or alternative African futures (see Fiston Mwanza Mujila, 60 Sinzo Aanza61 and Abdourahman Waberi62).

57 Cheah, What Is a World?, p. 247. 58 See Tierno Monénembo, Le Roi de Kahel (Paris: Seuil, 2008). 59 Léonora Miano, La Saison de l’ombre: roman (Paris: Grasset, 2013). 60 Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83 (Paris: Éditions Métailié, 2014). 61 Sinzo Aanza, Généalogie d’une banalité (La Roque d’Anthéron: Vents d’Ailleurs, 2015). 62 Abdourahman Waberi, Aux États-Unis d’Afrique (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 2006).

chapter i

‘Pasts and Futures’ ‘Pasts and Futures’

You are facing the Old Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Walk round its walls until you come to a brass strip set in the pavement. The smooth, gold band in the ground marks the Prime Meridian, or Longitude Zero. At the top of this small hill, you have found yourself at the zero point of the world, at the centre of time itself. Robert Young1

What is historical time and how was its traditional perception maintained but also contested during the years that led to the decolonization of the African continent? These two broad questions will inform this chapter. The first is meta-critical as it will explore, via thinkers operating at the intersection of history, memory studies, and philosophy, the epistemological factors presiding over the development of African history as a discipline during the colonial period; the second question, on the other hand, will rely more substantially on ideas and texts disseminated during the 1950s by French and African intellectuals. This chapter will thus interrogate the way in which a certain historical model developed in the West during modernity – the ‘Newtonian notion of absolute time’2 – became the scene of a confrontation between those who advocated the absolutization of a tripartite temporal schema (past, present, and future) linearly ordered and predicated on the idea of progress, and the promoters of alternative regimes of historicity or 1 Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 1. 2 Stefan Tanaka, ‘History without Chronology’, Public Culture, 28.1 (2015), 161–186 (p. 162).

34

Past Imperfect

‘heterotemporality’. 3 If the latter were often found among scholars and activists (Cheikh Anta Diop and Georges Balandier come to mind), it would be wrong to assume that anti-colonialism necessarily rhymes with the promotion of different modes of temporalities for, as argued by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Western historicism is so entrenched that ‘[m]ost modern third-world histories’ are invariably underpinned by a ‘transition narrative […] of which the over-riding (if often implicit) themes are those of development, modernization, and capitalism’.4 It will be demonstrated in this chapter, then, that anti-colonial movements were rarely able to depart from the developmentalist tropes produced by the ‘mechanistic and regular temporality that serves as the foundation for the conceptualization of modern history’. 5 The Marxian and Marxist discourses of decolonization – whether espoused by Che Guevara, Amílcar Cabral, Sartre, Fanon, Nelson Mandela, and Kwame Nkrumah – were suffused with dialectics-inflected phrases and schemata in which the ‘now’ was still a ‘not-yet’ to be perfected in the future, 6 for, as argued by François Hartog, ‘[p]rogress and revolution march together’.7 Of course, it is not my intention to conflate these figures who, whilst being contemporaries, operated in different contexts. However, it is a fact that they attempted to adapt socialism to African realities and to examine the contradictions elicited by colonial capitalism8 and it is in this sense that ‘activist thinkers participating in decolonization movements were attracted to the materialist dialectical variety of

3 Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 11–19. ‘Heterotemporality’, as a notion, was first coined by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe. In his book, Cheah appraises the limitation of this concept as he argues that the possibility of inhabiting another time (the Other’s time) is made difficult by the dominance of capitalist temporality. 4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, with a new preface by the author (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 [2000]), p. 31. 5 Tanaka, ‘History without Chronology’, p. 162. 6 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 8. 7 François Hartog, ‘The Modern Régime of Historicity in the Face of Two World Wars’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 124–133 (p. 126). 8 See Babacar Camara, Marxist Theory, Black/African Specificities, and Racism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), pp. ix–x.

‘Pasts and Futures’

35

teleological time as a schema for making sense of anticolonial resistance and revolution’.9 Sartre and Fanon, for instance, embraced the Hegelian dialectic to explain historical change and militate for the eradication of the colonial system. Thus their thinking was inflected by Marxist and Marxian principles since Marx himself had adapted the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to account for the tensions between conflicting forces (the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) in the capitalist system and argue that a clash between these forces (i.e. the thesis and the antithesis) would provide the basis for the emergence of a new socialist synthesis. Sartre’s ‘Orphée noir’, a text which would influence Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, is predicated, as analysed later in this chapter, on the analogous idea that tensions between two main conflicting forces – the white world and negritude – will generate the conditions for a new synthesis (a race-less postcolonial world). Equally, it is important to acknowledge that ‘historical difference’10 – the Other’s time (first dismissed by Western historians as ahistorical, then celebrated as a sign of cultural authenticity) – also provided the basis for a ‘metaphysics of difference’ and became the instrument of African identity politics ‘founded on membership of the black race’.11 Time, in its modern and colonial meaning (‘modern’ and ‘colonial’ are synonymous here), will be shown to be a pliable notion that both contributed to the longevity of the colonial system and fulfilled the évolués’ progressive desires. The first part of the chapter will examine the way in which the new historical regime generated by the worldwide expansion of capitalism coincided with the ‘imperialization of time’.12 In this discussion, I shall refer to two related concepts – ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ – forged by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck to describe the transition from a religious to an increasingly worldly (or secular) conception of time in post-Enlightenment Europe. By means of V.Y. Mubimbe’s analysis of missionary presence in the Belgian Congo, this tension between ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’, but also religious and secular times, will be closely examined and appraised against the backdrop of the spatial and temporal implications of the evangelizing 9 Cheah, What Is a World?, p. 197. 10 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 11 Achille Mbembe, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’, trans. by Steven Rendall, Public Culture, 14.1 (2002), 239–273 (pp. 240–241). 12 Harry Harootunian, ‘Remembering the Historical Present’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (Spring 2007), 471–494 (p. 474).

36

Past Imperfect

process. In the subsequent part, I shall focus on the curatorial role played by state-funded institutions like the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro and the Musée de l’Homme in archiving the African past, musealizing its objects, and maintaining its cultural patrimony in a primitive and vestigial temporality. After Peter Fritzsche, it will be argued that this process of musealization, albeit ‘confiscatory’, provided the colonized with tools to repossess their past and develop alternative temporalities. The third part will be devoted to the methodological turn that swept through Africanist historical research in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, a context also marked by the centenary of the abolition of slavery in 1948. I shall explore here the particular significance of UNESCO and the publisher Présence Africaine and focus on some of the strategies deployed by these institutions to relativize the cultural hegemony of colonial powers and call attention to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot named ‘one-sided historicity’.13 Via two major texts – Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Race and History and Joseph Ki-Zerbo’s ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’ – I shall explore the factors that paved the way for critical explorations of ‘modern’ time and progress; and I shall analyse how the examination of colonial violence, and the notion of ‘crime against humanity’, provided the basis for the emergence of a new breed of African historian. The last part of this chapter will offer an analysis of Georges Balandier’s groundbreaking ‘La Situation coloniale’ and assess the theoretical and methodological factors that led him to advocate the development of a more dynamic anthropology. In this investigation, a specific focus will be placed on the intellectual context in which Balandier was operating: his familiarity with the work of the anti-Apartheid sociologist Max Gluckman to dismantle the inauthentic tenets of tribal anthropology and account, at the same time as Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, for the lived experience of the colonized and colonizers. The Imperialization of Time With the acceleration of imperialism in the nineteenth century, temporal hegemony became as important as concrete territorial annexations of overseas domains where the Western ‘notion of clock-time was 13 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, with a new foreword by Hazel V. Carby (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015 [1995]), p. 4.

‘Pasts and Futures’

37

vigorously insinuated into daily life’.14 The gradual acceptance of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is the culmination of a long process of temporal and spatial homogenization that started with the Great Discoveries, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar,15 and the invention of the marine chronometer; and which also became increasingly noticeable with the standardization of capitalist rhythms of work and modes of production.16 In this context, time became ‘a most effective colonizing tool’,17 and one that also consolidated the centrality of the Western world and the superiority of its industrial and scientific achievements.18 It is important to point out here that non-Western nations were poorly represented at the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference held in Washington DC, the international event which established the primacy of GMT.19 If Asia’s interests were defended by one representative only, Africa had no real emissary of its own as the only delegate for rather than from Africa was William Coppinger, the secretary of the American Colonization Society, who, a few years after the Berlin Conference (which also took place in 1884–1885), would write a vibrant tribute to the ‘great powers’ engaged in delivering ‘progress in Africa’. 20 Henceforth, clock-time would assume a universal status and be regarded as a reliable instrument to measure productivity and determine civilizational progress and cultural backwardness, its assumed opposite. 21 Orientalizing ‘discourses of temporal aberrance’22 would develop about 14 Frederick Cooper, ‘Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa’, in Nicholas B. Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 209–246 (p. 210). 15 See Lynn Hunt, ‘Globalisation and Time’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 199–215 (p. 205) – see particularly the section ‘History and Time-Keeping’ (pp. 204–208). 16 Cooper, ‘Colonizing Time’. 17 Barbara Adam, Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 136. 18 See Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2002), p. 39. 19 Hunt, ‘Globalisation and Time’, pp. 204–205. 20 Ibid., p. 205. William Coppinger, Progress in Africa (Washington City: Colonization Building, 1889). 21 On the hegemony of clock-time, see also: David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, rev. ed. (London: Viking, 2000). 22 Giordano Nanni, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 9.

38

Past Imperfect

those – in rural areas but also in the colonies – who had not reached a sufficiently high level of progress and were still, as a result, lingering in a pre-modern time dominated by ahistorical myths and the cyclical return of timeless events. In this respect, ‘Europeans came to associate a failure to keep time with an inability to keep up with time’. 23 The adoption of GMT – which, as Giordano Nanni remarks, was ‘rather aptly named “mean time”’24 – and, more generally, the various attempts on the part of capitalists, colonizers, and even missionaries to impose this new temporal regime of progress, was predicated on (but also further exacerbated by) the idea of ‘the synchrony of a-synchronic events’.25 The emergence of modernity – the ‘new time’ (Neuzeit) theorized by Reinhart Koselleck – coincides with the awareness that the present is made up of mixed and often diverging temporalities or what Koselleck named (after Ernst Bloch), ‘the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous’.26 Although Koselleck gave little attention to colonialism in his examination of historical time and was largely unable to ‘see further than the frontiers of European society’, 27 he nonetheless acknowledged the significance of early globalization in the process that led to the emergence of progress as a conquering concept and metaphor: examples of the ‘Copernican revolution, the slowly developing new technology, the discovery of the globe and its people living at various levels of advancement […] are indicative of the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous’.28 The realization that human development manifested itself unevenly became the very basis of modernization and the horizon against which some notions originally employed to refer to movement – e.g. progress and advancement – acquired a temporal meaning. This spatialization of time was also contingent on a newly recast geography where it was established that the least progressive peoples were to be found in the distant colonies. This conflation of time and space – Stefan Tanaka links this operation 23 Ibid., p. 10. 24 Ibid., p. 2. 25 Lucian Hölscher, ‘Mysteries of Historical Order: Ruptures, Simultaneity and the Relationship of the Past, the Present and the Future’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 134–151 (p. 144). 26 See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1983]). 27 Harootunian, ‘Remembering the Historical Present’, p. 476. 28 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 266.

‘Pasts and Futures’

39

to what Foucault called the ‘irruptive violence of time’29 in The Order of Things – is a process, which became part and parcel of the colonial imaginary (and discourse). As such, it has left powerful traces in representations of non-Western locales to this day and whether these are driven by a Baudelairean poetics – the timelessness of ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ – or by the Conradian motif of the upstream journey to the Heart of Darkness, this imaginary has continued to entertain the fiction of a temporally split humanity. And, in fact, it has persisted ‘in the contemporary political economic discourses of modernization and development’. 30 This ‘denial of coevalness’ – or, as demonstrated by Johannes Fabian, this inability to include the Other in a Western present – has its roots in a tripartite chronological system in which past, present, and future were ascribed distinct slots on an abstract (but increasingly influential) evolutionary line of progress: ‘Here time is a metric external to life and events to which they are adjusted, recorded, and arranged. It is a mechanistic and regular temporality that serves as the foundation for the conceptualization of modern history.’31 This metric was, above all, in the service of imperialistic nation states and their expansionary agenda. In this context, this reconfigured progress-driven linear history became a ‘knowledge system’ deployed to domesticate and accumulate data on the colonized territories. 32 The metric informing historical time functions in the same way as a metonymy. In this regard, Stefan Tanaka argues that history ‘has been a technology that facilitates [a] fallacy of misplaced concreteness’, 33 that is, a process whereby an abstraction (modern history) is confused for a reality – e.g. ‘life and events’ whose order needs rearranging to fit a theoretical model and its structuring criteria. Modern history – Koselleck’s ‘new time’ – is a narrative ‘technology’ called upon to emplot the nation states and their imperial achievements ‘along a timeline of historical becoming’. 34 Its emergence and the modalities of its emergence can, according to Koselleck, be described by means of two concepts ‘without which history is neither possible nor 29 Tanaka, ‘History without Chronology’, p. 166. 30 Cheah, What Is a World?, p. 200. 31 Tanaka, ‘History without Chronology’, p. 162. 32 Ibid., p. 167. 33 Stefan Tanaka, ‘Unification of Time and the Fragmentation of Pasts in Meiji Japan’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 216–235 (p. 218). 34 Tanaka, ‘History without Chronology’, p. 168.

40

Past Imperfect

conceivable’. 35 These ‘anthropological givens’ of ‘possible histories’36 are known in the Koselleckian vocabulary as ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’: Experience is present past, whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered. Within experience a rational reworking is included, together with unconscious modes of conduct which do not have to be present in awareness. There is also an element of alien experience contained and preserved in experience conveyed by generations or institutions. It was in this sense that Historie, since time immemorial, was understood as knowledge of alien experience. Similarly with expectation: at once person-specific and interpersonal, expectation also takes place in the today; it is future made present; it directs itself to the not-yet, to the non-experienced, to that which is to be revealed. 37

This definition must be understood within the methodological parameters of Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte [conceptual history], of which Futures Past is a significant intellectual offshoot. One of the pivotal heuristic objectives of this project rests on the idea that Neuzeit (the emergence of ‘modern’ Prussia) was generated by semantic shifts and that its emergence can be traced in language and in the development of new meanings and words replacing and/or displacing existing usages. The dialectic between the pair Historie and Geschichte is used here to reflect on the semantic implications, for history as a discipline, of the advent of Neuzeit. 38 Koselleck argues that by the eighteenth century, Geschichte would gradually supplant Historie (to render the modern meaning of ‘history’) and that this displacement would also weaken the time-honoured assumption (since Cicero) that history’s function was to act as a ‘teacher of life’ (historia magistra vitae) and a ‘reservoir of multiplied experiences which the readers can learn and make their own’. 39 In this pre-modern sense, history invariably refers to ‘alien experience’ as for ‘that which we cannot ourselves experience, we have to follow the experience of others’.40 Koselleck’s definition 35 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 257. 36 Ibid., p. 259. 37 Ibid. 38 See Koselleck, Futures Past, chapter II, ‘Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process’, pp. 26–42. 39 Ibid., p. 27. 40 Ibid.

‘Pasts and Futures’

41

of ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’ is useful because it departs from a compartmentalized understanding of the relation between the temporal entities informing modern history (past, present, and future) and, of course, his creative terminology – ‘present past’, ‘future made present’, and ‘futures past’ – testifies to his desire to approach these issues dynamically. The focus on the (un)conscious, personal, interpersonal, and institutional factors behind experience and expectation also contributes to a welcome complexification of the mechanical ‘geochronocultural tableau’41 produced by the shift to Neuzeit. Via the notions of ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’, Koselleck suggests that lived time coincides with but also diverges from the quantitative chronology of ‘clock’ time. This subjective and existential dimension of Koselleck’s reflection on temporality possesses an ‘ekstatic’ quality which is close to the way in which time was developed by Heidegger in Being and Time for, here too, the individual is defined by the facticity of the past and the possibilities offered by the future.42 Koselleck argues that the respective significance accorded throughout history to past, present, and future can be examined via these ‘metahistorical categories’.43 These two notions – experience and expectation – ‘are not symmetrical’44 and not ‘to be statically related to each other’ for ‘the previously existing space of experience is not sufficient for the determination of the horizon of expectation’.45 Koselleck contends that with the advent of Neuzeit the discrepancy between experience and expectation grew exponentially. This shift reflects – but, as we shall see, is not completely synonymous with – the gradual secularization of time and the (equally gradual) demise of sacred time: ‘As long as the Christian doctrine of the Final Days set an immovable limit to the horizon of expectation (roughly speaking until the mid-seventeenth century), the future remained bound to the past.’46 The idea of progress (i.e. the notion that improvement would occur on earth rather than in the Hereafter) gained momentum: 41 Tanaka, ‘History without Chronology’, p. 168. 42 See M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. [from the 7th German ed.] by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), see ‘Being There as State-of-Mind’ (pp. 172–179). 43 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 259. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p. 263. 46 Ibid., p. 264.

42

Past Imperfect Henceforth history could be regarded as a long-term process of growing fulfilment which, despite setbacks and deviations, was ultimately planned and carried out by men themselves. The objectives were then transferred from one generation to the next, and the effects anticipated by plan and prognosis became the titles of legitimation of political action. In sum, from that time on, the horizon of expectation was endowed with a coefficient of change that advanced in step with time […] progress was directed toward an active transformation of this world.47

One of the consequences of this rupture is that the present and the future became less dependent on past traditions and that the future itself became the unlimited backcloth against which a path towards human perfectibility would be imagined: ‘Time, as argued by François Hartog in a commentary on Koselleck’s work, [was] no longer a simple classificatory principle, but rather an agent, an operator of a historical process – the other name, or rather the true name, for progress.’48 This process, in turn, gave way to the development throughout the nineteenth century of a number of stadial theories – Hegel’s ‘Spirit’, Auguste Comte’s ‘laws of the three stages’, Marx’s historical materialism – in which ‘man’ was regarded as a perfectible ‘not yet’. In the meantime, and often as a direct result of these teleological theories, the term ‘revolution’, which hitherto had been used to refer to the cyclical movement of stars and planets in the firmament,49 acquired a new significance and became, according to Aleida Assmann, one of the ‘philosophical and political means to break up time, to induce a temporal rupture for the forging, staging and establishing of the “new”’. 50 This modern regime of historicity was also the ‘metric’ applied in the colonies to ‘elevate’ the ‘primitives’ to a higher civilizational stage and plot their historical trajectory onto a pre-established grid. This grid had been refined by several generations of scientists, some (in the French case) working under the auspices of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris at a time when the demarcation line between physical and cultural anthropology was not easily discernible; and when, in a context favouring 47 Ibid. 266. 48 Hartog, ‘The Modern Régime of Historicity’, p. 124. 49 See Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 23. 50 Aleida Assmann, ‘Transformations of the Modern Time Regime’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 39–56 (p. 45).

‘Pasts and Futures’

43

the development of social Darwinism, no definite agreement had been reached regarding the monogenetic or polygenetic origins of humanity. 51 If this situation slowly changed at the beginning of the twentieth century – the word racisme appeared in French for the first time in 190152 – there is no doubt that the assumption that some races had developed less than others retained its currency and that essentialist ideas about the ‘pre-logical’ characteristics of the primitive mentality (Lévy-Bruhl)53 and the totemistic nature of primitive religions (Durkheim)54 continued to hold sway until the Second World War. For colonial supporters and policymakers – whether these championed a system that would subjugate and/or bring assistance to indigenous populations (Jules Ferry)55 or even grant them an associative role in the post-First World War colonial ‘mise en valeur’ (Albert Sarraut)56 – progress remained the unsurpassable finality of a system founded on self-declared (and ‘self-congratulatory’)57 universal values and time. In his examination of the factors that paved the way for Neuzeit, Koselleck identifies a distinction between secular time, progress-driven and future-orientated, and Christian time, which relies more evidently on the ‘space of experience’, that is, on a set of rituals and behaviours whose features were fixed in the past and expected to be reproduced in the present and in the future. Biblical time extended from God’s creation to Judgement Day. Its ‘horizon of expectation’ was thus chronologically predetermined and contingent on the prospect of the inevitable Apocalypse. Neuzeit, on the other hand, is infinite and presents itself as a field where progress will be free to operate: 51 On this society and these debates, see: Jean-Claude Wartelle, ‘La Société d’anthropologie de Paris de 1859 à 1920’, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 1.10 (2004), 125–171. 52 Ibid., p. 135. 53 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La Mentalité primitive (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1922). 54 Émile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Le système totémique en Australie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912). 55 See Gabrielle Parker, ‘Francophonie and Universality: The Evolution of Two Intertwined Notions (1961– 2006)’, in Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas (eds), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, trans. by Alexis Pernsteiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 562–576 (p. 563). 56 See Albert Sarraut, La Mise en valeur des colonies françaises (Paris: Payot, 1923). 57 Allen, The End of Progress, p. 22.

44

Past Imperfect The objective of possible completeness previously attainable only in the Hereafter, henceforth served the idea of improvement on earth and made it possible for the doctrine of the Final Days to be superseded by the hazards of an open future. Ultimately, the aim of completeness was temporalized […] and brought into the process of worldly occurrences. 58

The opposition established by Koselleck between ‘spiritual profectus’ and ‘worldly progressus’59 also suggests that, beyond the rupture that he is eager to underline, the Christian idea of completeness went through a process of sublation. Its overall logic of perfectibility was maintained but, at the same time, it underwent a radical transformation as it was temporalized (‘wurde verzeitlicht’), 60 which means that it was secularized for, as argued by Amy Allen commenting on Koselleck’s reflection on time, the Christian concept of progress ‘referred to a spiritual progress that was to culminate at a point outside of time; Christianity thus opened up the horizon of the future, but the better future that it projected would only be realized after the end of history’.61 The opposition between spiritual and temporal (worldly, secular) progress is therefore real but not absolute. The Church was able to survive the rupture described by Koselleck and to accommodate the advent of a more secularized world and time order. The former model of completeness continued, as argued by François Hartog, to inform the modern regime of historicity: As the spearhead of progress, the Revolution in France is simultaneously behind us, because it has taken place, and in front of us: to be resumed. For some, its defeat means that it awaits completion; it has yet to reach its conclusion. For others that defeat has the contrary meaning: It is necessary to start the struggle over again in order to move it to a new level, beyond its bourgeois phase. In large measure, the Revolution is seen as an occasion for reactivating in a new guise the ancient and powerful Christian temporal schema that straddles the already and the not-yet: it has taken place, just as the Redeemer has already come, but all has not yet been accomplished, far from it. Variants will graft themselves onto this schema, differing from it to greater or lesser degrees.62

58 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 265. 59 Ibid. 60 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘“Erfahrungsraum” und “Erwartungshorizont”: zwei historische Kategorien’, in Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010 [1979]), p. 362. 61 Allen, The End of Progress, p. 7. 62 Hartog, ‘The Modern Régime of Historicity’, pp. 126–127.

‘Pasts and Futures’

45

Sacred and secular times, and their respective figures, remained interdependent and, in this regard, Koselleck detects ‘[b]ehind Robespierre’s vow to […] accelerate the French Revolution […] an unconscious secularization of eschatological expectation’.63 What is important to underline here is that the opposition between ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’ is a convenient construct whose absoluteness Koselleck was keen to relativize. In the colonies, secular progress and Christian salvation were often conflated and simultaneously called upon to serve the civilizing mission.64 Ultimately, though, this unlikely but real and factually attested coalition was a tool to undermine African history and reduce the African present to a ‘not-yet’. Colonial ventures in Africa – whether British, French, Portuguese, or Belgian – were worldly affairs and, as such, predicated on a capitalist logic. However, it is well known that the day-to-day implementation of this resource-hungry system relied heavily on ecclesiastic agents sent over the whole continent by Christian churches and their suborders.65 In this regard, it would not be an exaggeration to argue that their presence partly thwarted the modern logic of the colonial enterprise and its underpinning regime of historicity. Hartog – like Koselleck – is of the view that Christian time favours the present, that is, ‘the already fulfilled’ by the history of salvation over the future (‘the not yet completed’). Indeed, Hartog argues, ‘the already carries more weight, since that “decisive point” has irreversibly changed the course of history. The world has already been saved. The present ushered in by this “already” is consequently a privileged time’.66 In colonial sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, this model could not operate in the absence of comprehensive evangelization and in the absence of a Christian ‘already’. In this context, the indigenous (pagan) present was always read as a ‘figure of lack’67 and for this reason, the future – a future in which modernity, progress, and Christianity would 63 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 50. 64 Walter D. Mignolo speaks usefully of the secular and theological structure of ‘coloniality’, in The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 13. 65 For a focus on French (but also Belgian) missionary ventures, see Owen White and James Patrick Daughton (eds), In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 66 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. by Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 61. 67 This ‘sad figure of lack and failure’ is also the focus of Chakrabarty (but in an Indian context); see Provincializing Europe, pp. 40–41.

46

Past Imperfect

coalesce – was the only possible ‘privileged time’ to be had. With regard to the history of missionary action in Africa (South Africa in this case), Jean and John Comaroff refer to ‘two contrapuntal narratives’: ‘One speaks of a specific Christian mission and its consequences; the second, of a more general postenlightenment process of colonization in which Europe set out to grasp and subdue the forces of savagery, otherness and unreason.’68 In The Idea of Africa, Valentin Mudimbe reflects on the measures implemented by the Church – in fact the ‘regular’ clergy and some of its orders such as the White Fathers, the Benedictines, and the Dominicans – to ‘domesticate’ the Congolese space through a temporalization of their daily existence. Implicitly building on the biopolitical potential of what Foucault called ‘historicité évolutive’,69 Mudimbe argues here that an ‘idea’, that is, a ‘normalizing project’ and ‘panoptic organization’, had to be implemented to follow through this programme whereby space, time, traditions, and memories were reordered to fit the exigencies of colonial and missionary progress.70 This idea – ‘dreams, models, [and] politics fuse[d]’ 71 – also resulted from a fallacy of misplaced concreteness whereby arbitrary temporal criteria dreamed up by Belgian White Fathers shortly after the conquest of the Congo (and foundation of the Congo Free State) in 1885 were introduced to restructure the locals’ horizon of expectation: Village life was now subordinated to the missionaries’ schedule. After the space, which they reorganized according to a new memory exemplified by the Church, missionaries rapidly command[ed] time and its categories. There w[ould] be a religious economy of days, weeks, months, years, espousing a liturgical calendar, and also specific new daily ritual arrangements.72

The temporal expropriation of the Congolese present brought about by the regular clergy was also inscribed in the landscape and in the geography. Like Michel de Certeau, Mudimbe uses rhetorical figures, 68 Jean and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 11. 69 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 188. 70 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 125. 71 Ibid., p. 112. 72 Ibid., p. 111.

‘Pasts and Futures’

47

the synecdoche and the asyndeton in this particular instance, to assess various ways in which the Congolese space could be interpreted (walked and, hence, read) and linked to antagonistic memories and the advent of a new regime of historicity. In his ‘walking rhetorics’,73 Certeau contends that the two figures are comparable to ‘pedestrian speech acts’,74 that is, strategies whereby the (urban) walker creates, reappropriates, and gives sense to space: ‘There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of “turning” phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path […] Like ordinary language, this art implies and combines styles and uses’.75 Despite their differences, Certeau posits that these ‘two pedestrian figures’ are in fact ‘related’: Synecdoche expands a spatial element in order to make it play the role of a ‘more’ (a totality) and take its place (the bicycle or a piece of furniture in a store window stands for a whole street or neighborhood). Asyndeton, by elision, creates a ‘less’, opens gaps in the spatial continuum, and retains only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics.76

In his own rhetoric of walking, Mudimbe focuses on a real place, Mpala, located on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, in the Belgian Congo (now DRC), to ascertain the respective implications of these two rhetorical figures and assess colonial temporal politics. Mpala is hugely significant from a geographical and historical perspective as it is remembered as the site where the first Catholic mission was created during the evangelization of Eastern Congo. The mission is therefore associated with colonial mythology and the joint effort on part of the crown and the cross – e.g. the collaboration between Leopold II and Cardinal Lavigerie77 – to bring in civilization and eradicate slavery in this part of the world.78 73 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 100. 74 Ibid., p. 97. 75 Ibid., p. 100. 76 Ibid., p. 101. My emphasis. 77 There exists a vast literature on his collaboration. See, among many other texts, Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, Histoire générale du Congo. De l’héritage ancien à la République Démocratique (Paris: Duculot, 1998), pp. 292–298. 78 See Philippe Marechal, De ‘Arabische’ campagne in het maniema-gebied (1892–1894). Situering binnen het kolonisatieproces in de onafhankelijke Kongostaat (Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique centrale, 1992); Norman R. Bennett, Arab versus European: Diplomacy and War in Nineteenth-Century East Central Africa (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986).

48

Past Imperfect

This site (of memory) also resonates with the action of soldiers – Alphonse Jacques, Louis Joubert, Émile Storms, and Alexis Vrithoff, who fought against the Afro-Arab slave traders from Zanzibar – and clerics such as Victor Roelens and Stefano Kaoze, the first-ever Congolese Catholic priest.79 Mudimbe incorporates these historical details and insists on the fact that the Mission of Mpala ought to be regarded ‘as a political and religious sign’ and ‘a spatial project’ embodying the ‘new memory’ engendered by ‘processes of conversion’.80 Although only one element of the whole edifice, he argues that the fortress erected under the auspices of Émile Storms on the mission site is a synecdoche for it captures the project in its totality: the conquest and the overthrow of the Afro-Arab slave traders but also the gradual consolidation of the evangelizing process throughout the colonial period.81 Thus, the ‘syn’ in ‘synecdoche’ renders the idea of a historical continuum and implies a conjunction between the different stages of this process (the past and the present of the mission). Ultimately, this synecdochic reading of Mpala demonstrates how colonial propagandists were able to engineer positive and progressive assessments of the memorial and spatial operations underpinning the transformation of the Congo since 1885. Mudimbe is also eager here to approach Mpala as an area extending along a south-north axis, from the forest next to the original village at the southern end to the mission in the north. This other spatial perspective also lends itself to the ‘walking rhetorics’ developed by Michel de Certeau. Mudimbe imagines himself strolling from north to south and decides to interpret this movement by means of the asyndeton and the discontinuities that this figure evokes (the ‘a’ of asyndeton negates the ‘syn’): The inhabitant of Mpala, being Christian converts, officially abandoned the spirit of the earth, which lives in [Mount] Nzawa […] This north, with its new economic, cultural, and spiritual values, took the place of the old system of values that had previously coordinated activity in the south.82 79 About these figures and the mission of Mpala, see also Maurice Cheza, ‘L’Accompagnement armé des missionnaires dans l’Afrique des Grands Lacs’, in Jean Pirotte (ed.), Les Conditions matérielles de la mission. Contraintes, dépassements et imaginaires, XVIIe –XXe siècles (Paris: Khartala, 2005), pp. 93–103. 80 Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, p. 136. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid, p. 138.

‘Pasts and Futures’

49

The synecdoche helps to approach the colonial and missionary project as a coherent whole uniting past, present, and future along a teleological line of progress; the asyndeton, on the other hand, ‘bursts the bonds that hold together the diachronic continuity of events and erases that which brings together’.83 However, Mudimbe is also mindful of the fact that, to return to Certeau’s point, these two figures are ‘related’. The set of oppositions highlighted in this analysis – ‘the north versus the south, the future versus the past, modernity versus tradition’84 – demonstrates, ultimately, that the asyndeton also reinforces the historical logic (and ideology) of the colonial and missionary project and, as such, ‘marks a positive rupture in a progressive plan’.85 In this examination of Mpala, Mudimbe acknowledges this existing interface between these two rhetorical figures: ‘The “more” of the whole presented by the synecdoche, mobilizing ties, conjunctions, and expansion, corresponds to the “lesser” of the asyndeton and its games of separation and fragmentation.’86 This acknowledgement helps to identify some of the major features and strategies – indeed, Mudimbe refers here to ‘Tactics and Strategies of Domestication’ – behind the imperialization of time for Mpala both symbolizes the grandeur of the colonial and missionary project and the radical rupture between the Europeans and the locals. Like Koselleck, Mudimbe holds the view that the separation between sacred and secular time politics is not absolute. However, and this is where Mudimbe’s contribution to this debate is so illuminating, Koselleck’s analyses of temporalization never ventured into the colonial domain and remained, as already signalled, largely Eurocentric. In this discussion on the respective significance of the synecdoche and asyndeton as means to measure the effects of colonization on indigenous cultures, Mudimbe singles out two main temporal processes. Firstly, the operation consisting in positioning sub-Saharan Africans on a geochronocultural grid in which the progressive and ameliorative logic of Christian salvation and colonial capitalism is presented as the only available horizon of expectation. Secondly, the assumption that the African past is ahistorical and can therefore be elided (see the disjunctive and fragmentary power of the asyndeton); and that the material and immaterial traces of this past in the ‘modern’ (and colonial) present are mere relics of a mythical (rather than 83 Ibid., p. 136. 84 Ibid., p. 139. 85 Ibid. My emphasis. 86 Ibid.

50

Past Imperfect

historical) time. The term ‘relic’, as will be further examined in the next sections on the tension between curatorial museography and colonial historical practices, needs to be understood literally – from the Latin relinquere – as that which has been left behind and abandoned. This idea, in turn, conjures up notions of cultural dereliction and ruination and of a past which, as a result, requires Western scientific and archival attention and redemptive guardianship. Koselleck and Mudimbe, then, describe the emergence of modern time which, during the long nineteenth century, became one of the major biopolitical techniques for appropriating and managing Africa. Although largely secular, this process of temporalization was, as examined via The Idea of Africa, facilitated by a Christian teleology. This temporal operation – modernity as the only conceivable vector of progress – was also used to musealize Africa’s pre-modern past. Salvaging the Relics Cultural anthropology and its institutionalization – via university chairs and the establishment of specialized museums like the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro87 or the Congo Museum in Tervuren88 – relied heavily on the notion that African cultures were characterized by their timelessness and immobility. Although this assumption was increasingly challenged after the First World War, 89 there is no doubt that the modernity/pre-modernity binary continued to be entertained well after African decolonization and that this paradigmatic premise was used ‘to deny African societies any historical depth and to define them as radically other, as all that the West is not’.90 An analogous belief informs the ‘denial of coevalness’, as examined by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other. This denial – Fabian also used the neologism 87 See Emmanuelle Sibeud, ‘The Metamorphosis of Ethnology in France, 1839–1930’, in Henrika Kuklick (ed.), A New History of Anthropology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 96–110. 88 I focused on the development of this museum in La Mesure de l’autre. Afrique subsaharienne et roman ethnographique de Belgique et de France (1918–1940) (Paris: Éditions Honoré Champion, 2007), see chapter I, ‘Savoirs Ethnographiques et fictions d’empire’. 89 See Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, p. 72. 90 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 11.

‘Pasts and Futures’

51

‘allochronism’ to describe this temporal operation – is underpinned by a network of binary oppositions: ‘preliterate vs. literate’, ‘traditional vs. modern’, ‘peasant versus industrial’, ‘tribal vs. feudal’, and ‘rural vs. urban’91 – whereby Africans are positioned outside Western modernity and outside the parameters that this contested and over-generalizing construct92 is supposed to represent: ‘the secularization of culture, the release from the thrall of nature, the end of miracles, the elimination of finalism from religions, and the shattering of primary bonds and loyalties and ancient customs and beliefs’.93 The emergence of cultural anthropology as a discipline needs to be understood against this ethnocentric context. The modern and colonial regime of historicity crucially depended on the accumulation of data that were ordered to fit progressive national narratives and temporal taxonomies.94 Official archives and museums became new secular temples where nation states celebrated their achievements and the legitimacy of their historical trajectories by means of datable facts and objects. Of course, museums and archives perform different functions, but they are nonetheless commonly engaged in the act of indexing, cataloguing, dating, storing, preserving, and displaying (the museum more than the archive) that which has been collected and is now identified and open to scrutiny, speculations, and definitional endeavours. These sites were (are) endowed with enormous political power and the latitude to offer free and open access to information and (arte)facts in the name of the democratization of knowledge and knowledge production.95 Conversely, their agents also exercise(d) their constitutionally enshrined rights to delay the release of sensitive facts and, in some extreme examples – the colonial archive being a case in point – to create archival no-go areas and contribute to the constitution of what Sonia Combe named ‘forbidden archives’.96 91 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects, with a foreword by Matti Bunzl (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 [1983]), p. 23. 92 See Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991). 93 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, p. 10. 94 Tanaka, ‘History without Chronology’, p. 167. 95 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 4 n. 1. 96 Ibid. Derrida refers here to Sonia Combe, Archives interdites. Les peurs françaises face à l’histoire contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994).

52

Past Imperfect

The colonial enterprise was predicated on an analogous data/objectgathering spirit; but it was also driven by a will to synchronize the newly acquired territories ‘into an order where heterogeneity [was] recast [and] measured by uneven levels of incompletion toward an abstract future’.97 Material and immaterial (arte)facts from the colonies were thus musealized and archived – the two verbs are synonymous here – in the assumption that the world was made up of divergent temporalities (Koselleck’s ‘contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous’). This assumption – the allochronistic opposition between historical nations and primitive territories – significantly shaped the new ‘museumizing imagination’,98 aesthetic agenda, and curatorial practices. In this regard, it is important to signal that imperial nation states like France developed a two-tier museum policy whereby objects of African provenance were allocated to, and curated by, specialized institutions such as the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (MET), and its successor, the Musée de l’homme, created in 1938.99 The Musée d’ethnographie was funded in 1879 and mainly concerned itself with the material culture of ‘primitive civilizations’.100 The Musée de l’homme, on the other hand, developed a much more universal understanding of the concept of ‘man’ and became ‘the musée de l’homme biologique et culturel’ [the museum of the biological and cultural man] – this was the chief objective of the museum’s creator, Paul Rivet.101 Albeit very different, these two institutions belonged to the same colonial continuum102 and were both shaped by the Francocentric confidence of the Third Republic, a seventyyear-long political regime (1870–1940) synonymous with the heyday of 97 Tanaka, ‘History without Chronology’, p. 168. 98 Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), p. 178; see chapter X, ‘Census, Map, Museum’, pp. 163–185. 99 See Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Claude Blanckaert (ed.), Le Musée de l’Homme: histoire d’un musée laboratoire (Paris: Muséum national d’histoire naturelle/Éditions Artlys, 2015); Benoît de L’Estoile, Le Goût des autres. De l’exposition coloniale aux arts premiers (Paris: Flammarion, 2010 [2007]); Sibeud, ‘The Metamorphosis of Ethnology’. 100 Christine Laurière, ‘1938–1949: un musée sous tensions’, in Claude Blanckaert (ed.), Le Musée de l’Homme: histoire d’un musée laboratoire (Paris: Muséum national d’histoire naturelle/Éditions Artlys, 2015), pp. 46–77 (p. 53). 101 Ibid. 102 See de l’Estoile, Le Goût des autres, p. 304.

‘Pasts and Futures’

53

modern French imperialism. In the geographical logic generated by this two-tier museum policy, African artefacts were often kept separate from objects of French, European, and Asian origin, although, interestingly, the bulk of the pieces collected – looted103 – by Napoleon during the 1798–1801 Egyptian campaign were housed in Le Louvre. This exception speaks volumes and reflects the long-held belief – gradually challenged by scholars like E.W. Blyden, Anténor Firmin, and Victor Bérard, but also Léopold S. Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, Théophile Obenga, Engelbert Mveng, and Joseph Ki-Zerbo – that ancient Egyptian culture was Caucasian rather than authentically African. The latter point was posited by Friedrich Schlegel but also Gobineau, ‘who had both advanced the somewhat circular argument that the Egyptians must have been Aryans because they had been civilized’.104 Beyond this debate, to which I shall return in Chapters II and III – were the ancient Egyptians black or white? – this presence of the Egyptian collections in Le Louvre demonstrates that, for early nineteenth-century historians and their successors in the twentieth century, ancient Egypt and ancient Western civilizations were culturally coeval. They belonged to the same historical line of progress and their respective regimes of historicity displayed similar qualities. As such, it was assumed that they were all characterized by an ability to be integrated into the master narrative of the universal history of mankind. As a result of this view, Egyptian objects functioned like synecdoches of a Western totality. Ethnographic museums, on the other hand, were expected to translate the delayed progress of non-Western peoples. Until the early years of the twentieth century, objects collected in sub-Saharan Africa were rarely historicized. In fact, sub-Saharan Africa itself was seldom deemed worth of historicization despite some notable exceptions like Haut Sénégal-Niger by Maurice Delafosse,105 a work focusing on French Sudan which nonetheless did not depart from the historical methodology and positivist terminology established by 1 03 See the exhaustively documented book by Ivan Lindsay: The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity until the Present Day (London: Unicorn Press, 2014). 104 Robert J.C. Young, ‘The Afterlives of Black Athena’, in Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon (eds), African Athena: New Agendas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 174–187 (p. 178). 105 Maurice Delafosse, Haut-Sénégal-Niger. Le pays, les peuples, les langues, l’histoire, les civilisations, with a preface by M. le Gouverneur Clozel, 3 vols (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1912).

54

Past Imperfect

historiographers during the Third Republic.106 In the first half of the twentieth century, history writing continued to favour written archives. In the absence of such sources – but of course this absence was not absolute and the formidable scholarly potential of the Islamic libraries of Coki, Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu remained largely untapped107 – it was methodologically difficult to conceive of an African history. In this context, African cultures were invariably ‘condemned to orality’.108 At the same time, the use of oral testimonies in history writing was held in suspicion and considered as unreliable and unverifiable.109 Gradually, however, oral sources gained in scientific status and became part and parcel of the research methodology in colonial settings. If this process was more evident in disciplines such as sociology and, of course, cultural anthropology, it also seeped through historical scholarship. I shall return to this changing context in the last part of this chapter. Despite these developments, African objects and artefacts were regarded as the relics of a pre-modern past which was still living on in, or rather alongside, the modern present. Ethnographic museums like the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, where African objects played a ‘clearly marginal’ role,110 became the sites of this temporal disjuncture between sub-Saharan Africa and European modernity. Their collection and musealization need to be understood as the signs of an evolutionary conception of history in which that which has been left behind by primitive civilizations – their relics or ruins – cannot form the basis of any progressive future but can contribute, nonetheless, to a better understanding of pre-modern cultures, an objective pursued by ErnestThéodore Hamy, the first director of the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro.111 The tension between the synecdoche and the asyndeton 106 See Jean-Louis Triaud, ‘Haut-Sénégal-Niger, un modèle “positiviste”? De la coutume à l’histoire: Maurice Delafosse et l’invention de l’histoire africaine’, in Jean-Loup Amselle and Emmanuelle Sibeud (eds), Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998), pp. 210–232. 107 See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘Philosophie africaine: histoire d’une expression’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), ‘Francophone African Philosophy and the Aftermath of the Empire’, special issue of International Journal of Francophone Studies, 18.2–3 (2015), 385–394 (p. 390). 108 Chantal Zabus, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), p. 19. 109 Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 34. 110 Conklin, In the Museum of Man, p. 39. 111 Ibid., p. 22.

‘Pasts and Futures’

55

operates here, too, for ethnographic museums both testified to the power of Western scientific knowledge and the civilizational distance between the West and the Rest. In ‘The Ruins of Modernity’, a text exploring the consequences of the French Revolution on regimes of historicity in Europe and beyond, Peter Fritzsche argues that the beginning of the nineteenth century coincided with the advent of what he calls ‘salvage ethnography’.112 Fritzsche explores here the tension between nature and culture and its implications in the context that paved the way for Western hegemony. Nature here is a quasi-synonym for tradition – and the space of experience – and its logic of cyclical repetitions. In this discussion, the representation and perception of the ruin – whether real ruins or artificial ones in landscaped gardens – played an important part. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the ruin assumed an ‘admonitory’ role: ‘it suggested the impermanence of human effort and human pride, and it taught the moral lesson of humility’.113 Fritzsche demonstrates that this trend was reversed after the Revolution and that nature was no longer perceived as the great arbiter. Indeed, the Revolution marked ‘the end of the ancient régime and facilitated a way of thinking that saw the ceaseless destruction of the old and the traditional in modern time’.114 In this new future-orientated temporal configuration, ruins suggested ‘the fact that things would never be as they once were’ and, as such, they ‘embodied irretrievability’.115 From admonitory, ruins became ‘confiscatory’, that is, the object of a ‘salvage ethnography’, whereby ‘the past was not preserved’ but ‘rendered archaeological’.116 This new type of ethnography, an ‘enterprise’ conducted by ‘the winners’,117 must be understood against the background of the national and imperial logic inaugurated by the end of the ancien régime: Ruins could be read as signs of the inevitability of the forced integration of indigenous societies into higher orders of development. In the chronology of universal development, they were the evidence of confiscation, 1 12 Peter Fritzsche, ‘The Ruins of Modernity’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 57–68 (p. 61). 113 Ibid., p. 58. 114 Ibid., p. 59. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., p. 61. 117 Ibid.

56

Past Imperfect whereby the succession of periods (the chains Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment; Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Urban; feudalism, capitalism, socialism; or childhood, adolescence, adulthood) produces the ongoing obsolescence of the past.118

Ruins from the New World – Fritzsche records here the shock felt by Chateaubriand and Tocqueville119 in the face of Amerindian cultural devastation and dispossession in nineteenth-century America – and ‘obsolescent’ artefacts from sub-Saharan Africa were ‘confiscated’ by scholars and museum curators. Interestingly, this process, whether in Paris under Hamy or in Oxford under Augustus Pitt Rivers – abided by this ‘chronology of universal development’ in which nature and culture (or civilization) were pitted against one another. Collections of objects were classified according to what was deemed to correspond to ‘human “natural” needs, such as food, shelter and clothing’.120 In the evolutionist climate of late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the material culture of so-called primitive and non-industrialized peoples attracted a great deal of interest because it was thought that these ‘vanishing peoples’ were ‘the missing links, or survivals, that could shed light on the long-term development of apes into “Europeans”’.121 In some museums, the arrangement of primitive objects according to their assumed simplicity/complexity – ‘from the simplest to the most complex’ – was preferred over geographical and racial criteria and used to demonstrate ‘the necessary linear evolution of humanity’.122 This approach to material culture ‘rendered’ the past ‘archaeological’ for this line of objects ordered in strata from the simplest to the most complex evokes the excavatory work of archaeologists and their search for a hierarchy of meanings, values, continuities, and ruptures through the ages of mankind. Fritzsche’s contention must, however, be nuanced when applied to the development of curatorial and ethnographic practices in France during the Third Republic. Albeit ‘confiscatory’ and driven by a desire to lay the basis of a progressive future, museum curators and ethnographers (and indeed historians as we shall see) operating within the epistemological 1 18 Ibid., p. 59. 119 Koselleck also identifies Tocqueville as a figure whose ‘entire work is laden with the tension of the modern breaking free of the continuity of an earlier mode of time’ (Futures Past, p. 31). 120 Conklin, In the Museum of Man, p. 38. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid.

‘Pasts and Futures’

57

framework informing the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro and the Musée de l’homme also developed a nostalgic relationship to the past and African traditions. Aleida Assmann explains this tension between past and future by means of Odo Marquard’s Zukunft braucht Herkunft [The Future Needs an Origin] and the ‘compensation theory’ developed therein.123 In this logic, progress and the core principles of the modern regime of historicity are not challenged but accommodated through the development of ‘a culture of preservation and memory’. For the compensation theorists, ‘the homo conservator is the Doppelgänger of the homo faber: Both coevolve within the modern time regime, and it is the dialectical function of one to temper the painful and radical effects of the other’.124 This tension, as will be explored now, became one of the major features of the work carried out by intellectuals and scholars in the human and socials sciences – but also by political activists in France and in African colonies – to question the epistemological premise of the colonial/modern time. The years leading to decolonization (i.e. the period between the end of World War II and the beginning of the 1960s), marked the beginning of a new Neuzeit. Africa’s ‘Present Past’ Neuzeit, as the notion was conceptualized by Koselleck, favours the new, the modern, and progress over the space of experience. This does not mean, however, that experience and everything that it symbolizes – past traditions – became irrelevant. The period immediately after the war was characterized by a reassessment of the relationship between the past and history. The allochronistic dimension of anthropology – the invention of ‘cultural gardens’ examined by Fabian125 – meant that little attention was given to historical change in the analysis of ‘tribal’ cultures. Their supposed ‘timelessness’ and, it was assumed, their inability to convert experience into expectation, did little to promote their entry into historical time. The spirit underpinning the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1945 123 Odo Marquard, Zukunft braucht Herkunft. Philosophische Essays (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003). 124 Assmann, ‘Transformations of the Modern Time Regime’, p. 51. 125 Fabian, Time and the Other, p. 52.

58

Past Imperfect

further contributed to dispute (rather than genuinely dispel) the body of assumptions and prejudices that had maintained non-Western cultures outside the West’s progressive present. The preamble of its Constitution declares that UNESCO will strive to champion peace, justice, and liberty among ‘the peoples of the world’ through the dissemination of culture, knowledge, and ‘the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth’ whilst, at the same time, putting in place the conditions to deliver ‘full and equal opportunities for education for all’, ‘without distinction of race, sex, language or religion’.126 This preamble crucially links the ‘great and terrible war which has now ended’ to the ‘propagation’ of ‘the doctrine of the inequality of men and races’.127 The ambition here, after the Holocaust (and in the midst of early decolonization), was to definitively put to bed late nineteenth-century anthropological tenets and methodologies. Aimé Césaire’s repeated references to the craniometer in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal – ‘I am of no nationality ever provided for by the chancelleries / I defy the craniometer. Homo sum etc.’128 – is useful to appraise the perceived gap between the type of humanism advocated by UNESCO and the place of race in the human sciences before but also after the war (although first published in 1939,129 Césaire’s long poem remained largely unacknowledged until its re-edition in 1947 with a preface by André Breton).130 This uncomfortable racial heritage would continue to haunt intellectuals after the Second World War. In a brief commentary on Alan Burns’s Colour Prejudice,131 Fanon deplores that this author, who nonetheless describes racism as ‘unreasoning hatred’,132 had to wait until page 108 to conclude that ‘we are unable to accept as 126 UNESCO, ‘Constitution of the United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000372956/PDF/ 372956eng.pdf.multi.page=6 , pp. 5–6 [accessed 2 March 2018]. 127 Ibid., p. 5. 128 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land/Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, trans. by Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard; introduction by Mireille Rosello (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1995), p. 106. 129 In the journal Volontés. 130 Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, preface by André Breton (Paris: Bordas, 1947 [1939]). 131 A. Burns, Colour Prejudice, with Particular Reference to the Relationship Between Whites and Negroes (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948). 132 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, forewords by Ziauddin Sardar and Homi K. Bhabha; trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1967]), p. 89.

‘Pasts and Futures’

59

scientifically proved the theory that the black man is inherently inferior to the white, or that he comes from a different stock’.133 In Race and History, published in 1952 also under the auspices of UNESCO,134 and a direct product of the 1951/1952 UNESCO ‘Statements of Race’ and the 1948 ‘Déclaration des droits de l’homme’,135 Claude Lévi-Strauss reminds his readers that: The original sin of anthropology […] consists in its confusion of the idea of race, in the purely biological sense (assuming that there is any factual basis for the idea, even in this limited field – which is disputed by modern genetics), with the sociological and psychological productions of human civilizations.136

In this text, Lévi-Strauss is primarily concerned with cultural diversity: cultural progress depends on a coalition of cultures. The essence of such a coalition is the pooling (conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary, deliberate or accidental, on their own initiative or under compulsion) of the wins which each culture has scored in the course of its historical development.137

In this discussion, he ascribes a central role to structuralist anthropology which, whilst being a tool to understand the development of worldwide cultural and mythical patterns, needs to be called upon to contribute to the promotion of cultural diversity and combat the spread of homogenization.138 Thus, Lévi-Strauss intimates that the higher level of scientific objectivity attained by structuralist anthropology can provide the basis for severing the links between anthropology (in its physical and evolutionist iterations) and imperialism. He argues here that diversity is never ontological but to be attributed to historical 133 Ibid., p. 18. 1 34 See Wiktor Stoczkowski, ‘Racisme, antiracisme et cosmologie lévistraussienne. Un essai d’anthropologie réflexive’, L’Homme. Revue française d’anthropologie, 182 (2007), 7–51. 135 See Kamala Visweswaran, ‘The Intervention of Culture: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race, and the Critique of Historical Time’, in Robert Bernasconi (ed.) with Sybol Cook, Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 227–248 (p. 229). 136 Claude. Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), p. 5. 137 Ibid., p. 46. 138 See Christopher Johnson, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 115–116.

60

Past Imperfect

circumstances and geographical locations. Cultural diversity ‘depends less on the isolation of the various groups than on the relations between them’.139 Cooperation, competition, and the ability to borrow habits, usages, customs, rituals, products, and words from other cultures and/or assert one’s difference from one’s neighbours is thus key to understanding the way in which cross-cultural differences develop over space and time. Lévi-Strauss was famously critical of history as a discipline. The last chapter of The Savage Mind140 (‘History and Dialectic’) offers a dismissal of the overwhelming place accorded to history by Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason.141 Lévi-Strauss argues that history relies on partial processes whereby certain periods, groups of men, or individuals within these groups are given priority over other facts (moments or figures) deemed secondary. Against this one-sided selection, he contends that ‘historical facts are no more given than any other’.142 This arbitrariness at the heart of historical investigation tends to produce ethnocentric views and to generate the idea that humanity is divided between historical cultures and ‘peoples “without history”’.143 History is regarded as being too reliant on surface manifestations – such as freedom and subjectivity – at the expense of myths and other deep-seated subconscious factors, and underlying structures. Race and History (published ten years before The Savage Mind) rests on an analogous premise: race and history, as argued by Lévi-Strauss, are partial constructs, and race itself has no meaning outside the arbitrary and exclusionary logic informing history (that is, ‘modern’ history). As such, this essay ‘engages the question of temporality’ by exploring ‘the West’s understanding of its own historicity’.144 Lévi-Strauss, alongside other anthropologists such as Michel Leiris and Alfred Métraux,145 proceeds therefore to challenge some of the assumptions which have contributed to the hegemonic status of the West and the ‘place of Western 139 Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, p. 10. 140 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 141 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. by Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. by Jonathan Rée, foreword by Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 2004). 142 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 257. 143 Ibid., p. 248. 144 Visweswaran, ‘The Intervention of Culture’, p. 234. 145 Johnson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 110.

‘Pasts and Futures’

61

civilization’.146 This implicit deconstruction of modern time focuses extensively on the notion of progress. If humanity has undoubtedly progressed (in technological terms, for instance), he argues that it is extremely difficult to ‘arrange mankind’s achievements in a regular and continuous series’.147 This discourse, promoted by several generations of historians and museum curators (at the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, for instance), is informed by what is called here ‘false evolutionism’148 and by the assumption that progress is a regular process, a point refuted by Lévi-Strauss: Advancing humanity [‘l’humanité en progrès’]149 can hardly be likened to a person climbing stairs and, with each movement, adding a new step to all those he has already mounted; a more accurate metaphor would be that of a gambler who has staked his money on several dice and, at each throw, sees them scatter over the cloth, giving a different score each time. What he wins on one, he is always liable to lose on another, and it is only occasionally that history is ‘cumulative’, that is to say, that the scores add up to a lucky combination.150

If the theory of biological evolution provides the basis for scientifically accurate classifications of animal species and their development through time, the same cannot be said of human objects excavated from geological strata: ‘an axe’, remarks Lévi-Strauss, ‘does not give birth to an axe […] Therefore, to say that an axe has developed out of another axe is to speak metaphorically and with a rough approximation to truth’.151 This view applies also to ‘institutions, beliefs and customs’, whose development ‘is generally a closed book to us’.152 Progress and development are not only difficult to trace but also highly relative notions. In this respect, Lévi-Strauss establishes a distinction between two notional models of history (‘cumulative’ and ‘stationary’): a progressive, acquisitive type, in which discoveries and inventions are accumulated to build up great civilizations; and another type, possibly

146 Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, chapter VII, ‘The Place of Western Civilization’, pp. 30–33. 147 Ibid., p. 20. 148 Ibid., p. 14. 149 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire (Paris: Denoël, 1987 [1952]), p. 38. 150 Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, p. 22. 151 Ibid., p. 14. 152 Ibid.

62

Past Imperfect equally active and calling for the utilization of as much talent, but lacking the gift of synthesis which is the hall-mark of the first.153

It would seem that Lévi-Strauss’s suggestion does little to dispel the evolutionist binary between stagnant and progressive (or ‘great’) civilizations. Later in the text, however, he provides clarification and demonstrates that this opposition between ‘cumulative’ and ‘stationary’ history should not be understood in hierarchical or racial terms for ‘“cumulative” history is not the prerogative of any one civilization or any one period’.154 Its emergence is predicated on chance – hence Lévi-Strauss’s use of gambling metaphors (‘taken directly from the game theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern’)155 – and its logic can only be explained through the calculation of probability and a ‘stochastic model of historical change’.156 Cumulative societies are characterized by their ability to absorb and make use of other cultures’ contributions so the ‘big question, as the essay unfolds, is how the cumulative societies, in particular, Western civilization, came to exercise the global influence they now enjoy’.157 These two types are the expressions of different temporal modalities and manners of inhabiting time: whereas stationary societies resist historical change, their cumulative counterparts thrive on it. What is more, these models are not fixed once and for all as they ultimately depend less ‘on the intrinsic nature of the cultures to which the terms are applied’ than on ‘the ethnocentric point of view which we always adopt in assessing the value of a different culture’.158 Lévi-Strauss uses the well-known metaphor of the train traveller observing other trains and appraising their respective sizes, either at a standstill or when moving at different speeds and in opposite directions to relativize the distinction between stationary and cumulative societies: to this ‘traveller sitting at the window of a train, the speed and length of other trains vary according to whether they are moving in the same or the contrary direction’.159 Of course, he is not the first intellectual to have identified this human inability to measure other cultures except through one’s own ‘conscious and unconscious influences […] value judgments, motivations 153 Ibid., p. 19. 1 54 Ibid., p. 22. 155 Johnson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 114. 156 Ibid., p. 115. 157 Ibid., p. 113. 158 Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, p. 24. 159 Ibid., p. 25.

‘Pasts and Futures’

63

and centres of interest’.160 However, Race and History aptly captures the tensions at work in the early 1950s for, without being a straightforward anti-colonial statement, this short but demanding text complexifies the very temporal principle – progress – on which the colonial enterprise had relied since mid-nineteenth century. Lévi-Strauss also puts forward the idea, developed further in Tristes tropiques, that modern historicity has the power, if left unchecked, to precipitate the demise of cultural diversity, a point, incidentally, also explored by Balandier in Afrique ambiguë (see Chapter IV of this book). In this sense, the stationary/cumulative pair announces the author’s anti-globalization stance and another binary opposition, ‘cold’ vs ‘hot’ societies, which also challenged modern time and its propensity to favour one-size-fits-all developmentalist models: ‘Cold’ societies border on ‘the zero [of] historical temperature’ and seem to be predominantly concerned with ‘preserving their existence.’ ‘Hot’ societies, on the other hand, exist at a higher temperature or, more precisely, experience internal differences in temperature within the system, from which they ‘extract change and energy.’ They ‘interiorize history, as it were, and turn it into the motive power of their development.’161

Lévi-Strauss does not say that cold societies have no history: ‘we are inclined to talk of “peoples with no history” […] This ellipsis simply means that their history is and will always be unknown to us, not that they actually have no history’.162 He means, rather, that history, as a mode of temporalization and technique to negotiate the dialectic between past, present, and future (and measure the gap between the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation’) is more prevalent in hot/cumulative societies. The reflection conducted in Race and history is also driven by Lévi-Strauss’s ambition to think ‘about the future of cultural diversity and the possibilities of influencing that future’.163 Although not a committed intellectual (in the Sartrean sense of the phrase), Lévi-Strauss contends, quite programmatically, that the transformation of the post-war geopolitical order will need to draw on the lessons from structural anthropology. He demonstrates that in the course of the nineteenth 1 60 Ibid. 161 Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, p. 24. Quoting from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Conversations with Lévi-Strauss, trans. by John and Doreen Weightman, ed. by Georges Charbonnier (London: Cape, 1969). 162 Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, p. 19. 163 Johnson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 115.

64

Past Imperfect

century, capitalism and imperialism were able, on account of their ability to foster large coalitions between diverse cultures, to provide the basis for the development of progress-driven cumulative civilizations.164 He also argues, however, that this world order has reached an impasse as it has increasingly become the vehicle for ‘blind particularism’ and the ill-fated promotion of ‘universally applicable formulae’ which run the risk of restricting ‘the dignity of humankind to a single race, culture or society’.165 In this context of homogenization – nurtured by colonialism and accelerated by globalization – Lévi-Strauss contends that it is incumbent on ‘our international institutions’ (it would seem that this plea is addressed to the UN and UNESCO in particular) to develop new coalitions which, whilst fostering cultural and scientific progress, would also maintain and promote diversity.166 This focus on progress – but here it is dialectical progress – can also be identified in Sartre’s ‘Black Orpheus’, a text whose publication in 1948 coincided with the centenary of the abolition of slavery.167 Sartre ascribed a commemorative role to the African, Caribbean, and Malagasy poets anthologized by Senghor. Their orphic descent, that is, their attempt to remember and reconnect with histories often ignored by colonial historiographers, was presented as the negative moment of a Hegelian movement whose synthesis, it was hoped, would bring about black emancipation and a universal ‘human society’ free of racial prejudice.168 Seen from here, Sartre’s appropriation of the classical myth is not very apposite for the subterfuge of Orpheus, the Greek mythological figure, does little to emancipate black culture from several centuries of Western domination or from the idea (refuted a few years later by Cheikh Anta Diop in Nations nègres et culture – see Chapter III) of ancient Greece’s unsurpassable uniqueness. The Hegelian dialectic is equally problematic. There is of course Hegel’s oft-quoted claim that Africa ‘is no historical part of the world’.169 Beyond this Eurocentric argument shared by other 1 64 Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, p. 47. 165 Ibid., p.48. 166 Ibid. 167 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Orphée noir’, in Léopold Sédar Senghor (ed.), Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ‘avant-propos’ by Charles-André Julien (Paris: PUF, 1948), pp. ix–xliv. 168 Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. by S.W. Allen (Paris: Présence Africaine, n.d.), p. 60. 169 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 99.

‘Pasts and Futures’

65

philosophers such as Hume, Kant,170 and Marx,171 the Hegelian system, as applied by Sartre, offers very little scope to those interested in a long-term examination of black culture and history: Senghor ‘had asked Sartre for a cloak to celebrate negritude [but] he was given a shroud’.172 The synthesis to come presents itself as a progressive process in which, ultimately, African (and Caribbean) particularisms will be evacuated in the name of ‘the future universalism’, a moment which, Sartre argues, will coincide with the ‘twilight’ of negritude.173 Therefore black culture remains a ‘not-yet’ – or a relic – to be superseded by and completed in the universal. In this regard, it is interesting that for Sartre black poets are the survivors of another time (‘the great period of mythical fecundity’) in the same way as African artefacts are meant to reflect less advanced stages of humanity. These poets inhabit an ‘epoch in which […] “the word creates the Gods”’. Unlike their French counterparts, whose inspiration has been restrained by ‘ten centuries of erudite poetry’, negritude poets are still able to tap into the mythical, folkloric, and popular resources of poetry.174 Sartre’s emancipative programme also relies on the idea that African culture and history are dispensable entities for negritude is only a means towards a race-less (and classless) society; its necessary end marks ‘the dawn of the universal’.175 Many post-war intellectuals and artists in Africa and in the African diaspora understood, however, that there was nothing absolute about this universalism – ‘Whose freedom is this universal freedom?’ – and that there was probably ‘some danger in eclipsing the positive content of the second moment in the universalism (even if that is freedom) of the third movement’.176 170 On this issue, see Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ‘Introduction: Philosophy and the (Post)colonial’, in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 1–21; see also (edited by the same author): Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997). 171 See Allen, The End of Progress. 172 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 85. 173 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 62. 174 Ibid., p. 33. 175 Ibid., p. 62. 176 Jason M. Wirth, ‘Beyond Black Orpheus: Preliminary Thoughts on the Good of African Philosophy’, in Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook (eds), Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 268–285 (p. 276).

66

Past Imperfect

If many African(ist) figures – Senghor and others – welcomed Sartre’s anti-racist manifesto, they were however not ‘stifled’ by some of its most ‘peremptory arguments’.177 Indeed, the years leading to the independence of Africa were marked by a proliferation of works – among Présence Africaine authors and beyond – in which the examination of African culture and history was seen as an objective of the highest intellectual significance. Unlike Sartre, they saw no reason why their efforts to explore their past and explain their present through (pre)colonial history should necessarily be short-lived and strictly dependent on the construction of a desirable but still elusive universal future. The creation of Présence Africaine in 1947 bore witness to this multifaceted quest to reconnect with African pasts, dissect contemporary African cultures and produce ‘at the same time a discourse on Africa and a discourse by Africans’.178 The emergence of this publication marked the beginning of more sustained dialogical exchanges between European and African intellectuals. In the first issue, Alioune Diop remarked that the journal was seeking the collaboration ‘de tous les hommes de bonne volonté (blancs, jaunes ou noirs), susceptibles de nous aider à définir l’originalité africaine et de hâter son insertion dans le monde moderne’ [of all men of good will (whether white, yellow, or black) capable of helping us to define African originality and accelerate its introduction into the modern world].179 This collaborative stance was not in itself revolutionary but was, rather, a reflection of the more participative role – and indeed presence – assumed by the colonized in France and in its empire. Collaborators, interlocutors, African intellectuals became also the prime witnesses of the ‘present past’ which, as argued by Koselleck, includes not only events that can be remembered by the living but also, and more importantly for the purpose of this analysis, ‘unconscious modes of conduct which do not have to be present in awareness’ and (as already signalled above) ‘an element of alien experience contained 177 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p. 85. 178 Bernard Mouralis, ‘Présence Africaine: Geography of an “Ideology”’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 3–13 (p. 5). 179 Alioune Diop, ‘Niam n’goura ou les raisons d’être de Présence Africaine’, Présence Africaine, 1 (1947), 7–14 (p. 7).

‘Pasts and Futures’

67

and preserved in experience conveyed by generations or institutions’.180 Thus, the (African) scholars operating within Présence Africaine were invariably the witnesses – and sometimes the victims – of colonialism. Remembering and bearing witness to colonialism was a personal, interpersonal, and intergenerational experience involving conscious and unconscious processes. If it is usually accepted that the 1980s coincided with the ‘memory boom’ in the humanities,181 one must admit that the period immediately preceding decolonization was also rich in declarations and developments lending themselves to some of the analytical tools perfected by trauma and memory scholars. In the pages of Présence Africaine, colonialism, but also slavery and the slave trade, became hotly debated topics. In an impassionate and epistemologically vigilant condemnation of the racist discourses informing the devastation of West Africa and the expansion of the slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Théodore Monod – then director of the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) – argues that lessons from the past will need to be heeded to overcome the time of contempt (‘le temps du mépris’) and build that of sympathy (‘celui de la sympathie’).182 Monod focuses on three historical figures – Chevalier de Boufflers, Dominique Lamiral, and S.-J. Ducœurjoly – who, whilst being known for their philanthropic views among their contemporaries, also profited from slavery.183 By means of these brief historical portrayals, Monod, who adopts here the stance of the sceptical moralist, draws his readers’ attention to the fact that contemporary (i.e. post-1945) attitudes towards racial equality and difference might also be judged severely and even disqualified as ‘turpitudes’ by future generations.184 Interestingly, Monod’s critiques remain very relevant now at the beginning of the 2020s. Indeed, they evoke the responses generated by the killing of George Floyd and the demands, on the part of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, to expose the crimes of colonial grandees such as Edmund Colston, Cecil Rhodes, 1 80 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 259. 181 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 9. 182 Théodore Monod, ‘Étapes’, Présence Africaine, 1.1 (1947), 15–20 (p. 20). 183 On this ambiguity as expressed by Chevalier de Boufflers, see Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 70. 184 Monod, ‘Étapes’, p. 19.

68

Past Imperfect

and Leopold II, to name but a few figures who have captured the public’s imagination. In another piece on Victor Schœlcher, Émile Tersen, who in 1948 had re-edited Shœlcher’s Esclavage et colonisation with a preface by Césaire,185 contends that commemorating the achievements of the abolitionists should not be used as a pretext for complacency: ‘nous savons que si l’institution servile a été, en 1848, abolie dans sa lettre, il subsiste encore dans les territoires d’outre-mer des millions d’esclaves “réels”’ [we know that if the institution of slavery was legally abolished in 1848, there remain millions of real slaves in overseas territories].186 Although the celebrations of this centenary took place in a consensual spirit and were often employed developmentally,187 that is, as a means to highlight a rupture with past colonial excesses, demonstrate the ‘generosity’ of France,188 and sing the praises of the newly constituted French Union,189 the period was characterized by the emergence of a new generation of (French and African) historians, social scientists, novelists, and philosophers determined to treat this ‘present past’ as a ‘hot past’ that ‘does not automatically vanish by virtue of the sheer passing of time but stays present in the “bloodlands” of Europe and in other places all over the world’.190 Présence Africaine reflected this shift, which became increasingly tangible towards the end of the 1950s.191 As I shall demonstrate now via Ki-Zerbo and Balandier, African history, as a field of study, became an object of scholarly contention and a space to voice what had previously been silenced by History. 1 85 Victor Schœlcher, Esclavage et colonisation, texts selected and annotated by Émile Tersen, foreword by Charles-André Julien, introduction by Aimé Césaire (Paris: PUF, 1948). 186 Émile Tersen, ‘Victor Schœlcher’, Présence Africaine, 1.6 (1949), 15–21 (p. 21). 187 See Ruth Bush, Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization, 1945–1967 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 31–34. 188 Amady Aly Dieng, ‘L’abolition de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises d’une commémoration à l’autre, Présence Africaine, 157 (1998), 28–30 (p. 29). 189 See Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 30. 190 Assmann, ‘Transformations of the Modern Time Regime’, p. 53. 191 See Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘Présence Africaine: History and Historian of Africa’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 59–94.

‘Pasts and Futures’

69

In ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’ [History and Negro Consciousness], Joseph Ki-Zerbo, the well-known African historian (editor of the first volume of the UNESCO General History of Africa)192 and first Burkinabe agrégé d’histoire,193 provides a critical assessment of historical research on Africa in the second part of the 1950s.194 This article offers, at the same time, a meta-critical reflection on historical practice and a programme of decolonization. Ki-Zerbo contends that history can be used as a means to rebuild African consciousness and heal Africans of centuries of ‘amnesia’195 and cultural alienation in order to facilitate their conversion ‘de l’état d’ustensile a celui de personne’ [from tools into persons].196 Indeed, he calls for a new historical impetus to rehabilitate African history ‘faite sans nous et contre nous’ [made without and against us].197 From a theoretical perspective, Ki-Zerbo loosely taps into the ideas formulated by Sartre with regard to the advent of a ‘culture universelle’,198 but also Marcel Griaule, Alexis Kagame, Placide Tempels, and the proponents of what Paulin Hountondji would later call ‘ethnophilosophy’.199 We shall return to Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy in the second chapter, but suffice to say at this stage that Ki-Zerbo, without making any direct references to these ethnophilosophers, adheres to the idea that African ethnic groups 1 92 Joseph Ki-Zerbo, ‘General Introduction’, in UNESCO General History of Africa: Methodology and African Prehistory, vol. 1 (London: Heinemann Educational, 1981), pp. 1–23. On this crucial historical initiative, see Ruth Bush, ‘Making History: Performances of the Past at the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts’, in David Murphy (ed.), The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 97–112 (p. 98). 193 Jean-Hervé Jézéquel, ‘Les professionnels africains de la recherche dans l’État colonial tardif. Le personnel local de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire entre 1938 et 1960’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 24 (2011), 35–60 (p. 56). 194 Joseph Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, Présence Africaine, 5.16 (1957), 53–69. 195 Ibid., p. 53. 196 Ibid., p. 68. 197 Ibid., p. 67. 198 Ibid., p. 68. 199 Paulin Hountondji, Sur la ‘philosophie africaine’. Critique de l’ethnophilosophie (Paris: F. Maspero, 1977). The term ‘ethno-philosophie’ was originally coined by Kwame Nkrumah. See Paulin Hountondji, ‘From the Ethnosciences to Ethnophilosophy: Kwame Nkrumah’s Thesis Project’, Research in African Literature, 28.4 (1997), 112–119.

70

Past Imperfect

– whether the Ashanti, Bambara, Bantu, Dogon, or Yoruba – share and abide by a common core of cultural values. Their worldview, argues Ki-Zerbo, is predicated on an all-encompassing ‘notion de temps et du passé’ [notion of time and of the past]. 200 This notion of time, which regulates economic, social, political, and artistic life, ascribes a pivotal function to the spirits of the dead ancestors. In this system, where there exists a clear hierarchical line between the living and the dead, village and tribal chiefs act as mediators. It is also incumbent upon them to preside over the management and distribution of the land which, albeit used collectively, belongs to the ancestors. This focus on land ownership, and the way in which indigenous time and space are closely interlinked, enables Ki-Zerbo, by analogy, to highlight the illegitimacy of the colonial presence for even in the conquered regions, he remarks, land remains the property of its original occupants. 201 Land misappropriation reflects the confiscation to which African history has been submitted since the fifteenth century ‘tant au plan de l’action qu’au plan de la connaissance’ [not only in terms of action but also knowledge]. 202 Ki-Zerbo, who focuses here mainly on West Africa, argues that the absence of written archives had led some observers to assume that African cultures were incapable of producing cognitive mechanisms to record historical events. By way of Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth-century chronicle on the Malian empire, however, he demonstrates the instrumental role of griots, who assumed the function of official archivists and annalist. 203 Like Cheikh Anta Diop, Ki-Zerbo ascribes a significant place to sources in Arabic in his examination of African history;204 but he is also keen to add, echoing some of his contemporaries – Jan Vansina’s oral history205 and Cheikh Anta Diop’s archaeology – that ‘l’histoire ne se fait pas qu’avec des documents écrits’ [history is not just made with

2 00 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 53. 2 01 Ibid., p. 54. 2 02 Ibid., p. 53. 2 03 Ibid., p. 55. 2 04 Cheikh Anta Diop also mentions the importance of Ibn Battuta’s work. See Nations nègres et culture. De l’antiquité nègre égyptienne aux problèmes culturels de l’Afrique noire aujourd’hui (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1979 [1955]), pp. 346–348. 2 05 Jan Vansina, De la tradition orale: essai de méthode historique (Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Central, 1961). See also, by the same author, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1985).

‘Pasts and Futures’

71

written documents], 206 and that oral sources, when used with caution, 207 can produce valid reconstructions of historical sequences. 208 The confiscatory process to which sub-Saharan Africa fell victim also meant that this part of the world was long berated as a cultural and civilizational no man’s land. It is revealing that, fifty years after Leo Frobenius’s celebration of African cultural splendour, Ki-Zerbo still feels the need to accumulate examples of this past glory. This article reads as a tribute to African great civilizations whose ‘dynamism’ was interrupted – and ‘tué’ [killed] – as a result of the ‘violent invasions’ by Maghrebi and Europeans conquerors from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. 209 Since these predators – ‘hommes de proie’210 – had no interest in culture and were not educated enough to record their journeys accurately, the achievements of these great African cities and empires fell into oblivion. 211 Ki-Zerbo is eager to dispel a few myths about Africa. Its so-called backwardness – ‘le retard de l’Afrique’212 – is not to be attributed to the Sahara and to the isolationism that this desert allegedly created between the Mediterranean regions and sub-Saharan Africa, an argument which, incidentally, is still used to fuel the idea of the two Africas: In much of Western historiography, the Sahara was misconstrued as a buffer zone separating two culturally and racially contrasted ‘Africas’. Muslim writers similarly imagined a ‘land of the blacks” (Bilād al-Sūdān), south of the Sahara Desert that separated it from the Maghrib. 213

2 06 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 57. 2 07 On orality and historical research, see Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 86–87. With regard to Vansina (but also Yves Person), Mudimbe, in The Invention of Africa, argued that ‘in the 1950s’, these scholars ‘envisaged a new arrangement of the African past, interpreting legends, fables, and oral traditions as “texts” and “documents”, which with the help of archaeological data could contribute to the foundation of an “ethnohistory”, a discipline joining history and anthropology’ (p. 166). 2 08 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 55. 2 09 Ibid., p. 59. 210 Ibid. 211 Ibid., p. 57. 212 Ibid., p. 59. 213 See Ghislaine Lydon, ‘Saharan Oceans and Bridges, Barriers and Divides in Africa’s Historical Landscapes’, Journal of African History, 56.1 (2015), 3–22 (p. 4).

72

Past Imperfect

Ki-Zerbo shows, however, that powerful African polities – the Malian and Ghanaian empires, for instance – had trade relations with the Maghreb and Europe, and the Sahara was never an absolute barrier but a ‘trait d’union’ (connector) as already argued by Théodore Monod in 1937.214 Africa’s perceived isolation is to be put down to centuries of terrifying violence never experienced previously by any human community ‘sauf peut-être le peuple juif’ [except perhaps the Jewish people].215 This concession made to the Jews is indicative of Ki-Zerbo’s ambition to establish a link between the latter’s persecution and imperial violence in Africa. In the immediate post-war era, this link would, in some quarters, be an explicit element of anti-colonial rhetoric and would be evoked – by Alioune Diop, 216 Césaire, 217 Fanon, 218 Leiris, 219 and Sartre220 – to take French humanism to task and denounce its schizophrenic foundations. This reference suggests that Ki-Zerbo is of the view that imperialism is comparable to – and perhaps more horrific than (‘sauf peut-être le peuple juif’) – the Holocaust. In the wake of the Nuremberg trials (1945–1946), in 1948 the United Nations had defined the concept of ‘genocide’.221 It would seem that, by establishing a parallel between African and Jewish 214 Ibid. 215 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 60. 216 See Alioune Diop, ‘Niam M’Paya ou de la fin que dévorent les moyens’, the preface to Placide Tempels’s La Philosophie bantoue, trans. by Antoine Rubbens (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1949), n. pag. 217 Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955 [1950]). First published in Paris by Réclame (1950). 218 In Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), Fanon refers extensively to Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Paul Morihien, 1946). 219 Michel Leiris, Race et Civilisation (Paris: UNESCO, 1951). 220 In ‘Orphée noir’, Sartre relies heavily on the existential apparatus developed in L’Être et le néant and further developed in Réflexions sur la question juive. I have examined this genealogy in V.Y. Mudimbe: Undisciplined Africanism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 79–112. 221 ‘Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’ See ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’, http:// www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CrimeOfGenocide.aspx [accessed 30 March 2018].

‘Pasts and Futures’

73

experiences, Ki-Zerbo signifies his dissatisfaction with this definition and alludes to the heuristic desirability of generating a dialogue between Africans and Jews on this question of ethnocidal violence, a critical blind spot which was later identified by Paul Gilroy in ‘Black Culture and Ineffable Terror’.222 If his ‘peut-être’ introduces an element of memory competition – the confrontation, as examined by Michael Rothberg, between ‘memories of slavery and colonialism [and] memories of the Holocaust’223 – Ki-Zerbo nonetheless acknowledges the ‘multidirectional’ quality of these different histories. The Freud-inspired concept of ‘screen memory’ is a useful point of reference to examine Ki-Zerbo’s comparison. Here, too, the Holocaust, both hiding and revealing ‘that which has been suppressed’, reflects the two meanings of the word ‘screen’, that is, ‘a barrier between consciousness and the unconscious’ but also ‘a site of projection for unconscious fantasies, fears and desires’.224 And it seems that the Sahara itself has played this role of ‘screen’. Ki-Zerbo, as signalled above, mainly focuses on West Africa. However, it is interesting that in his catalogue of horrors, he chooses to examine the notorious case of the Congo Free State (CFS). He exposes the duplicitous principles presiding over the notion of land property in King Leopold’s colony, where it was ruled that indigenous land ownership would, whilst theoretically complying with the ‘customary rights of the natives’, 225 normally be limited to the portion of the Congolese territory ‘occupied’, that is, inhabited and farmed, by the locals. This concept of ‘terre occupée’ [occupied land], 226 was unilaterally established even though, as argued by Dirk Beke, ‘the “ownership” of nearly all of the land in the Congo had been claimed by [local] tribes’. 227 CFS agents, however, often paid lip service to the norms informing customary land tenure and ‘it was declared that “all things without master” belonged to the [Congo Free] State [and] thus all the land that was considered

222 The last section of the last chapter of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 213–223. 223 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 2. 2 24 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 225 Dirk Beke, ‘Land-Law in Central Belgian Africa’, in Jaap de Moor and Dietmar Rothermund (eds), Our Laws, their Lands: Land Laws and Land Use in Modern Colonial Societies (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1994), pp. 57–67 (p. 58). 2 26 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 60. 227 Beke, ‘Land-Law in Central Belgian Africa’, p. 58.

74

Past Imperfect

vacant land belonged to and could be alienated by the State’. 228 Ki-Zerbo argues that as a result of this legal subterfuge, the locals were regarded as trespassers and thieves – ‘voleurs’229 – whenever they ventured into CFS-administered ‘vacant’ land. This land ownership regime generated other abuses of which the Red Rubber Scandal is, of course, one of the most documented and debated to this day. 230 The state of utter dispossession in which the locals found themselves meant that they were coerced (if only to comply with the CFS’s relentless taxation system) to enter the capitalist order established by the Congo Free State, initially either as rubber collectors, foodstuff providers, or porters. 231 A few years after Auschwitz, and in the midst of decolonization and the catalogue of abuses generally associated with this period (in Algeria, Indochina, Madagascar, and Cameroon), Ki-Zerbo reveals the ‘exactions’ and acts of savagery (‘sauvagerie’) committed by CFS agents in the name of civilization. 232 What is significant is Ki-Zerbo’s attempt to engage with colonial crimes over time – from the fifteenth to the twentieth century – and space (in West and Central Africa) and to suggest that past violence can also be used to explain the present and the very contemporary efforts of the international community (of which Africa was still largely excluded in the 1950s) to define the notion of ‘crime against humanity’. In this regard, it is worth pointing out that Africa’s difficulty to make herself heard was compounded by the fact that the UN had no jurisdictional competence to investigate into colonial matters which, according to its Charter – article 2(7) – were purely domestic issues. 233 By focusing on the longue durée in this article but also elsewhere, 234 Ki-Zerbo identifies recurring patterns in the troubled relationship between sub-Saharan 228 Ibid. 229 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 61. 230 See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); David Van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People, trans. by Sam Garrett (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [2010]); and Robert Burroughs, African Testimony in the Movement for Congo Reform: The Burden of Proof (London: Routledge, 2018). 231 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 61. 232 Ibid. 233 Evan Luard, A History of the United Nations: The Age of Decolonization, 1955–1965, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 75–76. 234 See Joseph Ki-Zerbo, ‘L’Économie de traite en Afrique noire ou le pillage organisé (XVe–XXe siècle)’, Présence Africaine, 6.11 (1956), 7–31.

‘Pasts and Futures’

75

Africa and the West. If he does not explicitly refer to the UN definition of ‘crime against humanity’, 235 he certainly indicates that six centuries of ‘pillage organisé’ [organized pillage] have marked the ‘économie de traite’ [trade economy] between Africa and Europe and that this history has been plagued by enslavement, massacres, enforced deportations, racial hatred, and, as stated by the UN article on genocide and crimes against humanity, ‘other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health’. 236 As indicated above, Ki-Zerbo’s article possesses a programmatic dimension which resonates with Sartre’s Hegelian optimism in ‘Orphée noir’. Ki-Zerbo contends that by delving into their own history and identifying the source of their own ‘spontanéité créatrice’ [creative spontaneity], Africans will be in a position to overcome a state of ‘psittacisme’ and ‘mimétisme’ [mimicry] 237 generated by colonial assimilation and ‘enseignement colonial’ [colonial education], described here as ‘conquête coloniale continuée par d’autres moyens’ [colonial conquest pursued by other means]. 238 Ki-Zerbo regrets the pervasive effects of stereotypes and the analogy established between the Africans’ smile and their perceived ‘minor consciousness’ (‘le sourire “Banania” (Y’a bon!) est le sourire d’une conscience mineure’). 239 He also laments the way in which local culture is reduced to a ‘hors-d’œuvre folklorique’240 and how great civilizational achievements, for instance the emergence of the Ghanaian empire, are invariably attributed to non-African figures. 241 By disengaging themselves from colonial education – deemed not rooted (‘enraciné’) enough in African culture – it is argued here that Africans will be able to contribute to ‘la culture universelle’. 242 This point will be developed in this book via Cheikh Anta Diop and Felwine Sarr. Although this proposed trajectory of cultural emancipation remains reliant on a developmentalist (because vaguely Hegelian) conception of historical time, Ki-Zerbo seems to suggest – to return to the Koselleckian 2 35 See https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/crimes-against-humanity.shtml [accessed 5 April 2018]. 236 Ibid. 237 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 68. 238 Ibid., p. 63. 239 Ibid., p. 64. 2 40 Ibid., p. 63. 2 41 Ibid., p. 57. 2 42 Ibid., p. 68.

76

Past Imperfect

model presented above – that the future will predominantly be shaped by an African ‘space of experience’. Here Ki-Zerbo endorses the ethnophilosophical conception of the African community where the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born are hierarchically positioned within a chain of gradually weaker vital forces including also animals and the world of inanimate things. 243 Although theorized (ontologically) by Placide Tempels in Bantu Philosophy, this notion of the vital forces was already a well-known feature of the available knowledge on ‘primitive’ societies before the essay was first published in 1945. In this discussion, the relationship between the community and the individual played a significant role. It was generally agreed that non-Western societies had not yet witnessed the emergence of the individual and that the development of the individual was the preserve of ‘modern’ nations. In Primitive Philosophy (1935), an anthropological study focusing on the Bantu of Southern, Central, and East Africa, Vernon Brelsford advocates the idea of an all-powerful community in which the individual has virtually no critical agency. Brelsford contends that primitive philosophy is generated above all by the group and is thus ‘phylogenetic’ (as opposed to the ‘ontogenetic’ philosophy of the ‘white person’): ‘it is to be found not only in the thought of the individual, but also in the history of the clan, the tribe and the race […] the philosophy of the savage, he suggests, is a philosophy of the mass’. 244 Ki-Zerbo agrees with the view that African societies are premised on overly communitarian values. He is, however, also eager to show that it would be historically inaccurate to reduce African communities to ‘closed’ systems, organized once and for all, and structured by an ‘éthique fixée’ [fixed ethic]. 245 This vision, he contends, goes against the principles governing the vital forces which are activated not only to maintain but also to increase the power of the community and its individuals. 246 Therefore, it would be equally erroneous to equate Africa with the absence of individualism. This pride- and historicity-restoring argument is important for it allows him to return to precolonial Africa and demonstrate that the great African civilizations were created by exceptional individuals like Mamari Koulibali, the founder of the Segu 2 43 Ibid., p. 57. 2 44 Vernon Brelsford, Primitive Philosophy (London: J. Bale, Sons & Danielsson Ltd, 1935), p. 24. 2 45 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 56. 2 46 Ibid.

‘Pasts and Futures’

77

Kingdom. 247 Koulibali and the other African historical figures identified by Ki-Zerbo were not passive or static characters. If their conduct was guided by the cult of the ancestors (and hence their traditional space of experience), they were also capable of ‘progress’. 248 This notion needs to be qualified, however. Ki-Zerbo does not equate progress with Western modernity or with a modern understanding of temporality. Progress took place, he argues, before the annihilation generated by the slave trade and colonialism and at a time when sub-Saharan Africa could boast ‘constructions politiques au moins aussi valables que dans les pays européens’ [political constructs at least as valuable as those in European countries]. 249 Progress is understood here as a ‘syncretist’ ability to integrate change whilst remaining rooted in African traditions. 250 This ability to reprise that which has been partly obfuscated and confiscated by colonialism will be examined in chapters II and IV of this book. Ki-Zerbo is of the view that the new African historians are indebted to their contemporaries; they have a duty to testify on their behalf to help them to understand the world in which they live and identify a potential future. 251 Thus the new historical research inaugurated by scholars like Ki-Zerbo but also Abdoulaye Ly252 – to name another significant figure contributing to the Africanization of the field after the war – is driven by a reparative logic which exposes the shortcomings of traditional (African) History and coincides with the rise of ‘memory’ as a ‘metahistorical’ category. 253 The analysis of the slavery-colonialism continuum reveals that the past is in fact the ‘present past’ (Koselleck), that is, a ‘hot past’ (Assmann) in which sub-Saharan Africa is described as ‘le terreau sur lequel bien des États européens ont bâti et bâtissent encore leur fortune’ [the breeding ground on which many European states built and are still building their wealth]. 254 This ‘hot past’ is examined to bring to the fore the extensive degree of material and epistemological ruination brought about by imperialism in sub-Saharan 2 47 Ibid. 2 48 Ibid. 2 49 Ibid., p. 59. 250 Ibid., p. 56. 251 Ibid., p. 53. 252 See his study on the French slave trade in West Africa: Abdoulaye Ly, La Compagnie du Sénégal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958). 253 Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, p. 7. 254 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 69.

78

Past Imperfect

Africa. Like Peter Fritzsche, Ki-Zerbo contends, however, that the signs of this ruination can also be used to formulate an ‘adversarial’ agenda and disrupt the neat hierarchy between the French centre and its African peripheries. This decentring process is also temporal in that it bypasses the modern regime of historicity and relativizes its supremacy: In their decrepit survival, ruins also preserved a half-life that enabled repossession if the by-gone past could be seen as the particular prehistory of a potentially different present. The ruins could thus become available for the construction of alternative historical trajectories that had been defeated but were not necessarily obsolescent […] For the ruins to function in an adversarial rather than confiscatory way, it was necessary to make the argument that the ‘ruined’ nature of the ruin was the result of usurpation rather than under-development. 255

In his account of African history, Ki-Zerbo certainly bears witness to the fact that present underdevelopment is the product of six centuries of imperial usurpation. His exploration of Africa’s past greatness – its empires, political power, prominent individuals, and cultural achievements – is also a means to re-establish ‘the sovereignty of the past’. 256 And to argue, ultimately, that African history is ‘une dynamique où l’homme a sa place’ [a dynamic system in which man has his place]. 257 This adversarial agenda was accompanied by a determination to engage in ‘work of provenance’ to restore African material and immaterial culture in its ‘historical distinctiveness’ whilst establishing ‘the evidence of untimely conquest’. 258 This effort to situate Africa within a specific chronology, rather than ascribing it a slot on a teleological line of progress, is also one of the main arguments defended by Georges Balandier in his 1951 article ‘La Situation coloniale’, 259 255 Fritzsche, ‘The Ruins of Modernity’, p. 64. 2 56 Ibid., p. 65. 257 Ki-Zerbo, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, p. 57. 258 Fritzsche, ‘The Ruins of Modernity’, p. 65. 259 Gorges Balandier, ‘La Situation coloniale: approche théorique’, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 11 (1951), 9–29. Later republished under a slightly different title (‘La notion de “situation” coloniale’) as the first chapter of Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire. Dynamique des changements sociaux en Afrique centrale (Paris: PUF, 1955), pp. 3–36. I shall refer here to the English translation of this republication (amended and augmented): ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, in Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa:

‘Pasts and Futures’

79

which convincingly compares the ‘colonial situation’ to a sociological (if pathogenic) ‘laboratory’. 260 This important text, whose themes and arguments would be further developed in subsequent scientific contributions throughout the 1950s and 1960s, 261 proposes to reflect on late colonialism in Asia, the Middle East, and, of course, Africa and to renew the methodological basis of French Africanism. In an epistemological context where concepts of ‘culture change’, 262 ‘“the clash of civilizations” or of “race”’263 grew in significance, Balandier, in the wake of an Englishlanguage scholarly tradition with which he was familiar, advocated the urgent need to produce studies focusing on ‘culture contact’.264 This programme is predicated on an interdisciplinary approach which, whilst primarily aimed at sociologists, 265 seeks also to benefit from the input of history, anthropology, and psychology to gain a more accurate, comprehensive, and dynamic understanding of the factors underpinning colonial transformations in the immediate post-war era. Interestingly, the groundbreaking quality of the new approach suggested by Balandier (its ‘révolution scientifique’)266 was not immediately recognized and it took several decades for its applicability to the colonial, but also postcolonial, context to be seriously (and widely) acknowledged by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. 267 In this article, Balandier regrets that the study of colonialism has remained overly compartmentalized and has elicited very little collaboration between anthropologists and historians. Thus, he bemoans the

Social Dynamics in Central Africa, trans. by Douglas Garman (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 21–56. 2 60 Nancy Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 17. 2 61 Jean Copans, ‘Les soixante-dix ans (1946–2015) d’écriture buissonnière de Georges Balandier’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 833-861 (p. 840 n. 19). 2 62 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 28. 2 63 Ibid., p. 52. 2 64 Ibid., p. 39. 2 65 See Jean-Pierre Dozon, ‘Georges Balandier et la reconstruction d’Aprèsguerre de la sociologie française’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 809–818. 2 66 Benoît de L’Estoile, ‘Enquêter en “situation coloniale”. Politique de la population, gouvernementalité modernisatrice et “sociologie engagée” en Afrique équatoriale française’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 863–919 (p. 863). 2 67 On this slow recognition, see Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France’, Public Culture, 23.1 (2011), 121–156 (pp. 133–135).

80

Past Imperfect

fact that the colonized and the colonizers are examined separately, and that their social, economic, and political interdependency is invariably overlooked. Against this trend, he argues that the colonial ‘situation’ is ‘a complex’ and ‘a totality’, 268 demanding to be analysed ‘in its entirety and as a system’269 for the colony is a ‘global society’, 270 an entity comparable to ‘the total social phenomenon elaborated by [Marcel] Mauss’. 271 As argued by Jean Copans, the word ‘situation’ can be ascribed to its Sartrean usage and, in this regard, it is useful to mention Balandier’s collaboration with Les Temps modernes. 272 Indeed, Sartrean existentialism was also driven by a desire to analyse colonialism and racism, 273 and it is important to signal that for Balandier, too, racism was the founding principle of colonialism. 274 In this conceptual framework, colonialism is described by Sartre as a process predicated on intersubjective relationships between the colonizers and the colonized. This encounter is fundamentally unequal; the status of the colonized is entirely derivative as they remain the colonizers’ ‘being-for-others’ whose ontological horizon is once and for all determined by ‘an inferiority complex with regards to [their] masters’. 275 However, the situation is also an entity to be considered from a temporal point of view and against the backdrop of decolonization at a time when the colonized qua ‘being-for-itself’ is forced to make choices, access agency, and escape the timelessness of mythical time and the undifferentiated temporality of being. Balandier implicitly endorses this explicatory model: ‘an 2 68 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 28. 2 69 Ibid., p. 52. 270 Ibid., p. 44. 271 Ibid., p. 53. 272 Copans, ‘Les soixante-dix ans’, p. 841. Copans makes a similar point in ‘La “situation coloniale” de Georges Balandier: notion conjoncturelle ou modèle sociologique et historique?’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 110 (2001), 31–52 (p. 43). 273 On this link, see Noureddine Lamouchi, Jean-Paul Sartre et le Tiers Monde. Rhétorique d’un discours anticolonialiste, avant-propos by Jack Cornazi, preface by Geneviève Idt (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). 274 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 38. 275 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Colonialism Is a System’, in Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, preface by Robert Young, introduction by Azzedine Haddour, trans. by Azzedine Haddour, Terry McWilliams, and Steve Brewer (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 36–55 (p. 37).

‘Pasts and Futures’

81

essential feature of the colonial situation, he suggests, appears to be its inauthenticity’. 276 Citing Raymond Kennedy, 277 Balandier remarks that the ‘“colonizing” society’ operates on the basis of a ‘series of rationalizations’, that is, ‘inauthentic modes of behaviour’ which, in the name of an ideological fiction (‘the superiority of the white race’), have the effect of spreading ‘a stereotyped image of the native’: the ‘despotism of the traditional chiefs’, their ‘incapacity for leadership’, and the ‘inability of the indigenous people to exploit the natural resources of their countries’. 278 The analysis of this ‘dubious doctrine’279 whereby the colonized is effectively fabricated by the colonizer is of course contemporary to and reminiscent of the work conducted by Sartre and Fanon on anti-Semitism and racism. In Portrait of the Anti-Semite, a book providing the template for his subsequent examinations of (colonial) racism, Sartre argues that anti-Semitism is not generated by experience or the observation of reality but reflects, rather, the anti-Semite’s adherence to ‘an irrationalism of fact’. 280 Sartre deplores this blatant manifestation of inauthenticity: ‘It is thus the idea one has of the Jew which seems to determine history, and not “historical evidence” which gives rise to the idea.’281 Balandier’s dissection of the ‘colonial situation’ also presents itself as a critique of such deterministic – or inauthentic – positions. The analysis of the colonial doctrine, also described as ‘a system of pseudo-justifications and rationalizations’, 282 is an integral part of the methodological programme advocated by Balandier for, as he suggests, ‘there can be no sociology of the “colonized” people unless due weight is given to the[se] ideologies and to the more or less stereotyped behaviour they entail’. 283 In ‘Social Science and Decolonization’, a section added to the 1970 English translation of ‘La Situation coloniale’, Balandier pays a resounding homage to ‘Dr F. Fanon’s book on the 2 76 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 25. 277 Raymond Kennedy, ‘The Colonial Crisis and the Future’, in Ralph Linton (ed.), The Science of Man in the World Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), pp. 306–346. 278 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 25. 279 Ibid. 280 Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait of the Anti-Semite, trans. by Erik de Mauny (London: Secker & Warburg/Lindsay Drummond, 1948), p. 20. 281 Ibid., p. 12. 282 Ibid., p. 38. 283 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 25.

82

Past Imperfect

Algerian Revolution’, 284 L’An V de la Révolution algérienne, 285 in which, Balandier argues, the Martinican thinker explores the links between the revolutionary situation and the ‘widespread onslaught on traditional types of behaviour’. 286 Balandier also praises Les Damnés de la terre, ‘at once violent and lyrical’, in which Fanon attempted to propound a methodology of decolonization, which led him to examine and assess nationalism, national culture, the role of the bourgeoisie, the function of parties and leaders, etc., with the result that the sociology of decolonization became a passionate theory of total revolution. 287

Beyond this important but nonetheless implicit existential framework of reference, the phrase ‘sociology of decolonization’ is intriguing. Balandier identifies Fanon’s sociological inclinations, that is, his focus on the intersubjective relationships between the colonized and the colonizers, and it is interesting that the 1966 edition of L’An V de la révolution algérienne was preceded by a new title: Sociologie d’une révolution. 288 In his biography of Fanon, David Macey argues, however, that this new title is ‘rather misleading’ for this book is ‘obviously not an exercise in sociology in any real sense’. 289 That said, Balandier remarks that this concept of ‘situation’ was first introduced by sociologists operating at the interface between sociology and cultural anthropology. The divide between these two disciplines is elusive. Historically, anthropologists specialized in the cultures and societies of non-Western peoples. However, from the interwar period onwards, sociologists would turn their attention to the subcultures (e.g. those of the poor, prostitutes, homosexuals, or African Americans) generated by Western modernity in urban areas – the work conducted by the members of the Chicago School of Sociology springs to mind. 290 284 Ibid., p. 51. 285 Frantz Fanon, L’An V de la Révolution algérienne (Paris: François Maspero, 1959). 286 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 51. 287 Ibid. 288 Frantz Fanon, Sociologie d’une révolution. L’An V de la Révolution algérienne (Paris: François Maspero, 1966). 289 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2012 [2000]), p. 394. 290 Martin Bulmer, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1984).

‘Pasts and Futures’

83

For this reason, Balandier’s own ‘sociology of decolonization’ resonates with the work of figures such as Roger Bastide, Marcel Mauss, Henri Wallon, Georges Gurvitch, 291 and, above all, Max Gluckman. 292 Indeed, Gluckman’s Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand, 293 a text dealing with a ‘microhistory’ (the opening of a bridge) and the impact of this event on its main ‘actors’ (Zulus and Europeans), 294 would prove very significant for Balandier’s formulation of a ‘dynamic’ anthropology. Here, too, the various actors, irrespective of their ethnic identities, are part of a common social situation, that is, a ‘totality’ – ‘une communauté formée dans et par le contexte colonial’ [a community created in and by the colonial context]. 295 On this point, Gluckman is unambiguous: At the outset, I must note that the chief situation was one arising in a particular form in Zululand for the first time. That Zulu and Europeans could co-operate in the celebration at the bridge shows that they form together a community with specific modes of behaviour to one another. Only by insisting on this point can one begin to understand the behaviour of the people as I have described it. 296

Frederick Cooper argues that in this book Gluckman ‘broke with the notion of the bounded ethnic group and wrote about whites and blacks, officials and subjects within the same framework’. 297 Gluckman was a South African who founded the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester in 1947, a department which came to be known as the ‘Manchester School’ among social scientists and anthropologists. 298 As a communist (and anti-Apartheid) activist, 299 he was naturally inclined to explore social scenes (in 2 91 See Dozon, ‘Georges Balandier’ and Copans, ‘La “situation coloniale” de Georges Balandier’. 292 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 53. 293 Max Gluckman, Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand (Manchester: Manchester University Press/The Rhodes-Livingston Institute, 1958 [1940]). 294 Richard P. Werbner, ‘The Manchester School in South Central Africa’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 13 (1984), 157–184 (p. 162). 295 Michel Agier, ‘Un pont sur la Manche. Vers une anthropologie situationnelle’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 921–932 (p. 923). 296 Gluckman, Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand, p. 9. 297 Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 35–36. 298 Werbner, ‘The Manchester School in South Central Africa’, pp. 157–158. 299 Agier, ‘Un pont sur la Manche’, p. 922 n. 6.

84

Past Imperfect

urban but also rural areas) where capitalism and industrialization had generated new social, political, and cultural practices among Africans and Europeans. 300 This focus on ‘culture change’ – which was to become one of the driving forces of Balandier’s Africanist research in the 1950s and 1960s – constitutes one of the major contributions of the Manchester School. Although Gluckman was trained as a structuralist at Oxford before the Second World War and, according to Richard Werbner (also a member of the Manchester School), he understood his post-war research as being an offshoot of this intellectual tradition, 301 his ‘situational’ anthropology significantly diverged from this original theoretical premise. ‘Prewar Oxford structuralists’, Werbner suggests, ‘showed little or no interest in social problems such as apartheid, industrialization, and labor migration’ and ‘the structure they conceptualized was a normative order, a set of values, or an arrangement of jural principles’. 302 Balandier’s enthusiasm for Gluckman’s approach needs also to be read as the expression of his frustration with contemporary French ethnology and its tendency to evade ‘reality’. 303 The well-known rivalry between Balandier and Lévi-Strauss – the latter allegedly declared ‘tant que je serai au Collège de France, Balandier n’y entrera pas’ [as long as I am at the Collège de France, Balandier will not get in]304 – can partly be attributed to their very different methodological views and treatment of ‘primitive’ societies. In a review published in 1956, Lévi-Strauss appears to welcome Balandier’s Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires:305 Ce n’est pas un des moindres mérites de l’œuvre de Balandier que de nous contraindre à un renversement de perspective: l’ethnologue classique étudiait des sociétés figées grâce auxquelles il espérait éclairer nos lointaines origines; Balandier observe des sociétés bouleversées, mais qui nous renseignent sur les transformations analogues qui se sont produites à une époque toute récente, dans la nôtre. 306 300 Ibid., pp. 922–923. 301 Werbner, ‘The Manchester School in South Central Africa’, p. 162. 302 Ibid. 303 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 25. 304 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘Contribution de Georges Balandier à la genèse de l’histoire africaine de langue française’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 825–832 (p. 825). 305 Georges Balandier, Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires (Paris: Armand Colin, 1955). 306 Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Compte rendu: Balandier (Georges) – Sociologie des

‘Pasts and Futures’

85

[One of the most significant merits of Balandier’s œuvre is to invite us to reverse our perspective: traditional ethnologists studied fixed societies and hoped, in this way, to clarify our remote origins; Balandier observes societies that have been turned upside down but which provide information on similar transformations that have recently occurred in our own society]

Although quite laudatory, this review does carry a caveat. Lévi-Strauss, in the end, still maintains that Balandier’s approach, like that of his predecessor (‘l’ethnologue classique’), serves ‘our own society’ and its ambition to know and understand its remote and recent history. Indeed, it is implied here that, for Balandier and this notional predecessor, indigenous societies have no epistemological autonomy and their examination, rather than being interesting in its own right, is conducted in the service of an ethnocentric agenda. If Balandier departs from the conceptual premises that had informed ‘classical’ ethnology, the dynamic anthropology that he advocates is also different from Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. Indeed, there is little overlap between Lévi-Strauss’s effort to tabulate cultural ‘purity’ and Balandier’s focus on the ‘impurity’ created by cultural and political crises, ruptures, evolutions, and ‘social dramas’. 307 His theorization of the ‘colonial situation’ is predicated on the belief that African societies are as ‘hot’ or ‘cumulative’, that is, as change- and crisis-prone, as their Western counterparts. Balandier was implicitly critical of the overwhelming role allocated to ‘mythical time’ in the work of French ethnologists such as Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen. 308 In a context which favoured static and ordered representations of African ‘cultural gardens’ and gave rise to the ‘invention’ of the Dogon and the Bantu, he was advocating a return to history and historicity and insisting that the study of sub-Saharan peoples should combine, as argued by Ficquet and Hazard, ‘l’histoire du présent et de la longue durée’ [the history of the present and of the longue durée]. 309 This break with French ethnology was articulated Brazzavilles noires’, Revue française de science politique, 6.1 (1956), 177–179 (p. 178). Cited by Éloi Ficquet and Benoît Hazard, ‘Lignes de force et traits de fuite d’un père fondateur’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 795–807 (p. 798). 307 Ficquet and Hazard, ‘Lignes de force’, pp. 797–798. 308 See Jean-Paul Colleyn in ‘Georges Balandier, du village lébou au monde global’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 819–823 (p. 820). 309 Ficquet and Hazard, ‘Lignes de force’, p. 798.

86

Past Imperfect

through arguments formulated in the 1930s by Bronislaw Malinowski in his theorization of ‘culture contact’. 310 Like his British counterpart, Balandier is of the view that it would be absurd to assume that ‘phenomena of cultural change […] could be evaluated by starting from a “zero point”, which would define the conditions of social equilibrium prior to European intervention’. 311 He adds that this would be a naïve point of view, since it was bound to underrate the remote influences, the already existing ‘discordances’, and to exaggerate the possibilities of reconstructing and interpreting the earlier state of affairs. Any reference to an earlier situation, in which the tribe appeared to have been protected from any outside contact, seems to [Malinowski] to be a dangerous illusion. Malinowski protested against the ‘pseudohistorical passion for reconstruction’; for the research worker engaged in studying culture contact, he said, observation of the existing reality was enough. 312

On this last point, however, the two scholars were not in agreement. Malinowski’s functionalism, suggests Balandier, tends ‘to reject history’, 313 whereas Balandier is of the view that in the study of the present, and present past, Africanist scholars must register the fact that ‘modern “colonized” societies are the product of a twofold history’. 314 Balandier remarks that his own study of contemporary messianic movements in Central Africa (see Chapter IV of this book) is approached from this dual historical perspective. Given that this religious phenomenon has been ‘active amongst the Ba-Kongo since 1920’, it is essential to examine ‘recent history’ but, at the same time, ‘the persistence of certain institutions can only be fully explained […] where reference to their mode of operation in the old context is available to the investigator’. 315 Balandier’s insistence that cultural anthropology (‘ethnologie’) should be dragged out of its ahistorical ghetto is also the mark of his political commitment and signals that he has taken on board Max Gluckman’s 3 10 Bronislaw Malinowski, Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1938). 311 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 40. 312 Ibid. 313 Ibid. 314 Ibid., p. 25. 315 Ibid., p. 40.

‘Pasts and Futures’

87

observations on the links between racial oppression (in the South African context), political domination, and the crises generated by racial prejudices in the colonial situation. The problem with French ‘colonial anthropologists’, he suggests, is that, unlike their Anglo-American and Brazilian counterparts, they ‘have devoted too little attention to race problems’. 316 He ascribes this failure to the fact that their research has been overwhelmingly concerned with ‘cultures’ rather than with ‘societies’. However, he hastens to add that this situation is also to be explained by ‘their more or less conscious anxiety not to call into question the very foundations and ideology of the colonizing society to which they belong’. 317 A year before the publication of Peau noire, masques blancs, Balandier notes that racial differences were for a very long time instrumentalized by colonialists to maintain the colonized in servitude and justify the ‘civilizing mission’. 318 In this discussion, Balandier singles out Octave Mannoni who, in Psychologie de la colonisation, 319 was the first French author to deliberately problematize this notion of ‘colonial situation’ within a racial framework (that of colonized Madagascar). 320 This essay, as is well-known, would be heavily criticized by Césaire in Discours sur le colonialisme321 and Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs. Indeed, in the chapter ‘The So-Called Dependency Complex of Colonized Peoples’, Fanon deplores the fact that Mannoni adopts an overly deterministic – or ‘inauthentic’ (in the Sartrean meaning of the word) – perspective in his description of the Malagasy. Fanon cannot accept Mannoni’s contention that the complex of dependency that he identifies in Madagascar is an innate feature of the Malagasy psychological make-up, an ‘original complex in its pure state that supposedly characterized the Malagasy mentality throughout the whole precolonial period’. 322 For Fanon, this dependency (and subservience) of the Malagasy population is simply 3 16 Ibid., p. 46. 317 Ibid. 318 Ibid. 319 Octave Mannoni, Psychologie de la colonisation (Paris: Seuil, 1950). 320 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 22. 321 Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, pp. 37–41, in which Césaire dismisses Mannoni’s dependency complex and compares it to Placide’s Tempels’s ‘idée ontologique’ (41). 322 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann, forewords by Ziauddin Sardar and Homi K. Bhabha (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1967]), p. 81.

88

Past Imperfect

a product of colonial history: it ‘proceeds from the arrival of white colonizers on the island’, and thus, ‘it appears to me that M. Mannoni lacks the slightest basis on which to ground any conclusion applicable to the situation, the problems, or the potentialities of the Malagasy in the present time’. 323 Interestingly, Fanon calls upon Balandier’s authority – in an article published in 1950 in Esprit324 – to invalidate Mannoni’s method and demonstrate his inability to provide an ‘explanation of the colonial situation’. 325 Balandier’s assessment of Mannoni’s essay, on the other hand, is much more positive. He welcomes the essay for its ability to examine racism in a situation of crisis, that is, a context marked by social, religious, and cultural transformations;326 and to identify, like Balandier himself, the way in which the colonized and colonizers ‘exert a reciprocal influence upon one another’. 327 The essay also allows useful analogies to be drawn between psychological pathologies and ‘the state of crisis we have already noted on the plane of the social structures’. 328 What is more, this focus on the psychology of colonialism provides an opportunity to take Africanist research in new directions and away from its traditional focus on the concepts of ‘institutions’, ‘primitiveness’, and ‘primitive mentality’329 and its inauthentic tendency to define sub-Saharan ‘primitives’ as acritical recipients of timeless traditions. From a temporal perspective, this shift could (but Balandier argues that Mannoni does not) open the possibility of identifying individuals (and individual pathologies) and situate them in concrete historical contexts. However, Balandier is of the view that Mannoni’s essay remains too absorbed by psychoanalytical issues and, as such, does not quite manage to translate the multifaceted situatedness of the colonial situation. 330 More to the point, he contends that Mannoni fails to render the specific colonial situation of Madagascar in the aftermath of the 1947 riots, the bloody political uprising violently suppressed by the French military. In this respect, it is interesting to indicate that in the French version of ‘La Situation coloniale’, Balandier 323 Ibid. 324 Georges Balandier, ‘Où l’ethnologie retrouve l’unité de l’homme’, Esprit, 166.4 (April 1950), 596–612. 325 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 70. My emphasis. 326 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, pp. 47–48. 327 Ibid, p. 49. 328 Ibid., p. 48. 329 Ibid., p. 48. 330 Ibid., pp. 22, 49.

‘Pasts and Futures’

89

mentions ‘les “événements” de Madagascar’. 331 The word ‘événements’ [events] is symptomatic of the French official colonial discourse and its tendency to employ coded expressions (or langue de bois) to refer to tragic historical moments – the Algerian war of independence was, for instance, also referred to as ‘les événements’. 332 His use of quotation marks (‘les événements’) clearly indicates, however, that Balandier does not wish to be associated with this obfuscatory practice. He is of the view that occurrences such as the 1947 rebellion in Madagascar can be explained if the right methodology is applied. 333 The issue here is that Mannoni, although well-intentioned, was too dependent on psychoanalysis at the expense of historical facts, a view also validated by Maurice Bloch in the foreword to the English translation of Psychologie de la colonisation. 334 Like Fanon, then, Balandier argues that the study of colonialism must be captured through the lived experiences of its main actors and (agents of change) and that in this process, it is ‘essential to return to the concrete [and] consider particular “situations”’. 335 With regard to Mannoni’s unreasonable use of psychoanalytical constructs, Fanon, who was at the same time psychiatrist and existentialist, cautions not to ‘lose sight of the real’. 336 ‘The rifle of the Senegalese soldier’, he warns, ‘is not a penis but a genuine rifle, model Lebel 1916’. 337 In sum, the ‘colonial situation’, as theorized by Balandier, emerged at a time when French colonialism, as an idea, was on the wane. 338 By demanding a return to the real and concrete factors underpinning the 3 31 Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire, p. 18. This reference was left out of the English translation. 332 See Miquel Calçada, ‘Analysis of the Algerian War of Independence or Les Événements: A Lost Opportunity for Peace’, Journal of Conflictology, 3.2 (2012), 52–61. 333 Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire, p. 18. They are only, he argues, ‘inexplicables en apparence’ [apparently inexplicable]. Also left out of the English translation. 334 Maurice Bloch, ‘New Foreword’, in Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. by Pamela Powesland, with a new foreword by Maurice Bloch (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), pp. v–xx (p. vi). 335 Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, p. 50. 336 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 61. 337 Ibid., p. 79. 338 See Natacha Gagné and Marie Salaün, ‘L’Effacement du “colonial” ou “seulement de ses formes les plus apparentes”? Penser le contemporain grâce à la notion de situation coloniale chez Georges Balandier’, Revue Internationale d’Anthropologie Culturelle & Sociale – CARGO, 6–7 (2017), 219–237.

90

Past Imperfect

colonial situation in Africa and beyond, Balandier was less interested in colonialism per se than in its transformations over time and space. Although eager to explore issues of racial and economic domination and the ‘pseudo-rationalizations’ expounded by colonial advocates to legitimize the imperial system and its segregationist basis, Balandier was, ultimately, driven by an ambition to identify the dynamic constraints threatening the stability of colonialism. The colonial ‘totality’ is a space where goods, ideas, and words are exchanged by actors whose behaviours are observed to measure the way in which modernity, in its national, imperial, and (increasingly) globalized guises, is, at the same time, real but also elusive. ***** In this chapter I have focused extensively on the link between time – as a coercive ‘technology’ of biopower – and imperialism. The ‘absolutization’ of modern time gained momentum in the nineteenth century and, in the French context, this process reached its peak during the Third Republic. This chronological revolution had far-reaching consequences and further consolidated the geopolitical and epistemological hegemony of France – and Belgium – over the colonies. In this context, the human and social sciences – history but also ethnology and museology, as we have seen – became the implicit and sometimes explicit levers of the new evolutionist tenets propagated by what Koselleck named Neuzeit, whereby a new hierarchy was established between the past, the present, and the future and the associated notions of ‘experience’ and ‘expectations’ but also stationary/cold or cumulative/hot history (Lévi-Strauss). In Neuzeit, experience (or past traditions) was partly discarded in favour of the present and, above all, the future. The present was now at the service of the future and was thus expected to offer the necessary resources for the planning and delivery of ‘progress’, another key notion forged during this era of change. This investment in the future had disastrous consequences for peoples deemed to be at the periphery of modernity. On this fictitious temporal line elicited by a modern ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’, sub-Saharan cultures were ascribed to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot called the ‘savage slot’. 339 This development, with its befores and afters, 3 39 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

‘Pasts and Futures’

91

was accompanied by a spatialization of time and a temporalization of space, as demonstrated through Mudimbe’s use of the synecdoche and asyndeton. The primitive was the product of this invention in which the idea of a racialized other preceded concrete evidence. The most palpable manifestation of this process was also temporal for it was assumed that the primitive’s present would provide materials to understand and even reconstruct our past. This ‘allochronistic’ assumption (Fabian) ran very deeply and affected most exegeses of African material and immaterial culture. The principles presiding over the archivization/musealization of this heritage reflected the new regime of historicity – and temporalization, whether secular or religious – generated by colonial modernity. African primitiveness and preliteracy were invariably interpreted as signs of Africa’s mythical and ahistorical timelessness and/or incompletion. This ‘figure of lack’ persisted after the Second World War but its scientific validity was dismissed by a new generation of intellectuals – Balandier (social anthropology), Fanon (psychoanalysis), Ki-Zerbo (history), Lévi-Strauss (structural anthropology), and Sartre (existentialism) – operating in the various anti-colonial cenacles alluded to in this chapter and in this book. Progress itself was reimagined as a realm where cultural diversity (Lévi-Strauss) and the development of a ‘black consciousness’ (Ki-Zerbo) would be nurtured. African ‘ruins’ were reappraised, and it was noted that they were also relics, that is, significant remnants, of better times and greater civilizations. From ‘confiscatory’, the ruins became ‘adversarial’, an epistemological rupture which paved the way for fresh investigations in which scholarship and political activism were mobilized to construe an African historicity – as posited by Ki-Zerbo – not completely contingent on Western developmentalist schemata. Post-war Europe never recovered from the Holocaust. Its ‘lessons’ were not heeded and other événements occurred in Madagascar, Indochina, Algeria, and Cameroon, when, ironically, it was hoped that the centenary of the abolition of slavery in 1948 would herald a new beginning for African historiography. At a time when the notion of crime against humanity was being mooted by United Nations delegates, French wars of decolonization triggered new tragedies whilst conjuring up memories of ancient wounds. These had lain in a state of semi-dormancy in the African (and, indeed, Caribbean) ‘present past’. It is my contention that, from the perspective of the colonized, this present past was a ‘hot past’ which, incidentally, annulled the idea of ‘cold societies’ and inaugurated the reparative logic which has characterized research in African history until today.

chapter ii

‘Things’ ‘Things’

Tant qu’on est pas mort, il faut rester vivant. Sony Labou Tansi1

This chapter focuses on the 1953 film essay Les Statues meurent aussi by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, two acclaimed French directors, and the award-winning Belgian photographer Ghislain Cloquet. 2 The film was commissioned by Présence Africaine, the publisher and academic journal which would radically transform France’s post-war intellectual landscape and pave the way for a wholesale reassessment of the relationship between Africa and the West in the arts, literature, the human sciences, and philosophy. Les Statues, which will be analysed here to ascertain ‘how, in a given present, the temporal dimensions of past and future [are] related’, 3 resonates with the main concerns of this period: it embraces its ethno-philosophical mood, bemoans the commodification of African art in European museums, calls for the establishment of a new humanism, but also militates for a more equitable and post-racial world order. The documentary, and the mournful discussion that it conducts on the imminent death of African art, will be appraised against a set of viewpoints by Placide Tempels,4 1 Sony Labou Tansi, La Parenthèse de sang (Paris: Hatier International, 2002 [1981]), p. 38. 2 Les Statues meurent aussi, dir. by Chris Marker, Ghislain Cloquet, and Alain Resnais (1953). 3 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1983]), p. 3. 4 Placide Tempels, La Philosophie bantoue, trans. A. Rubbens; preface

94

Past Imperfect

Cheikh Anta Diop, 5 Georges Balandier, 6 and V.Y. Mudimbe.7 The chapter will also examine the long-term legacy of Les Statues and consider the response by the Irish video artist Duncan Campbell in It for Others, his 2014 Turner Prize-winning essay film.8 Les Statues, a thirty-minute documentary, which was awarded the 1954 prix Jean Vigo, captures the mindset of an epoch which also coincided with the emergence of anti-colonial thought and African philosophy. If it taps into a repository of conventional views and assumptions on African art, it also announces future debates, in and out of Africa, on cultural authenticity and the emergence of post-authentic African artistic trends. This dialogue between past, present, and future will significantly inform this analysis as it will be shown here that African art, as an object of study, problematizes our understanding of the colonial ‘regime of historicity’ and the disjuncture, but also possible links, between ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’ (as defined by Koselleck). The documentary reopens the historical argument examined in Chapter I and particularly the idea (put forward by Joseph Ki-Zerbo in ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’) that the ravages generated by colonial violence seriously impacted our ability to make sense of African history and establish its precise chronology. In a sequence of nearly five minutes Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Alioune Diop (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2013 [1949]). The English translation will be used in this chapter: Bantu Philosophy, trans. (and with a foreword) by Margaret Read (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959). 5 Cheikh Anta Diop, L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire. Domaines du patriarcat et du matriarcat dans l’antiquité classique (Paris: Présence Africaine (1982 [1959]). I shall refer here to the translation into English: The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa: The Domain of Patriarchy and Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962) and cite it as CUNA in the main body of the text. 6 Georges Balandier, Afrique ambiguë (Paris: Plon, 1957). The English translation will be used in this chapter: Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision, trans. by Helen Weaver (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966) and I shall cite it as AA in the main body of the text. 7 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Art’, in Susan Vogel (ed.), Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (Munich: The Center for African Art and Prestel, 1991), pp. 276–287. It was also published as a chapter of Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). In this chapter, I shall use the version included in The Mudimbe Reader, ed. by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Dan Orrells (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), pp. 200–216. 8 Duncan Campbell (dir.), It for Others (2013).

‘Things’

95

focusing on artefacts from Benin and Ife (Nigeria), the documentary deplores that: Ces grands empires sont les royaumes les plus morts de l’histoire. Contemporains de Saint Louis et de Jeanne d’Arc, ils nous sont plus inconnus que Sumer et Babylone. Au siècle dernier, les flammes des conquérants ont fait de tout ce passé une énigme absolue.9 [These great empires are the most lost to history. Contemporaries of Saint Louis and Joan of Arc, they are even more unknown to us than those of Sumer and Babylon. Last century, the flames of the conquerors turned this whole past into an absolute enigma]

The claim that Ife and Benin were still historical enigmas when the documentary was released in 1953 is unfounded10 for, as Jan Vansina notes, ‘the looting of Benin by a British expedition in 1897 led to the realization that there was art in Africa’.11 However, there is no doubt that the connection established here between these former African empires and their ability to produce great and durable art contributed to dismantle prevailing assumptions disseminated by evolutionist historiographers such as the proponents of the Hamitic theory, who contended that African cultural achievements were to be attributed to ‘white blacks’ of Aryan origin.12 Leo Frobenius, for instance, had suggested that bronze figures from Ife and Benin were too symmetrical to be authentically African and that these Yoruba objects had thus to be credited to an ancient Greek artistic tradition transplanted to Yorubaland after the 9 Chris Marker, Commentaires 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 9–25. In this chapter, I will use the same commentary by Marker: ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’ – reproduced in the exhibition catalogue dedicated to Les Statues meurent aussi, Ode au grand art africain: Les Statues meurent aussi, ed. by Elena Martínez-Jacquet et al. (Arquennes: Primedia SPRL, 2010), pp. 27–32. For the English translation of this commentary, I have used, and often adapted, the English subtitles of the documentary. See: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LkkIDfY8ifQ [accessed 12 July 2019]. 10 For a history of these artefacts, see Suzanne Preston Blier, Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, c. 1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See also Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 11 Jan Vansina, Art History in Africa: An Introduction to Method (London: Longman, 1984), p. 19. My emphasis. 12 See François-Xavier Fauvelle, L’Afrique de Cheikh Anta Diop, preface by Elikia M’Bokolo (Paris: Khartala, 1996), pp. 130–136.

96

Past Imperfect

fall of Atlantis.13 The documentary reminds its viewers of this paradox: early accounts spoke of ‘apparitions diaboliques’ but when explorers came to Africa they also found ‘nations’ and ‘palais’ [palaces].14 Les Statues, then, is an instructive document with which to look back at the critical status of African art in the long twentieth century and ascertain the views that it generated in works by anthropologists, art historians, and philosophers. Les Statues, while not a ‘text’ about philosophy or African philosophy, is a documentary that provokes philosophical reflections. The main purpose of this chapter is to interrogate this short film to bring out this philosophical content. There is first the ontological question and the idea of a distinct African mode of ‘being’, an argument that will be investigated via Sartre’s emancipative examination of subjectivity and colonialism but also, and more substantially, through a focus on Placide Tempels’s ethnophilosophy. Secondly, there is the epistemological issue. The documentary and the various positions that it adopts with regard to African art and culture is close not only to Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy but also to Cheikh Anta Diop’s ideas about the uniqueness of African civilization in The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa. The significant point here is that these texts, however different they might be, all resulted from the same epistemological terrain and were also driven by an analogous ambition to define the contours of an authentically African cultural and aesthetic continuum. Georges Balandier’s reflections on the category ‘African art’ in Afrique ambiguë (1957) will be called upon to appraise the temporal dimension underpinning this analysis of African aesthetic authenticity. Balandier explicitly argues here that artistic creativity in African urban centres bears witness to innovative practices in which the divides between the authentic past and the modernist present became increasingly blurred and paved the way for the emergence of hybrid reappropriations. In the second part, this set of pronouncements will be read against V.Y. Mudimbe’s essay ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies in 13 See Leo Frobenius, Atlantis: Volksmärchen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas, 12 vols (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1921–1928). On this historical falsification, see Valentin Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 13. On Frobenius’s aesthetic agenda, see Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 17–18. 14 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, p. 28.

‘Things’

97

Contemporary African Arts’, in which the notion of creative reappropriations is further explored. Thirty years after African independence, Mudimbe, who, like Franz Crahay,15 Fabien Eboussi-Boulaga,16 Marcien Towa,17 and Paulin Hountondji,18 has often adopted a critical stance towards ethnophilosophy, is able to take stock and appraise the many responses generated by African art in the second half of the twentieth century. Mudimbe does not focus on Les Statues but his work is nevertheless able to reflect on the entanglements amongst African decolonization, ideology, and aesthetics. Alongside ontology and epistemology, aesthetics, which since the Enlightenment has been an important sub-discipline of European philosophy, is investigated to philosophize about African art and the evolving relationships between artworks and their producers in a post-authenticity Africa. This chapter is less about art per se than the way in which African art has been interrogated in the past sixty years and, in turn, has provided the basis for an analysis of temporality and cultural transformation. This emphasis on meta-discursive issues might be a little misleading, however, as it has a tendency to play down the documentary’s immense aesthetic qualities. The fact remains that Les Statues is an intriguing and beautiful piece of work. It is, at the same time, ‘art’ and ‘essay’ and, as such, combines aesthetic creativity with an in-depth reflection on beauty. In It for Others (2013), Irish video artist Duncan Campbell pays a direct tribute to Les Statues and its revolutionary dimension. Campbell seems to argue here that Sartre’s and Fanon’s ideas have retained their relevance in this late capitalist era. The recent flurry of books and articles on Fanon is an interesting case in point.19 But this activity is more than just commemorative. Like Achille Mbembe in Sortir de la grande nuit, 20 Campbell suggests that late capitalism, in Africa, Europe, 15 Franz Crahay, ‘Le Décollage conceptuel: conditions d’une philosophie bantoue’, Diogène, 52 (1965), 61–84. 16 Fabien Eboussi-Boulaga, ‘Le Bantou problématique’, Présence Africaine, 66 (1968), 4–40. 17 See Marcien Towa, Essai sur la problématique philosophique dans l’Afrique actuelle (Yaoundé: Clé, 1971). 18 Paulin Hountondji, Sur la ‘philosophie africaine’. Critique de l’ethnophilosophie (Paris: Maspero, 1977). 19 See, among many other examples, the special issue of Actuel Marx (55) edited in 2014 by Elsa Dorlin and Hourya Bentouhami and dedicated to Fanon. 20 Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (Paris: La Découverte, 2010).

98

Past Imperfect

and Northern Ireland, is strangely reminiscent of late colonialism. Les Statues is analysed to comment on the world today and reopen the vexed issue of the relationship between art objects, their commodification, and the value of images. In the past few years, Campbell has made a number of polemical documentaries, such as Bernadette (2008), a piece focusing on Bernadette Devlin, the Irish socialist and republican political activist and dissident. Campbell’s documentaries fall into the essay film genre, ‘a form that thinks’, according to Jean-Luc Godard. 21 He has a tendency to rely on historical archives and newsreel footage to reconstruct the history of past events and figures but also to reflect on the way in which these images are used by film-makers to present and interpret reality. There is therefore an ambition to write stories but also to explore self-reflexively the conditions presiding over this construction. In a talk on It for Others delivered at a conference dedicated to Chris Marker at MIT in 2013, Campbell compared Sans Soleil – and in particular Marker’s examination of Amílcar Cabral – to his own take on history and historiography. 22 In other interviews and lectures, Campbell has argued that documentary, as a genre, is highly constructed and relies on the same conventions and devices as fiction (plot, narrative voices, viewpoints) and that the footage incorporated and edited by film-makers offers, ultimately, ‘no transparent window onto reality’. 23 Campbell’s own treatment of such figures as Devlin and Joe McCann, an IRA fighter whose image appears briefly in It For Ohers, does not escape this inherent limitation of the genre. Regarding the making of Bernadette, Campbell says that he was seeking to understand what was made of her by the media whilst attempting to remain ‘faithful’ to her character and what she stands for. 24 This dual perspective – the story but also the mechanisms and choices presiding over the genesis and development of the story – was also a central self-reflexive position adopted by the directors of Les Statues meurent aussi, a documentary as much about art as the art of film-making. 21 Cited here by Timothy Corrigan in The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 33. 22 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOH3-CkM_kg [accessed 22 July 2015]. 23 Mark Brown, ‘Turner Prize 2014: Duncan Campbell Wins Britain’s Prestigious Art Award’, Guardian, 1 December 2014, http://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2014/dec/01/turner-prize-2014-duncan-campbell-wins [accessed 22 July 2015]. 24 https://lux.org.uk/work/bernadette [accessed 23 January 2021].

‘Things’

99

African Art and Its Commodification Les Statues meurent aussi was subject to censorship until 1968, 25 less for its anti-colonial content than for featuring real figures, such as François Mitterrand, who appears briefly in the second part of the documentary in his capacity as Minister of France’s Overseas Territories. What is striking in this documentary is the directors’ ability to tease out the vexed relationship between art and politics. In Guernica, another short piece released in 1950, Resnais, with his co-director Robert Hessens, had already reflected on Picasso’s pictorial rendition of the Guernica air raids in 1937. 26 This thirteen-minute documentary is a tribute to Picasso’s ability to translate suffering into images. By way of Maria Casares’s solemn but impassioned commentary (written by Paul Éluard), the viewer is reminded of the ravages of fascism and also invited to embrace the post-war belief in, and hope for, the emergence of a ‘new man’, as this concept was understood by Frantz Fanon and anti-colonial revolutionaries of the 1950s and 1960s. 27 Later, in Nuit et brouillard (1955) and Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Resnais would engage again with the aftermath of the war and some of its most haunting consequences. 28 Les Statues is both a documentary and an essay, an essayistic documentary or a cinematic essay. The documentary certainly falls into the ‘art et essai’ genre. The difficulty, for the viewer, resides in the fact that images, some still and others ‘moving’, are juxtaposed with a running commentary by Jean Négroni. From the point of view of register, there is no doubt that Négroni’s commentary, which was written by Marker, is driven by a literary ambition as not only is it very scripted, it is also delivered with theatrical poise and declamatory emphasis. The narrator pursues a thesis of sorts, and throughout this demonstration he provides 25 See Jenny Chamarette, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi/Statues also Die’, Sense of Cinema, 52 (2009), http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/les-statues-meurentaussi/ [accessed 27 July 2015]; Sarah Cooper, Chris Marker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 12; and Daniel Payot, L’Art africain entre silence et promesse (Strasbourg: Les Éditions Circé, 2009), pp. 13–14. 26 Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens (dirs), Guernica (Panthéon Production, 1950). 27 See Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Maspero, 1961). 28 Chris Marker was also involved in this film as co-writer of the commentary and co-editor. On Resnais, see Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

100

Past Imperfect

a number of facts and arguments to substantiate his case. The premise of this demonstration is that ‘Negro art’ has remained a misunderstood object and that this large-scale misconstruction is the main factor behind its imminent death. The temporal implications of this reflection should not be underestimated. The discussion conducted by this documentary is predicated on a strict opposition between precolonial times (and their supposed functional and cultual features) and colonial history. Négroni seems to suggest here that the musealization of black objects inaugurates their entry into the cultural realm but also their disappearance as cultual/functional artefacts: ‘Quand les statues sont mortes, elles entrent dans l’art. Cette botanique de la mort, c’est ce que nous appelons la culture’ [When the statues die, they enter into art. This botany of death is what we call culture]. 29 The word ‘object’ is important and sums up some of the most pressing discussions marking this period of cultural and political emancipation. African art, it is argued, has no autonomy. Despite its variety and creativity, it has remained an object of consumption. Its status is defined by the onlooker, who, more often than not, is ill-equipped to discern how and why it is first and foremost the product of time- and space-specific conditions of possibility. In this logic, African artefacts lie outside of history, in an atemporal zone where change is deemed inconceivable, as argued, for instance, by the Columbia University-based art historian Douglas Fraser: ‘most African styles are fundamentally static and seem to indicate an acceptance of the status quo’. 30 This point has morbid overtones; from the very beginning of the documentary the viewer is made aware of this process of objectification which, it is suggested, will precipitate African art into oblivion: Un objet est mort quand le regard vivant qui se posait sur lui a disparu. Et quand nous aurons disparu, nos objets iront là où nous envoyons ceux des nègres: au musée. 31 [An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears. And when we disappear, our objects will be confined to the place where we send black objects: to the museum]

This short quote acts as a warning and strips European culture – that is, ‘nos objets’ – of its exceptionality. 29 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, p. 27. 30 Douglas Fraser, Primitive Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), p. 52. 31 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, p. 28.

‘Things’

101

Resnais and Marker provide a humorous and surrealist illustration of this descent into cultural irrelevance by staging an imaginary museum displaying ordinary everyday life objects (an alarm clock, a sieve, a knife, rubber stamps, and other domestic items), an approach resonating with André Malraux’s reflection on the status of museum objects and his contention that they are often displayed outside their primary functions. 32 Incidentally, this collection of things might be less haphazard than it seems: the presence of rubber stamps amongst other artefacts of ‘unknown origin’ could certainly be interpreted as a mise en abyme of the recent excesses and crimes committed in the name of national and ethnic logic and the administrative devices called upon to perpetrate these atrocities. The use of the future tense – ‘quand nous aurons disparu’ – indicates, however, that ‘we’ have not quite yet experienced this fall into oblivion. By contrast, it is implied that African culture has ceased to exist. This focus on the exotic and primitivist reception of ‘negro’ art and on its misunderstanding by the general public is utterly political. It resonates with other anti-colonial statements of the period, particularly those formulated in existentialist circles by figures such as Albert Memmi, Francis Jeanson, Balandier, Fanon, and Sartre, who was the main spokesperson of this phenomenology-inspired brand of anti-colonialism. Memmi, Fanon, and Sartre discussed in detail the colonial situation and focused extensively on the conflicts between its main ‘actors’ (the colonizer and the colonized) as exemplified by Portrait du colonisé (Memmi), 33 Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, and the many accounts published by Sartre during the Algerian war of independence. Balandier’s ‘La Situation coloniale’ (as argued in Chapter I) is built on the idea that, whilst generating alienation, the colonial situation provided the basis for the development of a new relationship between the colonizers and the colonized and an opportunity, on part of the colonized, to reappropriate (reprendre, as Mudimbe would say) practices crushed and silenced by the colonial apparatus. As editor of Les Temps modernes, and member of the reading committee at Le Seuil, then a minor publishing house who would publish Fanon’s Peau noire (on Jeanson’s recommendation), 32 See André Malraux, Psychologie de l’art. Le Musée imaginaire (Paris: Albert Skira, 1947). 33 Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé: précédé du portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Corréa, 1957). The 1985 Gallimard edition of this book is prefaced by Sartre.

102

Past Imperfect

Jeanson participated fully in this existentialism-fuelled critique of French imperialism in the period leading up to the political decolonization of the African continent. Already in L’Être et le néant (1943), Sartre had analysed the difficulty of ‘being’ and contended that intersubjective relationships always imply a degree of objectification. This argument was politicized in subsequent texts. In Réflexions sur la question juive, Sartre demonstrates that the Jew is the ultimate ‘being-for-others’; that his or her identity is a mere ‘thing’ that has been defined once and for all – and ascribed ‘mineral permanence’34 – by the Other’s tyrannical ‘look’. Sartre would then use the same schemata in his denunciation of the colonial system and, later, in fact until the end of the 1970s, in his various examinations of the Third World question. This theorization of colonialism and colonial racism would also be adopted by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, and specifically in the chapter ‘The Fact of Blackness’. In this famous testimony, Fanon pays homage to Sartre and the latter’s exploration of colonial alienation: ‘I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.’35 By the same token, Marker deplores that these ‘negro’ artefacts have been cannibalized by Western audiences and have become inauthentic objects constrained, ultimately, to perform an act they were not meant to be performing: L’art nègre, nous le regardons comme s’il trouvait sa raison d’être dans le plaisir qu’il nous donne. Les intentions du nègre qui le crée, les émotions du nègre qui le regarde, cela nous échappe. 36 [Black art: we look at it as if its raison d’être was to give us pleasure. The intentions of the black who created it, the emotions of the black who looks at it: all that escapes us]

Interestingly, it can be argued that it is the ‘inauthentic’ that makes it possible to think the instantiation, representation, and ipseity of that which is presumed to be ‘authentic’. 34 Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait of the Anti-Semite, trans. by Erik de Mauny (London: Secker & Warburg/Lindsay Drummond, 1948), p. 22. 35 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1967]), p. 82. 36 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, p. 18.

‘Things’

103

The relationship between selfhood and object, as examined by Fanon in Peau noire, is at the heart of this chapter. Indeed, one of the main objectives here is to demonstrates that members of other races and their objects were submitted to an analogous process: the objectifying white gaze that Fanon resents as a member of a visible minority is also used to appraise and exoticize African artefacts. The documentary Les Statues is thus predicated on the idea that decolonization is a concrete process that should also encompass material culture and challenge its essentialization. Thus, ‘decolonization’ is not used in the abstract but to examine the arguments conveyed by the film on colonial curatorship. The co-directors of Les Statues contend here that African objects collected (in fact, often stolen) by Europeans have been misconstrued and that their interpretation should be decolonized. In view of the current debate on the restitution of African objects, the film demonstrates that, if a political, but also aesthetic, literary, and philosophical decolonizing process started in the 1950, it is still raging on now, hence the inclusion here of Duncan Campbell’s It for Others for it re-engages with some of the views put forward by Les Statues and complements other perspectives expounded by contemporary artists, curators, writers, and film directors such as Uriel Orlow, 37 Susan Vogel, 38 Arno Bertina, 39 and Fatoumata Ngom.40 In his preface to Les Damnés de la terre, Sartre compares assimilated locals to ‘mensonges vivants’ [living lies].41 Les Statues meurent aussi pursues a very similar line of argument: it is contended here that 37 Uriel Orlow (dir.), The Visitor (2007), a sixteen-minute documentary focusing on the plundering of Benin bronzes during the 1897 Britain-led expedition in West Africa. 38 Susan Vogel, Robert Pemberton, Jean-Paul Colleyn, Ron Street, and Jon Shaver, Fang: An Epic Journey (First Run/Icarus Films, 2001). This film (fictional but based on real events) follows the journey of a sculpture from the time of its collection in 1904 in Cameroon to its subsequent translocations in various museums around the world. 39 Arno Bertina, Des lions comme des danseuses (Lille: Éditions La Contre Allée, 2015). 40 Fatoumata Ngom, Le Silence du totem (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018). On this proliferation of films, books, and events dedicated to the restitution of artefacts, see Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Restituer le patrimoine africain (Paris: Philippe Rey/Seuil, 2018), pp. 45–47. 41 See Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Préface’ to Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: Maspero, 1961), p. 9.

104

Past Imperfect

museums – the Musée de l’homme, the Museum of the Belgian Congo in Tervuren, the British Museum, and the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford42 – are places of deceitful and inauthentic exhibits. This point of view, which was not completely new in 1953, needs to be understood against the backdrop of debates on the aesthetic status of ‘primitive’ objects. In Primitivism in Modern Art (1938), Robert Goldwater reflects on then recent developments in the organization of ethnographic museums and is keen to identify, in the work of museum curators, an increasing tendency to present ‘their objects (or at least some of them) as worthy of purely formal study’. This sporadic shift from function to aesthetics is for Goldwater ‘the “ethnocentric” risk’ facing museums of ethnology in the interwar period. But he is also eager to argue that this ‘ethnocentric risk’ has beneficial consequences: ‘Thus the artistic creations of primitive cultures have entered fully into the world history of art, to be, like those of any other culture, understood and appreciated on their own merits.’43 ‘Forces’ and ‘Life’ In their critique of museums, Resnais and Marker challenge the idea that African artefacts have been appraised at all on their own merits. These directors desire to remedy the situation and offer a more reliable explicatory reading grid. They adopt here the part philosophical, part ethnographic model developed by the Franciscan missionary Placide Tempels in Bantu Philosophy. This famous (but also notorious) book constitutes an important milestone in the history of writing on Africa. It is the first-ever book to be published by Présence Africaine and its reputation owes a great deal to Alioune Diop’s celebratory preface.44 Bantu Philosophy is presented here as the most influential statement

42 Alongside prominent private collectors such as Hans Hartung and Tristan Tzara, the representatives of these museums are all duly thanked in the opening credits of the documentary. 43 Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, [1938] 1986), p. 13. My emphasis. 44 Alioune Diop, ‘Niam M’Paya ou de la fin que dévorent les moyens’, preface in Placide Tempels, La Philosophie bantoue, trans. by Antoine Rubbens (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1949), n. pag. This preface is not included in the 1959 English translation.

‘Things’

105

on Africa alongside Sartre’s ‘Black Orpheus’.45 Alioune Diop adopts a discourse of difference. He argues that Africans and Europeans do not share the same worldview. He highlights Europe’s ethnocentric self-obsession and inability to know itself other than ‘au miroir de sa propre conscience’ [through the prism of its own consciousness].46 Africans, on the other hand, are said to possess a ‘respect inné de l’homme et du créé [innate respect of man and creation] and to be the representatives of a type of humanism in which man is at one with the world and with ‘life’.47 This preface is thus an opportunity to come to terms with past and present inequalities and to envisage the construction of what Alioune Diop calls ‘la cité commune de demain’ [the communal city of tomorrow].48 In this reflection, which, it must be said, remains general and certainly very conciliatory, Diop opposes the ‘will to power’ [volonté de puissance] responsible for Nazi atrocities and colonial crimes, to the African ‘vital force’.49 From a temporal perspective, this statement continues to be marked by an attempt to bridge the gap between European modernity, seen here as a vehicle for progress, and the advent of ‘a utopian humanist project rooted in Christianity’. 50 These two (secular and religious) strands, as already suggested when I focused on the temporal significance of Mpala (Chapter I), often converged during the colonial period. With regard to this convergence, Koselleck argued that: Progress thus combined experiences and expectations, both endowed with a temporal coefficient of change. As part of a group, a country, or finally, a class, one was conscious of being advanced in comparison with the others; or one sought to catch up with or overtake the others. One might be superior technically and look down on previous states of development enjoyed by other peoples, whose guidance was thus a justifiable task for their civilized superiors. One saw in the hierarchy of orders a static ranking which in the future would be superseded by the pressure of progressive classes. It is possible to extend these examples. 45 Ibid., para. 4. 46 Ibid., para. 20. 47 Ibid., para. 29. 48 Ibid., para. 39. 49 Ibid., para. 22. 50 Ruth Bush, Publishing Africa in French : Literary Institutions and Decolonization, 1945–1967 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), p. 61. See the pages dedicated to Alioune Diop’s literary and publishing engagement in the post-war era (pp. 60–70).

106

Past Imperfect

What interests us here is that progress was directed toward an active transformation of this world, not the Hereafter, no matter how diverse the actual relationship between Christian expectation of the future and progress might be when registered by intellectual history. 51

Albeit couched in evangelical terms, Diop’s hope for the emergence of ‘la cite commune de demain’ is underpinned by the idea that change will happen here rather than in the Hereafter. It is also suggested that this incomplete, and imperfect, progress-driven modernity will be bolstered by the African ‘vital force’ and informed by African values and traditions. Like Lévi-Strauss in Race et histoire, Alioune Diop implies that progress cannot be achieved without cultural diversity. This view was also defended by other African thinkers such as Senghor, Nyerere, 52 and, later, Kwasi Wiredu 53 and Kwame Gyekye. 54 I would like now to focus on Placide Tempels’s essay in order to read it alongside Statues and thus assess the way in which Resnais and Marker embraced a loosely ‘tempelsian’ conception of African art. Placide Tempels was a Flemish missionary who, from the 1930s onwards, worked as a teacher and an evangelist among the Luba people of southern Katanga (Belgian Congo). 55 Like many missionaries and colonial administrators, he became a keen ethnographer and in this capacity he set out to excavate a Bantu ontology from Kiluba, one of the most widely spoken Katangese languages. Foreshadowing some of the methodological and linguistic concerns expressed by non-Europhone African philosophers, 56 Tempels was aware of the difficulty of finding ‘in the philosophical vocabulary of European language terms which 51 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 266. 52 Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism/Uhuru na Ujamaa (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968). 53 Kwasi Wiredu, Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy: Four Essays (Ibadan: Hope, 1995). 54 Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 55 See Frans Bontinck (ed.), Aux Origines de la philosophie bantoue. La correspondance Tempels-Hulstaert (1944–1948), Bibliothèque du Centre d’études des religions africaines X (Kinshasa: Faculté de Théologie catholique, 1985). 56 On this issue, see: Jean-Paul Martinon, ‘The Birth of Language or The Necessity of Rule’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, special issue ed. by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture on ‘Translating African Thought and Literature’, 81.3 (2018), 413–424; and in the same issue: Alena Rettová, ‘Translation as Destruction: Kezilahabi’s Adaptation of Heidegger’s “Being”’, pp. 439–457.

‘Things’

107

cover Bantu thought better’. 57 This scientific activity, which prefigured the ‘deterritorialization’ of philosophy by Afrophone philosophers, 58 was nonetheless conducted in the name of the ‘real civilization’59 and in an effort to foster the civilizing and evangelizing mission: ‘a better understanding of the realm of Bantu thought is indispensable for all who are called upon to […] hold administrative or judicial office among African people; [for] all who wish to civilize, educate and raise the Bantu’.60 Tempels was part of a well-established tradition of thinkers and, although he focused on a geographically and ethnically circumscribed terrain, he also assumed that his examination of Bantu ontology would enable him to produce a ‘monadologie universelle’61 and draw general laws about all ‘primitives’, pagans, and non-civilized people, a point which did little to promote coevalness as this temporal notion is understood by Johannes Fabian. African commentators such as Paulin Hountondji62 and Tsenay Serequeberhan 63 have often read Tempels with the grain. Invariably, they have identified in his work the imperial tendency of submitting knowledge production to violent discourses of conversion and ‘Africanité’. 64 There is no doubt that Tempels and many of his colleagues in Africa were driven by an ulterior motive. Beyond its obvious patronizing tendencies, Bantu Philosophy is also a book that bore witness and contributed to the post-war decolonization of knowledge on Africa and the significant point here is that from the 1930s onwards, ‘Tempels’ conception had evolved from a negation of Bantu “civilization” to the recognition of a [Bantu] “philosophy”, which he considered to be complex.’65 57 Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, trans. (and with a foreword) by Margaret Read (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959), p. 43. 58 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, L’Encre des savants. Réflexions sur la philosophie en Afrique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2013), p. 37. 59 Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, p. 29. 60 Ibid., pp. 23–24. 61 Diagne, L’Encre des savants, p. 39. 62 See Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, trans. by Henri Evans with the collaboration of Jonathan Rée, introduction by Abiola Irele (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996 [1977]). 63 See Tsenay, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1994). 64 Ibid., pp. 46–47. 65 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, Tales of Faith: Religion and Political Performance in Central Africa (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), p. 156.

108

Past Imperfect

It also presents itself as a response to earlier statements and is the admission, on Tempels’s part, that the Church needs to review its evangelizing practices. Indeed, the book challenges some prevailing prejudices regarding sub-Saharan traditions: ‘It is contended that in condemning the whole gamut of their supposed “childish and savage customs” by judgment “this is stupid and bad”, we have taken our share of the responsibility for having killed “the man” in the Bantu.’66 If Tempels continues to use contentious words such as ‘primitive’ and ‘non-civilized’, he is determined, however, to demonstrate that Bantu ontology is underpinned by a set of coherently articulated principles. The Bantu worldview rests, according to Tempels, on the concept of the ‘vital force’: The Bantu say, in respect of a number of strange practices in which we see neither rime nor reason, that their purpose is to acquire life, strength, or vital force to live strongly, that they are to make life stronger, or to assure that force shall remain perpetually in one’s posterity […] Force, the potent life, vital energy are the object of prayers and invocations to God [whom the Bantu designate] as ‘the Strong One’, he who possesses Force in himself […] Supreme happiness, the only kind of blessing, is, to the Bantu, to possess the greatest vital force […] Every illness, wound or disappointment […], every injustice and every failure: all these are held to be […] a diminution of vital force.67

This all-encompassing principle regulates daily life, but also the afterlife, and provides a hierarchical framework in which the Bantu is situated within a chain of forces and tied up in a relation of reciprocal influences linking past and present. God and the ancestors stand at the upper end of the chain, then the living Bantu, and, in the inferior echelons, animals and inanimate things. In his commentary Marker also endeavours to translate this sense of reciprocity between the world of the dead and the world of the living: Gardiens de tombeaux, sentinelles des morts, chiens de garde de l’invisible, ces statues d’ancêtres ne forment pas un cimetière. Nous mettons des pierres sur nos morts pour les empêcher de sortir, le nègre les conserve près de lui pour les honorer et profiter de leur puissance […] C’est des morts que procèdent toute sagesse et toute sécurité. Ils sont les racines du vivant.68 66 Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, pp. 28–29. 67 Ibid., pp. 44–46. Emphasis in original. 68 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, p. 29.

‘Things’

109

[Guardians of graves, sentinels of the deceased, watchdogs of the invisible, these ancestors’ statues are not made for the cemetery. We put stones over our dead in order to prevent them from escaping; black people keep them nearby to honour them and benefit from their power. All wisdom and protection stem from the dead. They are the roots of the living]

This short passage aims at differentiating the Negro worldview (philosophy or ontology) from the European (‘Nous mettons … nos morts’). The word ‘puissance’ is the premise of the demonstration and the sign that Chris Marker had internalized Tempels’s ‘lessons’. Elsewhere, this intellectual allegiance of sorts is conveyed even more explicitly. In the next excerpt, Marker returns to the porous boundary between life and death to discuss the power of African masks but also to meditate on the afterlife of a dead monkey whose hand is briefly captured by the camera: [L]a mort ne peut rien contre la force vitale éparse en chaque être […] Où est passée la force qui habitait cette main? Elle est libre maintenant […], elle va tourmenter les vivants.69 [Death cannot do anything against the vital force present in every being. Where has the force which inhabited this hand gone? It is free now. It will torment the living]

This ubiquitous ‘vital force’ is the bond between past and present; it is the past made present – Koselleck’s ‘present past’ whose ‘events have been incorporated and can be remembered’.70 Resnais and Marker are of the view that this vital force, and particularly its ability to reconcile life and death and act as a mediating principle between men, animals, and things, is the main societal, religious, and cultural factor behind African artistic production. Indeed, there is a tendency to collapse traditional categories and to argue that religion and art are in Africa entirely interchangeable. In a world where ‘tout est religion’ and ‘tout est art’ [everything is religion and everything is art],71 the divide between the cultual and the cultural is presented as irrelevant and as a distinction which has no validity in the African worldview. Africa, as it is understood by Resnais and Marker, does not suffer any deviation: ‘Ce monde est celui de la rigueur. Chaque chose y a sa place’ [This is a world 69 Ibid. p. 30. 70 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 259. 71 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, p. 28.

110

Past Imperfect

of rigour and each thing has its place within it].72 In an extraordinarily fast-paced scene this unity is exemplified by the juxtaposition of objects made from different substances (wood, stone, and cloth). The repetition of similar geometrical patterns implies that they all result from the same fabric in which inanimate objects, animals, men, and the earth are one and the same thing: Les techniques se mélangent. Le bois imite subtilement le tissu, le tissu prend ses motifs de la terre. On s’aperçoit que cette création n’a pas de limites, que tout communique, et que, de ses planètes à ses atomes, ce monde de la rigueur renferme à son tour le monde de la beauté.73 [Techniques are mixed. Wood subtly imitates fabric, fabric borrows its motifs from the earth. One realizes that this creation has no limits, that everything communicates and that from its planets to its atoms, this world of rigour, in turn, comprises the world of beauty]

This pure realm of transitive relations is close to Tempels’s own unanimist understanding of the Bantu worldview constituted of ‘precise, well-defined ideas fitting into a logical system’.74 By contrast, European presence in Africa ‘is understood to rip this fabric’,75 and there is no doubt that the frantic accumulation of images, coupled with Guy Bernard’s equally frenetic musical score, adds to the inherent violence of this scene. This world of rigour – in which nature and human creations replicate the gestures of the gods – was evidently not fully thought and systematized by Resnais and Marker. As argued by Christopher Miller, this idea was first circulated by Leo Frobenius, who after visiting the Kasai region of Congo in 1906 was keen to portray Africa as an ‘uncontaminated’ place and a sort of ‘esthetocracy’ where ‘the smallest detail bears witness to a perfect order’.76 Paradoxically, traces of this functional conception of African art are to be found in ‘Black Orpheus’: ‘Black poetry’, contends Sartre, ‘has nothing in common with the effusion of the heart; it is functional, it answers a need which exactly defines it’.77 72 Ibid., p. 29. 73 Ibid., p. 29. 74 Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, p. 41. 75 Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 14. 76 Miller, Theories of Africans, p. 17. 77 Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. by S.W. Allen (Paris: Présence Africaine, n.d.), pp. 17–18.

‘Things’

111

Les Statues, a text which nevertheless engages with the existentialist context of the 1950s, remains heavily dependent on the view – held by Frobenius and his contemporaries in the first part of the twentieth century – that African art is what it is: The totality of African art is the corner stone of Frobenius’s anthropology – art is everything and everything is art; therefore art is functional and wastes no time or energy on false seductiveness […] This is the essence of African art and African being for Frobenius: the essence preexists the art in which it is found.78

The temporal implications of this perceived rigour and functional dimension of African art are far-reaching. The ‘perfect order’ identified by Frobenius cannot – for what is perfect is completed and achieved (achevé: ‘finished’ or ‘killed’ in French) – accommodate change and be incorporated into a different future. What is of course ironic and the sign that this view had become a received idea, is that Sartre himself had thought it best to relegate negritude to a zone – the second stage of his dialectics – where it would remain unadulterated by the effects of a postcolonial regime of historicity, at the same time ‘human’ and race-less: ‘this negative moment is not sufficient in itself and the blacks who employ it […] know that it serves to prepare the way for the synthesis or the realization of the human society without racism’.79 In the same way, Frobenius’s ‘esthetocracy’ does not allow any transcendence and is a realm where past, present, and future are collapsible entities and where the ‘space of experience’ will exhaustively replicate this perfect past and the cultu(r)al rigour that it represents. Well after political decolonization, this process of self-replication was captured by John Mbiti’s extraordinary contention that African languages – he refers here to the Bantu languages Kikamba and Gikuyu – are inherently incapable of conceptualizing the distant future. In the following passage, Mbiti, also an ethnophilosopher, seems to concur with the idea, advocated by Tempels, that traditional African cultures primarily rely on their ‘space of experience’: [A]ccording to traditional concepts, time is a two-dimensional phenomenon, with a long past, a present and virtually no future. The linear concept of time in Western thought, with an indefinite past, present and infinite future, is practically foreign to African thinking. The future 78 Miller, Theories of Africans, p. 17. 79 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 60.

112

Past Imperfect

is virtually absent because events which lie in it have not taken place, they have not been realized and cannot, therefore, constitute time […] Actual time is therefore what is present and what is past. It moves ‘backward’ rather than ‘forward’; and people set their minds not on future things, but chiefly on what has taken place.80

Resnais and Marker, then, adhered to this ethnophilosophical reading grid even though it is doubtful that they ever read Bantu Philosophy. What is significant to point out at this stage, however, is that this notion of ‘perfect order’ – which had already provided the basis for the development of Senghor’s ‘âme nègre’ [negro soul] in ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ (1939)81 – was so deeply rooted that it retained the status of unsurpassable reference. When they were first approached by Alioune Diop to make this documentary, 82 the two French directors knew nothing about African art.83 For this reason, they were advised throughout the process by the art critic Charles Ratton, who selected the 135 pieces shown in the documentary. Ratton was close to Alioune Diop and had just contributed, alongside experts such as Georges Balandier, Paul Mercier (an Africanist who worked closely with Balandier), 84 Jacques Howlett, William Fagg, and Marcel Griaule, to a special issue of the journal Présence Africaine dedicated to African art.85 Resnais and Marker were therefore influenced by the arguments put forward by these specialists who had also welcomed Tempels’s explicatory model, relied on his understanding of the vital 80 John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 17. 81 Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, reprinted in Senghor, Liberté, I. Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 22–38. 82 Alain Resnais, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi et les ciseaux d’Anastasie: Propos d’Alain Resnais, recueillis par René Vautier et Nicole Le Garrec’, in MartínezJacquet et al. (eds), Ode au grand art africain: Les Statues meurent aussi (Arquennes: Primedia SPRL, 2010), pp. 35–41 (p. 35). The documentary was made between 1950 and 1953 (Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 12). 83 Elena Martínez-Jacquet, ‘Un Hommage au premier manifeste esthétique sur les arts d’Afrique de l’histoire du cinéma’, in Martínez-Jacquet et al. (eds), Ode au grand art africain: Les Statues meurent aussi (Arquennes: Primedia SPRL, 2010), pp. 18–23 (p. 18). 84 See Jean Copans, Georges Balandier. Un anthropologue en première ligne (Paris: PUF, 2013), p. 51. 85 Georges Balandier and Jacques Howlett (eds), L’Art nègre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2010 [1951]).

‘Things’

113

force, and attempted to identify an aesthetic ‘grammar’ common to all artistic productions from black Africa. The documentary sets out to reveal the unitary characteristics of African art (in the singular). By and large, it says very little about regional styles even though, in some rare instances, it singles out noteworthy artefacts from Benin and Ife, notably. Resnais and Marker are completely committed to this project, which, in the early 1950s, had obvious political, and pan-Africanist, connotations, if not implications. What is African art? What is African culture? are the questions that they address here. On closer inspection, however, one realizes that these questions cannot be disentangled from the colonial situation as this notion was understood by Balandier (see Chapter I), that is, as a social totality characterized by its actors’ agenda. The short answer the documentary provides to these questions is that African culture is essentially something that European culture is not. One can thus conclude that the discourse of difference promoted by the documentary contributes to envisaging the emergence of a postcolonial geopolitical order in which Africa will be entitled to assert and cultivate its cultural specificity (authenticity) and heterotemporality. Resnais and Marker bemoan the effects of European/colonial modernity on African art and the mummifying practices of Western museum curators. Citing Resnais, Daniel Payot suggests that the documentary was premised on the question, ‘Pourquoi l’art nègre se trouve-t-il au musée de l’homme, alors que l’art grec ou égyptien est au Louvre?’ [Why is negro art exhibited at the Musée de l’homme while Greek or Egyptian art is at the Louvre?].86 In ‘L’Impérieuse nécessité des musées africains’, Alexandre Adande, a noted Beninese ethnographer, registers the pernicious effects of European civilizations on Africa. He contends that African culture has fallen victim to ‘hybridisme’ and has lost not only its mark of African authenticity (‘cachet d’authenticité africaine’) but also its ‘principe vital’. 87 Marker and Resnais mention the disastrous impact of capitalism on African artists and the emergence of what they disdainfully refer to as ‘bazaar art’ and ‘indigenous craft’.88 There 86 Payot, L’Art africain entre silence et promesse, p. 14. See also MartínezJacquet, ‘Un Hommage au premier manifeste’, p. 18. 87 Alexandre Adande, ‘L’Impérieuse nécessité des musées africains’, in Georges Balandier and Jacques Howlett (eds), L’Art nègre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2010 [1951]), pp. 163–166 (p. 163). 88 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, p. 31.

114

Past Imperfect

is also a sense that the agony of Negro art has been accelerated by attempts on the part of African and European artists to fuse their respective aesthetics. This ‘métissage’, argues Marker, means that ‘both traditions will destroy each other’.89 In Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), Resnais would praise the archival work of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and insist on the necessity of preserving the past and curating past intellectual achievements for the benefit of all. Later, in Sans Soleil (1983), Marker, who was also the editor of the ‘Petite Planète’ travel guides at Le Seuil, 90 conducted a meandering meditation on the links between authentic cultures – in Guinea-Bissau and Japan particularly – and their spatial embeddedness. Their contemptuous appraisal of métissage is to be read as a rejection of that which cannot be preserved, located, repeated, and memorialized. The film, as argued earlier, unambiguously adheres to the anti-colonial view that colonialism from the Renaissance onwards (and from the time when black became ‘la couleur du péché’ [the colour of sin])91 was responsible for the devastation of sub-Saharan Africa. In this regard, it would be right to argue that the film is successful in identifying an African ‘present past’ (Koselleck) – the myths archived by tradition and the memory of colonial exactions – but fails, nevertheless, to explain how this (sometimes) ‘hot past’ (Assmann 92) could form the basis for the articulation of future aesthetic trends. This dismissal of métissage also signals the directors’ will to militate against the progressive dilution of African culture and to denounce the destructive effects of colonial modernity. If they condemn the misappropriation of African art by museum curators and art critics, they are also of the view, unlike Fanon in Les Damnés de la terre, 93 – that revolutionary art – ‘art du provisoire dont l’ambition n’est pas de durer mais de témoigner’ [provisional art whose mission is not to last but to testify]94 – is bound to remain aesthetically short-lived. The anti-colonialism of Marker and Resnais, and it is undoubtedly its weakness, is rooted in a 89 Ibid., p. 32. 90 This activity started in 1954; see Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 2. 91 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, p. 28. 92 See Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 93 See the essay ‘Sur la culture nationale’ in Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre, pp. 153–185. 94 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, p. 32.

‘Things’

115

stable and immutable definition of African culture and in the idea of a definitive ‘present past’. Unlike Sartre and Fanon, they implicitly argue that African creators must remain what they are and that their survival will depend on their ability to express their essential Africanness rather than bear witness to historical changes. This central thesis, as will now be explored, is also to be found, albeit in a slightly different shape, in Cheikh Anta Diop’s The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa. Africa’s Difference Cheikh Anta Diop’s essay is a militant text in which the respective features of distinct cultures, or ‘cradles’ (with northern and southern cradles used as shortcuts for Europe and Africa), are appraised and, ultimately, opposed in the logic of this discourse of difference already identified in Alioune Diop’s writings and in Les Statues. Like Tempels, Cheikh Anta Diop is determined to provide a set of general statements on the unity of Africa, and to trace the origins of this African unity in ancient Egypt. Political power, and in this specific example the choice of African kings, is explained by way of a ‘tempelsian’ grid: The choice of the African, whether he was ancient Egyptian, Ethiopian or came from another part of Africa particularly the Bantu, was linked to the idea he had of the world of beings and of essences; thus to a whole ontology and metaphysics which the R.F. Tempels calls ‘Bantu Philosophy’. The whole universe is divided up into a series of beings, of quantitatively different forces, which are thus also qualitatively different. From this is derived a hierarchy or natural order. Each of these pieces of essences, of ontological beings, appears to us in the guise of a material body, either animated or inorganic. These forces, said to be vital forces, are additive, that is to say, that if I carry on me in the form of talisman, amulet, fetish – call it what you will – the organ where the vital force of an animal is supposed to be fixed (claw or tooth of lion for example), I add this force to mine. (CUNA, 152)

This essay is also underpinned by a pan-Africanist agenda and the desire to identify the homogeneity of African culture.95 Cheikh Anta Diop contends that a shared sense of historical continuity is indispensable ‘to the idea of a multinational African state’ (CUNA, 10). The ideological basis of the book is synonymous with this search for common traits 95 See Fauvelle, L’Afrique de Cheikh Anta Diop, p. 20.

116

Past Imperfect

which Africans would be able to recognize but also celebrate, and be recognized for; that is to say, their Africanness. Although written by a convinced anti-colonial militant, The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa remains haunted by Diop’s French university mentors. Indeed, Diop pays tribute here to Marcel Griaule, Gaston Bachelard, and his professors André Aymard and André Leroi-Gourhan (CUNA, 7). In this sense, Diop’s essay is very close to Statues, a text advocating African liberation by means of Western scholarship and expertise. Diop’s comparative analysis of European and African cultural ‘cradles’ is heavily dependent on the ‘colonial library’, in V.Y. Mudimbe’s sense of the phrase. The bulk of the bibliographical material used in this essay is provided by canonical Western figures. Even though Diop quotes medieval Arabic-speaking chroniclers such as Ibn Battuta, there is, apart from one passing reference to Amadou Hampâté Bâ, no mention of contemporary African figures in this book. This absence speaks volumes and bears witness to Diop’s inability to sever the epistemological link with Western scholarship. This dependency complex – later examined by Mudimbe in L’Odeur du père96 and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Decolonising the Mind – is not absolute, however, as Diop would also advocate the use of Wolof as a tool to reduce the reliance on France and its culture (see Chapter III of this book). The greatest strength of The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa lies in Diop’s ability to extract, from this Western corpus, a body of arguments to substantiate the thesis of a radically different Africa and put forward the claim of a superior African Ur-civilization whose main traits are still prevalent today but are increasingly threatened by the Westernization of Africa. This interpretative process is not without many ideological pirouettes, however. Diop’s book is not located in a realm of pure erudition; it has a tendency to be ‘nakedly polemical’ and to be driven by nationalist concerns.97 The text, despite its anti-colonial force, is still part of the Africanist tradition. Africanists were never quite able to resolve the ambiguity of their activity. Their analysis of Africa-related issues and the data-gathering procedures underlying this operation were not entirely neutral. It seems that Diop’s style bears the marks of this inability of Africanism to maintain a clear divide between ideological and scholarly pursuits. One of the most intriguing aspects of Diop’s 96 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, L’Odeur du père: essai sur des limites de la science et de la vie en Afrique noire (Paris: Présence africaine, 1982). 97 Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London: Verso, 1998), p. 180.

‘Things’

117

production is the fact that it denounced the ideological artifices of Western historiography with regard to ancient Egypt and inaugurated the pan-African ideology.98 In The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa, Diop uses family structures and kinship as points of departure to prove the cultural homogeneity of Africa and trace the fundamental difference between the northern and southern ‘cradles’. This premise enables him to take to task European gender politics and argue that Africa has, since ancient Egypt, been a place of greater equality, a point which resonates with Marker’s insistence on African unanimism and ‘rigour’. In this demonstration, Diop relies on the opposition between matriarchy and patriarchy. By way of established French historians and classicists such as Fustel de Coulanges and Victor Bérard, he is able to mount a case against patriarchal societies and, conversely, sing the praise of matriarchal structures in Africa. Via the examples of Osiris, and Dionysus (his Greek Doppelgänger), Diop surmises that matriarchy has generated more egalitarian and harmonious gender relations and that this historical difference is still palpable in Africa now (CUNA, 166). By contrast, he posits that women in the northern cradle have remained victims of the patriarchal system. His depiction of this other ‘Indo-European’ (or ‘Aryan’, as he calls it) model is quite dualistic and appears as a foil to celebrate African cultural achievement since Egyptian antiquity. Here, too, an ideological stance is adopted to counter the equally biased (and ideological) position defended by missionaries and colonial administrators regarding the status of women in (Muslim) West Africa from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War, a time in which, as argued by Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu, ‘matrifocality and the maternal principle in families were downgraded and patrifocality and the idea of fathers as rulers gained ascendancy’.99 Like Marker, and Tempels before him, Cheikh Anta Diop is keen to equate Africa with life and vitality and to highlight the sacred role assumed by mothers and fecundity in the African worldview (CUNA, 98 Fauvelle, in L’Afrique de Cheikh Anta Diop, draws his readers’ attention to ‘l’idéologie que débusque Ch. Anta Diop et l’idéologie que nous débusquons chez lui’ [the ideology uncovered by Cheikh Anta Diop and the ideology that we uncover in him] (p. 20). 99 Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu, Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 25.

118

Past Imperfect

36).100 In his conclusion, Diop returns to the foundational role of matriarchy and to the opposition between the two cradles: [T]he Meridional cradle, confined to the African continent in particular, is characterised by the matriarchal family, the creation of the territorial state, in contrast to the Aryan city-state, the emancipation of women in domestic life, xenophilia, cosmopolitism, a sort of social collectivism […], a material solidarity of right for each individual, which makes moral or material misery unknown to the present day; there are people living in poverty but no one feels alone and no one is in distress […] The Northern cradle […] is characterised by the patriarchal family, by the city-state […]; it is easily seen that it is on contact with the Southern world that the Northerners broadened their conception of the state […] The particular character of these city-states, outside of which a man was an outlaw, developed an internal patriotism, as well as xenophobia. Individualism, moral and material solitude, a disgust for existence […] An ideal of war, violence, crime and conquests. (CUNA, 97)

Further, Diop engages in a meditation on the future of the planet earth in the cosmos. He moves away from the cultural and anthropological issues explored in the essay (matriarchy vs patriarchy) to reflect on the way in which science and scholarship could be mobilized to contribute to ‘the future of the species’ (CUNA, 198). This protoecological rumination provides Diop with yet another opportunity to praise Africa and to oppose what he regards as its innate vitalism to the morbid destructiveness of the West. African scholars, he contends, are better placed than any others to undertake this planet-saving exercise. Their ‘cultural past’ predisposes them to this formidable task and Diop concludes triumphantly (in the last sentence of the book) that ‘the universe of tomorrow will in all probability be imbued with African optimism’ (CUNA, 199). The tone of this concluding statement, in which one can detect a certain degree of utopianism, is a recurring rhetorical trait of essays on African decolonization in the immediate post-war era – Sartre and Fanon come to mind – but also after, in works by Mudimbe, Mbembe, and Felwine Sarr, who in Afrotopia calls for the development of an ‘utopie active’.101 This utopia will be the product of a ‘réflexion 1 00 Interestingly, the editors of the catalogue of the 2010 exhibition dedicated to Les Statues meurent aussi chose a Luluwa (DRC) ‘figure de maternité’ for their front cover. 101 See Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2016), p. 14.

‘Things’

119

prospective’102 in which Africans will attempt to identify ‘les lieux d’où s’énoncent de nouvelles pratiques, de nouveaux discours, et où s’élabore cette Afrique qui vient’ [sites where new practices and new discourses are expressed and where this new Africa can come into view].103 Sarr argues that Africans should strive to prepare the ground for a humancentred civilizational project underpinned by a ‘meilleur équilibre entre les différents ordres: l’économique, le culturel, le spirituel [et] un rapport différent entre le sujet et l’objet, l’arché et le nouveau, l’esprit et la matière’ [a better equilibrium between the different economic, cultural, and spiritual orders and a different relationship between subject and object, old and new, mind and matter].104 In Statues, the narrator concludes his commentary with the idea that blacks and whites will be the architects of humanity’s future, ‘notre avenir’ [our future].105 Cheikh Anta Diop’s happy ending, in which Africa is rehabilitated and given a leading role in the reconstruction of the ‘universe of tomorrow’, is the expression of his anti-colonialism and willingness to read African history away from colonial scholarship. I shall come back to Cheikh Anta Diop’s use of the future in Chapter III, but it is worth noting here the paradox that this political and epistemological gesture remains heavily dependent on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conditions of possibility and obsession with genealogical constructs. If he demands independence, Diop is often unable to depart from the tenets that had characterized late nineteenth-century Africanism. Like many African writers of his generation, he cannot quite escape the methodological framework that he inherited from his European teachers. He is, to refer to Mudimbe’s analysis of epistemological decolonization in L’Odeur du père (but also Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe) under the influence of discourses set in motion to subjugate the colonized and which were subsequently internalized by indigenous local elites in the French empire and elsewhere. One of the consequences of this discursive legacy is that African intellectuals of the 1950s were rarely able to envisage their future outside the two main categories – progress and heritage – underpinning the modern ‘regime of historicity’.106 102 Ibid., p. 15. 1 03 Ibid., p. 14. 104 Ibid., p. 15. 105 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, p. 32. 106 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. by Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 5–6.

120

Past Imperfect

Diop believes that the unity of African culture is the product of geographical and historical conditions, that this homogeneity was established in a very distant past (ancient Egypt), and maintained, albeit precariously, throughout the ages until the twentieth century. This premise, which is shared by the authors of Statues, does not easily integrate ideas of change, evolution, and transformation or the view – as will shortly be analysed – that Africans and Europeans are the interdependent (albeit unequal) participants of Balandier’s ‘colonial situation’. The terminology used by Diop to refer to the stability (or otherwise) of the original ‘cradles’ bears witness to his anxiety to preserve what is nonetheless continually exposed to cultural erosion. By and large, Diop’s interpretative methodology remains dualistic and redolent of diffusionist theses as developed by Edward Burnett Tylor in the early 1870s.107 Diffusionism, a school of thought that would continue to be very influential amongst Egyptologists such as G. Elliot Smith until the late 1930s, would rely heavily on the assumption that human civilizations had spread from identifiable ‘cradles’. Diop’s Egyptology provides ‘local tales of ethnogenesis with prestigious origins’.108 His analyses are predicated upon temporal and spatial oppositions in which ideas of original states and subsequent cultural alterations and superimpositions are invariably expressed. In the following passage, for example, he reflects on the presence of the two cradles from Saudi Arabia to the Indus River: ‘It has been possible to show everywhere the pre-existence of a meridional substratum, which was later covered by a Northern contribution’ (CUNA, 112). The words ‘pre-existence’ and ‘substratum’ are significantly used here to refer to the more ancient and more deeply established meridional (i.e. African) cradle; the northern ‘contribution’ is, on the other hand, added onto the existing stratum and, by way of consequence, deemed to be secondary and superficial. Elsewhere, Diop uses expressions such as ‘internal evolution’ and ‘external elements’ to account for this hierarchy (and opposition) between pre-existing and additional cultural traits. In this quote (which, incidentally validates the myth of 1 07 See Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, with an introduction by Paul Radin (New York: Harper, 1958 [1871]). 108 Etienne Smith, ‘Merging Ethnic Histories in Senegal: Whose Moral Community?’, in Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola (eds), Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), pp. 213–232 (p. 218).

‘Things’

121

the two Africas),109 he comments on the emergence of Islam in West Africa: ‘With the coming of Islam, that is to say, under the influence of an exterior factor, and not by an internal evolution, most of the people who in the Middle Ages were matrilineal became patrilineal, at least in appearance’ (CUNA, 68). Additional features engendered by cultural diffusion are often treated as mere appearances. In his analysis of the Fulani, Diop highlights the ‘collection of apparent contradictions’ of this population who, albeit nomadic, operates on the basis of a matriarchal system (CUNA, 122). He resolves this anomaly by adding that the Fulani are of Egyptian descent, the reason why they have retained their matriarchal habits (CUNA, 123). In his exploration of the development of the human and social sciences from the Classical age to the modern period, Michel Foucault identified an epistemological shift at the beginning of the twentieth century, a moment coinciding with the emergence and the methodological constitution of linguistics, ethnography, and psychoanalysis. Indeed, in the last chapter of The Order of Things, Foucault argues that social scientists are increasingly inclined to accommodate deviations and to move away from a tendency which consisted in treating social and human phenomena from a dualistic perspective. Henceforth, it gradually became unacceptable to approach these phenomena on the assumption that what was not ‘normal’ within a given system was necessarily ‘abnormal’. In this process, which was to transform the human sciences and generate a decisive break with evolutionist and diffusionist practices, Foucault singles out Freud as ‘the first to undertake the radical erasure of the division between the positive and the negative (between the normal and the pathological, the comprehensive and the incommunicable, the significant and the non-significant)’.110 It seems that Cheikh Anta Diop, despite the novelty of his reading of African historiography (and his objective to restore some obfuscated aspects of African history), cannot circumvent previous dichotomies. His obsession with original cultural ‘cradles’ remains deeply dependent on a set of ideas that had been mobilized to legitimize the colonial order, a system of knowledge largely predicated on centres and peripheries. In The Invention of Africa, a book which relies extensively on The Order 109 See Ghislaine Lydon, ‘Saharan Oceans and Bridges, Barriers and Divides in Africa’s Historical Landscapes’, Journal of African History, 56.1 (2015), 3–22. 110 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 2002), p. 393.

122

Past Imperfect

of Things, Mudimbe contends that Diop was located at the crossroads between a new knowledge about Africa and the ‘colonial library’ and that, as such, his work constituted the ‘best’ but also one of the most ‘excessive’ examples of the ‘Africanization of diffusionism’.111 However, one other decisive factor behind Diop’s style of writing – and anti-racist racism – is the fact that he had throughout his career to contend with ‘scholarly rogues’ such as Charles G. Seligman, whose racist account The Races of Africa (first published in 1930) ‘was reprinted until 1966 virtually unchanged’.112 In Chapter III, I shall return to Diop’s thought and contribution to the decolonization of Africanist scholarship by exploring the concrete and future-orientated measures that he formulated to reverse the linguistic and intellectual dependency of Africa on Europe. Ultimately, Cheikh Anta Diop’s promotion of a pure and more original cradle and Marker’s rejection of métissage are predicated on a specific conception of time and evolution in which racial purity necessarily predates métissage: ‘la “race” était là avant’ [the race was there before].113 This defence of purity, and contention that Africans are first and foremost the members of a rigorously constituted whole, has clear aesthetic implications. Indeed, Marker regrets that a willingness on the part of the Church to foster syncretism in Africa has divested Christendom of its aesthetic (and, it is implied, original) signature. In a particular scene of Les Statues meurent aussi, the camera’s rapid focus on the façade of Dakar’s Cathedral Notre Dame des Victoires and its three African angels is accompanied by a dismissal of Negro-Christian art: Tout se ligue contre l’art nègre. Prise dans une pince entre l’Islam ennemi des images et la chrétienté briseuse d’idoles, la culture africaine s’effondre. Pour la relever, l’église tente un métissage : l’art négro-chrétien. Mais chacune des deux influences détruit l’autre.114 [Everything contributes to the downfall of Negro art. Caught between Islam, the enemy of images, and Christianity, which burns idols, African culture collapses. In order to rescue it, the Church attempts a métissage: black Christian art. But each of the two influences destroys the other] 1 11 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p. 181. 112 Aaron Kamugisha, ‘Finally in Africa? Egypt from Diop to Celenko’, Race and Class, 45.1 (2003), 31–60 (p. 32). 113 Fauvelle, L’Afrique de Cheikh Anta Diop, p. 142. 114 Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, pp. 31–32.

‘Things’

123

Les Statues and Cheikh Anta Diop’s essay are, as argued earlier, not philosophical texts. However, their examination of sub-Saharan Africa, whilst possessing a temporal dimension and an ability to relocate ‘past and future […] with respect to each other’,115 lends itself to a philosophical discussion. Of pivotal significance here is the epistemological issue and the fact that their authors’ style remains dependent on a specific order of knowledge and on their own inability to extricate themselves from explanatory grids in which Africa (its arts, culture, and history) remains the West’s ‘Other’. This discourse of difference would, during decolonization and after, play a significant role in the development of Présence Africaine and its ‘Politics of Otherness’. If this discourse provided the basis for autonomy and the emergence of a distinctive African cultural agenda, it was far from being unanimously adopted, as I shall now show through an exploration of Georges’s Balandier’s appraisal of the category ‘negro art’ in Afrique ambiguë. ‘Lost Arts’ … Georges Balandier’s work constitutes a break with traditional anthropology and was predicated on the idea that the ‘primitive’ – a term that he nonetheless still used in the first version of his 1951 article on the ‘colonial situation’116 – needed to be studied as an agent engaged in a dynamic relationship with the colonizer and the various actors that this generic category represented (missionaries, administrators, and colonial employers). Although Balandier continued to lend his support to Tempels’s hierarchy of vital forces to account for power structures in African communities of the Bantu area,117 he was considering African art from the point of view of the sociological and historical changes generated by the ‘colonial situation’. Balandier’s view on negro art is pessimistic – former artistic centres in Gabon and Congo, he argues, 1 15 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 4. 116 In ‘“La situation coloniale” chez Georges Balandier. Relecture historienne’, Monde(s), 4 (September 2013), 211–232 (pp. 215–216), Isabelle Merle shows that the first version of Balandier’s article was not completely free of colonial derogatory nomenclature. 117 See Balandier, ‘Social Change Among the Ba-Kongo of the Congo’ (pp. 287–472), in The Sociology of Black Africa, p. 336.

124

Past Imperfect

were ‘mortellement atteints’ [mortally wounded]118 – and resonates with the mournful assessment conducted in Statues. Here, I shall mainly focus on the way in which this discussion is approached in ‘Arts perdus’ [Lost Arts], the fourth chapter of Balandier’s Afrique ambiguë, a book which will be explored in greater detail later in this study (see Chapter IV). Balandier was involved in the conception of the documentary and he contributed, at the initial stage of this enterprise, to the formulation of the main argument and the selection of the iconographic material.119 The most enduring input of the film is, as he suggests, to have demonstrated that art is politics.120 This point is systematically developed in ‘Lost Arts’, where Balandier sets out to argue that African objects have been abused to engineer the precedence of the West over Africa and entrap the latter into a Western aesthetic and epistemological order: I detest objects, above all those regarded as works of art, when they are divorced from the human context which gives them their full significance; objects under glass, as helpless in the presence of sightseers as the dead in the presence of the crowds on All Saints’ Day. Both are ‘defenseless’, so that we have unlimited freedom to consider and treat them as we please. They become pretexts. (AA, 100)

This view strongly echoes Sartre’s and Fanon’s exploration of racism and focus on the power of the onlooker to convert the artefacts under their gaze into inauthentic objects. Balandier deplores the ‘absolute passivity’ of these objects and the attitude consisting in investing them ‘with meanings which satisfy us’ (AA, 100) at their expense. He suggests that the pretextual status of African art has already a long history. It informed the Surrealist appropriation of non-Western museum pieces at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro.121 In this context, African artefacts were divested of their original meanings – Balandier uses the word ‘dépaysés’ to describe this process of deracination – and became ‘symbols of total subversion’ called upon by Surrealists to unleash the ‘liberating forces’ of their movement and wage war against European 1 18 Georges Balandier, ‘Les conditions sociologiques de l’art noir’, in Georges Balandier and Jacques Howlett (eds), L’Art nègre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2010 [1951]), pp. 59–67 (p. 60). 119 Georges Balandier, ‘Extraits d’Histoire d’autres de Georges Balandier’, Gravidha. Revue d’anthropologie et d’histoire des arts, 10 (2009), 170–173 (p. 171). 120 Ibid. 121 See Benoît de L’Estoile, Le Goût des autres. De l’exposition coloniale aux arts premiers (Paris: Flammarion, 2010 [2007]), pp. 323–324.

‘Things’

125

civilization (AA, 101). But Balandier argues that this controversial and political use of African art and its ‘misapprehension’ – according to Alioune Diop, to whom he refers here (AA, 101) – also extends to the contemporary period and to the tendency among ‘certain African intellectuals’ to employ it as ‘an instrument of conservative thought’ whereby the ‘glorification of traditional values’ betrays a ‘taste for “fixed” societies’ (AA, 101–102). This criticism, whilst also being aimed at traditional Western ethnographers and their excessive protection of authentic styles and traditions,122 resonates with Fanon’s critique – in The Wretched of the Earth – of the colonized intellectual’s wish to ‘revive’ the past123 at all costs and indulge in the fetishization of indigenous cultures and their ‘mummified fragments’.124 Balandier and Fanon concur but where the former remains amenable to Senghor’s cultural project, Fanon decides, at a time when Senghor had agreed to ‘support French proposals on Algeria’,125 to dismiss his brand of negritude. Balandier’s reflection on African art espouses Sartre’s (and Fanon’s) understanding of negritude as a dialectical movement that will engender change. However, he regrets that the ‘first victory’ of this process, that is, ‘the right of African cultures to be recognized as civilizations’, has been followed by a ‘second phase’ during which the ‘Negro “fetish”’ has ‘become a symbol of all the obstacles to progress’ (AA, 102). Interestingly, Balandier notes that this development – the glorification of the ‘Negro fetish’ – has been criticized by Cheikh Anta Diop – ‘that impassioned advocate of the Negro origins of civilization’ – who ‘fears nothing so much as an idealization of the past inspired by ancient masterpieces which would divert attention from present tasks’ (AA, 101). It is important to point out that Afrique ambiguë was released only two years after the publication of Nations nègres et culture.126 Like L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire, Nations nègres makes the case for a new historiography of Africa and argues, by means of an analogous theory of competing ‘cradles’, that ancient Egypt was originally inhabited by 122 See Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). 123 Frantz Fanon, ‘On National Culture’, in The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. by Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, [1961] 2001), pp. 166–199 (p. 174). 124 Ibid., p. 180. 125 Ibid., p. 189. 126 Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations nègres et culture (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955).

126

Past Imperfect

black Africans and that their superior civilization became the model for less-advanced peoples in the Mediterranean and in Asia Minor. I will examine Nations nègres in detail in Chapter III, and focus primarily on Cheikh Anta Diop’s linguistic agenda, but suffice to say at this stage that he also deplores the fact that African art has been hijacked by European critics and contends that this misappropriation constitutes yet another example of the state of alienation in which Africa has been plunged under French colonialism.127 Beyond this focus on the purported ascendancy of ancient Africa, Cheikh Anta Diop desired above all to lay down the foundation of a freer Africa, and this entailed the implementation of future-orientated schemes – for example, he insists on the urgency of relying on the resources of African languages to create and disseminate (scientific) concepts128 – to reduce the epistemological dependency of black Africans. Like Balandier, Cheikh Anta Diop does not dismiss modernity per se but contends that the modernization of Africa should primarily rely on African (intellectual, cultural, and linguistic) concepts. This vision is also shared by Felwine Sarr in Afrotopia. This epistemological critique – the idea that Africa and her fetishes were conquered and conceptually repackaged for the sole benefit of the conquerors – is a salient feature of Balandier’s exploration of cultural and psychological alienation in Afrique ambiguë. At various points in this book, Balandier accounts for the psychological devastation wrought by colonialism. As a keen but also critical reader of Octave Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonisation, a book he reviewed,129 and from which he developed his concept of ‘la situation coloniale’,130 Balandier often returned to the links between colonial dependency and psychological traumas amongst urbanized black populations torn between traditional practices and the new allegiances engendered by the haphazard emergence of European modernity in newly established African cities (see AA, 40–41). His reading of negro art mirrors this psychological assessment and exemplifies the all-encompassing crisis 127 Ibid., chapter IV, ‘Les Problèmes de l’art africain’, pp. 513–532. 128 Ibid., see ‘Développement des langues’, pp. 405–413. 129 Georges Balandier, ‘O. Mannoni: Psychologie de la Colonisation’, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 9 (1950), 183–186. 130 Gregory Mann, ‘Anti-Colonialism and Social Science: Georges Balandier, Madeira Keita, and “the Colonial Situation” in French Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55.1 (2013), 92–119 (p. 110 n. 75).

‘Things’

127

experienced by African societies. In a passage which bears a striking resemblance to the first few scenes of Statues, Balandier expresses his abhorrence of non-Western exhibits at the Musée de l’Homme where, just before taking on his first ethnographic assignment in Senegal, he had the opportunity to: test my reservations, which amounted almost to aversion, to these collections so painstakingly assembled in order to construct an image of exotic civilizations. By an effect of prolepsis, they seemed to be already dead. I could not bear to see them utterly contained, as in a digest, within a few showcases arranged with laudable pedagogical care. Their slightest material value, made more obvious here, inevitably asserted itself at the expense of their immaterial value; and I asked myself whether we would agree that a complete picture of French civilization could be presented to the eyes of strangers in artfully arranged showcases. (AA, 102)

The idea of the prolepsis – of a flashforward – is interesting for it highlights further the taxonomic violence underpinning colonial curatorship, its morbid long-term effects, and the vision of a future in which African objects will have been ossified: ‘There will always be something disturbing about these exhibits of foreign peoples – this immobility, this formalization which seems definitive and misses what is intangible but in my eyes essential: the various changes by which a civilization reveals its vitality and its history’ (AA, 102; my emphasis). A little further on, Balandier likens the spirit informing these exhibits to ‘a campaign of dispossession’ (AA, 103) and, by means of an intriguing comparison whereby it is implied that ethnography and biometric profiling systems surged from the same taxonomic order, Balandier remembers, with some discomfort, his first attempts at classifying African objects: I forced myself to compose, according to the rules, those types131 of cards of identity which always accompany them. I classified. And I still remember vividly my attempt to work my way through a collection of axes – utilitarian, ritual and ceremonial – which seemed endless. All individuality and the profound meaning of the objects seemed to disappear in this effort of meticulous tabulation, just as the most personal characteristics are destroyed in police files. (AA, 103)

1 31 I have amended the published translation here as ‘ces sortes de cartes’ (Afrique ambiguë, p. 136) had been erroneously translated as ‘those species of cards’.

128

Past Imperfect

Balandier’s analogy is rich in historical and epistemological implications.132 It registers the repressive dimension of ethnographic tabular pursuits and the image of the ethnographer-cum-sleuth ‘sniffing out social facts’;133 it also shows that the discipline emerged at the crossroads of racial theories and new policing techniques, Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometry134 and Francis Galton’s introduction of fingerprint identification (in Bengal)135 being concrete manifestations of this tendency. Both Statues and Afrique ambiguë depict the inventory of African artefacts as a morbid exercise. However, the contention that African art obeys immutable traditions runs counter to the methodological spirit that Balandier had embraced at the time of his first ethnographic missions in West Africa. He remarks that these exhibits – their ‘immobility’ and the ‘formalization which seems definitive’ – miss ‘what is intangible but in my eyes essential: the various changes by which a civilization reveals its vitality and its history’ (AA, 102). ‘Changes’, ‘vitality’, and ‘history’: these words capture Balandier’s intellectual ambition to explore modern Africa differently and reinscribe it into a dynamic (and ‘modern’) temporal trajectory. This research premise also means that Balandier does not subscribe unconditionally to the mournful approach adopted by the co-directors of Statues as he notes that ‘the death of Negro art’ was announced too prematurely (AA, 117). Thus, this chapter sets out also to demonstrate that sub-Saharan Africa has not been completely divested of its artistic creativity and Balandier singles out the case of the Bamileke from Cameroon to substantiate this view: There is no denying the dynamism of this ethnic group which, proud of its traditions and preserving its originality, has nevertheless proved skilful in assimilating modern contributions. Its equilibrium and vitality are revealed by the strength of its art, which thus proves to be one of the best indices to the health of a civilization. (AA, 118) 132 On the ‘captured’ nature of museum objects and their ‘epistemological and, indeed ontological bondage’, see Paul Basu (ed.), The Inbetweenness of Things: Materializing Mediation and Movement between Worlds (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. 3. 133 On policing and ethnographic enquiries, see the account of Griaule’s work by James Clifford in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 72. 134 Alphonse Bertillon, Ethnographie moderne. Les races sauvages (Paris: G. Masson Éditeur, 1883). 135 Francis Galton, Finger Prints (London: Macmillan, 1892).

‘Things’

129

The post-mortem has given way to a resounding all-clear diagnosis; the Bamileke’s vitality and ability to absorb foreign inputs to their advantage whilst ‘defending their identity’136 are the encouraging signs of their historical agency. Incidentally, one can understand why this dynamic people clashed from 1955 onwards with the French colonial army then in the process of eradicating the outlawed ‘Union des populations du Cameroun’ which, from the Bamileke high plains, first took up arms against the colonizers and then Ahmadou Ahidjo’s postcolonial regime in what would become a protracted civil war and genocide.137 Like Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, Balandier regards this artistic creativity as a concrete manifestation of political agency: ‘this example shows how closely those areas of the Negro world where artistic activities remain strongest coincide with the distribution of those peoples138 least subjected to, or best defended from, the constraining effects of colonization’ (AA, 119). This diagnosis is also predicated on a close observation of urban life; where ‘aesthetic preoccupations tend to center around houses and clothing’ (AA, 122). And Balandier is keen to explore the unexpected mutations generated by this cultural reordering. In Chapter IV, where I focus on Balandier’s examination of African millenarianism, I shall again pay attention to this context where objects, words, and concepts are ascribed new – and often incongruous – meanings. An analogous sense that the city has become a spontaneous arte povera laboratory permeates Balandier’s account of artistic creativity in urban settings: ‘Color plates and illustrations torn from magazines, reproductions from scholarly books or catalogues replace the old wall decorations […] Then 1 36 The translator decided to leave out the clause ‘en défendant son identité’ (Afrique ambiguë, p. 159) from this passage, possibly because it overlaps with the preceding clause ‘en maintenant son originalité’. 137 See Achille Mbembe, ‘Ecrire l’Afrique à partir d’une faille’, Politique Africaine, 51 (1993), 69–97; and Achille Mbembe, La Naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun, 1920–1960. Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (Paris: Khartala, 1996). But also: Ruben Um Nyobé, Écrits sous maquis, introduction and notes by Achille Mbembe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989) and Ruben Um Nyobé, Le Problème national Kamerunais, introduced by Achille Mbembe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). 138 The translator used ‘tribes’ to translate ‘peuples’ (Afrique ambiguë, p. 161). Given the derogatory connotation of the word tribe – and the fact that Balandier was determined to move away from tribal anthropology – I decided to reinstate the less loaded and more faithful ‘peoples’.

130

Past Imperfect

there is the ornamental use of certain of our waste products, boxes with pictorial advertisements or gaudy wrapping paper’ (AA, 122). Although it is fair to say that Balandier remains less than impressed by this ‘African baroque’, he nonetheless concedes that this ‘alienation and “Africanization” of our familiar objects […] contributes to the emergence, as yet awkward and hesitating, of an aesthetic peculiar to modern Africa’ (AA, 123). The word ‘Africanization’ is also a sign that the process of colonial alienation (or assimilation) has been partly overturned and that this new era is marked by an desire to invent new practices and ‘unhome’ colonial culture. The process of ‘unhoming’ occurs when ‘both the host and the guest accept, in different ways, the uncomfortable and sometimes painful possibility of being changed by the other’.139 In this regard, Balandier welcomes the work produced by the painters of the (now famous) Poto-Poto atelier in Brazzaville140 and argues that their production, whilst tapping into ‘the ancient cultural heritage’ (AA, 127), is also rich in future promises. At the very end of the same chapter, he argues that the expression ‘lost arts’ may simply be a symptom of the fact that ‘we are dwelling on a certain image of Negro civilizations which have already been swept away by the tide of history’ (AA, 128). With a turn of phrase that foreshadows the thesis informing Mudimbe’s ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies’, he also notes that Africa is ‘recovering her balance in order to begin again’ (AA, 128), a sentence which does not quite render the meaning of the original: ‘L’Afrique se “reprend” et cherche à se refaire’.141 … And Reprised Arts Let us examine Mudimbe’s response to the philosophical and, above all, aesthetic context that marked the emergence of Présence Africaine. In his analysis of the colonial library, the Congolese thinker has demonstrated that Africa remained for centuries an object of fascination that Westerners would invariably appropriate to satisfy self-aggrandizing 1 39 Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 176. 140 See also Balandier in Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires (Paris: Armand Colin, 1955), which focuses on this area of Brazzaville. 141 Balandier, Afrique ambiguë, p. 174. My emphasis.

‘Things’

131

goals. In this process, Africa became a mere receptacle that they would fill with their own ideas at the same time as divesting it of its contents and values. Beyond this focus on contemporary African art in ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies’, Mudimbe has also dedicated essays to the place of Africa in European art and architecture in the Middle Ages,142 the Renaissance and the Classical Age,143 and the modernist era.144 In these texts, he appraises artistic trends, links them to prevailing racial discourses, and identifies invariables but also epistemological shifts. Although Mudimbe never focused specifically on Les Statues, he has nonetheless abundantly commented on the discourse of difference that I have identified in this documentary and in Cheikh Anta Diop’s work. In ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies’, Mudimbe explores the significance of Pierre Romain-Desfossés, a former French colonial officer who moved in 1946 to Élisabethville (now Lubumbashi, DRC), where he founded ‘Le Hangar’, an art studio.145 Romain-Desfossés became an important local figure and was a key promoter of what could be called a re-indigenization of Katangese artistic imagination. Mudimbe is keen to highlight the patronizing dimension of his enterprise. Like his contemporary Tempels, Romain-Desfossés regarded himself as a benevolent and supportive ‘father’ who would guide his ‘black children’146 and help them to retrieve and express the essential traits of an innately African aesthetic tradition. Mudimbe goes on to explain that Romain-Desfossés’s mentoring of local budding talent was predicated on a system in which Africa and the West were treated in radically oppositional terms. Indeed, he took it upon himself to protect his pupils from ‘Western degeneracy’, ‘snobism’, and ‘folly’ in order to enable them to tap into the ‘pure and fresh sources’ of their African creativity.147 The dualism at work here echoes what has already been identified in Tempels’s essay, Statues, 142 See Valentin Yves Mudimbe, ‘L’Un et ses autres’, in L’Autre Face du royaume. Une introduction à la critique des langages en folie (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1973), pp. 25–31. See the English translation of this text, ‘The Self and Its Others, in The Mudimbe Reader, ed. by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Daniel Orrells (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), pp. 183–189. 143 See Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, pp. 5–10. 144 See Valentin Yves Mudimbe, ‘From “Primitive Art” to “Memoriae Loci”’, in The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 55–70. This text was republished in The Mudimbe Reader, pp. 190–199. 145 Mudimbe, ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies’, pp. 201–202. 146 Ibid., p. 203. 147 Ibid.

132

Past Imperfect

and Cheikh Anta Diop’s impassioned rehabilitation of Africa. The vocabulary used by Romain-Desfossés reiterates the morbid status of the West, the degeneracy at the heart of its artistic practices, and, it is implied, its imminent fall. Africa, on the other hand, is praised for its vitality and life-giving propensity. Mudimbe exposes the nature of Romain-Desfossés’s cultural analysis and view that his African ‘pupils’ are the recipients of a collectively shared ‘Nilotic’ creativity.148 We are in 1946 and there is no doubt that this concern with Egypt as a ‘source’ from which a major civilization was diffused throughout Africa resonates with Cheikh Anta Diop’s exploration of ‘cradles’. Understandably, Mudimbe is critical of Romain-Desfossés’s position and his ambition to link ‘geography, race, and art’.149 The latter’s endorsement of an ethnically based ‘aesthetic unconscious, common to sub-Saharan Africans’150 does not sit comfortably with Mudimbe’s promotion of existential freedom and authenticity (in the Sartrean sense of the word). Already in his very first essays, Mudimbe had complained about this precedence that had been fostered by ethnophilosophy but, more problematically, had also become one of the most visible ideological tenets of the Mobutu-driven return to Bantu authenticity.151 For Mudimbe, ethnophilosophy is a critical school that served an emancipating purpose at a particular time in history even though, elsewhere in his work, he has remained very dismissive of its subsequent transformations and instrumentalizations by African rulers and African-American activists.152 In ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies’, he adopts a similar position: if he praises (with some caveats) Romain-Desfossés’s activities in colonial Katanga, Mudimbe nonetheless believes that his model and his focus on tradition are of little use for understanding the evolution of African art after independence. This examination of Romain-Desfossés, who feared that Negro art would die out if not protected from decadent European influences, lends itself as an indirect commentary by Mudimbe on Les Statues and the 148 Ibid., pp. 201–202. 149 Ibid., p. 201. 150 Ibid., p. 202. 151 See Valentin Yves Mudimbe, ‘Héritage occidental et conscience nègre’, Congo-Afrique, 26 (June–July 1968), 2–14, republished in English as ‘Western Legacy and Negro Consciousness: An Introductory Study of the Sources of African Ideology’, in The Mudimbe Reader, pp. 13–24. 152 See his critique of the reappropriation of Bernal’s theses in The Idea of Africa, pp. 103–104.

‘Things’

133

period in which the documentary was released. Like Romain-Desfossés and many others of his contemporaries, Marker is unable to entertain the view that Negro art might survive the aesthetic upheaval usually associated with the large-scale Westernization of Africa. In ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies’, Mudimbe proves them wrong and demonstrates, with the benefit of hindsight (this must be stressed), that African art was to be produced against a less dualistic set of paradigms. Reprendre, the French verb that Mudimbe leaves untranslated, conveys the simple idea that African artistic creativity was affected by European practices, but that African art did not disappear as a result. Like Georges Balandier before him, Mudimbe contends that African traditions, albeit transformed, still inform the work of contemporary artists. The term reprendre – an equivocal verb meaning to ‘take up again’,’ take over’, but also ‘reprise’ and ‘reappraise’ according to the context – is used by Mudimbe to disrupt the rigid historicity (precolonial, colonial, postcolonial) that for a very long time prevailed among scholars of European imperialism and art historians. Mudimbe argues against this type of chronological segmentation and contends that the racially compartmentalized colonial context was, in fact, more porous than it may have seemed and generated a space in which African and European traditions would be taken up again and submitted to deliberate processes of reprises, reappraisals, reprisals, and ‘unhoming’. Mudimbe, in effect, suggests that African art, whilst the product of an African ‘space of experience’, is also contingent on a ‘modern’ ‘horizon of expectation’ and the product of an ‘ekstatic’ temporality whereby the subject is also a future possibility. Marker was unable to see the future of African art as his attention remained focused on the excesses of late imperialism (the recent past) and myths of origins (the remote past), whilst remaining silent on the intermediate period (i.e. the unknowable era that Jan Vansina called the ‘floating gap’): ‘There are many accounts for very recent times, tapering off as one goes farther back until one reaches times of origin for which, once again, there are many accounts’.153 This partial historical recovery – silent on the ‘floating gap’ and the future – privileges the discrepancy between two types of past, one perfect, rigorous, and harmonious and the other, violent and iconoclastic. This context explains why Statues, whilst being a documentary on art, remained entirely entangled in political 153 See Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1985), p. 168.

134

Past Imperfect

and racial issues.154 In his critical examination of African postcolonial art, Mudimbe does not move away from these issues but he contends that the less than palatable consequences of late colonialism, such as, for instance, the mass production of indigenous artefacts, ironically generated a space where African artists were able to thrive and invent new rules beyond the strict opposition between African and Western traditions. At this stage, it is worth signalling that in ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, Senghor had also envisaged this issue of reprise. In this 1939 piece, he contends that African culture has survived – notably in North America – despite the destruction of African civilizations as a result of slavery and colonialism. According to Senghor, who focuses specifically on the links between music (and rhythm) and sculpture and adopts Frobenius’s functional argument, African culture is, ‘neither game nor pure aesthetic enjoyment’, for its main purpose is ‘to signify’ communal spirituality.155 After Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro,156 Senghor insists that ‘rhythm’ is the ‘ordering force’ and the ‘vital element’ behind ‘negro style’. This rhythmical quality – rhythm is ‘alive’ and ‘free’ – means that traditional sculpture is a realm where creative freedom is expressed because ‘reprise is neither redundancy nor repetition. The theme is reprised at another place, on another level, in another combination, in a variation; and it generates another tone, another timbre, and another accent’.157 Foreshadowing what Jean-Paul Sartre would say nine years later in ‘Black Orpheus’, Senghor argues that African rhythmicality will provide the ‘necessary sap’ to re-energize an ‘impoverished’ Western creativity.158 In this programmatic essay, Senghor also argues that African humanism and what he romantically calls ‘l’âme nègre’ [negro soul] should act as a model to reboot Western democracies on the eve of the Second World War. Indeed, he lists here the specific qualities of a negro worldview in which man exists symbiotically with nature and where the collective needs of the community are favoured over individualistic pursuits. This innate socialism and ecological consciousness are, in this impassioned defence of the ‘negro soul’, presented as bulwarks against the progression of (colonial) capitalism. 1 54 Payot, L’Art africain entre silence et promesse, p. 14. 155 Senghor, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, p. 34. 156 Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro, La Sculpture nègre primitive (Paris: G. Crès, 1929). 157 Senghor, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, p. 35. 158 Ibid., p. 36.

‘Things’

135

Unlike Marker and Senghor, who speak on behalf of negro art (in the singular), itself an expression of the ‘negro soul’, and largely gloss over regional singularities, Mudimbe is eager to highlight the obvious but often overlooked fact that African art is ‘amazingly diverse’.159 He goes a step further, however, as he also explores the works of individual contemporary artists such as Twins Seven Seven (Nigeria), Iba N’Diaye (Senegal), or Tshibumba Kanda Matulu (DRC), the Congolese painter to whom Johannes Fabian dedicated a book160 in which he is presented as the unofficial historiographer of Congo-Zaire and chronicler of the Congolese ‘present past’ (Koselleck). This focus on individual production is, on Mudimbe’s part, yet another sign of his effort to explore these artists’ authenticity (again in the Sartrean sense of the word). In this respect, Balandier argues that the scientific apparatus that he adhered to whilst on fieldwork renders individual artists invisible: ‘In the course of this undertaking, I never reached the men who created these tools or objects of artistic value; the more I concentrated on the objects, the more the subjects disappeared as if behind a screen’ (AA, 103). For Marker, on the other hand, art production is above all an immanent feature of Africanness. It is a pervasive aspect of African ‘vital force’ and ‘being’ (in Tempels’s understanding of these concepts) but is, however, a feature which is allegedly not interrogated by African practitioners. This view reiterates Tempels’s idea that, although there is such a thing as African (or Bantu) philosophy, its main agents are unaware of its inner mechanisms and thought procedures.161 African art is therefore a domain without aestheticians, a point which, ultimately, does little to affirm its autonomy since it is presented as the by-product of an ‘alreadythere’ and the concrete manifestation of a universally accepted set of values in which the notion of ‘man’ will be eternally subsumed by that of the community. In his ironically entitled ‘Les fétiches sont beaux aussi’ [Fetishes Are Also Beautiful], Jacques Howlett denounced this tendency among Africanist art historians to obfuscate individual creativity in the name of the communitarian principles informing the African socioreligious ‘Umwelt’.162 1 59 Mudimbe, ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies’, p. 201. 160 Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 161 Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, p. 21. 162 Jacques Howlett, ‘Les fétiches sont beaux aussi’, in Georges Balandier and Jacques Howlett (eds), L’Art nègre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2010 [1966]),

136

Past Imperfect

Mudimbe’s focus on contemporary African artists and their tendency to reprendre traditions, often ironically, is useful because it helps us to measure a very noticeable transformation in the way in which African art has been received outside of Africa but also, and more importantly, perceived by its own practitioners since the early 1950s. His focus on ‘popular art’ is in this respect particularly revealing of a domain in which a rich variety of styles, registers, and genres interact and interfere with one another. ‘Popular art’, as a phrase, is eminently linked to the development of the Western market economy. It also blurs the divide between the artistic and the consumable. It threatens the sacrosanct status of ‘Art’ and, since everything seems to be reproducible (as Marker bemoans in Statues), brings into question notions usually cherished by art historians: the genius of the artist and the uniqueness of her/ his inspiration. Mudimbe welcomes the emergence of African popular art. If in his view it often lacks the ‘polysemous, associative, [and] open principles of most works of art’,163 he is eager to signal the complexity of artists such as Tshibumba Kanda Matulu: [T]he message of Patrice Lumumba’s walk to death in Héros National Lumumba is ambiguous. The painting’s surface clarity does not prevent the viewer from gleaning a variety of meanings from it: the dignity of the nationalist hero, the symbolic link between the Western-built helicopter and the three Katangese officials, the morality of the soldiers serving a state capable of such a crime, the physical absence of the Belgians themselves, and so on. Meanings, suggestions, images emerge from the frame, and history meets symbols in the mind of a ‘popular’ viewer with an efficiency impossible in even the best book.164

Mudimbe’s notion of reprendre sheds light on the legacy of Présence Africaine and on the ethnophilosophical pronouncements of some of its major figures (Placide Tempels, Alioune Diop, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Senghor) but also more distant supporters (Leo Frobenius, Pierre Romain-Desfossés, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker). It also provides a retrospective refutation of the discourse of difference – and ‘politics of otherness’ – highlighted in this chapter; but it shows, too, that pp. 79–81 (p. 81). Howlett’s article was published in 1966 in a new and augmented reedition of L’Art nègre (originally published in 1951). 163 Mudimbe, ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies’, p. 209. 164 Ibid. p. 210. On Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, see ‘Conversations: Tshibumba Kanda Matulu and Johannes Fabian’, in Matthias De Groof (ed.), Lumumba in the Arts (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020). pp. 339–360.

‘Things’

137

thinkers like Balandier – and Fanon – had understood that urbanization, particularly, would produce new creative insights and transform African art without completely eradicating traditions. The emancipative trajectory from ‘Negro art’ to the constitution of home-grown African discourses on art resonates with Mudimbe’s optimistic concluding remark in The Invention of Africa: I believe that the geography of African gnosis also points out the passion of a subject-object who refuses to vanish. He or she has gone from the situation in which he or she was perceived as a simple functional object to the freedom of thinking of himself or herself as the starting point of an absolute discourse.165

From Les Statues meurent aussi to It for Others Les Statues meurent aussi celebrates the greatness of Negro art but announces its imminent death. In their dismissal of métissage and failure to ascribe a revolutionary potential to non-traditional African art, the documentary’s French directors signal their inability to identify evidence of a possible renaissance in African artistic practices of the early 1950s. Their perspective, as suggested here, bears witness to the intellectual debates in ethnographic and anti-colonial circles of the period even though the views defended by Balandier in Afrique ambiguë constitute a departure from this ethno-philosophical essentialism. The documentary provides more than it promises, however, and does not – which is very fortunate – completely adhere to its programme of ethnographic orthodoxy and cultural authenticity. By skilfully combining slow-moving scenes with frantically paced shots and newsreel footage, the directors are able to instil vitality into these mortal statues: ‘The animation of the inanimate is key to the life that this documentary breathes back into its subject, while it also resuscitates links to African culture.’166 The post-mortem becomes paradoxically a pretext to submit these authentic artefacts to a process of cinematic reprise. The release of It for Others (2013) by the Irish video artist Duncan Campbell provides an interesting addendum to the long-term legacy of Les Statues and its underlying anti-colonial commentary. This fifty-fourminute film essay won its director the 2014 Turner Prize. It deliberately 1 65 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p. 200. My emphasis. 166 Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 13.

138

Past Imperfect

reconnects with Statues and problematizes the relationship between art and its consumers, between objects and the predatory ‘gaze’ of viewers/purchasers. The scope of the film is wide and avowedly militant. Campbell’s discussion of the value of the object – the ‘it’ of the title whose only purpose is to be ‘for others’ – is underpinned by explicit references to Capital and Marxist economic theories and mediated by way of a choreographed equation – ‘Measure of value’/‘Means of circulation’ – performed by ballet dancers from the Michael Clark Company dressed in black and moving on a white canvas. Another powerful equivalence is established between the commercialization of goods and ideas and the commodification of significant historical moments such as the anti-imperialist IRA martyrdom – notably the recent use of Joe McCann’s image on Christmas stockings – and the equally ironic focus on a Chinese sweatshop mass-producing tee-shirts with the effigy of Che Guevara. The interesting point, however, is that It for Others is itself an artistic by-product – a reprise and reappraisal – of Les Statues meurent aussi. Campbell pays tribute to its aesthetic and political power and the first part of the film is a remake of the French original. There are, however, subtle differences. The narrative style adopted by the female voiceover is less stilted, less solemn and declamatory than Négroni’s. In fact, the tone and rhythm of the exposition is close to that of Marker’s Sans Soleil. There is a tendency in Statues to provide comprehensive explanations so as to equip the viewers with the tools to grasp what African art is and is not. This didactic dimension is not absent from It for Others but here the narrator is more interested in deciphering the choices and decisions presiding over the composition of the documentary. This explicatory work focuses as much on the documentary itself as on what it is overtly exploring (art, the value of art objects, and the language of advertising), as if the narrator had constantly to remind the viewer, but above all herself, of the purpose and focus of the documentary: ‘An educational and methodological film on the characteristics of commodities in relation to value when put into circulation’.167 This running commentary adopts the structure of a travel log. Indeed, the narrator structures her commentary as a sequence of diary entries (‘March 14’, etc.) to report on the development of the documentary, which is treated as work in progress rather than 1 67 It for Others (Middle Part): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z6SCD eh4_A [accessed 24 July 2015].

‘Things’

139

as a completed piece, a point reflecting Campbell’s determination to produce ‘open-ended’ films.168 The narrator also provides pointers to describe, to what is obviously a non-francophone audience, the context in which Statues was produced in 1953, at a time (a point forcefully made here) when France was waging a war in colonial Indochina. In the second part of the film, there is an extraordinary sequence capturing Campbell’s will to explore and parody the processes underpinning the dissemination of facts and information by the media. A cardboard box of Unifilla© appears on the screen and becomes a radio as an aerial conspicuously emerges from one of its corners. At the same time, a female voice comes out of the radio set and starts praising the revitalizing benefits of a Scotch Whiskey-flavoured shampoo. Rather incongruously – Campbell relishes such incongruities – the focus shifts to current affairs and to what a new male (French-language) radio presenter describes as a number of bloody ‘manifestations musulmanes’ [Muslim demonstrations] that have taken place in Algeria. It becomes apparent that this authentic news bulletin was broadcast in June 1961 as the journalist subsequently refers to the condemnation of Georges Robin, one of the French army officers who took part in the OAS-orchestrated putsch against the French colonial administration in Algiers on 22 April 1961.169 By way of these diegetic and non-diegetic commentaries, the viewer is in a position to glean relevant information on the history of French colonialism and its gradual demise after the Second World War. In the first part of the documentary, the female narrator mentions the work of Frantz Fanon and focuses on the significance of Présence Africaine and, whilst African artefacts are displayed on the screen, she reads from Sartre’s ‘Black Orpheus’ and draws the spectator’s attention to the notion of ‘anti-racist racism’ to reinforce the curatorial violence that Marker and Resnais were denouncing in their documentary. She also conveys the content of a report published in 1971 by the journal Présence Africaine exploring the creeping effects of neocolonialism in West Africa and elsewhere on the continent.170 She reflects on colonial 1 68 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOH3-CkM_kg [accessed 23 July 2015]. 169 See Georges Robin (with Pierre Bozio), Commandant rebelle. Algérie, 1958: de l’obéissance à la révolte (Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1998). 170 She is most probably referring to the following article by Moustapha Diabaté: ‘Du sous-développement au blocage au développement’, Présence Africaine, 79.3 (1971), 17–33. Diabaté deplores the return to ‘feudal’ practices on the part of

140

Past Imperfect

and neocolonial assimilation and regrets that some African regimes were built on ideas developed elsewhere by thinkers such as Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu and that this intellectual dependency has precipitated the disappearance of cultural and linguistic diversity. She then establishes an analogy between this assimilation of Africa and that of African objects in Western museums. At this point, the film becomes self-referential and concerned with the conditions of its own making. The viewer is informed that Neil MacGregor, the British Museum’s director, denied Campbell and his crew access to some of the Benin sculptures that appear in Les Statues and that they had originally planned to include in their film. This overt criticism of the British Museum’s inability to recognize the validity of Campbell’s project forms the basis of another related discussion on the status of African artworks in the postcolonial world. The narrator, who seems here to be speaking on behalf of Campbell himself, implies that the film-maker had to rely on replicas, reproductions, and serially produced masks to complete this particular section of the film. This limited access to originals, and the subsequent proliferation of copies, resonates also with the situation in which postcolonial subjects find themselves with regard to objects which were once their own, then were looted by colonial powers, and have since been curated by museums in major Western cities.171 In this respect, it is interesting to point out that most of the 135 objects shown in Statues had been lent by private collectors and museums in the West. Exactly sixty years after this, Campbell suggests that issues of their acquisition and repatriation have not yet been resolved, a point which, of course, resonates with the ongoing work by scholars such as Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy on African patrimonies and their (non-)restitution.172 This old controversy, reignited by President Macron’s Ouagadougou speech in 2017,173 has resurfaced many times since decolonization. At the end of the 1970s, UNESCO Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow became one of the main advocates for the repatriation of artefacts from ‘North’ to ‘South’.174 His ‘Plea for the Return of an Irreplaceable Cultural contemporary African regimes (p. 31) and their regular misappropriation of public funds at the expense of development projects (p. 32). 171 On this dubious ‘guardianship’, see Van Beurden, Authentically African. 172 See Sarr and Savoy, Restituer le patrimoine africain. 173 https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2017/11/28/emmanuel-macronsspeech-at-the-university-of-ouagadougou.en [accessed 12 May 2020]. 174 Sarr and Savoy, Restituer le patrimoine africain, pp. 37–38.

‘Things’

141

Heritage to Those Who Created It’ still captures some of the main – and very concrete – issues explored by Campbell: The peoples who were victims of this plunder, sometimes for hundreds of years, have not only been despoiled of irreplaceable masterpieces but also robbed of a memory which would doubtless have helped them to greater self-knowledge and would certainly have enabled others to understand them better.175

By linking the past to the present and suggesting that African art, and by extension Africa, has remained the West’s ‘being-for-others’ (Sartre), Campbell argues, then, that the criticism at the heart of Statues retains some of its relevance today. ***** This chapter has examined the nature but also the long-term legacy of Les Statues meurent aussi. This essay documentary was released at a time when old-style Africanism was reconsidering its premises and thought procedures in addition to reappraising the limits – the boundaries but also the limitations – of its own investigative methodology, Balandier’s dynamic sociology and exploration of the ‘colonial situation’ being the most telling example of this rupture with tribal anthropology. Les Statues is an intriguing object because it advocates freedom but remains nonetheless prescriptive and trapped in essentialist discourses on the functional dimension (Frobenius) of ‘negro’ art and ‘soul’ (Senghor). It embraces wholeheartedly a Sartrean understanding of objectification – intersubjective, racial, and, by analogy, ‘curatorial’ objectification; but it is also underpinned by a constraining interpretative grid in which African statues are presented as the products of a rigorously ordered cultural (and cultual) universe. This contradictory gesture has its logic and bears witness to a time – the ethnophilosophical moment of African thinking – when issues of political, economic, racial, aesthetic, and literary emancipation were inherently linked to claims of ontological definitions.

1 75 Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, ‘A Plea for the Return of an Irreplaceable Cultural Heritage to those who Created It’ (7 June 1978). See file:///C:/Users/Piw/Documents/ PUBLICATIONS/African%20philo%20and%20decolonisation%20Monograph/ All%20Chapters%20April%20May%202020/PealforReturn_ DG_1978%20 Amadou-Mahtar%20M’Bow.pdf [accessed 12 May 2020].

142

Past Imperfect

In the francophone domain, Présence Africaine (the publisher and its eponymous journal) came to represent this moment. Its main quest – what is Africa? – was approached from a number of different disciplines. Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy and Cheikh Anta Diop’s The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa exemplify this ambition to explore Africa from the point of view of its heterotemporal, ontological, and cultural singularity. In ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies’, Valentin Mudimbe dissects some of the ideological prejudices underlying the ethnophilosophical moment and, via Pierre Romain-Desfossé, focuses specifically on the aesthetic implications of this invented Africa. In his reading of recent African aesthetic trends, Mudimbe mobilizes an impressive array of sources on African art and focuses on the conditions that facilitated its gradual absorption into Western aesthetic and curatorial practices. Beyond the subtlety of the analysis, Mudimbe’s argument is driven by a determination to reveal the romantic tenets upon which ethnophilosophical aesthetics came into being; and to develop the idea that African styles are not exclusively linked to the timelessness of communal rituals or to an unchangeable ‘space of experience’, a point also robustly made by Georges Balandier in ‘Arts perdus’. Senghor’s ‘negro soul’, an idea which today cannot be dissociated from the stereotypical representation of a rhythmical and close-to-nature Africa, would continue long after decolonization – and, in fact, until the 1990s – to shape responses to African art and create the expectation that African artists had a duty to remain authentically African.176 The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium), for instance, was until 1992 opposed to the idea of exhibiting post-traditional and modernist works of African origin.177 Quite pragmatically, then, Mudimbe concludes that African creativity is not immune to external pressure or rather, and more to the point, that external pressure and influence are not necessarily to be equated with the assimilation or the ‘death’ of the ‘original’ creative impetus, an argument also developed in Afrique ambiguë. African art, Mudimbe contends, has for centuries been actively engaged in a global process where ‘tradition’, whilst still a very significant factor in contemporary productions, has also been contested, popularized, parodied, and 176 See Elizabeth Harney, In the Shadow of Senghor: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 177 Luc Vellut, ‘Ressources scientifiques, culturelles et humaines de l’africanisme en Belgique. Perspectives sur un patrimoine d’outre-mer et sa mise en valeur’, Cahiers africains, 9–11 (1994), 115–144.

‘Things’

143

reprised. By parenthesis, it is interesting to point out that ‘Reprendre’ is also the title of a film event organized in 2018 by the Pompidou Centre on the repatriation of plundered African artefacts.178 It for Others takes up again and reopens the issue regarding African art and its value, be it aesthetic or commercial. What is noteworthy here is the tribute paid by Campbell to emancipative demands resulting from Les Statues. Like Marker, he is very clear that issues of reception and spectatorship cannot be disentangled from politics and power relationships engendered by the violent confrontation of unequal market actors. Sartre and Fanon are briefly mentioned here to engage with a reflection on colonial alienation and the reification of the colonized and, much more fundamentally, the production of incongruous equivalences whereby the limits between objects and humans are perpetually suspended.179

178 See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/agenda/event.action?param.id=FR_ R-813444e4af74897f4035a0c37b682d34¶m.idSource=FR_E-813444e4af7489 7f4035a0c37b682d34 [accessed 13 May 2020]. This event aimed to present films which ‘contribuent à questionner le devenir et la transmission d’objets confisqués, trop souvent voués à la seule muséification [contribute to interrogate the evolution and the transmission of confiscated objects all too often destined to end up in museums]. This title, ‘Reprendre’, may not be completely coincidental for one of the film-makers presented at this event, Susan Vogel (Fang: an Epic Journey), was the editor of the collection of essays in which Mudimbe’s essay was originally published: Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. The other two film-makers whose films were presented at this event were Uriel Orlow (The Visitor) and Fatou Kandé Senghor (Giving Birth, 2015). 179 For an analysis of the way in which the film blurs the limits between objecthood and subjecthood, see Jules O’Dwyer, ‘Reorienting Objects in Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Les Statues Meurent aussi’, Screen, 58.4 (2017), 497–507.

chapter iii

‘Words’ ‘Words’

The mother tongue is the site of nativity and pure origin. But what if this mother tongue itself is not really monolingual, homogenous, and fully familiar? Yasemin Yildiz1

Empires were also linguistic enterprises. When they set out to colonize Africa, Europeans were faced with the pressing issue of mastering the African multilingual landscape. This chapter will explore the role of languages and language policies in francophone sub-Saharan Africa and pay attention to some of the strategies deployed by imperial administrations in West Africa but also in the Congo Free State to manage linguistic issues and provide the basis for communication in the ‘colonial situation’ (Balandier). The first part of this chapter will focus on the intense linguistic activity that accompanied the conquest of West and Central Africa from the nineteenth century onwards and delineate the ideological factors responsible for this large-scale homogenizing process. I shall also ascertain, via Third Republic figures like Louis Faidherbe, Onésime Reclus, and Maurice Delafosse, the way in which language planning became one of the main biopolitical technologies used by the colonizers to develop African colonies and, by means of what the French linguist Louis-Jean Calvet named ‘glottophagia’, 2 bring about progress, and to open Africa to a Western ‘horizon of expectation’. In this analysis, priority will be given to the epistemological context 1 Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Post Monolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), p. 67. 2 Louis-Jean Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme. Petit traité de glottophagie (Paris: Payot, 1974).

146

Past Imperfect

behind the emergence of racially driven theories – such as the Hamitic hypothesis – developed in the long nineteenth century by Africanists eager to postulate the cultural superiority of the Aryans and Caucasians and to promulgate, like Charles-André Julien (who would write the foreword to Senghor’s famous anthology) and Émile-Félix Gautier (author of L’Afrique noire occidentale and L’Afrique blanche), the idea of the two Africas. 3 In a climate dominated by evolutionism, diffusionism, and indeed graphocentrism, these theories had the effect of consolidating the widely shared assumption that sub-Saharan African languages were rudimentary preliterate systems lagging behind their Indo-European and Semitic counterparts. At this stage of the argument, it is important, if a little self-evident, to add that this attempt on the part of the colonizers to impose Europhone languages did not quite succeed; that colonial language policies remained ‘heterogeneous, uneven, and often self-contradictory’;4 and that this process did not prevent African languages – Yoruba, Shona, Kiswahili, Lingala, Wolof, and many others – from becoming powerful vectors of ethnic and cultural identities. 5 In this discussion, it will also be demonstrated that colonial rule was facilitated by the publication of vocabularies and glossaries which, whilst promoting utilitarian approaches to language learning and privileging some vehicular languages over others, also paved the way for the constitution of African (applied) linguistics. It will be argued here that the process of linguistic standardization engendered by colonialism also reinforced the ‘allochronistic’ (Fabian) feature of the imperial encounter. In this logic, the relation between African dialects and European languages was often submitted to developmentalist interpretations whereby Africans were regarded as inchoate interlocutors or infants, a word understood here in its etymological meaning – ‘that cannot speak, without speech, mute, speechless’.6 Gradually, however, this evolutionist 3 See Ghislaine Lydon, ‘Saharan Oceans and Bridges, Barriers and Divides in Africa’s Historical Landscapes’, Journal of African History, 56.1 (2015), p. 10. 4 Karin Barber, ‘African Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism’, Research in African Literatures, 26.4 (Winter 1995), 3–33 (p. 13). 5 Karin Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 160–161. 6 From the Latin infans, literally ‘not yet able to speak, young, little, infant’, see Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary: http://www. perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=infans [accessed 25 January 2021].

‘Words’

147

postulation was challenged by the rise of the évolué class and by a new brand of African intellectuals who would simultaneously master the French language and advocate the conceptual and historical richness of African vernaculars. I will then describe the ambivalent recognition of this African personnel and focus specifically on Amadou Hampâté Bâ and the working relationship he developed with Théodore Monod, his French ‘patron’ at the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), and Marcel Cardaire, the Islamophile colonial administrator with whom he co-authored a book published with Présence Africaine. In the second part, the discussion will move to Cheikh Anta Diop’s first major essay, Nations nègres et culture (1955). This voluminous book expounds some of the theses identified in his later L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique (see Chapter II). Diop bridges the gap between scholarship and political activism and takes to task Western Egyptologists such as the Champollion brothers or Gordon Childe and their persistent tendency to whitewash (‘blanchir’) ancient Egypt and describe it as a cultural offshoot of previously established white Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations. Against this North-South diffusionist axis, Diop argues that the roots of ancient Egypt – its ‘cradle’ – are to be found in the Upper Nile, a region inhabited by black Africans. This historiographical reappropriation is also articulated by means of linguistic data and an attempt on Diop’s part to reconstruct, via ‘the gendered and affectively charged kinship concept of the unique “mother tongue”’,7 a genealogical continuum between ancient Egyptian and contemporary West African languages like Wolof and Serer. This aspect of Diop’s work, although still redolent of the ideological (and racialist) climate against which colonial ethno-linguistics had developed under scholars such as Maurice Delafosse, is avowedly future-orientated and part of a project aiming at decolonizing language use in late colonial West Africa. Indeed, Diop provides here his own comparative Egyptian-Wolof vocabulary (‘vocabulaire comparé égyptien-valaf’)8 to explore the linguistic, and hence civilizational, filiation between contemporary Africans and their remote ancestors. Diop was determined to dismantle the prevailing linguistic hierarchy of the French colonies and demonstrate that African vernaculars 7 Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, p. 6. 8 Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations nègres et culture (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1979 [1955]), pp. 287–335. The abbreviation NNC will be used to cite this book in the body of the text.

148

Past Imperfect

such as Wolof had to be mobilized to drive African modernity and nationalism. His own translation into Wolof of Paul Langevin’s synopsis of Einstein’s theory of relativity (NNC, 443–447) testifies to this ambition to decolonize knowledge and the linguistic factors presiding over knowledge production. Moreover, he was eager to prove that African languages were no less abstract than their Indo-European counterparts.9 This chapter, finally, will also appraise the legacy of Cheikh Anta Diop’s examination of the links between language and cultural autonomy by exploring Boubacar Boris Diop’s Céytu project (Éditions Zulma and Mémoire d’encrier) of translating French and francophone classics into Wolof. This scheme, although limited in scope (only three titles, by Aimé Césaire, Le Clézio, and Mariama Bâ, have so far been published),10 is certainly significant of a less linguistically subservient, and less ‘Senghorian’, conception of francophonie. African Babble Colonial ventures were undertaken, fought, publicized, and dismantled with words. The discursive cacophony generated by this process had – and continues to have – a major impact on the way in which languages are used, standardized, and hierarchized. Colonialism imposed a new regime of historicity, as seen in Chapter I, but there is no doubt that what I have referred to (after Harry Harootunian) as the ‘imperialization of time’ was aided by culturalist conceptions of linguistic practice and difference and a context in which ‘native tongues are overmanaged, banned, or reduced to the status of endangered species’.11 Linguistic homogenization is one of the tools but also one of the most discernible effects of modernity. The translation of the Bible into European vernaculars 9 On the alleged concreteness of African languages and the ‘illusion de l’abstracton naturelle’ of some languages like French, see Souleymane Bachir Diagne, L’Encre des savants. Réflexions sur la philosophie en Afrique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2013), p. 35. 10 Aimé Césaire: Nawetu deret; J.M.G. Le Clézio: Baay sama, doomu Afrig; Mariama Bâ: Bataaxal bu gudde nii. All published in 2016 by Éditions Zulma (Paris) and Mémoire d’encrier (Quebec). The original titles are, respectively: Une saison au Congo (Césaire), L’Africain (Le Clézio), and Une si longue lettre (Bâ). 11 Emily Apter, ‘On Translation in a Global Market’, Public Culture, 13.1 (2001), 1–12 (p. 6).

‘Words’

149

affirmed the hegemony of Christianity and, whilst it became foundational to the making of Europe,12 it also consolidated the monolingual tendencies of emerging European empires. It is against this context – the birth of what Benedict Anderson names ‘national print-languages’,13 that one needs to examine encounters between Africans and Europeans in the modern period. The formidable collection of scientific facts that underpinned the colonization of Africa was also a linguistic exercise. Given that the success of the imperial enterprise was dependent on effective communication, European explorers, administrators, and missionaries took it upon themselves to map out and, ultimately, control African linguistic diversity and replicate a mechanism – the constitution of ‘monoglot mass reading publics’14 – that had been fruitfully triggered in the West to advance capitalism. The colonial library was fashioned against these pragmatic parameters. Africanist linguistics was until the early years of the twentieth century above all applied linguistics and often conducted outside fully accredited philological circles. At the Colonial University of Antwerp, an institution set up to train Belgian colonial staff, the approach was clearly utilitarian and ‘Bantu linguistics’, for instance, was taught until the 1950s to equip future administrators with knowledge ‘that would allow them to master the languages of the regions to which they would eventually be assigned’.15 There lies one of the major differences between Orientalism and Africanism. Orientalists explored existing written corpora and whether their appraisal of these other cultures was derogatory or not they had to acknowledge, as argued by Raymond Schwab commenting on Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of the Avesta and Upanishads in the late eighteenth century, the presence of fully fledged historical and literate cultures beyond the confines of Europe. In the following extract, Schwab is quoted by Edward Said: Before [Anquetil], one looked for information on the remote past of our planet exclusively among the great Latin, Greek, Jewish, and Arabic 12 See Henri Meschonnic, ‘The Europe of translation’, Translation Studies, 1.1 (2008), 34–40. 13 Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), p. 67. 14 Ibid. p. 43. 15 Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938, foreword by Edward Said (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 89–91.

150

Past Imperfect

writers. The Bible was regarded as a lonely rock, an aerolite. A universe in writing was available, but scarcely anyone seemed to suspect the immensity of those unknown lands. The realization began with the translation of the Avesta, and reached dizzying heights owing to the exploration in Central Asia of the languages that multiplied after Babel. Into our schools, up to that time limited to the narrow Greco-Latin heritage of the Renaissance [of which much had been transmitted to Europe by Islam], he interjected a vision of innumerable civilizations from ages past, of an infinity of literatures; moreover the few European provinces were not the only places to have left their mark in history.16

Expressed in a book published in 1934,17 these words are surprisingly modern and demonstrate Schwab’s desire to relativize and, indeed, provincialize Europe’s cultural significance in the longue durée. Although he refers to very ancient texts – the Avesta and the Upanishads were both written before the Christian era – he makes a point of acknowledging the cultural splendour and the linguistic diversity (‘after Babel’) of a very large territory – Central Asia and the Indian Peninsula – which, at the time he was writing, was still largely under colonial rule. Unlike most of his Africanist counterparts, however, Schwab had the luxury of relying on written documents. In a world which was still overwhelmingly graphocentric and/or ‘logocentric’ because writing was often regarded as the necessary (colonial) ‘supplement’ to the preliterate speech of the primitive,18 late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Africanists were unable to make analogous claims about Africa’s past achievements. And the absence of recognizable and widely used graphic systems in sub-Saharan Africa was invariably interpreted as a sign of cultural primitiveness and incompletion.19 In the francophone colonies, ‘palabre’ (palaver) – from the Spanish ‘palabra’ (word) – was derogatorily used among colonialists to describe African languages and their locutors’ alleged puerile verbiage and inarticulate ‘long-winded speeches’. 20 16 Edward Said in Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, with a new afterword (London: Penguin, 1995 [1978]), p. 77. 17 Raymond Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-Duperron, preface by Sylvain Lévi, with two essays by Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (Paris: E. Leroux, 1934). 18 See Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967), ‘Ce dangereux supplément’, pp. 203–234. 19 See Alain Ricard, The Languages & Literatures of Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2004), pp. 1–21. 20 Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 135.

‘Words’

151

‘Palabre’, then, came to symbolize African preliterate condition and to reinforce the stereotype according to which Africa was the ‘continent de l’oralité’. 21 Like some of the other areas investigated in this book – time, art, and museology, for instance – colonialists took on a curating role and became ‘language keepers’. 22 However, what is equally important to highlight is that this focus on orature was a preconception for Africans wrote (and not just in Arabic) well before the arrivals of Western colonizers, as illustrated by the production of Ge’ez texts in Ethiopia, seventeenth-century Swahili literature, and early nineteenth-century written Hausa and Fulani poetry. 23 The compilation of vocabularies fell under this remit of linguistic guardianship and control. Although they varied greatly in terms of scholarship – not a very surprising fact since they were written by amateur linguists (explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and colonial administrators) – they mostly presented themselves as multilingual or bilingual lists of frequent words and phrases. Their authors’ chief objective was to facilitate communication with the (soon-to-be) colonized. These documents, as suggested by Johannes Fabian, need, however, to be regarded as ‘historical accounts’ for, if their scientific quality is often questionable, they ‘provide valuable indicators of a communicative praxis’. 24 Increasingly, they became time-saving tools at the service of imperialism and their compilation a ‘measure of tropical hygiene’, 25 whereby ‘la langue est celle qui doit servir à travailler et à commander’ [language is a tool for work and command]. 26 Beyond the linguistic information that they supply, these vocabularies (or lexicons) also offer insights into colonial language strategies and how these strategies dovetailed with prevailing discourses on the classification (and status) of European and African languages. The contexts from which these documents resulted – exploratory expeditions and military campaigns – meant that they generated a communicative logic in which ‘using words’ mattered more than ‘speaking’ and where ‘function’ 21 Cécile Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes. Échanges linguistiques en Afrique coloniale (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2017), p. 57. 22 Ibid., p. 12. 23 Barber, ‘African Language Literature’, p. 12. See also Ricard, Languages & Literatures of Africa, pp. 46–74 (chapter III, ‘The Manuscript Heritage’). 24 Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, pp. 10–11. 25 Fabian, Out of our Minds, p. 133. 26 Alain Ricard, Le Kiswahili, une langue moderne (Paris: Karthala, 2009), p. 25.

152

Past Imperfect

prevailed over ‘form’. 27 As colonial power consolidated its grip over sub-Saharan Africa, linguistic exchanges were increasingly marked by a ‘transition from communication to command’. 28 Via a comparison between two word lists written fourteen years apart by two Congo Free State agents (Pierre Dutrieux 29 and Charles Lemaire), 30 Fabian notes that this transition happened very quickly: Dutrieux’s vocabulary evokes an exploratory phase in which the isolated European traveler or military man depended on some sort of support which Africans would give on, and in, their terms (i.e. in terms not likely to be accommodated by short lists). Lemaire’s guide is an instrument for colonial agents who have begun to cover the immense area of the Congo and to dictate their terms to the natives. 31

This change of style speaks volumes and signals a shift to a more imperious linguistic modus operandi. In this respect, Fabian remarks that it took the author of a 1903 vocabulary of ‘135 useful phrases […] 40 imperatives and (imperative) questions’ before introducing a first ‘statement’ (‘il avait peur de votre fusil’ [he was afraid of your gun]) which, in its chilling implications, leaves little doubt as to where this linguistic custody was heading. 32 The search for linguistic homogenization is another important issue generated by colonial modernity and it is interesting that in francophone Africa – like in Western Europe before – this objective was obviously

27 Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, pp. 21–22. 28 Ibid., p. 21. 29 [Pierre Dutrieux] Association Internationale Africaine, Vocabulaire françaiskisouahili (Brussels: Verhavert, 1880). 30 C. Lemaire, Vocabulaire pratique: français, anglais, zanzibarite (Swahili), fiote, kibangi-irébou, mongo, bangala (Brussels: Charles Bulens, 1897 [1894]). 31 Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, pp. 21–22. 32 Ibid., p. 40. On the use of imperatives, see also Ricard, Le Kiswahili une langue moderne, p. 25. Kiswahili teaching methods long remained marked by this colonial context of unequal relationships. In La Langue swahilie (Liège: Éditions F.U.L.R.E.A.C/Université de Liège, 1965), Ernest Natalis devotes a few pages to the working relationships between the master and his ‘boy’ (pp. 221–235): ‘Bwana ni razi (Le maître est content) [the master is happy] and ‘Bwana si razi’ (Le maître n’est pas content) [the master is not happy] (pp. 224–225), and ‘Amri nyingine za kazi (Autres ordres de travail) [other work orders] (pp. 232–233). These sections are presented as a two-column vocabulary of common Kiswahili words and phrases and their French equivalents.

‘Words’

153

154

Past Imperfect

reached at the expense of linguistic, and indeed ‘biocultural’, diversity. 33 This process, although not directly imputable to the evolutionist and allochronistic climate of the period, significantly contributed to the marginalization of peripheral and non-hegemonic languages and to the consolidation of nationalistic conceptual constructs. This far-reaching standardization process ‘saw no room for any trace of the foreign, which would trouble the story of uninterrupted sui generis native genius’. 34 By the end of the nineteenth century, the multilingual openness of the exploratory period gave way to a more prescriptive and normative approach of linguistic appropriation and management. 35 In the French colonies, attempts to implement regimes of ‘colinguisme’ failed and monolingualism became the norm. 36 French assimilationist policies were to be significantly shaped by this monolingual drive which also became part and parcel of what would constitute the backbone of a French cultural policy in the colonies. In France, Algérie et colonies (1880), the French geographer Onésime Reclus coined the term ‘francophonie’. 37 In the aftermath of the 1870 military defeat by Prussia, Reclus provides here an assessment of the place and significance of the French language – its geographical distribution – in France, where it still competed with regional languages such as Flemish, Basque, and Breton, but also in the world. 38 Overall, this review is quite pessimistic, and although he recognizes that French has retained some degree of ‘universalité’, 39 Reclus notes that it is threatened by other languages, such as Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and English, particularly, and has lost much of its prestige and appeal as a useful means of communication. He argues that intense colonialism (like in Algeria and Senegal) should provide the basis for an overall increase of the number 33 See Michael Cronin, ‘Translation Studies and the Common Cause’, Modern Language Open, 1 (September 2018), 1–7, https://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/ articles/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.225/ [accessed 19 July 2019]. 34 Ibid., p. 4. 35 See Fabian, ‘Missions and the Colonization of African Languages: Developments in the Former Belgian Congo’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/ Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 17.2 (1983), 165–187 (pp. 181–182). 36 Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes, pp. 12–13. 37 In Onésime Reclus, France, Algérie et colonies (Paris: Hachette, 1886 [1880]), pp. 422–424. 38 Ibid. See chapter VI, ‘La Langue française en France, en Europe, dans le monde. Langue d’oïl et langue d’oc’, pp. 407–440. 39 Ibid., p. 414.

‘Words’

155

of francophone speakers worldwide. However, he is keen to highlight the fact that plans to expand the hegemony of some languages over others will be seriously impeded by the rise of what he calls ‘hétéroglotties’. The term, which has nothing to do with the part linguistic, part narratological concept of heteroglossia created by Bakhtin, is unusual and not attested by French dictionaries. It is probable that Reclus had something very straightforward in mind and used it etymologically (hetero – different/ glottie –language). Referring to the Berbers, he reminds his readers that the Romans called them ‘Barbares’ [barbarians], a word which then meant ‘étrangers, hétéroglottes’.40 The foreigner (étranger) is then the hétéroglotte, that is, the outsider/non-national who – literally – uses a different language. In this respect, francophone Louisianians are described by Reclus as being ‘perdus au milieu des hétéroglottes’ [outnumbered by the hétéroglottes].41 In this sense, Reclus’s neologism is close to the contemporary word ‘allophone’. Reclus is critical of cosmopolitanism for this global process poses a threat to minority languages. Echoing Chris Marker’s contention in Les Statues meurent aussi that ‘l’histoire a tout mangé’ [history has eaten everything],42 Reclus remarks that the Welsh, Hungarians, Romanians, Finns, and Franco-Canadians are all in the process of being ‘besieged’, ‘invaded’, and even ‘devoured’ by the speakers of more dominant languages.43 Reclus recoils at the thought of a universal language which, he contends, ‘restera sans autels et sans adorateurs’ [will remain without altars nor worshippers].44 This proto-anti-globalization stance, along with this defence of some endangered vernaculars is coloured, however, by Reclus’s Eurocentric agenda and tendency to entertain a dualistic conception of linguistic diversity. In the context of late nineteenth-century colonial expansion, he remains convinced that the French language – at the same time dominant but increasingly besieged by emerging ‘hétéroglotties’ such as English and Spanish – has a historic role to play. Reclus posits that it is France’s duty as a colonial nation to ‘asseoir les enfants des indigènes à côté des nôtres 40 Ibid., p. 678. 41 Ibid., p. 422. 42 Chris Marker, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, in E. Martínez-Jacquet et al. (eds), Ode au grand art africain: Les Statues meurent aussi (Arquennes: Primedia SPRL, 2010), p. 27. 43 Reclus, France, Algérie et colonies, p. 424. 44 Ibid.

156

Past Imperfect

sur les bancs de l’école’ [to sit indigenous children next to our children in schools].45 This mission to francophonize is, however, launched at the expense of non-European vernaculars – the Kabyle language in the example that follows: ‘Nous les amènerons à nous en leur donnant notre langue: le Kabyle n’y perdra que des patois sans littérature’ [We shall bring them to us whilst giving them our language. Kabylians will only lose patois without literatures].46 The opposition between patois/ dialect and language is a recurrent feature of the standardization process implemented by monolingual nation states and empires. Linguistic classifications remained for a very long time – in fact, until the 1950s – heavily indebted to evolutionist schemata,47 and to the idea that the Other’s language is of another time: the allophone (the hétéroglotte) is also allochronistic. The etymological origin of ‘patois’ reflects this legacy and the assumption that dialects and patois lie on the wrong side of progress and modernity. In her book on linguistic exchanges in colonial Africa, Cécile Van den Avenne shows that the word stems, or rather is likely to stem,48 from the Old French verb patoier meaning ‘to move one’s hands, gesticulate (to be understood)’.49 Patoier would thus derive from ‘patte’ [paw] and, before acquiring its present sense of ‘dialecte particulier à une localité’ [locale-specific dialect], 50 it was used to refer to ‘gesticulation’ and ‘rude behaviour’ but also ‘le babil des enfants [and] le jargon des oiseaux’ [children’s babble and the jargon of birds]. 51 In his examination of the progress of francophonie in Haiti, Onésime Reclus notes that: Aujourd’hui, les merveilleuses vallées de la république d’Haïti […] ont pour idiome civilisé le français, et pour langage maternel le patois créole, qui est un babillement de nourrice, une espèce de balbutiement d’enfant, un parler doux, chantant, naïf, à peu près sans conjugaison avec un minimum de syntaxe, grâcieux cependant, précisément parce qu’il est puéril. 52 [Today the marvellous valleys of the Republic of Haiti use French as their civilized language and the Creole patois as their native dialect; the latter is a wet nurse’s babble, a kind of childish stammering, a sweet, melodic, 45 Ibid., p. 690. 46 Ibid., pp. 689–690. 47 See Ricard, Languages & Literatures of Africa, pp. 1–21. 48 A point confirmed by Rey, Le Robert, vol. 2, pp. 2611–2612. 49 Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes, p. 268 n. 544. 50 Rey, Le Robert, p. 2611. 51 Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes, p. 268 n. 544. 52 Reclus, France, Algérie et colonies, p. 421.

‘Words’

157

and naive jargon. Although it is almost without any conjugation or syntax, it is nonetheless gracious precisely because it is puerile]

This description of the Haitian linguistic situation rests on the same dualistic vision. French, the ‘civilized language’, is pitted against Creole – a langage and a parler (rather than an idiome or langue) of pure innocence: it is ‘na[t]ive’, ‘childish’, and ‘puerile’. It is also ‘melodic’, presumably because unwritten (it is a parler). Here one needs to remember Derrida’s famous critique of Rousseau’s phonocentric thought and Rousseau’s praise of melody – the unmediated, primitive, and self-present expression of the human voice – over harmony, its written counterpart. 53 The brief evocation of Haiti’s ‘marvellous valleys’ is steeped in temporal prejudices and conjures up the image of a fabulous mythical realm and of a preliterate language, which has remained ‘pure [and] innocent’;54 it also reinforces the idea that this country, albeit an independent republic, is stuck in a pre-modern time warp where magic and presyntactic communication prevail over science, causality, and reason. Creole’s alleged quasi-absence of conjugation has the effect of consigning Haiti to a state of timelessness – that is, to a domain where temporal links do not operate – and replicating, in the linguistic field, the evolutionary criteriology underpinning the colonial enterprise. African languages were submitted to an analogous classificatory grid. Already in the Renaissance, and at the time of the first European imperial expansion in the Americas and Asia, there was a tendency to hierarchize languages along a Christian/pagan line and, as a result, to put Latin at the top of this hierarchy, and to use ‘Latin’s grammatical categories’ to analyse and describe non-Western languages. 55 Later efforts to qualitatively rank languages, notably in the context of nineteenth-century Egyptomania, 56 continued to favour religious but also – and increasingly – geographical, ethnic, and racial criteria. In his attempt to ‘reduce’ African languages to a Western alphabetic logic, the nineteenth-century German linguist and Egyptologist Richard Lepsius set out to ‘furnish destitute nations […] with that most important, 53 Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 284–285. 54 Ibid., p. 176. 55 See Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: a Story of Language, Meaning, and Power (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), pp. 30–31. 56 See Robert J.C. Young, ‘The Afterlives of Black Athena’, in Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon (eds), African Athena: New Agendas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 176.

158

Past Imperfect

most indispensable means of intellectual, moral, and religious culture, a written language’. 57 He also devised a linguistic taxonomy after the names of Noah’s three sons (Japheth, Shem, and Ham) which reflected other scholarly (and often pseudo-scholarly) attempts – e.g. by Gobineau and Gustave Le Bon – to rank races58 and languages. 59 The ‘Curse of Ham’ (from the book of Genesis) provided the premise of this classificatory theory.60 Indeed, Ham, the disgraced son who failed to cover up Noah’s nakedness, that is, to effectuate the passage from primitiveness to civilization, was used here to signify the imperfect nature of African languages: ‘The Indo-European or Japhetic languages were the sophisticated languages of discriminating minds; Semitic languages were the (as yet unrefined) expression of Oriental creative confusion; while Hamitic languages were the rough instruments of a primitive people.’61 This theory – as Mudimbe puts it, the idea that ‘primitive difference must be transcended in the language of the same and its culture’62 – would later be built upon, but also contested and nuanced, by Carl Meinhof. In the early years of the twentieth century, this prominent German linguist would significantly shape Afrikanistik 63 but also, and beyond the German-speaking world, propagate an overly culturalist and diffusionist conception of African language formation – the Hamitic hypothesis – which had a tendency ‘to conflate physical and linguistic traits when classifying African peoples’.64 Taking his cue from earlier research conducted by his teacher Wilhelm Bleek – who had ‘coined

57 R. Lepsius, Standard Alphabet for Reducing Unwritten Languages and Foreign Graphic Systems to a Uniform Orthography in European Letters (London: Williams and Northgate, 1855), p. 26. 58 See Pierre-André Taguieff, La Couleur et le sang. Doctrines racistes à la française (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 1998). 59 See the chapter (XV) dedicated to the inequality of language in Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie de Paris, Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1884 [1853–1855]). 60 See Sara Pugach, Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), p. 102. 61 Ricard, The Languages & Literatures of Africa, p. 2. 62 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, Tales of Faith: Religion and Political Performance in Central Africa (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), p. 37. 63 A discipline encompassing African linguistics and African Studies. See Pugach, Africa in Translation, pp. 186–195. 64 Pugach, Africa in Translation, p. 19.

‘Words’

159

the terms Bantu and Hamitic to describe the distribution of African languages through space and time’65 – Meinhof consolidated a linguistic theory that would pave the way for the reconstruction of UrBantu.66 The overall thrust of this philological research was comparative and genealogical and, as such, still heavily redolent of theories – by Lepsius but also the Schlegel brothers67 and Wilhelm von Humboldt68 – in which Indo-European or so-called ‘inflecting’ languages were ascribed a higher degree of sophistication. For Friedrich Schlegel, inflecting (or ‘organic’) languages like Greek, Latin, German, and Sanskrit were superior because, unlike what he named ‘mechanical’ languages (Chinese, Coptic, Basque, or Arabic), they were endowed with ‘flexion’ (i.e. a grammatical system in which ‘words were obligatorily comprised of roots and additional elements marking number, tense [and] gender’).69 The presence of flexion also had historical implications for Schlegel for the recurring roots of inflecting languages were a sign of their dynamism, ability to sustain change, and shape their historical destiny. Roots were therefore regarded as vestiges of ancient eras and proofs that inflecting languages, unlike ‘mechanical’ languages, possess a ‘capacity to maintain their continuity over time’.70 As scholarly (and ideological) tools, they enabled researchers to excavate the past, engage in ‘glottochronologie’,71 and attest to the historicity of Indo-European – and Aryan – cultures.72 For Schlegel, this ‘organismic vision of language’ – he held the view that inflected languages were to be treated like living organisms whose heredity, proto-stages, and evolution could be traced – bore witness to the fact that Indo-European languages (and by analogy Indo-European peoples) ‘actively engage with historical forces, reshaping themselves rather than passively suffering change’.73 Unlike ‘mechanical’ languages, ‘they are more than mere objects of historical forces, and so can be studied in and with history’.74 65 Ibid., p. 17. 66 Ricard, The Languages & Literatures of Africa, p. 10. 67 See Georges Mounin, Histoire de la linguistique des origines au XXe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1970), pp. 188–189. 68 On the Schlegel brothers and Humboldt’s philological input, see also Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World, pp. 72–77. 69 Ibid., p. 73. 70 Ibid. 71 Calvet, Linguistique et Colonialisme, p. 50. 72 Ibid., p. 53. 73 Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World, p. 73. 74 Ibid.

160

Past Imperfect

In his own linguistic typology, Humboldt identified four fundamental language families: the isolating, the agglutinating, the inflecting, and the polysynthetic.75 From a purely scientific perspective, this classification, which would be further developed by figures such as August Schleicher and Franz Bopp, is sound. However, it also reflects the ideological bias of Schlegel’s opposition between ‘inflecting’ and ‘mechanical’ languages and, until the 1950s, the isolating/agglutinating/inflecting triad would be used to perpetuate a developmental and historicist conception of linguistic evolution. It was also employed to cement the view that all languages were once isolating before becoming agglutinating and that only the most sophisticated ones reached the inflecting stage.76 Carl Meinhof, for his part, proceeded to distribute African peoples into three main language groups: Hamitic, Bantu, and Sudanic/Nigritic.77 The interesting point here is that he was of the view that Hamitic languages (i.e. North African languages such as Berber, Cushitic, and Egyptian), because he and Bleek had identified in these grammatical genders,78 were in fact inflecting languages and were, as such, closely related to the Indo-European and Semitic categories.79 As argued by Alain Ricard, this observation generated ‘blatant prejudices’: For Meinhof, the presence of grammatical gender in Hamitic languages made them superior to Bantu languages spoken by black people. Civilization would travel from Northern to Southern Africa, from the tall, light-skinned pastoral peoples speaking languages with grammatical genders to the short, dark agriculturalists speaking class languages.80

Interestingly, this taxonomy would rely on geographical and racial criteria to hierarchize African languages. This hierarchical logic – already present, as seen earlier, in Onésime Reclus’s vast survey – would continue to determine linguistic scholarship (and language-management policies) in the francophone colonies of sub-Saharan Africa. Here, too, the description and analysis of African languages was conducted in the spirit of the German comparative 75 See Pugach, Africa in Translation, p. 33. 76 Calvet, Linguistique et Colonialisme, p. 52. 77 Pugach, Africa in Translation, p. 4. 78 Ibid., p. 33. 79 Ibid., p. 34. 80 Ricard, The Languages & Literatures of Africa, p. 10.

‘Words’

161

philology and thus premised on the belief that Indo-European languages were innately more complex.81 Indeed, there was a clear tendency, among French but also Belgian linguists, to ‘rank languages from isolating (monosyllabic, “Sudanese”) languages to inflective European languages, with the agglutinative (Bantu) languages in the middle’.82 This ‘epistemological fallacy’83 – the ‘one-to-one correlation between languages and race’84 – had far-reaching consequences. In his Essai sur la langue poul, grammaire et vocabulaire 85 and other publications on West African languages, Louis Faidherbe, the famous French colonial military figure and administrator, would infer linguistic taxonomies from physical and anatomical features. In his comparison of Fula and Malinke, he ascribed the – in his view – greater sophistication of the former language to the fact that the Fulani, unlike their Malinke neighbours, are endowed with harmonious facial traits: they have small mouths and are straight-jawed [‘Le Poul a une petite bouche orthognathe’].86 The term ‘orthognathe’ (orthognathic) is interesting and certainly indicative of the overlap between linguistic and medical discourses during the colonial period. Racial classifications had relied heavily on anthropometric studies.87 Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the craniometer had continued to play a significant role in the medicalization of racial difference and in the constitution of cranial typologies (and ‘cranial libraries’)88 ‘which were justified as the best means to achieve a quantifiable delineation of racial groups’.89 Faidherbe’s anatomical observation – and his insistence that the 81 See El Hadji Abdou Azi Faty, ‘Les enjeux du processus de grammatisation du Pulaar vus à partir de la grammaire de la langue Poul (Faidherbe, 1882)’, Glottopol, 20 (2012), 55–68 (p. 62). 82 Ricard, The Languages & Literatures of Africa, p. 11. 83 Ibid. 84 Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui. The Power of Babel: Language & Governance in the African Experience (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), p. 43. 85 Louis Faidherbe, Essai sur la langue poul, grammaire et vocabulaire (Paris: Maisonneuve et Cie, 1875). 86 Quoted by Faty in ‘Les enjeux’, p. 59. 87 See Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 88 Thomas F. Glick, ‘The Anthropology of Race across the Darwinian Revolution’, in Henrika Kuklick (ed.), A New History of Anthropology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), pp. 225–241 (p. 231). 89 Ibid., p. 240.

162

Past Imperfect

Malinke, on the other hand, are ‘prognathous’ 90 – is to be understood against the new biopolitical regime implemented by the French in West Africa. Faidherbe notes that Malinke sounds, which he compares unfavourably to ‘detonations’, are too ‘guttural’ and he adds that the prevalence of the ‘kha’ letter in this language makes it extremely difficult for French people to master its pronunciation. Conversely, Fula is ‘soft’ and ‘melodious’; the Fulani’s diction is ‘elegant’ and, as in some European languages (French and Italian), ‘l’accent est souvent sur la pénultième syllable’ [the stress often falls on the penultimate syllable].91 This perceived proximity between Fula and European languages may explain why in 1936 Meinhof promoted it to the status of Hamitic language: From that point on Hamitic ceased to be an arbitrary name for a group of non-Semitic languages with Semitic-like features, and became the name used for the languages spoken by a specific racial ethnic group, the Hamites, presumed to be fundamentally different from the ‘Negroes of Africa’.92

The classificatory systems complied with by Africanist linguists was premised on the idea that European languages provided the gold standards by which every other language was studied and measured. There was a marked tendency to adopt very normative perspectives and, in this logic, African languages were seen not so much to differ as to deviate from their European ‘models’. In his Éléments de la grammaire bambara, Étienne Montel deplores the absence of articles in this West African language93: ‘En bambara, il n’y a pas d’article; on dira donc, c’est cheval […] au lieu de: c’est un cheval’ [In Bambara, there is no article; one thus says, ‘it is horse’, instead of it ‘is a horse’].94 As argued by Cécile Van den Avenne, the translation into French of this Bambara statement is anything but ‘ideologically neutral’ for it conveys the idea 90 ‘le Malinké a une grande bouche, prognathe et lippue’ [the Manding has a big and thick-lipped mouth and is prognathous]. Quoted by Faty in ‘Les enjeux’, p. 59. 91 Ibid., pp. 58–59. 92 Paul Newman, cited by Ricard, in The Languages & Literatures of Africa, p. 11. 93 Étienne Montel, Eléments de la grammaire bambara avec exercices appropriés, suivis d’un dictionnaire bambara-français (Saint-Joseph de Ngasobil: Imprimerie de la mission, 1887). 94 Étienne Montel, cited by Van den Avenne, in De la bouche même des indigènes, p. 107.

‘Words’

163

that Bambara is innately deficient and that African vernaculars are indistinguishable from ‘petit-nègre’.95 This French-African pidgin – also known as ‘français-tirailleur’ or ‘Pitineg’ and first studied by the French ethno-linguist Maurice Delafosse96 – was created in the army to facilitate communication between African troops and their French officers,97 and subsequently adopted (according to Delafosse) by ‘the uneducated in West African French colonies’.98 The success of Kiswahili as a colonial vehicular language in the African Great Lakes countries is informed by an analogous logic and by the facile assumption that its perceived proximity to European languages could be harnessed to serve colonialism. Some of its specific features – e.g. it is not tonal and its vocalic system (and shallow orthography) is close to that of Romance languages like Italian99 – formed the basis for the development of simplified versions of Kiswahili and led some European users to believe that Kiswahili was a grammatically poor language.100 In La Vie en Afrique, Jérôme Becker, a Belgian officer who conducted an expeditionary mission in eastern Africa on behalf of the Association Internationale Africaine in the early 1880s,101 provides a number of annotations on Kiswahili noun classes, syntax, conjugation, and semantics whilst offering a multilayered account of his exchanges and negotiations with a wide range of Kiswahili speakers.102 But Becker remains incapable of severing the link with linguistic – and ‘glottopolitcal’103 – Eurocentrism. For him, linguistic management – the adoption of Kiswahili as a lingua franca – is a political act but, as a 95 Van den Avenne, in De la bouche même des indigènes, p. 107. 96 See Chantal Zabus, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 102–103 and Kathryn Batchelor, Decolonizing Translation: Francophone African Novels in English Translation (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2009), pp. 38–39. 97 Van den Avenne, in De la bouche même des indigènes, see ‘L’armée, laboratoire linguistique’ (pp. 71–88), in which Van de Avenne examines the development of this French pidgin. 98 Zabus, The African Palimpsest, p. 102. 99 Ricard, The Languages & Literatures of Africa, p. 9. 100 Ibid. 101 Jérôme Becker, Vie en Afrique, ou trois ans dans l’Afrique Centrale, 2 vols (Paris: J. Lébègue, 1887). 102 On Becker, see Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, pp. 24–33. 103 Zabus, The African Palimpsest, p. 17.

164

Past Imperfect

strong advocate of the Europeanization of Kiswahili orthography,104 he is eager throughout his book to perpetuate the idea that African languages are inherently deficient. In his analysis of La Vie en Afrique, Johannes Fabian notes the paradoxical nature of Becker’s reflections on language. On the one hand, there is no doubt that Becker experienced highly sophisticated verbal exchanges with his African interlocutors, whether in his own ‘immediate household’ or with African dignitaries such as Tippu-Tip, the SwahiliZanzibari ivory and slave trader, and Mirambo (the Nyamwezi ruler) with whom he discussed ‘political and philosophical views’. There is also evidence that he appreciated ‘the artistry of a Swahili story-teller’ and was able ‘to instruct Africans in a number of European crafts’.105 On the other hand, however, Becker’s account is interspersed with derogatory statements on the purported ‘poverty’ of Kiswahili, a language that, he argues, ‘does not lend itself to philosophical reasoning’.106 Indeed, Becker’s appraisal is damning. Regarding Kiswahili semantics, he remarks that it is deprived of any ‘abstract term’, ‘literary turn’, or ‘synonym’, and that sentences are constructed ‘mathematically’.107 He deplores the fact that Kiswahili is characterized by a high degree of ‘lexical borrowing’ from other languages,108 and concludes that ‘one or two days’ would suffice to get to grips with this ‘most elementary’ language.109 Maurice Delafosse’s exploration of African languages, although certainly quite open-minded and scientifically sound for its time, suffered from similar ideological shortcomings and was a typical product of French ‘glottopolitics’ during the Third Republic.110 In The African Palimpsest, Chantal Zabus uses this term ‘and its derivatives to refer to language politics or what is called in French la politique linguistique and its pragmatic application in language planning […] and language policy’.111 Two related aspects will be evoked in Delafosse’s examination of African languages. Firstly, his continued support of the classificatory 104 Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, pp. 25–26. 1 05 Ibid., p. 27. 106 Ibid., p. 30 (Becker quoted by Fabian). 107 Ibid., p. 32 (Becker quoted by Fabian). 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid., p. 32 (Becker quoted by Fabian). 110 On Delafosse, see Jean-Loup Amselle and Emmanuelle Sibeud (eds), Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie, l’itinéraire d’un africaniste (1870–1926) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998). 111 Zabus, The African Palimpsest, p. 17 n. 12.

‘Words’

165

logic informing European philology and the latter’s obsession with origins and filiations; secondly, his insistence on the necessity to favour monolingualism in the administration of French West Africa. In his numerous books and articles on West African cultures and languages, Delafosse remained a formidably inquisitive and enlightened advocate of African diversity. At a time when blacks from sub-Saharan Africa were deemed to occupy the lowest ‘rung’ of humanity, he was laying the basis of French ethnology and moving away from the racialist tenets underpinning physical anthropology.112 He was also instrumental in the professionalization of ethnology, a field that from the early years of the twentieth century became crucially reliant on direct observation and fieldwork conducted in situ.113 His studies on African languages were conducted in this new epistemological context whereby the African informers were increasingly regarded as scientific (albeit still ancillary)114 collaborators and would begin to author their own publications on African ethnography and linguistics. From a methodological point of view, Delafosse’s examination of West African languages was marked by a tendency to demonstrate the continuity between anthropological and linguistic data and to privilege arborescent categorizations in which languages were subdivided into ‘dialects’ and ‘sub-dialects’ (‘sous-dialectes’) and organized in ‘groups’ and ‘sub-groups’ which were themselves included into larger ‘categories’ and ‘families’.115 Delafosse shows that this taxonomic premise is universal and can be applied to the linguistic landscape of France where, for instance, Low Norman is a ‘sub-dialect’ of Norman, itself a ‘dialect’ of the French ‘language’ which, in turn, belongs to the Romance ‘sub-group’ and the Latin ‘group’, the Italo-Celtic ‘category’ and the Indo-European ‘family’.116 He contends, however, that this classification is not sufficient on its own and that linguists must also ascertain whether the languages under their scrutiny are isolating, agglutinating, or inflecting. He remarks that these types are not absolute and that some 1 12 See Emmanuelle Sibeud, Une Science impériale pour l’Afrique. La construction des savoirs africanistes en France (1878–1930) (Paris: E.H.E.S.S., 2002). 113 See Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. 78–82. 114 Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes, p. 137. 115 Maurice Delafosse, Esquisse générale des langues de l’Afrique, et plus particulièrement de l’Afrique française (Paris: Masson et Cie Editeurs, 1914), p. 2. 116 Ibid., p. 5.

166

Past Imperfect

languages, like French, display, at the same time and in varying degrees, the features of these three notional types. He adds that the important aspect of this classification is to identify the ‘dominant type’ and that French – the imperial language – is overwhelmingly inflecting.117 Delafosse also attempts here to retrace the history of African languages. The approach is developmentalist and he places African linguistic achievements on a line of progress legitimizing the salutary French intervention and its modern regime of historicity. He notes that Africa was first inhabited by the so-called ‘négrilles’, or pygmies, and after providing a disparaging physical description of these first African populations, he concludes, with some caution since the ‘verification of this hypothesis seems impossible’, that their language was ‘purely isolating’.118 Gradually, these original inhabitants were outnumbered by ‘negroes’, that is, speakers of agglutinating languages who were ‘stronger’, ‘more intelligent’, and ‘more industrious’ than the négrilles.119 Like Carl Meinhof and Felix von Luschan who, incidentally, had also sorted the pygmies ‘into the least advanced category of Africans, along with those other Sudanic speakers whom the Hamites had conquered’,120 Delafosse adopts a diffusionist thesis to explain the subjugation of the négrilles by the ‘negroes’. He admits that the lack of written documents makes it difficult to prove these facts with absolute certainty but surmises that, although the négrilles had to abandon their original languages, they exercised influence on the dominant agglutinating languages and retained some of their ‘génie linguistique propre’ [their distinctive linguistic genius].121 The historical perspective adopted by Delafosse is driven by the belief that the fittest languages eventually triumphed over the weaker ones and that languages, ultimately, behave like living organisms.122 In this regard, it is interesting that the négrilles are described as an ‘endangered human race’123 and that the shift from hunting to agriculture is said to have contributed to the gradual sophistication 117 Ibid., pp. 5–6. 1 18 Ibid., p. 9. 119 Ibid., p. 10. 120 Pugach, Africa in Translation, p. 109. 121 Delafosse, Esquisse générale des langues de l’Afrique, p. 9. 122 See Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme, p. 52. And by the same author: La Guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques (Paris: Payot, 1987). 123 Delafosse, Esquisse générale des langues de l’Afrique, p. 9.

‘Words’

167

of the negroes’ agglutinating languages and the emergence of the noun class system, qualified here as one of the distinctive features of the ‘negro mentality’.124 This last point – Delafosse’s attempt to delineate an African ontology from linguistic data – is part and parcel of the epistemological context informing the functional viewpoint (see Chapter II) defended throughout the first part of the twentieth century by figures such as Frobenius, Tempels, Senghor, and even the directors of Les Statues meurent aussi. Like art, language is shown to mirror the African essence, and this essence, in turn, is used to convey a sense of historical discontinuity between the West and Africa. Functionalism, alongside evolutionism and diffusionism, is the constitutive element of Delafosse’s epistemological horizon. There is no doubt, for example, that the adoption of ‘petit nègre’ in the French army (a linguistic phenomenon studied by Maurice Delafosse) was implemented for functional reasons. The constitution of vocabularies was predicated on analogous arguments. Beyond this particular focus on language, this functional viewpoint is at the core of some of the ontological models already presented in Chapter II, notably with regard to the idea that African societies are rigorously ordered and that their art (a point which became a stereotype) is primarily subordinated to the perpetuation of societal norms and cultural (and cultual) injunctions. This point was defended by Frobenius but also (more problematically) by Sartre in ‘Orphée noir’. The major difference between Tempels, C.A. Diop, and Senghor, on the one hand, and existentialist anthropologists like Max Gluckman, Georges Balandier, and Michel Leiris lies precisely in the latter’s ability to disrupt this functional paradigm. These beliefs, then, shaped the way in which Delafosse analysed contemporary African languages and promoted monolingualism over dialectical fragmentation for colonial powers regarded ‘multilingualism’ as ‘a threat to order’.125 Some of the words and expressions signalled above – e.g. ‘génie linguistique’ and ‘negro mentality’ – indicate the close connection that Delafosse wishes to establish between ethnic and linguistic identity. What is essentially argued here is that a people – whether in Europe or in Africa – is first and foremost recognized for its shared ethnicity and use of a common language. Delafosse implies that the linguistic conditions that paved the way for the making of modern France as a unified and homogenous political and territorial entity can 124 Ibid., p. 10. 125 Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, p. 48.

168

Past Imperfect

also be identified – and/or replicated and engineered – in West Africa. His study on La Langue mandingue et ses dialectes is symptomatic of this approach.126 The opposition between dialects – and their implied cognitive and structural deficiency – and languages is the rhetorical device used by Delafosse to make a case for Manding which, he suggests, should in the medium term supersede its inferior dialectical variants (Malinke, Bambara, and Diola) and become the vehicular language of French West Africa.127 Van den Avenne argues that for Delafosse the future of this linguistic standardization depended on the success of French colonialism and the colonizers’ ability to build ‘roads and railways’.128 In other words, the future of the colonized – their ‘horizon of expectation’, to return to Koselleck’s temporal concept – lies in the colonizers’ modern present, project, and historicity; and repeats, on the linguistic plane, what was observed elsewhere in this book when other areas – African art, African museology, and African history – were scrutinized in the context of colonial and Christian modernity. Interestingly, this model of ‘cultural protectionism’ is still adopted today in contemporary postcolonial nations like France and Britain which have continued to instrumentalize ‘national languages and cultures as litmus tests for political integration’.129 It is important to point out that although Delafosse died in 1926, his influence – and, above all, the influence of the Hamitic theory – continued to be felt until the 1950s.130 La Langue mandingue et ses dialectes, the two-volume study edited and posthumously published by Delafosse (in 1929 and 1955), is evidence of this enduring legacy. The first tome was exclusively penned by Delafosse whereas the second includes collaborators such as Faidherbe and Meinhof alongside a long list of well-known pre- and post-First World War administrators-cumlinguists such as François Clozel, Félix Eboué, Henri Gaden, and Louis Tauxier.131 126 Michel Delafosse, La Langue mandingue et ses dialectes (malinké, bambara, dioula), vol. 1 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1929). For a close analysis of the ideological implication of this book, see Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes, pp. 116–122; and Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme, pp. 74–75. 127 Delafosse, La Langue mandingue et ses dialectes, p. 22. 128 Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes, p. 121. 129 Cronin, ‘Translation Studies and the Common Cause’, p. 4. 130 See Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London: Verso, 1998), p. 116. 131 Delafosse, La Langue mandingue et ses dialectes, vol. 2.

‘Words’

169

Via the example of one significant West African intellectual (Amadou Hampâté Bâ), I will now focus on the working relationship between French and African scholars in the post-Second World War era and in the ‘colonial situation’ (Balandier). This period was characterized by a higher degree of collaboration between French and sub-Saharan scholars, a trend, as mentioned earlier, initiated by scholars of Delafosse’s generation who needed to rely on indigenous informers to collect and interpret local knowledge.132 In these collaborations, it was rarely possible to achieve complete equality between French and African participants.133 This fact – one of the main points made by Fabian in Time and the Other – was constitutive of the developmental, condescending, and exploitative apparatus put in place by colonizers. In this context, French scholars often acted as paternalistic figures who would at best sponsor local talent but also, and often, fail to acknowledge their contribution or appropriate their findings.134 In The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford argues that the research conducted by Marcel Griaule and his team among the Dogon of Mali contributed to dismantle the colonial logic that had hitherto prevailed in Africanist fieldwork. Partly true, this point needs nuancing. Clifford notes that Ogotemmêli took on the role of the savant and Griaule became his pupil.135 That the former should be acknowledged in the title – Dieu d’eau. Entretiens avec Ogotemmêli – is symptomatic of this reversal and the sign that local intellectuals – the African sages who would in the second half of the twentieth century be explored by some African philosophers136 – were ascribed a new and more prominent status. However, the important linguistic fact in this relationship is that Ogotemmêli and Griaule did not know one another’s language and thus had to depend on the work of translators and interpreters to conduct and transcribe these interviews. These crucial intermediaries on whom, of course, the success of Griaule’s research was so reliant, are hardly mentioned, let alone acknowledged by the French ethnographer. At the beginning of the 132 See Jean-Hervé Jézéquel, ‘Les professionnels africains de la recherche dans l’État colonial tardif. Le personnel local de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire entre 1938 et 1960’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 24 (2011), 35–60 (p. 41). 133 Ibid., p. 53. 134 Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes, pp. 178–179. 135 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 72. 136 See Henry Odera Oruka, Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1990).

170

Past Imperfect

book, he vividly describes Upper Ogol, the Dogon village in which his conversations with Ogotemmêli took place, and he provides colourful details about the early morning bustle and activity among those, children and adults, who will observe or play a part in the proceedings. Griaule registers the arrival of ‘the informants and interpreters’ and, after failing to name them, he concludes that this ‘scene was a repetition of what had happened the day before and the day before that, and every day for fifteen years past whenever white men visited the southern ridge of Upper Ogol’.137 It transpires from this short quotation that these informers and interpreters have no special status and although they certainly hold the key to some of the mythological mysteries exposed by Ogotemmêli, their presence is rendered insignificant; moreover, they appeared to be the indiscriminate characters of a timeless locale regularly enlivened by the arrival of white ethnographers. These encounters are symptomatic of Koselleck’s ‘contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous’ and, as such, bear witness to the temporal rift between the colonizers and the colonized. This scene is also reminiscent of what Karl Marx said about Indian society in 1853: it ‘has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of its successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society’.138 This presence/absence also reflects the partial invisibility and dependency of most évolués in the colonial situation.139 This condition was experienced by most African intellectuals, writers, and artists included. Already well before the Second World War, informers/ interpreters – Moussa Travélé, a talented linguist who published widely on Bambara under Delafosse’s supervision, comes here to mind140 – had to endure their white bosses’ condescending patronage. After the war, only some rare individuals like Georges Balandier himself were in a position to break the colonial mould (cross the racial divide) and 1 37 Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas, with an introduction by Germaine Dieterlen (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 7. 138 Cited by Russell West-Pavlov in Temporalities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 164. 139 See Alice Conklin, ‘The New “Ethnology” and “La Situation Coloniale” in Interwar France’, in Emmanuelle Saada (ed.), French Politics, Culture and Society, 20.2 (2002), special issue ‘Regards croisés: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Colonial Situation’, 29–46. 140 See Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes, pp. 125–128.

‘Words’

171

establish egalitarian working conditions with African collaborators.141 Balandier held Alioune Diop in high regard and was, in his own words, Diop’s ‘élève’ [pupil],142 while Mamadou Madeira Keita became his ‘instituteur en décolonisation’ [teacher in decolonization].143 Overall, however, the relationship between African and French scholars – notably within the IFAN in Dakar144 – remained difficult and marked by a dependency complex that extended into scholarly life. Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s trajectory during the 1950s is significant of this general trend. The well-known Malian novelist but also linguist, theologian, historian, and ethnographer of Fulani culture certainly benefited from his position at the IFAN, where he perfected his skills as a researcher under Théodore Monod’s supervision.145 The publication, in French, of his book on the life and teachings of the Sufi cleric Tierno Bokar is interesting, however, when considered from the point of view of the semi-intellectual autonomy enjoyed by Hampâté Bâ from the late 1930s to the 1950s. Hampâté Bâ had already completed a first draft of part of his manuscript when he became acquainted with Monod at the end of the 1930s and was subsequently appointed at the IFAN in 1942.146 Tierno Bokar. Le Sage de Bandiagara147 is the culmination of several years of collaboration between Hampâté Bâ and Théodore Monod, a devout Christian who felt spiritually close to the eponymous Malian sage, on whom he published two articles. One of these, ‘Un Homme de Dieu: Tierno Bokar’ [A Man of God], appeared in Présence Africaine.148 This piece, a resounding homage to 141 Ibid., p. 260 n. 470. 142 Balandier, Histoire d’autres, p. 41, cited by Jézéquel, ‘Les professionnels africains’, p. 57. 143 Balandier, Histoire d’autres, p. 47, cited by Jézéquel, ‘Les professionnels africains’, p. 57. On Madeira Keita, see also: Gregory Mann, ‘Anti-Colonialism and Social Science: Georges Balandier, Madeira Keita, and “the Colonial Situation” in French Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55.1 (2013), 92–119. 144 See Jézéquel, ‘Les professionnels africains’. 145 Louis Brenner, ‘Introduction’ to Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s A Spirit of Tolerance: the Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar, edited by Roger Gaetani, preface by R. Gaetani and Fatima Jane Caswit/author’s preface to the 1980 French ed. (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2008), pp. xv–xxvii (pp. xxii–xxiv). 146 Ibid., p. xxiii. 147 Amadou Hampâté Bâ and Marcel Cardaire, Tierno Bokar. Le Sage de Bandiagara (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1957). 148 Théodore Monod, ‘Un Homme de Dieu: Tierno Bokar’, Présence Africaine, 8–9 (1950), 149–158.

172

Past Imperfect

the Malian preacher and philosopher, provides a bucolic portrayal of the Peul/Dogon landscape and the Mancina kingdom. Monod, a Protestant of Swiss descent, compares Bandiagara to an ‘African Geneva’ and although he remarks that it has lost much of its former glory (it used to be the seat of a ‘theocratic sultanate’), he still admires the city for its puritanical austerity.149 He offers some detail on Tierno’s life and the difficulties that he experienced as a member of the Tijani brotherhood, a religious organization held in little regard by the French administration,150 which subjected him to ‘severe political persecution’ and ‘virtual house arrest’ until his death in 1940.151 The bulk of the article focuses, however, on Tierno’s worldview and legacy as a teacher and theologian. Monod praises him for his ability to spread Islam without artifice and in ‘parlers africains’ [African tongues] like Fula and Hausa rather than Arabic.152 He also presents Tierno as a bridge-builder and as a cleric who has developed a tolerant and ecumenical conception of Islam.153 The account is peppered with numerous statements in quotation marks attributed to Tierno himself. Monod notes that he had visited Bandiagara in 1945 and that in this ‘pélerinage’ [pilgrimage] he was accompanied by one of Tierno’s ‘plus chers disciples’ [dearest disciples].154 There is absolutely no doubt that this disciple – and ‘fils spirituel’ [spiritual son]155 – was Hampâté Bâ himself. The puzzling fact here is that he seems to have been doctored out of Monod’s text. For all the connivance and friendship that might have existed between the two men – a point supported by Louis Brenner in his introduction to the English translation of Tierno Bokar156 – the fact remains that, in this article, Hampâté Bâ, who had been taught by Tierno and had become his designated spiritual heir,157 remains the invisible informer/interpreter. The genesis of Hampâté Bâ’s book on Tierno Bokar was complicated by another set of circumstances. By the 1950s, the brand of Sufism (Hamalliyya) to which Tierno had adhered was no longer regarded as a 149 Ibid., p. 149. 150 Ibid., p. 150. 151 Brenner, ‘Introduction’, pp. xv–xvi. 152 Monod, ‘Un Homme de Dieu’, p. 152. 153 Ibid., p. 156. 154 Ibid., p. 150. 155 Ibid. 156 Brenner, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiii. 157 Ibid., p. xix.

‘Words’

173

political threat by the colonial authorities, who had become concerned about the rise of Wahhabism,158 the ‘internationalization of Islam’ and the ‘spread of the Arabic language in West Africa’.159 Wahhabis advocated a doctrinal return to the early practices of the Koran, insisted that teaching be delivered in Arabic, and were radically opposed to any religious innovation, such as Sufism.160 In this highly tense political climate, Sufism and its more ecumenical understanding of Islam was favoured against Wahhabism. With the assistance of Marcel Cardaire, a French administrator from the office of Muslim affairs who had himself published on Islam in West Africa,161 Hampâté Bâ became the main figure behind a Sufi revival inspired by Tierno Bokar’s catechism. This initiative, which came to be known as the ‘counter-reform’,162 had a pedagogical and linguistic dimension and was driven by the idea that Islamic religious instruction had to be taught neither in French nor in Arabic but in African languages.163 In its fight against Wahhabism, the colonial administration continued to be supportive of this project and in a move to facilitate the dissemination of Tierno’s ideas, Hampâté Bâ accepted Cardaire’s offer to co-author Tierno Bokar. Le Sage de Bandiagara (published in 1957 with Présence Africaine).164 This co-authorship presents itself as an interesting case of convergence between the colonial administration and a local (but assimilated) intellectual who remained nevertheless critical of French acculturation.165 Both had in mind the promotion of ‘Black Islam’. For the administration, who held the view that ‘“black[s]” were only superficially Muslim’, ‘Black Islam’, as opposed to the expansionist ‘White Islam’, was used to designate a more compliant and less rooted version of Islam whose followers had accepted the ‘superiority’ and 1 58 Ibid., p. xxiv. 159 Louis Brenner, Controlling Knowledge: Religion, Power, and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 87. 160 Brenner, ‘Introduction’, p. xxv. 161 Marcel Cardaire, L’Islam et le terroir africain (Dakar: IFAN, 1954). 162 Brenner, ‘Introduction’, p. xxv; and Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, pp. 87–88. 163 Brenner, ‘Introduction’, p. xxv. 164 Ibid., pp. xxv–xxvi. 165 Claire Ducournau, ‘The Ambivalent Portrayal of Colonialism in the Memoirs of Amadou Hampâté Bâ’, Research in African Literatures, 46.3 (September 2015), 68–84 (p. 71).

174

Past Imperfect

‘authority’ of the French.166 For Hampâté Bâ, on the other hand, ‘Black Islam’ was synonymous with the spiritual tolerance of Tierno Bokar’s religious teaching. The convergence was thus relative, and this may explain why Monod advised Hampâté Bâ against co-authoring his book with Cardaire as he feared that this association with the colonial regime would have the effect of tarnishing Tierno’s message.167 The climate of intellectual subservience that prevailed in West Africa – but also in the French university system, as already seen when we focused on Cheikh Anta Diop in Chapter II – meant that a scholar like Hampâté Bâ would have had little opportunity for publication without the backing of a French patron. In 1980, Hampâté Bâ published a revised and augmented version of the same book but under a slightly different title.168 In his foreword, he pays tribute to Cardaire and reminds his readers that, given its sensitive subject matter, the book would not have seen the light of day without the Frenchman’s mediation. Published now under his name only, it took Hampâté Bâ nearly a quarter of a century to reclaim his own ‘signature’!169 Cheikh Anta Diop’s Glottopolitical Project Cheikh Anta Diop’s reflections on language and commitment to promote Wolof over French need to be understood against the epistemological legacy of the Third Republic and the context of institutional dependency introduced in the first part of this chapter. As mentioned in Chapter II, Diop continued to abide by colonial methodologies and writing modes.170 This allegiance to models that had been employed in the long nineteenth century to study (and often denigrate) Africa is problematic and sometimes made it quite difficult for his voice to be clearly heard. Diop’s insistence that ancient Egypt (and Ethiopia) were black African 1 66 Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, p. 88. 167 Brenner, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxv–xxvi. 168 Amadou. Hampaté Bâ, Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar. Le sage de Bandiagara (Paris: Seuil, 1980). 169 Kusum Aggarwal, Amadou Hampaté Bâ et l’africanisme. De la recherche anthropologique à l’exercice de la fonction auctoriale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999) – see chapter 5.2 ‘Le Sage de Bandiagara: pour une reprise de la signature’, pp. 207–216. 170 Like other early representatives of the ‘école historique de Dakar’ such as Abdoulaye Ly; see: Jézéquel, ‘Les professionnels africains’, p. 54.

‘Words’

175

civilizations whose major characteristics were subsequently borrowed by the Greek-speaking classical world along a South-North axis reversed the geographical order of precedence that had hitherto informed Eurocentric diffusionist theses. A mere three years after the publication of Lévi-Strauss’s Race and History, Diop’s account of African cultural specificity is still dependent on the craniometer and the ideological mindset that this devise symbolizes. He argues, for instance, that métis are ‘prognathes’ and that their phenotype is to be imputed to their having ‘cinquante pour cent de sang blanc’ [fifty per cent white blood] (NNC, 68). Having said this, he is careful to point out that this exploration of African history and attempt to retrace its continuity through the ages should not be driven by what he calls a ‘nazisme à rebours’ [reverse Nazism] (NNC, 401). The theory of the original cradles is also an integral part of Nations nègres et culture (1955). Diop wrote this book between 1948 and 1953 as part of a Doctorat d’État (NNC, 24) – in those, days two theses (‘principale’ and ‘complémentaire’) – completed under the supervision of Gaston Bachelard and Marcel Griaule.171 This theory reflects Diop’s political commitments as an active member of the pan-Africanist Rassemblement Démocratique Africain.172 It also captures a new Afrocentric logic and provides the building blocks of an ideological system that Diop puts in place to formulate his pan-Africanist agenda, envisage the emergence of a ‘renaissance africaine’,173 and, as argued in the first preface of Nations nègres, demand the constitution of a federalized and democratic Africa stretching from the Mediterranean 171 On his difficult doctoral trajectory, see Bernard Mouralis, ‘L’Usage de l’antiquité chez Cheikh Anta Diop et l’ombre menaçante de Senghor’, in PierrePhilippe Fraiture (ed.), International Journal of Francophone Studies, 18.2–3 (2015), special issue ‘Francophone African Philosophy and the Aftermath of the Empire’, 215–234 (pp. 217–218). This first Doctorat d’État was never defended as the Sorbonne failed to constitute a panel to examine C.A. Diop’s thesis. In 1960, Diop was able to defend his doctorate (completed under André Leroi-Gourhan’s supervision) and became the first African to be awarded a Doctorat ès Lettres. See also, Amzat Boukari-Yabara, Africa Unite. Une histoire du Panafricanisme (Paris: La Découverte, 2017 [2014]), pp. 178–179. 172 This party was led by Félix Houphouët-Boigny. See Boukari-Yabara, Africa Unite, pp. 177–178. 173 See C.A. Diop, ‘Quand pourra-t-on parler d’une renaissance africaine’, Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, 57–65. See also the ‘Prelude’ to this book.

176

Past Imperfect

to the Cape and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean (NNC, 18). He would later insist that this future African federalized state should possess its own lingua franca.174 The debates that Nations nègres et culture generated took place in the ‘colonial situation’ (Balandier), a context which was marked by the confrontation and, often, the interaction between French and African scholars (and ‘évolués’). Diop sets out to rewrite African history. He adheres to the diffusionist spirit underpinning the Kulturkreis school of anthropology and subscribes to the idea that ‘cultural characteristics were diffused among far-flung societies over a period of time, instead of developing independently in different areas’.175 And he follows the diachronic approach adopted by Wilhelm Schmidt and Leo Frobenius but also by Africanist linguists such as Bleek, Meinhof, and Delafosse. Diop’s main contention, a point echoing Joseph Ki-Zerbo’s view in ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’ (see Chapter I), is that African history and particularly the history of ancient Egypt has been ‘whitened’ by Western historians. This process of ‘blanchiment’ is, according to him, one of the recurring trends of Western historiography and he suggests that apart from a few enlightened historians – e.g. Herodotus, Constantin Volney, Édouard Naville, and Émile Amélineau – most Egyptologists participated in what he names the ‘modern falsification of history’ (NNC, 59–203);176 and were engaged in an ‘invention’ (NNC, 156) whose main scope was to ‘blanchir la race égyptienne’ [whitewash the Egyptian race] (NNC, 69). The valorization of the linguistic question is another attempt by Diop to reconcile the African ‘space of experience’ with a progress-driven and technology-focused ‘horizon of expectation’. Languages, in this context, are tools to temporalize Africa, relocate ‘past and future […] with respect to each other’,177 and wash the continent of its assumed primitiveness. For Delafosse, African languages developed in steps. With the spread of ‘negroes’ in sub-Saharan Africa, as pointed out earlier, the 174 Cheikh Anta Diop, Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State, translated by Harold J. Salemson, with an interview by Carlos Moore (Westport, CT: Africa World Press Edition/Lawrence Hill & Company, 1987), pp. 9–14. 175 Pugach, Africa in Translation, p. 16. 176 This is the title of the third chapter of the book: ‘La falsification de l’histoire moderne’. 177 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1983]), p. 4.

‘Words’

177

négrilles’ isolating languages disappeared and were gradually substituted by agglutinating languages relying, as in the case of Kiswahili, on noun classes.178 However, Delafosse adds that the next stage coincided with the arrival south of the Sahara of ‘mercantile’ ‘white Mediterranean populations of Asian descent’ including ‘Egyptians, Phoenicians and Libyans’ who profoundly transformed not only ‘the culture, the way of life and even the physical aspect’ of these black – and increasingly hybridized (‘négroïdes’) – populations but also their ‘parler’ [tongue].179 The main linguistic transformations recorded by Delafosse include the appearance or disappearance of noun classes and, last but not least given the preference accorded to inflected languages, a tendency to adopt flexion (‘à adopter la flexion’) in rarer cases.180 C.A. Diop’s book is a response against this stadial explanation in which African languages are shown to have been the recipients of the salutary influence exercised by Hamitic and Indo-European languages. Again, it is important to underline that Diop does not oppose Delafosse’s methodology and environmental determinism but the North-South axis and direction of travel presiding over the latter’s ethnic, linguistic, and geographical hierarchization. Delafosse’s explanation rehearses the main tenets of the Hamitic theory. Indeed, he endorses the generally accepted idea that an elite of light-skinned populations of European and Middle Eastern lineage invaded sub-Saharan Africa and ruled over linguistically, culturally, intellectually, and physically inferior subject races. The now derogatory French term (and taxon) ‘négroïde’, which means ‘negro-like’,181 and implies that original negro traits have been diluted as a result of miscegenation,182 belongs to the anthropometric and diffusionist nomenclature. It also resonates with the belief – again inherently constitutive of the Hamitic theory – that interbreeding between this racial (Caucasoid) elite and their authentically African subjects precipitated the downfall of great African civilizations like Benin and Yorubaland whose ‘achievements’ were invariably attributed 178 Delafosse, Esquisse générale des langues de l’Afrique, p. 10. 179 Ibid. 180 Ibid. 181 According to the Petit Robert (1993) dictionary: ‘Qui présente certaines caractéristiques propres à la race noire’ [presenting some characteristics of the black race], p. 1719. 182 Delafosse (Esquisse générale des langues de l’Afrique, p. 10) clearly shows here that ‘black’ is not synonymous with ‘Negroid’ for he refers to ‘ces noirs tendant à devenir négroïdes’ [these blacks who tended to become negro-like].

178

Past Imperfect

to the genius of non-Africans.183 It is interesting here that Delafosse, whilst upholding this discourse of gradual deterioration, is also of the view that this injection of foreign syntax had an ameliorative effect on the otherwise primitive linguistic landscape of sub-Saharan Africa. But Delafosse, simultaneously scholar and colonial functionary, was also keen to argue that this ameliorative logic was an integral element of the colonial project of acculturation. Diop revisits the Hamitic theory, and, predictably, challenges its ethnic presuppositions. He remarks that whenever it is deemed ideologically convenient, Ham is ‘maudit, noirci et devient l’ancêtre des Nègres’ [cursed, blackened, and becomes the ancestor of the negroes]. But is whitewashed (‘blanchi’) when one seeks to ascertain the racial identity of the ‘premier pays civilisé du monde’ [first civilized country in the world] (NNC, 47). This historical ‘falsification’ gave way to the, in his view, dubious notion of ‘Chamites orientaux et occidentaux’ [oriental and occidental Hamites], which he describes as a subterfuge intended to deny black people any involvement in the creation of the Egyptian and other African civilizations (NNC, 47). This point invalidates Delafosse’s idea that Egyptians – alongside Phoenicians and Libyans – all lightskinned Hamites according to the French linguist – subdued Africans and transformed their cultural and linguistic habits since Egyptians, as Diop would insist throughout his career, were black. This ubiquitous argument is deployed to prove that Egyptian was not a Semitic language. By means of Édouard Naville, the Swiss Egyptologist who had in the early years of the twentieth century posited the black origins of Egypt, Diop refutes the argument, fabricated (according to him) by nineteenthcentury Egyptologists such as Karl-Heinrich Brugsch (NNC, 281),184 that ancient Egyptian (being allegedly of Semitic origin) was also predicated on a system of triliteral roots (NNC, 287). This point forms the basis of Diop’s promotion of Wolof as a language through which African existential agency could be reclaimed. Wolof, one of the main ‘vehicular’ languages of colonial Senegal, is said to bear a very strong resemblance to Egyptian. Diop is keen to underline this ‘parenté’ [kinship] and ‘quasiidentité’ which, as he would insist in all his other essays, is allegedly so 183 Howe, Afrocentrism, p. 115. 1 84 C.A. Diop cites here long passages of Naville’s L’Évolution de la langue égyptienne et des langues sémitiques: l’écriture, la grammaire, le démotique et le copte, l’araméen et l’hébreu (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1920), in which Brugsch’s theses are criticized.

‘Words’

179

compelling that it would not be an exaggeration to argue that ‘l’égyptien et les langues nègres forment une unité lingusitique naturelle’ [Egyptian and negro languages constitute a natural linguistic family] (NNC, 281). Interestingly, Nations nègres comprises a ‘vocabulaire’ through which Diop sets out to make a case for this close genetic kinship between pharaonic Egyptian and Wolof.185 Given his familiarity with colonial ‘science’,186 there is no doubt that Diop remained heavily influenced by the long tradition of ‘vocabularies’ published during the nineteenth century and the Third Republic. In his analysis of vocabularies, Johannes Fabian is careful to point out that these publications, although driven by practical objectives, in some cases also offered the basis for the development of a more scientifically motivated practice of comparative and applied linguistics (and pedagogy).187 Diop’s word list is, it would seem, to be attributed to this scholarly tradition borne out of the imperial context. Whereas colonial vocabularies would bring two (or more) contemporary African and European languages together, Diop adopts a diachronic perspective. His ‘Vocabulaire comparé égyptien-valaf’ (NNC, 287–335) presents itself as a two-column list of Egyptian words and expressions (left column) and their Wolof equivalents (right column). Unlike colonial vocabularies, where information was often distributed under thematic headings (food, nature, trade goods, or housing),188 Diop’s word list does not rely on any apparent organizational principle. It is alphabetically ordered, and lexical resemblance is the main criterion to explore the linguistic kinship between Wolof and its remote ancestor. Although he identifies intriguing similarities between the two languages, it must be said that the comparison conducted by the Senegalese thinker leaves a lot to be desired.189 The two-column list is a little misleading and conveys the impression that the two languages are synchronous. In his attempt to identify the ‘profound’ parallels between Egyptian and

1 85 A concern which would resurface in other works; see Cheikh Anta Diop, Parenté génétique de l’égyptien pharaonique et des langues négro-africaines: processus de sémitisation (Dakar: IFAN – Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1977). 186 See Howe, Afrocentrism. 187 A point also systematically explored by Van den Avenne in De la bouche même des indigènes. 188 Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, p. 22. 189 As argued by Maurice Houis in ‘Egyptien pharaonique et langues africaines, un dossier ouvert’, Afrique et langage, 13 (1980), 69–79.

180

Past Imperfect

Wolof ‘roots’,190 Diop does not sufficiently address the chronological and, perhaps more crucially given the geographical distance between Egypt and West Africa, the spatial factors that would help his readers to understand how and why Wolof and other West African languages such as Serer, Fula, and Toucouleur are genealogically related to ancient Egyptian.191 This linguistic kinship is, according to Diop, to be imputed to the ‘relatively static’ nature of African societies and the related fact that ‘l’évolution des langues […] semble être liée […] à la stabilité de l’organisation sociale ou pour prendre le contraire de celle-ci, aux bouleversements sociaux’ [language evolution seems to be linked to the stability of the social organization or, conversely, to social upheavals].192 It is not an unreasonable argument and one, incidentally, that underpins Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history). After all, one could argue that the relative homogeneity of West European cultures was until the sixteenth century guaranteed by the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church and that this position of domination contributed to the survival of Latin as a semi-vehicular language and the perpetuation of a ‘trans-European Latin-writing clerisy’;193 and that, on the other hand, the upheavals brought about by the Reformation and the French Revolution but also the rise of print culture and later the emergence of other mass media (radio, cinema, TV, and internet) further redefined the place and significance of regional and national vernaculars.194 C.A. Diop’s argument needs, however, to be approached with caution and his determination to favour the longue durée is in this particular instance probably unrealistic. Indeed, his linguistic comparison between classical Egyptian, a language written ‘from the ninth to the eighteenth dynasty’ (i.e. from 2400 to 750 BC) (NNC, 236), and contemporary Wolof stretches over 4,300 years. The argument that African societies remained ‘relatively static’ during this long historical period is simply untenable. And it is also ironic that this ahistorical view of Africa – the ‘millennia-long stable equilibrium of African societies’195 – should be 1 90 Diop, Nations nègres et culture, p. 287. 191 See Chris Gray, Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile Obenga (London: Karnak House, 1989), pp. 79–81. 192 Diop, Nations nègres et culture, p. 232. 193 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 15. 194 See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World, with additional chapters by Hartley, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2012). 195 Howe, Afrocentrism, p. 166.

‘Words’

181

formulated by an intellectual, and what is more a Marxist intellectual, whose career was entirely dedicated to promoting Africa’s historical uniqueness; and to the teaching of history as a strategy to drag Africa out of (neo)colonial dependency and underdevelopment. The argument was of its time, however, and resonates with an atemporal conception of the continent and with the belief – as argued in the chapter devoted to Les Statues meurents aussi – that Africa constitutes a perfectly ordered and determined whole in which the landscape, people, animals, things, and, it would seem, words themselves, are part of a rigorously homogenous system whose essence was fixed once and for all in time immemorial. The timelessness of Diop’s analysis (and his reliance on a fixed ‘space of experience’) is surprising and does not render the expected diachronic granularity of what must undoubtedly have been a very complex linguistic evolution. Diop talks of the ‘passage de cette langue au valaf’ [the passage from this language (i.e. ancient Egyptian) to Wolof] (NNC, 239) as if this shift had been immediate and had not gone through numerous mutations. As in his other historical analyses and comparisons of Pharaonic Egypt and contemporary negroAfrican societies, Diop has a marked tendency to favour resemblance at the expense of difference and ‘dynamic interaction’ and ‘to treat the near-3,000-year history of the successive Pharaonic states as a single, static entity’.196 Diop’s lifelong effort to explore this linguistic kinship was driven by an ambition to disprove the linguistic primitiveness of African vernaculars and to challenge the hierarchies established by linguists and ethno-linguists like Delafosse who, whilst dismissing African languages as rudimentary, maintained that French was one of the most difficult languages in the world and that Africans would never be able to assimilate it.197 Incidentally, this point had already been made by Gustave Le Bon at the end of the nineteenth century.198 By producing works in French, évolués like C.A. Diop (and Hampaté Bâ) demonstrated the absurdity of these claims and in his analysis of the Egyptian-Wolof kinship, Diop casts some doubt on the absoluteness of the isolatingagglutinating-inflecting taxonomy for, even though he contends that 196 Ibid., pp. 166–167. 1 97 Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes, p. 140. 198 See Laurent Dubreuil, Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post) Colonial Expression, trans. by David Fieni (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 96.

182

Past Imperfect

Egyptian and Wolof both display agglutinating characteristics (NNC, 263), he also mentions the presence of ‘désinences’ ‘dans nos langues’ [in our languages] (NNC, 245 and 266). Since desinences (e.g. endings designating gender, number, person, tense, or mode) were usually regarded as the defining features of inflecting languages, Diop intimates that this evolutionist distinction between agglutinating and inflecting languages may not, after all, be as crucial as once envisaged. From the late 1950s onwards, this typology would be simplified and reduced to two categories (synthetic and analytical languages) developed earlier by the American linguist, and precursor of structural linguistics, Leonard Bloomfield.199 In 1963, Joseph Greenberg 200 would prove that Fula is part of the West African linguistic ‘Atlantic family’. This discovery would definitively put to bed the belief, first theorized by Carl Meinhof in 1912 (but, as I have shown, already posited by Louis Faidherbe in 1875), that Fula, due to ‘the physical appearance of its speakers’, was a Hamitic language completely unrelated to neighbouring languages. 201 By asserting that Wolof has a prestigious lineage, Diop also entertains the hope of establishing its role as a major African language. This objective is at the heart of the second part of Nations nègres (‘Développement des langues’) in which he advocates the ‘necessity to develop national languages’ (NNC, 405–408). 202 The main line of argument in this discussion is reminiscent of the debates – ‘They are X because they speak X’ – that had marked the era of nation building in nineteenthcentury Europe. 203 Political independence, argues Diop, will need to be driven by African languages; and will, equally, require a concerted effort on part of future postcolonial regimes to reclaim cultural identity via a widespread use of African languages such as Wolof. On this issue, there is no doubt that Diop, alongside other prominent intellectuals such as the novelist/film director Sembène Ousmane, the linguist Pathé Diagne, 199 See Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1933). 2 00 In Joseph Greenberg, The Languages of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). 2 01 Fiona McLaughlin, ‘Senegal: The Emergence of a National Lingua Franca’, in Andrew Simpson (ed.), Language and National Identity in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 79–97 (p. 88). 2 02 This is the title of the first section, ‘Nécessité de développer les langues nationales’. 2 03 Sue Wright, Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), in chapter III ‘Language Planning in State Nations and Nation States’, pp. 47–77 (p. 50).

‘Words’

183

and the mathematician Sakhir Thiam, 204 significantly diverged from Senghor’s promotion of French and francophonie as devices to bypass African identity politics and establish a ‘dialogue’ between negroAfrican culture and the rest of the world:205 We must aim at cultural achievement, and in that cultural achievement we must welcome contributions from outside. First among them are the traditional historical contributions of Europe, reaching us through the channel of force; but we must also equally welcome contributions from Asia, from India, or from China. With all these contributions, we have had to build up in Senegal an authentic culture which is rooted in Negro-African values and which, at the same time, expresses itself in French. 206

Diop’s arguments in favour of African national languages has practical and philosophical implications. The European (and specifically French) model is referred to here. He argues that multilingualism is not typically African but a phenomenon that can be observed on all other continents and that in Africa, like elsewhere, there is no reason why European languages should become the main tools to achieve linguistic unity. In this regard, he argues that these (non-African/colonial) languages have remained virtually unspoken outside intellectual circles in urban areas (NNC, 405–407), a point also made by Hampâté Bâ. 207 Diop notes that in its relation with ‘economic imperialism’, ‘cultural imperialism’ acts as the ‘safety valve’ (‘est la vis de sécurité’); and he concludes that the cancellation of the latter will facilitate the suppression of the former (NNC, 407). This close correlation between the ‘base’ and the ‘superstructure’, although expressed more mechanistically than in classical Marxism, certainly indicates Diop’s wish – like other postcolonial thinkers such as C.L.R. James, Amílcar Cabral, Marcien Towa, and the early Mudimbe – to explore knowledge and culture through the prism of (modes of) production and ideology and, in turn, expose the ­impoverishing effects (culturally and economically) of colonialism. 208 2 04 See McLaughlin, ‘Senegal’, pp. 84–85. 2 05 See Mouralis, ‘L’Usage de l’antiquité’, p. 228. 2 06 Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Some Thoughts on Africa: A Continent in Development’, International Affairs, 38.2 (April 1962), 189–195 (p. 191). 2 07 See Ducournau, ‘The Ambivalent Portrayal of Colonialism’, p. 73. 2 08 For an analysis of the respective roles assumed by the ‘base’ and the ‘superstructure’ in classic Marxism and postcolonial studies, see: Ranabir

184

Past Imperfect

In his plea for the development of national languages, Diop makes a case for the implementation of language policies and argues against the belief that ‘l’évolution d’une langue est un phénomène naturel’ [the evolution of a language is a natural phenomenon], which should remain unregulated (NNC, 407). He provides two examples to substantiate this view. He first shows how the Irish, whose ‘mother tongue’ had fallen into complete oblivion under ‘English colonialism’, succeeded in ‘resurrecting’ Irish ‘à partir des bibliothèques’ [from the libraries] (NNC, 408). He then turns to the French situation and to the fact that the gradual imposition of French as the one and only language of the Hexagon was anything but natural but the result of an ‘official’ and ‘conscious’ effort: Le français n’a pu s’imposer aux différentes provinces que par un étouffement des langues locales: il importe de souligner ici qu’il ne s’agissait pas de dialectes du français mais de véritables langues différentes de la langue française; un Basque ou un Breton, etc., qui n’a pas appris le français est incapable de saisir la moindre idée exprimée en cette langue et inversement. Du reste ces langues ont conservé une littérature qui végète (littérature provençale: Mistral; poèmes occitans, poèmes basques …). La multiplicité des langues est donc un problème qui a été résolu ailleurs, du moins pratiquement, et que nous pouvons résoudre à notre tour. (NNC, 406–407) [The French language prevailed in the different provinces only because local languages were smothered: it is important to underline here that they were not dialects deriving from French but genuine languages which were also different from French; a Basque or a Breton, etc., who has not learnt French, is incapable of grasping any ideas expressed in this language and vice versa. What is more, these languages have retained their literatures in a vegetative state (Provençal literature: Mistral; Occitan poems, Basque poems …). Language multiplicity is thus a problem which has been resolved elsewhere and that we can also resolve]

Languages can be resurrected but also smothered. And these two situations, argues Diop, are dependent on political will. The postcolonial will to decolonize the linguistic basis on which Ireland was colonized by England (before it became Great Britain): this is still ongoing now in the twenty-first century and it must be said that the battle has been won by English and that Irish has remained a minority language despite official and conscious efforts on part of the Irish government to consolidate the Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

‘Words’

185

basis of Ireland’s mother tongue and ensure its revival; 209 and the will to homogenize the French territory when French was still a ‘dialect’ spoken by an intellectual and political elite based in the Île-de-France. In this latter case, Diop’s diagnosis is more accurate and still current: despite the efforts of regionalist men of letters such Frédéric Mistral – who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1904 210 – to counter and delay the linguistic standardization of France, Breton, Basque, and Occitan/Provençal have fought, and virtually lost, their own battles. These two examples are useful devices to explore the African linguistic context under French colonialism. Even though it was, as shown in this chapter, accompanied by a high degree of ‘glottophagia’ (or smothering), Diop contends – to return to Georges Balandier’s phrase with regard to African art – that ‘all may not be lost’ (AA, 117) and that African minority languages can recapture some of their agency since French, though the language of the victors, is only spoken by a fraction of the colonized population. This fact is the premise of Diop’s pedagogical programme which, whilst favouring African languages (and Wolof in particular) over French, also extols the scientific and technological merits of Western modernity. Diop does not reject progress per se and, in fact, his celebration of the Negro-Egyptian past – of which Wolof is the present legacy – is a device to plan the African future. Thus, he argues here that it would be ‘more efficient’ (‘plus efficace’) to allow African children to access this modernity in their own languages, and that when French is the language of instruction this process is delayed as there is too much focus on memory and not enough on reflection (NNC, 405), a situation also exposed by Balandier in his examination of African linguistic psittacism (see Chapter IV). Diop sets out here to reflect on the way in which this modernity – the ‘idées scientifiques et philosophiques du monde moderne’ [the scientific and philosophical ideas of the modern world] – could find its way into Wolof (NNC, 408). He proposes the establishment of the African ‘humanities’ in which ancient Egyptian would assume the function played by Greek and Latin in the West and suggests that thanks to this new field it would be conceivable to ‘enrichir une langue nègre quelconque à partir des racines égyptiennes’ [enrich any negro languages with Egyptian roots] (NNC, 408). Lexical creation 2 09 See Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost, The Irish Language in Ireland: From Goídel to Globalisation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005). 210 See Claude Mauron, Frédéric Mistral (Paris: Fayard, 1993).

186

Past Imperfect

constitutes the backbone of this proposal and reflects the protectionist measures adopted by some countries – the cases of France and Quebec come to mind – to combat the climate of linguistic laissez faire generated by the increasingly hegemonic place of English in the world.211 In essence, Diop posits that any new words should either be derived from Egyptian or rely on the internal resources of Wolof and on its ‘génie propre’ [intrinsic genius] (NNC, 409). This programme, like the other points put forward by Diop to challenge the discourses behind the ‘falsification’ of African history, is formulated to argue that: Les langues africaines sont loin d’être frappées d’une ‘pauvreté naturelle’ et qu’il suffit de leur appliquer un effort comparable à celui qui a été appliqué aux langues occidentales, pour qu’elles soient au niveau des exigences de la vie moderne. (NNC, 412) [African languages are far from being naturally poor and they simply need to be subjected to the measures applied to Western languages to be able to respond to the demands of modern life]

It is interesting that ‘modern life’ remains the end point – and the unsurpassable horizon (of expectation) of this linguistic and cultural programme. Diop registers his disapproval of Western scholarship, whether in the field of Egyptology or linguistics, but cannot completely escape Western canons and their regime of historicity and this is the reason why ‘many academic historians view [him] with disdain’. 212 He argues that the translation into African languages of ‘foreign works’ ranging from ‘poetry, songs, novels, dramas, but also philosophical, mathematical, scientific and historical essays’ should be given priority in this process that would prepare Africa to face modern life. The second chapter of the section on the development of African languages (‘Traductions’, NNC, 415–450) begins with another vocabulary list in which the author presents, in two opposite columns, scientific and mathematical words and phrases in French and their Wolof translations. In the subsequent section, Diop proposes three examples of canonical works translated into Wolof: an extract from Einstein’s The Principle 2 11 See Leigh Oakes and Yael Peled, Normative Language Policy: Ethics, Politics, Principles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 212 Etienne Smith, ‘Merging Ethnic Histories in Senegal: Whose Moral Community?’, in Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola (eds), Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), p. 217.

‘Words’

187

of Relativity (in fact the ‘résumé concis’ by the French physicist Paul Langevin);213 a short extract from Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Horace; and the first stanza and chorus of the French national anthem, ‘La Marseillaise’. These passages are simply translated and left without any commentary or explanation. The main objective of the exercise conducted by Diop is to demonstrate ‘la possibilité de traduire dans une langue africaine quelconque et en valaf en particulier tous les aspects de la réalité du monde moderne’ [the possibility of translating into any African language, and Wolof in particular, all aspects of the reality of the modern world] (NNC, 415). Diop’s intention here is to prove that Wolof is sophisticated enough to accommodate European ideas whether they belong to science, revolution, or versified classical tragedy. As I, like many of Diop’s French-language readers, have no knowledge of Wolof, some explanations would have been useful to understand how the translator negotiated this passage from French to Wolof and which concepts proved resistant to this translinguistic (and transcultural) passage. Non-Wolof speakers would have found it particularly interesting to be provided with information on the strategies adopted by the translator to render seventeenth-century French – words (and often concepts) such as ‘sort’, ‘honneur’, ‘âme’, ‘salut’, and ‘sang’ (NNC, 447–448) – in Wolof. Equally it would be interesting to know whether some archaic Wolof words and turns of phrase were called upon to reflect the original, and if any prosodic system had been applied to transpose Corneille’s Alexandrines into Wolof. Regarding the first stanza of the ‘Marseillaise’, it would have been equally enlightening to learn how Diop decided to tackle certain context-specific concepts such as patrie, tyrannie, or campagnes. The absence of this information conveys the impression that translation is an atemporal activity and that the two languages under examination are deprived of any dynamism and function, ultimately, like the two-column word lists referred to earlier. In this encounter, Wolof also appears to be a mere receiver and a linguistic vessel into which French, and the modernity it represents, can be unproblematically poured. In this understanding of translation, Wolof seems to unconditionally accept the gift of modernity. The replacement of French by Wolof (and other Senegalese languages) remained one of Diop’s lifelong political commitments, however, and 2 13 On this translation and C.A. Diop’s work at the physics laboratory of the IFAN, see Paul Bandia, ‘Cheikh Anta Diop: Translation at the Service of History’, in John Milton and Paul Bandia (eds), Agents of Translation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), pp. 209–227 (p. 217).

188

Past Imperfect

one that marked him out from Senghorian francophonie. In a series of ‘conversations’ held with Carlos Moore in 1975, Diop returns to one of the core objectives of his research, his determination to demonstrate ‘the profound links binding the ancient Egyptians to modern black Africans, not only racially and culturally, but also linguistically’. 214 When asked to give his opinion about the achievements of negritude, Diop takes Senghor to task without naming him explicitly: I see a total incompatibility between the formal defence of African culture on the one hand, and the systematic refusal on the other to adopt concrete measures to develop our national languages. Those who are incapable of solving this problem can do nothing for African culture. They merely embrace African culture to better smother it. Their attitude shows them to be impostors. Take a country like Senegal, for example, where 95 % of the population speaks Wolof […] Flight from one’s own language is the quickest short cut to cultural alienation. For Africa, this has been a monumental problem but it has to be tackled head on […] many of those who talk about promoting our national languages limit their intent to the domain of folklore. When they want to deal with serious questions, they turn to the languages of … Europe!215

Diop’s exploration of African languages, albeit practically minded and geared towards the implementation of ‘concrete measures’ to elevate Wolof to the status of official language of government and education, is also closely related to the question – pursued by African philosophers such as Alexis Kagamé, V.Y. Mudimbe, and Kwasi Wiredu 216 – of whether one can think and philosophize in African languages. The difference between these thinkers and Diop lies in the fact that they posit the conceptual autonomy of African vernaculars whereas Diop, more humbly it would seem, contends that these languages are resourceful enough to bear the weight of modernity. However, they are all intent on revisiting the time-honoured opposition between so-called 214 Carlos Moore, ‘Conversations with Cheikh Anta Diop’, Présence Africaine, 149–150 (1989), special issue: ‘Hommage à Cheikh Anta Diop’), 374–420 (p. 407). My emphasis. 215 Ibid. 216 Wiredu singles out C.A. Diop as one of the earlier advocates of African languages: Kwasi Wiredu, ‘Formulating Modern Thought in African languages: Some Theoretical Considerations’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 301–332 (p. 332).

‘Words’

189

indigenous and universal cultures and to demonstrate that this hierarchy is the product of unequal power relations generated by the colonial situation: ‘a man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language’. 217 African philosophers suggest that philosophy cannot be reduced to its Hellenic origins and developments even though Heidegger had peremptorily declared that philosophy would speak either Greek or German. 218 Many of them argue (Kagamé’s reliance on Aristotle springs to mind)219 that, if this heritage is undeniably beneficial, one can also philosophize outside the categories of Greek reason. Wiredu, for instance, remarks that because of colonialism, ‘the philosophical training of contemporary African scholars has come to derive from foreign sources’. 220 But, of course, he challenges, the absoluteness of this heritage: Why should the African uncritically assimilate the conceptual schemes imbedded in foreign languages and cultures? Philosophical truth can indeed be disentangled from cultural contingencies. But for this purpose nothing is more useful than the ability to compare different languages and cultures in relation to their philosophical prepossessions. 221

For Diop, who was at any rate of the view that Greek culture (and hence philosophy) was of Egyptian origin, the comparison of different languages is a scholarly enterprise premised on the conviction that great civilizations, whether Egyptian or European, are the bearers of sophisticated languages. For philosophers like Wiredu, on the other hand, this exercise is driven by the belief that philosophy, as a mode of enquiry, needs to be submitted to a process of deconstruction and be appraised against its geographical, cultural, and linguistic conditions of possibility. This examination, which, he adds, ‘can be philosophically beneficial 217 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1967]), p. 9. 218 See Jacques Howlett, ‘La philosophie africaine en question’, Présence Africaine, 91.3 (1974), 14–25 (p. 14). 219 See Daniel Orrells, ‘Oedipus in Africa: Mudimbe and Classical Antiquity’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), International Journal of Francophone Studies, 18.2–3 (2015), special issue: ‘Francophone African Philosophy and the Aftermath of the Empire’, 235–261 (pp. 235–236). 220 Kwasi Wiredu, ‘On Defining African Philosophy’, in Tsenay Serequeberhan (ed.), African Philosophy: The Essential Readings (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1991), pp. 87–110 (p. 98). 221 Ibid.

190

Past Imperfect

to the African as well as the non-African’, 222 is heuristically productive because it provides the means to discover what certain human groups prepossessed (i.e. the philosophical ideas that they traditionally (‘pre’) held), but also to ascertain which of these ideas were actual ‘prepossessions’ (or prejudices). This investigative method is at the heart of what Wiredu called ‘conceptual decolonization’. 223 Ultimately, Diop argues that African languages can be used to think, while Wiredu is of the view that they offer the means to think universally and differently. What is important here is that language, whether explored by Diop or philosophers like Wiredu, remains a terrain to combat Eurocentrism and reveal the legacies of colonial alienation. Diop’s focus on alienation is a future-orientated strategy. Abiola Irele argues that alienation, as it was understood by Hegel and then adapted by Marx via Feuerbach, contains a positive dimension for this state of loss and estrangement (the historical and linguistic dispossession explored in Nations nègres) also acts as a trigger for change: From Hegel’s abstruse dialectics, we can retain the notion of alienation as the principle of all becoming, or, more simply, as the moving power of the historical process. In cultural terms, it implies a willed movement out of the self and a purposive quest for new horizons of life and of experience. 224

Irele’s discussion is above all a critique of African contemporary identity politics. Although published in 1992, ‘In Praise of Alienation’ had originally been a lecture that Irele delivered at the University of Ibadan in 1982. 225 Irele’s intervention acts as a warning as he cautions that a 222 Ibid. 223 Kwasi Wiredu, Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy: Four Essays (Ibadan: Hope, 1995). 224 Abiola Irele, ‘In Praise of Alienation’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 201–224 (p. 215). 225 For a genesis (and critical examination) of this text, see Phyllis Taoua, ‘In Praise of Cultural Comparisons: Abiola Irele’s Contributions as a Cosmopolitan, Multi-Lingual Africanist’, Journal of the African Literature Association, 14.1 (2020), 90–102. See also, in the same journal issue: Cilas Kemedjio, ‘Abiola Irele and the Anti-Négritude Generation: “In Praise of Alienation”’, pp. 43–57, in which Irele’s text is described as ‘a Manifestation of the anxieties expressed by an entire generation in the face of the collapse of the dreams sparked by the anticolonial struggles’ (p. 43).

‘Words’

191

return to African traditions cannot be an end in itself or a way out of alienation. Colonialism, he argues, was not an ‘interlude’ but ‘marked a qualitative sea change of the historical process in Africa’. 226 This critique – we are in 1982 – is first and foremost aimed at African dictators like Mobutu of Zaire and their cynical abuse and manipulation of traditions for political purposes. 227 Thus, this text also presents itself as a critical reassessment of all culturalist movements – from Herder’s Volkgeist to Senghor’s negritude – and their tendency to develop an ‘organic’ and ‘romantic’ conception of past traditions which ‘confers an ontological status upon the notion of identity and constitutes the abstraction of national culture into its transcendental category’. 228 Irele argues that Diop, who was critical of negritude, alongside other thinkers (Stanislas Adotevi, Fanon, Marcien Towa, Paulin Hountondji, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Soyinka, and Kwasi Wiredu), 229 did not fall victim to the ‘organic fallacy’230 generated by the contemporary advocates of indigenous pasts and traditions. Although Irele maintains that Diop’s thesis is no longer valid now (in 1982), he is nonetheless of the view that it had transformative powers in the 1950s as the Egyptian past was ascribed a dialectal role: that of facilitating the advent of a future in which Senegal (and sub-Saharan Africa by extension) would be able to act independently as a modern country: It is of no practical significance now to us to be told that our forebears constructed pyramids if today we cannot build and maintain by ourselves the roads and bridges we require to facilitate communication between ourselves, if we still have to depend on the alien to provide for us the necessities of modern civilization, if we cannot bring the required level of efficiency and imagination to the management of our environment. Admittedly, the earlier emphasis of cultural nationalism was beneficial: it had an inspirational purpose which had a point in the colonial period. And if Cheikh Anta Diop to whom I have just alluded is to be understood aright, his appeal to a past of African achievement was not meant as an encouragement to cultural smugness but to greater effort. Unfortunately, that point is lost sight of in the postures we now adopt. 231

226 227 228 229 230 231

Irele, ‘In Praise of Alienation’, p. 207. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., pp. 205–206. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 213.

192

Past Imperfect

It is important to remember that Nations nègres et culture also had a subtitle: De l’antiquité nègre égytienne aux problèmes culturels de l’Afrique noire aujourd’hui [From Black Egyptian Antiquity to the Cultural Problems of Africa Today], and that by reopening an old argument – the blackness of ancient Egypt (already advocated by Volney in the late eighteenth century) – C.A Diop was also attempting to address contemporary issues. Interestingly, Diop’s assessment about the links between cultural alienation and language still applies today since Senegal, like some other francophone African countries, ‘can best be described as a predominantly Wolof-speaking nation, while on the international scene it is a francophone state’. 232 Towards the end of Nations nègres, in a short section dedicated to the development of African theatre under French colonial rule, Diop castigates the semi-cultural and semi-didactic work conducted by the École Normale William Ponty and contends that indigenous languages should be favoured over French in theatre productions. He also suggests that French educators have been unsuccessful in their attempt to render the ‘authentic’ features of African theatre in French and that it would be more ‘interesting’ to translate ‘Western dramas’ into African languages and measure the effects of such an undertaking on African audiences and readers (NNC, 526). This battle for the recognition of Wolof is one of the recurring features of postcolonial Senegal as illustrated, for instance, by the creation in 1971 of Kàddu (‘speech’ or ‘discourse’ in Wolof), the first Senegalese paper written exclusively in Wolof. 233 Initiated by cultural figures including Sembène Ousmane and Pathé Diagne, this publication was deeply influenced by the ideas formulated in Nations nègres and emerged as a response to Senghor’s Francophile inclination and ambition to control the rules presiding over the transcription of local languages. 234 Thus, as argued by David Murphy in his reading of Ousmane’s film Xala, this newspaper had a highly political significance. 235 In another 232 McLaughlin, ‘Senegal’, p. 79. 2 33 See Ibrahima Wane, ‘Kàddu – The Echo of Dissonant Discourse’, trans. by David Leye, The Chimurenga Chronic, 9 April 2018, http://chimurengachronic. co.za/kaddu-the-echo-of-dissonant-discourse/ [accessed 7 March 2020]. 234 See Ann Elizabeth Willey, ‘Language Use and Representation of the Senegalese Subject in the Written Work of Ousmane Sembène’, in Sheila Petty (ed.), A Call to Action: the Films of Ousmane Sembène (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 118–153. 235 D. Murphy, Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film & Fiction (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), p. 119.

‘Words’

193

domain, but equally significant to this ambition to control knowledge is Senghor’s refusal to include any references to ancient Egypt in the 1966 Dakar-based ‘Premier Festival mondial des arts nègres’. 236 The recently launched Céytu project (2016) is a stark reminder that C.A. Diop’s desire to implement conscious and official measures to consolidate the status of Wolof has not been satisfied, and that nearly sixty years after the independence of Senegal in 1960, the hierarchy between French and Wolof has been maintained: the former is still the language of written culture and political power and the only constitutionally recognized official language. Conversely, Wolof has retained its position of oral vehicular language even though Wolof written literature has of late experience a significant revival. 237 Céytu is the Senegalese village where Diop was born (and buried), 238 and the project is thus a direct homage to his work and ambition to drag Wolof out of its folkloric ghetto. 239 Initiated by the internationally acknowledged Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop, an author who has written in both French and Wolof and has played a significant role in the promotion of African literature, notably in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, 240 the Céytu project aims at translating into Wolof ‘major works of universal literature’. 241 To date, three titles have appeared in the Céytu series: Nawetu deret (by Aimé Césaire), Baay sama, doomu Afriq (Le Clézio), 2 36 Cédric Vincent, ‘“The Real Heart of the Festival”: The Exhibition of L’Art nègre at the Musée Dynamique’, in David Murphy (ed.), The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 45–63 (p. 59). 237 Armand Tchokothe (ed.), Études Littéraires Africaines, 46 (2018), special issue: ‘Qui a peur de la littérature wolof?’ 238 See Mbayang Sarr Faye, ‘Un pari réussi avec d’énormes défis à relever: la collection Céytu traduit “Une si longue lettre” en wolof’, 15 April 2016, http:// www.seneplus.com/culture/un-pari-reussi-avec-denormes-defis-relever [accessed 28 June 2018]. 239 Even though, as argued by Etienne Smith in ‘Merging Ethnic Histories in Senegal’, Wolof – and what he refers to as the ‘Atlantic/colonial/Islamic/ Wolof-centered modern master narrative’ – overshadows the other regional languages and imaginaries of Senegal (p. 224). 2 40 See Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi, le livre des ossements (Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions ivoiriennes, 2000), written as a result of the Fest’Africa literary project. On this issue, see Nicki Hitchcott, Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fictions after 1994 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). 2 41 Boubacar Boris Diop, ‘Le Dilemme des écrivains africains: qui a peur du wolof?’, Le Monde diplomatique, 756 (March 2017), p. 17.

194

Past Imperfect

and Bataaxal bu gudde nii (Mariama Bâ), respectively translated from the French-language originals Une saison au Congo, 242 L’Africain, and Une si longue lettre. 243 This publishing endeavour is meant, according to its originator, to produce a ‘cultural liberation’ in a country where writers – that is, for the most, francophone writers published in the capital of the former colonial power, Paris – are completely alienated from their readers for ‘Africa is the continent where the gap between authors and their fellow citizens is the widest.’244 Boubacar Boris Diop, like his predecessor C.A. Diop in the immediate post-war era and post-independence Senegal, advocates a break from the ‘heavy machinery’ created by francophonie of which Senghor remained the impassionate ‘griot’ throughout his life. 245 The difficulty here, and one that seems to have been generated by other former French colonies, is that francophone African intellectuals have developed a linguistic ‘neurosis’ and a tendency to consider that African languages are inferior to ‘la langue de Molière’ [Molière’s language], 246 and, by the way, it is interesting to add that Fanon, who had himself reflected on the effects of linguistic neuroses, declared that he had ‘found great interest in following the linguistic studies of Sheik [sic] Anta Diop’. 247 As a result of this situation of linguistic hierarchization, African writers are reluctant to write in Wolof and have perpetuated well into the twentyfirst century the colonial assumption that some African languages are ‘condemned to orality’248 and thus less suited than others to written expression. 249 This neat divide between literacy and orality does not reflect West African reality and Boubacar Boris Diop is keen to remind his readers 2 42 On the translation of Césaire’s play by Boubacar Boris Diop, see Alice Chaudemanche, ‘Une saison en wolof’, Études Littéraires Africaines, 46 (2018), 59–72. 2 43 All jointly published by Éditions Zulma (Paris) and Éditions Mémoire d’encrier (Montreal) in 2016 and respectively translated by Boubacar Boris Diop, Daouda Ndiaye, and Arame Fall and Mame Younouss Dieng. 2 44 Diop, ‘Le Dilemme des écrivains africains’, p. 17. 2 45 Ibid. 2 46 Ibid. 2 47 Fanon, White Skin, Black Masks, p. 17. 2 48 Zabus, The African Palimpsest, p. 9. 2 49 On this link between languages and publishing in Africa, see Audrey Small, ‘Publishing in African Languages and the Question of a National Literature: The Case of Senegal and Guinea’, ASCALF Bulletin, 21 (2000), 29–43.

‘Words’

195

that C.A. Diop had been brought up in a context where Wolof poetry was a written genre disseminated in Wolofal, an ajami script derived from Arabic. 250 Indeed, in Nations nègres, C.A. Diop dedicates a few pages to the ‘art poétique valaf’ (NNC, 528–532). He shows that this Wolofal tradition was initiated by the Mourides, a Senegalese Sunni brotherhood established in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 251 He argues that this cultural heritage – ‘constituting the first literary monuments of our language and thus the first foundations of our national culture’ (NNC, 529) – is in danger of disappearing and he suggests that it is incumbent on the IFAN to put measures in place to salvage this corpus from oblivion (NNC, 531). He argues, however, that it is also urgently necessary to develop a modern African poetry in African languages and that this strategy would be the surest way of introducing ‘par la voie de la langue maternelle […] les systèmes de pensée qui, jusqu’ici, constituent le secret de la prétendue supériorité intellectuelle de l’Occident’ [by means of the mother tongue (…) the systems of thought which have hitherto constituted the secret of the alleged intellectual superiority of the West] (NNC, 532). The Céytu project reflects other attempts, modest but promising according to Boubacar Boris Diop, to encourage literacy in Wolof and generate literary vocations in this language. 252 It must be noted that since 2001 there has been greater scope for fostering literacy programmes in Joola, Malinke, Fula, Serer, Soninke, and Wolof and in the other Senegalese languages with a codified writing system. 253 It is perhaps worth pointing out, too, that 2001 marked the end of a very long Francophile reign under presidents Senghor (1960–1980) and Abdou Diouf (1980–2000), who had both been active promoters of French and francophone cultures (Senghor as member of the Académie Française and Diouf as secretary general of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie). 254 From C.A. Diop to Boubacar Boris Diop, then, one can identify a strong sense of continuity. And 250 Diop, ‘Le Dilemme des écrivains africains’, p. 17. 2 51 Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, The Mourides of Senegal: The Political and Economic Organization of an Islamic Brotherhood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 9. 252 Diop, ‘Le Dilemme des écrivains africains’, p. 17. 253 McLaughlin, ‘Senegal’, p. 86. See also: Martine Dreyfus and Caroline Juillard, Le Plurilinguisme au Sénégal. Langues et identités en devenir (Paris: Karthala, 2004). 254 McLaughlin, ‘Senegal’, p. 85.

196

Past Imperfect

a common desire to link national autonomy – and cultural decolonization – to the promotion of African languages. From C.A. Diop to Boubacar Boris Diop, one can also trace the vicissitudes of negritude and francophonie in Africa. 255 The two Senegalese cannot adhere to the Sartrean opposition between African and so-called universal culture, or to the equally questionable idea that the exploration of African culture – reduced to the status of negative moment in Sartre’s dialectical construct – will soon be overcome by the emergence of a classless/race-less (but monolingual?) global culture. For the two African intellectuals – an analogous argument was formulated by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in his defence of Gikuyu against English – the use of one’s national tongue is an inalienable and fundamental human right. Boubacar Boris Diop also relativizes attempts on the part of several African francophone writers, such as Ahmadou Kourouma and Massa Makan Diabaté, to submit French to processes of lexical and syntactic Africanization.256 In the immediate post-war era, these experiments were read as the tangible signs of literary decolonization. In ‘Black Orpheus’, Sartre had praised the linguistically destructive power of the new black literature. Later, in his Poétique de la relation, Édouard Glissant, developing ideas put forward by Deleuze and Guattari, 257 would describe (and applaud) the linguistic deterritorialization of major languages in minor literatures.258 In the much-publicized ‘Manifeste pour une Littérature-Monde en français’, Jean Rouaud, one of the main initiators of this project, rejoiced at the fact that francophone literatures in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean had been successful in severing the umbilical cord with France and, as a result of this emancipating process, were no longer accountable to ‘la langue des anciens maîtres’ [the language of the former masters].259 Unlike some prominent French and francophone writers of his generation – Le Clézio, Glissant, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Assia Djebar 255 On Senegalese multilingualism and the emergence of literature in French, see David Murphy, ‘Birth of a Nation? The Origins of Senegalese Literature in French’, Research in African Literatures, 39.1 (2008), 48–69 (p. 49). 256 Diop, ‘Le Dilemme des écrivains africains’, p. 17. 257 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan, foreword by Réda Bensmaïa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 258 Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). 259 Jean Rouaud, ‘Mort d’une certaine idée’, in Michel Le Bris et Jean Rouaud (eds), Pour une littérature-Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), pp. 7–22 (p. 21).

‘Words’

197

to name but a few – Boubacar Boris Diop decided not to add his signature to this ‘Littérature-Monde’ manifesto. His defence of African languages against French is both old and new. Old because it mobilizes ideas circulated by romantic and Jacobin nationalists in the nineteenth century to engineer nations through linguistic homogenizations. Closer to home, his promotion of Wolof is also reminiscent of other experiments conducted by African nationalists – Julius Nyerere’s example springs to mind – at the time of political decolonization. Nyerere, whom C.A. Diop greatly admired because he had not hesitated to elevate ‘Swahili to the status of a national and governmental language’, 260 had also held the view that Swahili was robust enough to receive the gift of modernity and be the conduit of universal ideas. In this respect, it is important to point out that the Céytu project strongly resonates with Nyerere’s own translations of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice. 261 This translational enterprise was conceived as a strategy to foster Swahili as the official language of literacy and consolidate the basis of the new Tanzanian nation and Ujamaa project. 262 Boubacar Boris Diop’s defence of Wolof, whilst resonating with the identitarian and nationalist dimension that has informed decolonization since (at least) the 1950s, also addresses very contemporary issues. Ultimately, this asymmetrical linguistic and cultural exchange between Wolof and French continues to be the symptom of a world in which some goods, be they real or symbolic, circulate more widely and profitably than others.

2 60 Moore, ‘Conversations with Cheikh Anta Diop’, p. 407. 2 61 See Alamin M. Mazrui, ‘Shakespeare in Africa: Between English and Swahili Literature’, Research in African Literatures, 27.1 (Spring 1996), 64–79 (p. 69); Maëline Le Lay, ‘Africanizing Classical European Playwrights: Shakespeare and Molière’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 81.3 (2018), special issue: ‘Translation of African Thought and Literature’, 493–512; and Sonia Languille, ‘Ward Secondary Schools, Elite Narratives and Nyerere’s Legacy, in Marie-Aude Fouéré (ed.), Remembering Julius Nyerere in Tanzania: History, Memory, Legacy (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota, 2015), pp. 303–337 (p. 329). 2 62 On the rise of Swahili under Nyerere, see Farouk Topan, ‘Tanzania: The Development of Swahili as a National and Official Language’, in Andrew Simpson (ed.), Language and National Identity in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 252–266 (pp. 257–263).

198

Past Imperfect

***** By way of conclusion, it can be argued that the effects of colonial language policies, whilst significantly shaping African decolonization in the francophone world, are still very visible now, and that Boubacar Boris Diop is the direct continuator of C.A. Diop’s linguistic project.263 If the old taxonomies such as the Hamitic theory have completely disappeared from the academic discourse, there is no doubt that the ethnocentric logic underpinning these classificatory schemes tend to sporadically resurface. The vehemently Franco-French responses generated by the 2013 ‘Rapport sur l’intégration’ [Report on Integration] commissioned by Jean-Marc Ayrault, then François Hollande’s prime minister, convincingly illustrate that the ethno-linguistic determinism posited by figures like Faidherbe, Reclus, Delafosse, and, to some extent, C.A. Diop has continued to inform contemporary debates on the role and significance of the French language in a postcolonial world. This report was motivated by the desire of Hollande’s newly elected administration to propose practical steps to improve the integration process of French citizens of African descent and ‘assumer la dimension arabe-orientale de la France’ [recognize the Arabo-Oriental dimension of France].264 This report – in fact, several reports jointly drafted by civil servants, members of the public, experts, and academics – concluded, somewhat predictably, that future integration programmes would need to prioritize equality before the law and eliminate discrimination. Some of the measures suggested to reach these objectives included: ‘the lift of the ban on the Islamic veil in schools’, ‘the re-examination of French history’, ‘the creation of a ‘Museum of colonisations’, ‘the recognition of all migrations as constitutive of the French nation’, and, last but not least, ‘the possibility of learning an African language at secondary school level’.265 Many commentators, like 2 63 And an ‘héritier’ [heir] of ‘Mongo Béti, Ousmane Sembène, Cheikh Anta Diop et Ayi Kwei Armah’, as argued by Papa Samba Diop in ‘Introduction à l’œuvre de Boubacar Boris Diop: du français au wolof’, Études Littéraires Africaines, 46 (2018), 19–29 (p. 22). 2 64 Statement from the report cited by Jean-Pierre Cavaillé in ‘Les borborygmes des patois africains’, Mediapart, 9 January 2014, https://blogs.mediapart.fr/ edition/les-batailles-de-legalite/article/090114/les-borborygmes-des-patoisafricains [accessed 4 July 2018]. 2 65 ‘la suppression des interdictions sur le voile à l’école, la “(re)mise à plat de l’histoire de France”, la création d’un “Musée des colonisations”, la reconnaissance de toutes les migrations comme constitutives de la nation, la possibilité d’apprendre

‘Words’

199

Thierry Desjardins, the former general deputy director of the Figaro and an ‘officier de la Légion d’honneur’, were outraged by this last suggestion as they feared that it would threaten the unity of the French Republic by conjuring up the spectres of multiculturalism and communitarianism.266 Desjardins, who had previously defended shockingly racist views in a book dedicated to New Caledonia, 267 strongly criticized the report on his blog and deplored that Ayrault had dared to ‘considérer les borborygmes des patois africains sur le même plan que la langue française’ [put the borborygmi of African patois on the same level as the French language].268 ‘Borborygme’ [borborygmus] is not a very frequent word; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is mainly used in English to refer to a ‘rumbling or gurgling noise made by the movement of fluid and gas in the intestines’.269 As rightly argued by Cécile Van den Avenne, this derogatory term, together with the idea that African patois are not genuine languages, have the effect of perpetuating a sort of ‘colonialisme intérieur’ in the twenty-first century and the assumption that Africans are living in a ‘stade préverbal’ [preverbal stage].270 It must also be added that the repetition of the first syllable – bor-bor – is oddly evocative of the ‘indiscernible discourses of the barbarous’.271 une langue africaine dès le collège’. See: https://droit-finances.commentcamarche. com/faq/33164-rapport-sur-l-integration-telecharger-le-texte-en-ligne [accessed 4 July 2018]. 2 66 See Cavaillé, ‘Les borborygmes des patois africains’. 2 67 ‘The situation in New Caledonia is explosive. The French government knowingly leaves 40,000 whites and 100,000 others at the mercy of a handful of savages who are ready for a massacre … It is almost as if the Canaques are heating up their cooking pots … At the barrages one would have thought one were witnessing a stone-age horror film. All were armed to the teeth, with filthy looks, bloodshot eyes and perhaps a little drunk’. From Desjardins’s Nouvelle-Calédonie. Ils veulent rester français (Paris: Plon, 1985), cited by John Connell in ‘“Trouble in Paradise”: The Perception of New Caledonia in the Australian Press’, Australian Geographical Studies, 25.2 (October 1987), 54–65 (p. 62). 2 68 Thierry Desjardins, ‘A hue, à dia et à vau-l’eau’, http://www.thierrydesjardins.fr/2013/12/a-hue-a-dia-et-a-vau-leau/ [accessed 5 July 2018]. 2 69 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/borborygmus [accessed 5 July 2018]. 270 Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes, p. 204. 271 Jason M. Wirth, ‘Beyond Black Orpheus: Preliminary Thoughts on the Good of African Philosophy’, in Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook (eds), Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 280.

This brief return to our more recent present and its colonial resurgences is instructive because it enables one to picture more accurately, and more vividly, how it must have felt to live and work in the world – Balandier’s ‘colonial situation’ – in which C.A. Diop – but also Hampaté Bâ – became African intellectuals. It also allows us to ascertain the epistemological factors that shaped their thinking and the obstacles that stalled their creative freedom. Diop’s ‘glottopolitics’ emerged from specific conditions of possibility and from a context in which monolingualism was regarded as the single most important attribute of a progressive nation and one of the defining features of its horizon of expectation. He delved into the Egyptian-Wolof-Serer kinship because he was mindful that postcolonial Africa, in its national and/or pan-Africanist future, would need to equip itself with a modern lingua franca. There is no doubt that although he was an indefatigable advocate of ‘the African anteriority’, Diop was also a pragmatist and knew that ‘artificial but effective’ mechanisms – the creation of literary prizes, the setting-up of specialized databases, and the translation of foreign works – would need to be implemented to put an end to a situation in which Africans had been reduced to ‘perpetual copycats’. 272 His frequent returns to the perfect past of Egyptian pharaonic grandeur were part of a strategy to explore the imperfections of his present in post-war France and postcolonial Senegal. Ultimately, Diop’s incursions into African antiquity were also a pretext to envisage the contours of a future that Africans would define in their own words and on their own terms.

272 Diop, Black Africa, p. 12.

chapter iv

‘Customs’ ‘Customs’

L’événement, l’inachèvement, l’histoire vont ensemble. Georges Balandier1

The nouns ‘ambiguity’ and ‘ambivalence’ and their related adjectives have often been used to refer to the cultural, political, and historical phenomena generated by African modernity and decolonization. These terms have also been employed in literary studies to describe the identitarian ‘hybridity’ of (post)colonial subjects, ‘almost the same, but not quite’, 2 and the development by these subjects of a ‘double consciousness’. 3 Georges Balandier’s Afrique ambiguë will be explored here to tease out, in the context of sub-Saharan African decolonization (in Afrique Occidentale Française and Afrique Équatoriale Française), the notion of change and the ‘recognition that change is coevolutionary – that adaptation of one thing, in reaction to another, say external stimulus, leads to the mutual adaptation of each’.4 Afrique ambiguë was published in 1957 by Plon in its newly created series Terre Humaine. 5 1 Georges Balandier, Conjugaisons (Paris: Fayard, 1997), p. 295. 2 Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 121–131 (p. 123). 3 As first developed by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg, 1903). 4 Stefan Tanaka, ‘History without Chronology’, Public Culture, 28.1 (2015), 179. 5 Georges Balandier, Afrique ambiguë (Paris: Plon, 1957). On this series, its creation, and development, see Vincent Debaene, ‘La Collection Terre humaine: dans et hors de la littérature’, March 2007, https://www.fabula.org/atelier.php?La_ collection_Terre_humaine%3A_dans_et_hors_de_la_litt%26eacute%3Brature [accessed 3 September 2019].

202

Past Imperfect

After Jean Malaurie’s Les derniers rois de Thulé (1955), Claude LéviStrauss’s Tristes tropiques (1955), and Victor Segalen’s Les Immémoriaux (1956), 6 Afrique ambiguë was the fourth volume to be published in this series whose main aim was – and still is – to bridge the gap between fiction and the social sciences and provide a platform whereby the voiceless and members of ‘invisible’ minorities and endangered cultures from every corner of the planet are able to dialogue with acknowledged intellectuals.7 This notion of ‘endangered cultures’ is eminently temporal for it is premised on the idea that concrete ­conservationist measures need to be implemented to prevent specific cultures (their artefacts, languages, and worldviews) from slipping into oblivion. Terre Humaine, like the Petite Planète series headed by Chris Marker, approaches non-Western cultures from an anti-colonial standpoint and with a view to denouncing the culturecidal (and ecocidal) dimension of Western progress. These first few books were all dealing with non-Western others – Malaurie and the Inuit, Lévi-Strauss and the Nambikwara, Segalen and the Maori, and Balandier and the Fang and the Ba-Kongo – and the ‘ambiguous’ situations arising from ‘cultures in collision’, to use the subtitle of the English translation of Afrique ambiguë. 8 French colonial administrations had always taken this idea of ‘collision’ very seriously as they were conscious that ‘pacification’ and the integration of their agents would depend on the eradication of frictions with the colonized. However, it became apparent after the Second World War that the failed assimilationist project – the acculturation criticized by Cheikh Anta Diop and Amadou Hampâté Bâ – was now generating, in Indochina, Madagascar, Algeria, and Cameroun, for example, not mere cultural ambiguities but full-blown armed conflicts. Balandier’s early work was shaped by this context and a desire to combine science with political commitment. Indeed, from his first contacts with sub-Saharan Africa, ‘anti-colonial politics’ 6 First published in 1907 by Mercure de France (Paris). 7 See http://www.plon.fr/catalogue/collection/terre-humaine/titre/2 [accessed 24 August 2017]. On this series, see also Benoît de L’Estoile, Le Goût des autres. De l’exposition coloniale aux arts premiers (Paris: Flammarion, 2010 [2007]), pp. 423–424. 8 As mentioned before, I shall refer here to the English translation by Helen Weaver: Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966) and cite it as AA in the main body of the text.

‘Customs’

203

and ‘an emergent, engaged social science conditioned each other’.9 As one of Alioune Diop’s close friends, he contributed to the first issue of Présence Africaine with a short piece provocatively entitled ‘Le Noir est un homme’ [The Black Is a Man] in which he deplores the effects on French vocabulary of a residual ‘Darwinian’ grid employed by colonialists to measure the civilizational progress of the ‘évolués’.10 Like Sartre and Fanon, with whom he became acquainted through Présence Africaine,11 Balandier also criticizes the way in which the black man is invariably objectified by the white personnel operating in sub-Saharan African colonies. He is, he remarks, ‘[u]n objet d’une nature spéciale, un peu dangereux, comme un ressort qui sert le but, mais qui risque aussi de vous sauter à la figure’ [an object of a special nature, a little dangerous, like a spring which, while fulfilling its function, also threatens to fly in your face].12 The acknowledgement that the colonial system and its main actors can no longer be taken for granted is the backcloth against which Balandier’s work developed in the 1950s. If he continued to contribute to Présence Africaine13 – in fact, he was one of the very few French academics to do so before 196014 – he also became a major proponent of a new type of Africanist thought for which the notion of change, and the dynamic processes linking past, present, and future, became the main objects of investigation. The analysis of this temporal dimension of Balandier’s thought will significantly inform this chapter as he was engaged, with 9 Gregory Mann, ‘Anti-Colonialism and Social Science: Georges Balandier, Madeira Keita, and “the Colonial Situation” in French Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55.1 (2013), 92–119 (p. 92). 10 Georges Balandier, ‘Le Noir est un homme’, Présence Africaine, 1 (1947), 31–36 (p. 32). 11 On these contacts with Sartre and Fanon and other figures close to Présence Africaine (David Diop, Chris Marker, Emmanuel Mounier, Alain Resnais, L.S. Senghor, and Richard Wright), see Georges Balandier ‘Extraits d’Histoire d’autres de Georges Balandier’, Gravidha. Revue d’anthropologie et d’histoire des arts, 10 (2009), 170–173. Histoire d’autres (Paris: Stock, 1977) is one of Balandier’s autobiographies. 12 Balandier, ‘Le Noir est un homme’, p. 32. 13 See Jean Copans, Georges Balandier. Un anthropologue en première ligne (Paris: PUF, 2013), p. 69. 14 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘Présence Africaine: History and Historian of Africa’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 59–94 (pp. 62–66).

204

Past Imperfect

Afrique ambiguë, in relocating ‘past and future […] with respect to each other’.15 The extensive body of work that he produced in the period leading up to the political decolonization of Africa reflects this desire to analyse the ‘colonial situation’, the concept that he expounded in a now famous article first published in the Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie in 1951 and subsequently republished as the first chapter of Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire (1955).16 The exploration of the colonial situation – a social totality in which the colonized and the colonizer exist interdependently and which implies a conscious departure from ‘an anthropology focused on static, primitive Africa, divided into discrete tribal units’17 – ran parallel to the analysis of the economic and demographic but also social and cultural transformations experienced by ‘underdeveloped’ regions of the world. Notions of under/development and ‘dependence’ are among some of most frequently recurring questions explored by Balandier in this period. In ‘Sociologie de la dépendance’ (1952), he offers a compelling analysis of the mechanisms presiding over the dialectics between domination and dependence in the colonies when, as he emphatically puts it, colonial nationalism has become ‘le plus grand problème politique de notre temps’ [the most significant political problem of our time].18 This article bears witness to Balandier’s long-term commitment to renewing the basis of Africanism by tapping into the theoretical and methodological resources of sociology. As a discipline, Balandier remarks that sociology has been concerned with the study of ‘classes démunies’19 [impoverished classes] and the processes of domination/dependence engendered by capitalism. Since colonialism – and here Balandier refers to Octave Mannoni’s dependency complex – is a form of capitalist exploitation, 15 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1983]), p. 4. 16 In this chapter, I will refer, wherever possible, to the English translation of this book: The Sociology of Black Africa. 17 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 37. 18 We shall refer here to: Georges Balandier, ‘Sociologie de la dépendance’, republished in Balandier, Sens et puissance (Paris: PUF, 1971), pp. 151–168 (pp. 167). The original article had been published under a slightly different title: ‘Contribution à une sociologie de la dépendance’, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 12 (1952), 47–69. 19 Balandier, ‘Sociologie de la dépendance’, p. 151.

‘Customs’

205

he is of the view that this new ‘équipement théorique’20 [theoretical resource] should contribute to a more accurate examination of political change in the colonies and the ‘ambiguïté’21 that it produces. Even though Balandier is in favour of collaborations between anthropologists and sociologists, 22 he rejects the reductive and atemporal perspectives adopted by some contemporary anthropologists – Tempels’s Bantu and Griaule’s ‘invention’ of the Dogon spring to mind – and advocates a more materialistic (and ‘dynamic’) perspective to grasp this notion of dependence and delve into the ‘problème de la liberté humaine’ [problem of human freedom]. 23 In Mudimbe’s words, Balandier ‘reorganized the discipline and described the traditional “object” of anthropology, the “native,” as the only possible “subject” for his own modernization’. 24 Quoting Jean Copans, Mudimbe argues that Sociology was not just a new specialization, it constituted a complete break on several counts: empirically, as it took into consideration the real history of African peoples; in scale, as it moved on from the village to the national social group (from ‘mini’ to ‘maxi’); theoretically, as a materialistic and historical explanation took the place of Griaulian idealism which ignored the realities of colonialism. 25

Balandier’s reflection is thus located in a period of change in which the ‘native’, hitherto the ‘object’ of a coercive colonial system, succeeds in escaping the equally coercive paradigms of anthropology. In this context, the ‘native’ – a member of a timeless ‘already whole being’26 – was rarely regarded as a ‘subject’; he was confined to a communal ontology, temporality, and, it was assumed, ancientness. In 1956, one year after the Bandung Conference, Balandier edited an ambitious volume on the Third World under the auspices of the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, a book significantly prefaced by 20 Ibid., p. 167. 21 Ibid. p. 164. Italics in the original. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 166. 25 Ibid., p. 176. 26 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, ‘Western Legacy and Negro Consciousness: An Introductory Study of the Sources of African Ideology’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Daniel Orrells (eds), The Mudimbe Reader (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), pp. 13–24 (p. 20).

206

Past Imperfect

Alfred Sauvy, 27 the first director of the Institut, and also the inventor of the term tiers monde [Third World] even though Balandier intimated that he, rather than Sauvy, was the originator of the term.28 Here, too, Balandier is keen to register the very current – he was after all the pioneer of a ‘sociologie actuelle’ – and concrete factors underpinning the insurrection ‘des peuples pauvres et dominés’ [of poor and dominated populations] and the ‘violence’ and ‘extension extraordinaire’ of this historical process in Africa and beyond. 29 Like in ‘La Situation coloniale’, at several points he bemoans the residual effects of ethnocentrism and the tendency of major developed countries such as the US and the Soviet Union to apportion aid at the detriment of local interests. Therefore, he recommends a global approach to tackle the issues of development and underdevelopment for the relationship between rich and poor countries, like that between the colonizers and the colonized, is marked by interdependency – ‘Leur inquiétude est devenue notre inquiétude’ [their anxieties have become our anxieties]30 – and constitutes a totality which cannot be compartmentalized. For this reason, Balandier chooses to adopt an ‘approche totale’ [multidisciplinary approach]31 – ‘le fait du sous-développement ne peut être abordé sous les seuls aspects économiques’32 [underdevelopment cannot be explored through economic aspects only] and call upon the theoretical and methodological resources of sociology alongside those of demography and economics, which had hitherto been the main tools at the disposal of experts from the Institut National d’Études 27 Georges Balandier (ed.), Le ‘Tiers Monde’. Sous-développement et développement, preface by Alfred Sauvy (Paris: PUF, 1956). In addition to the general introduction and various introductions to the different parts of this book, Balandier’s contributions include: ‘La Mise en rapport des sociétés “différentes” et le problème du sous-développement’ (pp. 119–132); ‘Le contexte socio-culturel et le coût social du progrès’ (pp. 289–303); and ‘Brèves remarques pour conclure’ (pp. 369–380). 28 See Copans, Georges Balandier, pp. 120–121. A point that seems also to confirm Jean-Paul Colleyn in ‘Georges Balandier, du village lébou au monde global’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 819–823 (p. 821). 29 Georges Balandier, ‘Introduction de la première édition’, in Balandier (ed.), Le ‘Tiers Monde’. Sous-développement et développement, preface by Alfred Sauvy (Paris: PUF, 1956), pp. 13–17 (p. 13). 30 Ibid., p. 369. 31 Ibid., p. 13. 32 Ibid., p. 15.

‘Customs’

207

Démographiques. In a context in which ‘l’exotisme a reculé’ [exoticism has receded] and can no longer function as a screen to hide the destitution experienced by underdeveloped regions of the world, Balandier suggests that it would be unrealistic to cling to the outmoded notion that the world is made up of ‘dynamic’ and ‘static societies’. 33 In ‘Social Science and Decolonization’, the short subsection added to the 1970 English translation of ‘La Situation coloniale’, Balandier expands on this very point and identifies its temporal implications: The process of decolonization has had a direct influence upon scientific practice in the field of social anthropology and the sociology of non-European societies, as well as upon the classic attitude to this category of societies. It has upset long established habits, made us reconsider our terminology (the use of such words as ‘archaic’, ‘primitive’, etc.) and raised doubts as to the contemporary bearing of anthropological endeavour. Suddenly, societies that had hitherto been regarded as static, or bogged down in mere ‘repetition’, have been thrown open to change and revolution; they have rediscovered their own history and ceased to be passive objects in the hands of others. 34

In this critical assessment of ethnocentrism and its allochronistic violence, Balandier remains on the side of relativism. He contends that no development model is universal and that ‘progress’ – another concept that he holds in suspicion – cannot be achieved everywhere with the same methods. 35 This chapter will examine the significance of Afrique ambiguë and ascertain how this autobiographical narrative resonates with Balandier’s other scientific productions. 36 Afrique ambiguë provides a wealth of information to help understand how the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa unfolded in the 1950s. The many ambiguities recorded by Balandier are played out on the cultural, political, and, religious planes. However, it is also a book testifying to Balandier’s efforts to account for the complexity of decolonization, a historical process in which tradition and 33 Ibid., p. 21. 34 Georges Balandier, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, in The Sociology of Black Africa: Social Dynamics in Central Africa, trans. by Douglas Garman (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 50. 35 Balandier, ‘Introduction de la première édition’, p. 16. 36 Science and autobiography overlap in Balandier’s work, as argued by André Mary in ‘Ethnographie de soi sous le “zéro équatorial”. Le chantier autobiographique de Georges Balandier’, L’Homme, 225 (2017), 11–40.

208

Past Imperfect

modernity, but also past and present, are approached from a non-developmentalist angle. This temporal perspective – Balandier seems to argue at several points that Africa’s future lies in creative reappropriations of its traditional past – is also another sign of his determination to examine the study of African cultures and societies dynamically, and to propose, unlike most anthropologists analysed by Johannes Fabian in his seminal Time and the Other, ‘coeval’ interpretations of their present. That said, Balandier alerts his readers of the long-lasting effects of industrialization on the African landscape and the fact that the many human groups juxtaposed by colonial modernity ‘only seem to be contemporary’ (AA, 135). This point resonates with the idea – developed by Ernst Bloch and expanded by Reinhart Koselleck – of ‘the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous’, a notion implying that our human present cannot be understood solely through the prism of chronological history. This chapter will appraise the pessimistic and crepuscular mood running through Afrique ambiguë but also explore the strategies identified by Balandier to imagine and anticipate postcolonial futures. It will be argued here that Balandier is of the view that the colonial situation – a social (and sociological) totality – has comprehensively affected Africa and its inhabitants and has severely damaged the African environment. I believe that this discussion on the environment provides the relevant basis to explore the role of certain customs in late colonialism. Customs were meant to function in particular environments, and since some of these environments were disrupted and even ruined by the introduction of colonial capitalism, they ceased to operate effectively. In Afrotopia, Felwine Sarr argues that the type of economic dependency inherited from colonialism and neocolonialism can be overcome if one accepts that economics are not divorced from culture but an integral reflection of cultural practices which are themselves contingent on ecological factors. 37 Part one of this chapter will appraise the effects of this colonial ‘slow violence’ (Robert Nixon) and posit that Balandier’s ecocritical concerns are directed against the way in which French and European imperial administrations in West and Central Africa went about developing the territories under their jurisdiction. Like other French critics such as Lévi-Strauss and Alain Gheerbrant, 38 Balandier contends here that development – ‘mise en valeur’ – is a one-sided process predicated on 37 Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2016), pp. 64–66. 38 See Alain Gheerbrant, L’Expédition Orénoque-Amazone, 1948–1950 (Paris: Gallimard, 1952) and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955).

‘Customs’

209

an equally partial and self-serving conception of progress and time; and that, because it was often oblivious of native know-how, the concrete steps implemented to drive Western progress in Africa generated pockets of underdevelopment which further contributed to the gap between the West and the ‘Third World’. With this focus on ‘imperial debris’39 in mind, in the second part I will investigate how Balandier’s essay accounts for the devastating effects of French (and British) colonialism on individuals and their ‘communities’ and examine (like Fanon, Mannoni, but also Richard Wright and C.L.R. James at the same time)40 instances of cultural dispossession and alienation. The notion of colonial ‘guardianship’ will receive further attention here. Having been appraised in its temporal, aesthetic, and linguistic aspects – see chapters I–III of this book, where the coloniser is described as a time- and language-keeper but also as a custodian of traditional artefacts – this discussion will be dedicated to the role played by the colonial administration, and indirectly by Balandier himself, in supporting the phallocentric principles of indigenous gender and sexual politics. In this analysis, I shall place specific emphasis on the contested survival of clitoridectomy in this period of late colonialism; and argue that such traditional rituals, although maintained by indigenous practitioners, were also subtly transformed to articulate innovative ‘politics of the womb’ (Lynn Thomas) and anti-colonial demands. Building on the problematic relation between Christianity and sub-Saharan religions – of which clitoridectomy was of course a powerful sign – I will interrogate in the third part of this chapter how Balandier appraises the cultural but also political significance of messianic movements (Matswanism and Kimbanguism) among Fang and Kongo populations, and the attempts by some semi-assimilated local intellectuals to reprise indigenous myths to rewrite and translate biblical stories anew. It will be suggested that this exegetic reappropriation, whilst paving the way for a partial de-canonization of the colonial Ur-text, can be understood translationally and be compared to words caught up in the indeterminate zone between source and target languages. 39 See Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination’, Cultural Anthropology, 23.2 (2008), 191–219. 40 See Paul Gilroy, ‘“Without the Consolation of Tears”: Richard Wright, France and the Ambivalent Community’, in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 146–186.

210

Past Imperfect

Colonial Ruination How does one start a book? With words and ideas. And one’s memories. In Afrique ambiguë, Balandier (1920–2016), who was still in his thirties when it was published, looks back at his own African trajectory. On the face of it, the introduction appears conventional and even stereotypical. Like other illustrious travellers before him – Conrad and Gide, for instance – Balandier locates his desire to explore Africa in his childhood and in the excitement generated by a photograph depicting a European woodcutter in Gabon: The picture showed a powerful man with unruly hair, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, a gun over his shoulder; beside him, disjointed and grotesque, its head held like a toy in the hand of a Negro hunter, was a gorilla which had been shot in the forehead. (AA, 7)

This primeval hunting scene of Africa as ‘the symbol of male power and adventure’ (AA, 7) is turned on its head to disqualify old exotic stereotypes,41 or what the novelist Teju Cole called ‘The White Savior Industrial Complex’.42 A little further in the text, a reference to Joseph Conrad fulfils the same function: ‘I yearned toward old Africa with a passion fed by Conradian reminiscences, with the illusion that the celebrated Heart of Darkness was still a guide’ (AA, 11). On arriving in West Africa in 1946, Balandier remarks that he remained for a while on the side of those ethnologists ‘who cannot allow history to rob them of their “primitives”’ (AA, 14). However, this opening chapter – significantly entitled ‘The Play of Memory’ – enacts a rupture with past representations and testifies to Balandier’s determination and, indeed, political commitment to embed his research in the African present and away from colonial stereotypes. If he pays tribute to a group of recently deceased fellow ethnologists – Maurice Leenhardt, Gilbert Vieillard, Bernard Maupoil, and Charles Le Cœur – he is also of the view that they would not recognize Africa now or accept the ‘price of progress’, that is, ‘the breakdown of traditional civilizations and the spread of a certain monotony throughout the world’ (AA, 16). 41 On hunting and colonial imagination, see John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008 [1988]). 42 Teju Cole, ‘The White Savior Industrial Complex’, The Atlantic, 12 March 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/thewhite-savior-industrial-complex/254843/ [accessed 19 June 2020].

‘Customs’

211

At the end of ‘The Play of Memory’, Balandier reflects on the heavy price paid by the Gabonese people under French rule: ‘[d]evastation of forests, societies, and men’ (AA, 18). The English word ‘devastation’ does not quite render the strength of the original French saccage (‘saccage de la forêt, des sociétés et des hommes’).43 Like ‘devastation’, it signifies ‘great destruction or damage’44 but it also, and more disturbingly if one returns to Balandier’s primeval hunting scene of a ‘disjointed and grotesque gorilla’, conveys the idea of plunder, pillage, massacre, and ransacking (mise à sac in French). There is no shortage of critical accounts examining the vexed relationship between modern colonialism and indigenous destitution and suffering. In the French domain, the interwar period produced a long list of anti-colonial polemicists – André Gide, of course, but also Albert Londres, André Malraux, Georges Simenon, and Andrée Viollis – but their critical accounts of colonialism remained steeped in racial prejudices and shaped by the confidence that France had a ‘mission to civilize’.45 Unlike these earlier figures, Balandier’s approach is free of ethnocentric assumptions. When he went to Senegal in 1946 to conduct fieldwork, Europe had become, in his own words, ‘a society in ruins, a society whose collapse seemed to justify condemnation of a civilization which nonetheless chose to regard itself as “missionary”’ (AA, 11). If the collapse of Europe was precipitated by Nazism, Balandier also contends that the missionary zeal deployed by colonial nations, and the arrogance and violence underpinning this zeal, played a critical role in this historical process. For Balandier and authors such as Césaire, Alioune Diop, C.L.R. James, Fanon, and Michel Leiris, Nazism and colonial ethnocentrism are two sides of the same coin. The realization that the West had reached an existential cul-de-sac permeates Afrique ambiguë. The literary and autobiographical posture adopted by Balandier can be read as an attempt to return to the roots of cultural relativism by paying homage to Montaigne and his heirs in the twentieth century, Lévi-Strauss but also Leiris (AA, 7–8), the latter being one of most influential voices behind Balandier’s sociologization of anthropology.46 More personally, the autobiographical stance on 43 Balandier, Afrique ambiguë, p. 20. 44 Oxford English Dictionary, https://www.lexico.com/definition/devastation [accessed 12 September 2017]. 45 See Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 46 See Michel Leiris, ‘L’ethnographie devant le colonialisme’, in Les Temps

212

Past Imperfect

which Afrique ambiguë is predicated is a reminder that for Balandier, who, incidentally, started his writing career with a Bildungsroman,47 literature – fiction and poetry – has a role to play in recording and dissecting the conditions of possibility of the social and cultural transformations affecting the ‘colonial situation’ in the 1950s. By contributing to Raymond Queneau’s Histoires des littératures (the plural alone is the sign of an epistemological shift) with an article on the literatures of Africa and black Americas, Balandier firmly puts literature – oral literature from sub-Saharan Africa but also written productions from African diasporas in the USA, the Caribbean, and Latin America – at the centre of this discussion.48 When he first set foot in Africa, Balandier became quickly aware that he was witnessing ‘the end of an era’ (AA, 14): methodologically speaking, as the tenets that had hitherto informed anthropology were gradually being abandoned by anthropologists who ‘could not assume that the “tribes” they studied had a pristine existence’ since they ‘were part of a colonial system based on power, exploitation, and race’.49 But also politically, as the period coincided with the uprising of colonized peoples, a process described by Balandier (quoting Sauvy) as ‘a slow and irresistible, humble and savage movement’ (AA, 224). This decolonizing process has been so ‘slow’ that its effects and aftereffects are still felt in Africa now. Afrique ambiguë also records the ‘slow violence’ generated by industrialization in Africa and the environmental traces of this colonial ‘present past’. The concept of ‘slow violence’ was coined by the ecocritic Rob Nixon. 50 It relates first and foremost to the delayed environmental but also social and psychological consequences of (imperial) development, a notion that without any trace of irony was referred to as ‘mise en valeur’ in the French colonial parlance. The Modernes, 58 (1950), 357–374, republished in Leiris, Cinq études d’ethnologie (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1969). 47 Georges Balandier, Tous comptes faits (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1947). 48 Georges Balandier, ‘Les Littératures de l’Afrique et des Amériques noires’, in Raymond Queneau (ed.), Histoires des littératures, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1956), pp. 1536–1567. 49 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Cooper and Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56 (p. 15). 50 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

‘Customs’

213

phrase, which became one of the buzzwords of colonial rhetoric during the Third Republic, was predicated on the idea that overseas human and natural resources would be developed and ‘valorized’ by the colonizers. Some colonial ideologues like Albert Sarraut argued that the mise en valeur should also benefit the colonized. 51 The Anthropocene, an age which significantly contributed to the weakening of the earth’s life systems, started in earnest with the invention of the steam engine and imperial expansion. 52 If ‘[v]iolence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility’, 53 ‘slow’ violence, on the other hand, tends to remain hidden and to wreak havoc surreptitiously: it is ‘a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales’. 54 ‘Ordinary’ violence – hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and large-scale military operations – grabs the attention of the media while ‘slow’ violence can go unnoticed even though its effects are just as devastating in the long run. ‘Slow’ violence conjures up ideas of ‘disposable people’55 and ‘dispensable citizens’56 whose livelihoods have been disproportionately damaged by ‘corrosive transnational forces, including petro-imperialism, the megadam industry, outsourced toxicity, neocolonial tourism, antihuman conservation practices, corporate and environmental deregulation, and the militarization of commerce’, 57 processes usually associated with the Anthropocene in its most recent (post-1945) stage. 58 ‘Slow’ violence forces us to think historically and to argue that the main manifestations of this type of violence are often closely connected to the socio-economic configurations that had underpinned the ‘colonial situation’. It also reopens the question of the imperialism/globalization 51 Albert Sarraut, La Mise en valeur des colonies françaises (Paris: Payot, 1923). 52 Nixon, Slow Violence, p. 12. 53 Ibid., p. 2. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., p. 4. 56 Ibid., p. 17. 57 Ibid., p. 5. 58 It is difficult to date exactly the beginning of this ‘age of man’. Some argue that it started a thousand years ago, others in the Industrial Revolution, the Second World War, or in the 1960s. See Jan Zalasiewicz’s interview, ‘Jan Zalasiewicz on the Age of Man’, on https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b088fcgz [accessed 23 August 2019].

214

Past Imperfect

continuum. 59 This link and the conviction that imperialism – or rather the more dynamic concept of ‘imperial formations’60 – continues to literally corrode the present is closely related to the idea of ‘ruination’: the noun is derived from the verb ‘to ruin’ which, according to one dictionary definition, means ‘to inflict or bring great and irretrievable disaster upon, to destroy agency, to reduce to a state of poverty, to demoralize completely’.61 In Afrique ambiguë, Balandier provides a damning assessment of colonial ruinations and the ‘slow’ violence thereof. This critical diagnosis of ‘ecolological imperialism’, 62 and subjacent quest for a ‘troisième voie’63 [third way], resonates closely with his exploration of the place of the Third World – and the related idea of dependency – in the increasingly interdependent global order created by decolonization. African ecology is given serious consideration. Balandier, like other critics of imperialism – Édouard Glissant’s analysis of the Antillean situation is exemplary in this regard64 – approaches this ecological issue holistically and reads the environmental violence inflicted on Africa by colonial activities as one of the by-products of the unequal power relations put in place by European administrations in this part of the world. Balandier’s text – and this point also applies to his more scholarly production – abounds with words and expressions denoting the deleterious effects of colonialism on African landscapes, economies, and cultural productions. At various points, and by means of analogous turns of phrase, Balandier regrets ‘the contagious influence of our values’ (AA, 28) and, commenting on the spoiling process to which traditional Nigerian rural life is submitted, he remarks that ‘their villages are being contaminated; 59 Timothy Brennan, ‘From Development to Globalization: Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Theory’, in Neil Lazarus (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 120–138. 60 Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 8. 61 Ibid., p. 9. 62 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 [1986]). 63 Balandier, ‘Brèves remarques pour conclure’, p. 371, where Balandier singles out Abdoulaye Ly’s politically committed work in Les Masses africaines et l’actuelle condition humaine (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956). 64 See Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981).

‘Customs’

215

the germ is present in their society. Their culture has all the succulence of fruits past their prime’ (AA, 134). This lexis and its gloomy overtones are deployed across the text to register the feeling of utter ‘dispossession’ (another high-frequency term employed by Balandier and some of his students like Claude Meillassoux)65 experienced by the locals under Western rule. Balandier, who of course became one of the foremost sociologists of cultural change in African cities, bemoans the scars caused by ‘urban voracity’ (AA, 168). The methodological shift from anthropology to sociology he advocated is, in fact, predicated on the gradual ‘detribalization’ of the continent, 66 a process accelerated by the introduction of industrial and capitalist modes of production: ‘The industrial zones of the Saharan complex were soon to superimpose their pattern upon the cultural circles and tribal maps traced by the ethnologists of the previous century’ (AA, 12). The transformation of African geography and the many human displacements brought about by Westernization is the most significant contemporary fact explored by a book cataloguing ‘the ruins of defeated societies’ (AA, 40). Reflecting on his own past as a European who witnessed the systematic devastation of his own continent, Balandier asks himself how French people would have responded if the Nazi occupants had denied them every opportunity to think and engage in creative activities and ‘transformed us into mere machines of production’ (AA, 223). Twelve years after the end of the war, the suggestion that the occupation of France by Germany – an event of catastrophic magnitude – was less coercive and exploitative than the French colonial occupation of sub-Saharan Africa speaks volumes and testifies to Balandier’s will to relativize the primacy of European historical experiences. As he would argue later in another autobiographical account, Conjugaisons, the end of the Second World War was a ‘clôture trompeuse’ [deceptive closure].67 Although he approaches this question differently, Balandier is here quite close to Cheikh Anta Diop’s attempt to dismantle the Eurocentric assumptions of Western historiography. This view also echoes Joseph Ki-Zerbo’s comparison between slavery and the Holocaust in ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’ (see Chapter I). 65 See Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie économique des Gouro de Côte d’Ivoire: de l’économie de subsistance à l’agriculture commerciale (Paris: Mouton, 1964). 66 See Leiris, ‘L’ethnographie devant le colonialisme’. 67 Balandier, Conjugaisons, p. 230.

216

Past Imperfect

In the following passage, Balandier ponders the geographical transformations brought about by modern mining techniques in Jos (British-ruled Nigeria), an area which used to be the tin capital of Africa: An airplane flying over the outskirts of the city reveals to the traveller, as it rocks wide strips of landscape, a region revolutionized by human industry. Across a now barren bush, the large breaches opened by the miners are very evident. They are sometimes arranged in steps, giving the impression of a gigantic amphitheater, and are surrounded by heaps of loose soil which are flattened by the altitude […] Next, the eye falls on a compact group of monotonous buildings: a camp for native workers. However, it is only on ground level that the real scale of these exploitations can be grasped. Tractors and modern cranes with long steel arms extract, push and transport tons of ore and ‘sterile’ earth. The latter is piled in curious pyramids; it is used to reconstruct the natural surroundings according to Nigerian legislation as if the European businessmen were trying to prove to the natives, the real owners of the land, that nothing has happened, nothing has been taken. An engineer commenting on this obligation told me without irony, ‘In this way, we further the agricultural and pastoral vocation of the natives.’ (AA, 129)

This quote exposes the cynicism and the ‘environmental racism’68 presiding over the exploitation of strategic metals and resources in Nigeria, but also elsewhere in Africa during the colonial period and up to the present, the rush for coltan and rare earths being the latest chapter of this extraction history. The tale that it tells belongs to a string of ‘unfinished histories’69 and problematizes a strict temporal understanding of the concept of decolonization. It clearly reveals the profit-driven motivations of the Western multinational in charge of tin extraction in this part of the world and, as such, foreshadows other harrowing episodes of environmental activism, the battle fought (and lost) by Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight Ogoni kinsmen against the Shell Petroleum Development Company (the Nigerian subsidiary of the Royal Dutch Shell) being exemplary of this type of commitment.70 The different perspectives adopted by the narrator, from the sky and then ‘on ground level’, give two complementary visions of this ransacked and impoverished landscape. The bird’s-eye view does not offer any solace and illusion of managerial (or imperial) mastery. In fact, it appears 68 Stoler, Imperial Debris, pp. 11–12. 69 Ibid., p. 11. 70 Nixon, Slow Violence, pp. 103–127.

‘Customs’

217

that the original site has been ripped open and robbed of its original character and fertility; and that the locals have been proletarianized, a process that will elicit, as examined later in this chapter, futureorientated political, religious, and cultural responses among Africans. The English translation does not quite render the violence expressed by the original passage in French, however. The region around Jos is said to have been ‘revolutionized by human industry’ whereas the source text talks of a ‘territoire bouleversé par l’industrie humaine’.71 The term bouleversé is unambiguously negative and conveys ideas of disruption, disorganization, disorder, turmoil, and even profound sadness and depression. ‘Revolutionized’, and its equivalent révolutionné, on the other hand, are altogether much more positive as they carry the promise of a better future. It is impossible to know why ‘revolutionized’ was preferred over, say, ‘devastated’ (one possible alternative), but what is sure is that this choice clearly affects the way in which the passage is received by the reader. Furthermore, the word ‘amphitheater’, with its connotations of classical harmony, does not properly express what is implied by the French word ‘cirque’ 72 which, beyond its meaning of ‘circus’, denotes ideas of mess and chaos. The word ‘tractors’ also contributes to a certain sanitization of the French original. Balandier employs ‘caterpillars’,73 a term that he uses generically as most of the mining tractors, trucks, and vehicles were – and still are – produced by this flagship of American manufacturing. Of course, ‘caterpillar’, on its own, would not work in English as the word primarily refers to the larva of a butterfly rather than to a corporation. However, its removal from the text by the translator amounts to an unintentional act of absolution: Caterpillar Inc., and by extension all other companies involved in the mining industry, are exculpated of the part they played in colonial development (‘mise en valeur’) and are still playing in the ‘slow’ violence engendered by this process. Unsurprisingly, Caterpillar Inc.’s bien-pensant and self-congratulatory website reads as if imperialism never happened.74 In the meantime, tin mining has continued to wreak havoc on the Jos area and the environmental state of the region has become critical. 71 Balandier, Afrique ambiguë, p. 175. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 See http://www.caterpillar.com/en/company/history.html 20 September 2017].

[accessed

218

Past Imperfect

In 1972 – i.e., 23 years after Balandier’s visit in 1949 (AA, 130) – Nigeria’s federal government nationalized the sector and forced foreign companies to leave the area where they had been operating since the first decade of the twentieth century.75 However, the postcolonial state failed to put in place measures to curb the ecological effects of the industry and stop the proliferation of illegal mining activities.76 After more than a hundred years of exploitation, the most tangible environmental impacts include deforestation, water pollution, soil erosion, and biodiversity loss.77 Let us return briefly to Balandier’s depiction of the Jos region. The ‘curious pyramids’ seem to signal an ambition to engage in dubious environmental guardianship or preservation on the part of the corporate administration in charge of the tin mine and it is ironic when one knows that tin extraction in this region caused ‘loss of landscape’ and ‘aesthetic degradation’.78 This operation – the reconstruction of the ‘natural surroundings’ – is strangely reminiscent of the way in which European museum curators manipulated and took control of African aesthetic trends and became the guardians of ‘authentically’ African canons,79 a practice also applying to linguistic usages. As argued by Ann Stoler, ‘[c]olonialisms have been predicated on guarding natural and cultural patrimonies for populations assumed to be needy of guidance in how to value and preserve them’, 80 a pretext which, as demonstrated by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, is still put forward to object to the repatriation of African artefacts to Africa.81 Although flippant (or at best naïve), the engineer’s suggestion that the construction of these ‘pyramids’ will further the ‘pastoral’ and ‘agricultural’ natural inclination of the natives is a useful indicator of the way in which the heritage discourse had seeped through every aspect of the colonial situation. Given the widely attested ‘radioecological 75 Bill Freund, Capital and Labour in the Nigerian Tin Mines (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), pp. 33–38. 76 See    https://ejatlas.org/conflict/field-report-209-abandoned-tin-minesendanger-communities [accessed 20 September 2017]. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), p. 75. 80 Stoler, Imperial Debris, p. 15. 81 See Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Restituer le patrimoine africain (Paris: Philippe Rey/Seuil, 2018).

‘Customs’

219

impact of tin mining’,82 it is absurd to believe that this reconstruction will facilitate cattle grazing and the maintenance of crops. The engineer seems to have internalized the romantic and paternalistic idea that colonialists would act as guarantors of autochthonous practices and continue to steward mummified traditions. As explored by Richard Grove in Green Imperialism, there is a genealogy of sorts to be identified between colonialist conservationism and modern environmentalism; however, Grove is eager to insist that many ideas defended by these precursors were ‘contradictory and confused’ and ‘constrained by the needs of the colonial state’.83 Ultimately, the engineer’s confusion provides Balandier with another opportunity to delve into colonial ambiguities and register the tensions between capitalist exploitation and environmental conservation. Seen from the perspective of our coltanhungry era, these reflections enable us to measure the discrepancy between territorial and resource sovereignty for if postcolonial African countries control their own borders, they are often reliant on the West and China to exploit their own subsoils.84 This exploration of the links between industrialization and the dispossession experienced by the colonized is an important aspect of Afrique ambiguë and part and parcel of Balandier’s attempt to relativize the purported benefits and efficacy of Western progress. In his examination of (under)development in Le Tiers monde, he contends that the main instrument commonly employed to measure progress (e.g. annual per capita income in dollars) is too blunt and fails to account for other social and cultural factors.85 It is interesting to point out that this critique of economic reason has continued to mobilize African thinkers like V.Y. Mudimbe, Achille Mbembe, and Felwine Sarr until today. In Afrotopia, Sarr deplores the process of ‘extroversion’ to which sub-Saharan Africa has been submitted as a result of colonial 82 Abubakar Sadiq Aliyu, Timothy Alexander Mousseau, Ahmad Termizi Ramli, and Yakubu Aliyu Bununu, ‘Radioecological Impacts of Tin Mining’, Ambio, 44 (2015), 778–787. 83 Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 12. 84 See Maano Ramutsindela, Transfrontier Conservation in Africa: at the Confluence of Capital, Politics and Nature (Wallingford: Cabi, 2007). 85 Georges Balandier, ‘Analyse du problème’, in Balandier (ed.), Le ‘Tiers monde’. Sous-développement et développement, preface by Alfred Sauvy (Paris: PUF, 1956), pp. 135–137 (p. 135).

220

Past Imperfect

modernity.86 Development was a ‘prêt-à-porter sociétal’ [a one-size-fitsall societal model]: ‘Ce fut littéralement une œuvre d’enveloppement des sociétés non occidentales dans des formes sociétales qui ne leur convenait pas’ [It literally became a project of enveloping non-Western societies inside societal forms that did not cohere with their own practices].87 Felwine Sarr’s diagnostic of the postcolony – his reflection owes a great deal to Achille Mbembe – is supplemented by an attempt to formulate practical solutions to attenuate the effects of extroversion. By means of a quick reference to Cheikh Anta Diop’s L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire (see Chapter II of this book), Sarr remarks that it is legitimate to argue that, in light of a long tradition of exchange and interdependency, Africans have continued to share common traits.88 This body of shared values and practices is, he contends, the very resource that should be called on to reduce dependency and generate real development. Like Diop with regard to language policies and the promotion of Senegalese languages (see Chapter III of this book), Sarr is of the view that a possible departure from the logic of economic and cultural laissez faire engendered by global capitalism will not happen without a high degree of political interventionism. He shows that some existing African models could offer the inspiration for a less dependent Africa in which the effects of classical economy would be mitigated by indigenous practices. In this scenario, the ‘material economy’ would be conditional on the ‘relational economy’, 89 that is, on a system favouring ‘relations interpersonnelles et intercommunautaires’.90 The cultural and economic practices of the Senegalese Mouride Brotherhood could, in Sarr’s view, provide the basis for a more authentic way of life whilst allowing Africans to ‘reappropriate their future’.91 As one of the most successful communities of contemporary Senegal, the Mourides, Sarr points out, have been able to maintain the right equilibrium between their material and relational economy. What is interesting in this reflection is the fact that this Sufi brotherhood – which was able to pacifically retain its cultural specificity under French rule92 – controls 86 Sarr, Afrotopia, p. 24. 87 Ibid., p. 23. My emphasis. 88 Ibid., pp. 75–76. 89 Ibid., pp. 83–87. 90 Ibid., p. 83. 91 Ibid., p. 87. 92 Ibid., pp. 84–85.

‘Customs’

221

large swathes of Senegal’s informal economy.93 Although informal (i.e. unofficial), and hence largely ignored in the econometric calculations and projections of the IMF and the World Bank, this colloquial economy speaks to some of the deep-seated sociocultural characteristics of contemporary Senegal. As such, it offers a more reliable basis to foster development and it relativizes the objectivity of the criteria normally used to measure progress.94 The originality of the Mourides also lies in the fact that they are ‘transnational without being westernized’.95 By the same token, Balandier is of the view that it is more important to measure the ‘coût social du progrès’ [social cost of progress] and question its ‘finalité’ [purpose].96 He also contends that one should depart from the assumption that developed societies are ‘à rythme rapide’ [fast-paced] whereas underdeveloped ones are ‘à rythme lent’ [slow-paced] and that this assumed static make-up means that in the latter ‘le souci d’ordre et de conformisme l’emporte sur le souci de progrès’ [maintaining order and conformism is rated more highly than achieving progress].97 He adds that this ‘procès-verbal d’immobilisme’ [accusation of immobility] does not reflect reality.98 When Balandier’s theorization of the ‘colonial situation’ was examined earlier in this book, it was established that his ‘dynamic’ sociology was a response against the epistemological context informing works like Primitive Philosophy by Vernon Brelsford. In this study, Brelsford focused on the ‘communistic’ nature of traditional African societies and put forward the view that their members were above all the bearers of time-honoured customs and foundational myths and therefore possessed little potential for social change and individualistic behaviours.99 Thus, it would seem that this sort of ‘immanent community’ avant la lettre ‘communes’ too much. Here, I am deliberately reversing the formulation of Jean-Luc Nancy who, when discussing the inoperative community, points out that 93 Ibid., p. 86. 94 Ibid., pp. 21–22. 95 Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 129. 96 Balandier, ‘Le Contexte socio-culturel et le coût social du progrès’, in Balandier (ed.), Le ‘Tiers monde’. Sous-développement et développement, preface by Alfred Sauvy (Paris: PUF, 1956), pp. 289–303 (p. 289). 97 Ibid., p. 290. 98 Ibid. 99 Vernon Brelsford, Primitive Philosophy (London: J. Bale, Sons & Danielsson Ltd, 1935), pp. 18–20.

222

Past Imperfect

‘it does not commune’.100 Balandier rejects this conception of African communities and suggests, by means of Raymond Firth’s Elements of Social Organization,101 that the ‘dynamisme interne’ of non-industrialized societies has often been overlooked.102 Firth, who dedicated a good part of his career to the study of Polynesian kinship, also rejected the ‘antithesis between the apparently unprogressive primitive and the self-consciously developing civilized man’.103 For Balandier, then, social dynamism and progress can take different shapes and need not abide by Western models. Along with the economist François Perroux, who developed the concept of ‘économie désarticulée’ [disarticulated economy],104 Balandier believes – a point amply developed in the previous sections of this volume on the Third World – that rapid industrialization can be harmful and be the trigger for economic disorder. Quoting Perroux, he suggests the possibility of a non-­profit-driven economic system: Une espèce humaine respectueuse d’elle-même se prononce en faveur du principe que les vies humaines, et les conditions fondamentales d’une vie humaine pour tous, doivent être protégées par priorité. Pour ce faire, il faut accepter des formes d’activité économique sans rendement.105 [A human species respectful of itself must opt for the principle according to which human lives, and the basic provisions for the guarantee of a human life for everyone, must take precedence. To achieve this, one needs to accept non-profit-driven forms of economic activities]

Afrique ambiguë offers more than a diagnostic of African woes under colonial modernity and if Balandier argues that the ‘partnership of the tractor and the gourd’ (AA, 131) – in the French, ‘l’“association” du caterpillar et de la calebasse’106 – is not an equal one, he is also eager to sing the praises of indigenous know-how. There is, however, no 1 00 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. by Peter Connor; translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, foreword by Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 78. 101 Raymond Firth, Elements of Social Organization (London: Routledge, 2004 [1951]). 102 Balandier, ‘Le Contexte socio-culturel’, p. 290. 103 Firth, Elements of Social Organization, p. 80. 104 Balandier, ‘Brèves remarques pour conclure’, p. 378. 105 Ibid., p. 379. 106 Balandier, Afrique ambiguë, p. 177.

‘Customs’

223

romanticism involved here and no attempt either to present the natives as innate environmentalists. Balandier does not advocate a return to a precolonial golden age – ‘golden ages glitter only because they are always illusory’ (AA, 41) – but he acknowledges the instances where endogenous solutions and techniques contribute to a better equilibrium between people and their ecosystems. His portrayal of gold mining in Niger is predicated on the idea that ritual practices and a belief in the sacred status of the land have for many centuries and, in fact, until the recent arrival of ‘commercial companies’ (AA, 72), protected this activity from speculation. Although Balandier is aware that gold panning is carried out ‘at the expense of agricultural activity’ (AA, 75), he also registers the resourcefulness of its practitioners and their tendency to rely on locally perfected solutions to practical issues. He marvels, for instance, at the locals’ ability to use ‘a fine bamboo tube or the hollow shaft of a vulture’s feather’ to store gold grains (AA, 74) and he also highlights the superiority of local extracting techniques: ‘they can be proud of having “held out” where European enterprises have failed. In 1946, the Falémé-Gambia Society […] collected four and one-half pounds of gold, while the gold washers extracted over eleven hundred’ (AA, 75). His appraisal of the survival strategies developed by the Babinga in the Brazzaville area offers also an opportunity to reveal their harmonious (if trying) cohabitation with nature: ‘The forest was their real home, and their contribution to civilization consisted in their ability to control it’ (AA, 140). Cutting the Past: On Clitoridectomy These examples of symbiosis between people and their environment are few and far between. Balandier is overwhelmingly concerned with the sociological upheavals generated by the rapid urbanization of sub-Saharan Africa; this will form the basis of this second part of the chapter. The ecological devastation recorded in Afrique ambiguë is the concrete manifestation of an all-encompassing phenomenon affecting the core of African communities and, within these, individuals and their behaviours. Balandier bemoans the disruptive impact of ‘our machines, our laws and our monotheism’ (AA, 29). Urban colonialism and the increasing influence of ‘our “Aphrodisian” civilization’ (AA, 26) have, he argues, transformed African sexual politics. By means of a swift reference to Roger Bastide, a sociologist who also explored social and

224

Past Imperfect

cultural change but in the African diasporas of Brazil,107 Balandier suggests that a ‘libidinal sexuality’ has developed at the expense of a ‘socialized sexuality’ (AA, 28). Gender and sexuality, as discussed via Cheikh Anta Diop’s examination of African matriarchy (see Chapter II), were important terrains of colonial and missionary propaganda,108 ‘mise en valeur’, and biopower.109 All too often, African sexual mores and matrimonial practices were dismissed and read against the purported superiority of the Christian model.110 Although this Eurocentric perspective was gradually abandoned by social scientists in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the notion that Africa is sexually aberrant has nevertheless retained some power and has even – alarmingly – been revitalized, the sensationalist and ahistorical reading of recent sexual violence and rapes in the DRC being a case in point.111 Here, too, it seems that past stereotypes – the idea of an African sexuality functioning like a ‘porno-tropics for the European imagination’112 – have not completely disappeared: ‘In this historical production of otherness, Africa was not only fundamentally racialized but also profoundly sexualized, whereby black skin became a signifier of dark morals and practices but also of a dark sexuality.’113 For Balandier (and Bastide), sexuality – like the environment and religion – is sociologically significant as it provides a body of signs on which the analysis of 107 See, among other works, Roger Bastide, Les Religions africaines au Brésil: vers une sociologie des interpénétrations de civilisations (Paris: PUF, 1960). 108 See Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu, Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), particularly chapter I, ‘Family Politics: Making Patriarchy in a Patrilineal Society’, pp. 23–62. 109 See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality’ and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) and Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (eds), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 110 See Rachel Spronk and Thomas Hendriks (eds), Readings in Sexualities from Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020). 111 Nancy Rose Hunt, ‘An Acoustic Register: Rape and Repetition in the Congo’, in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 39–66. 112 Anne McClintock, cited by Spronk and Hendricks in the ‘Introduction: Reading “Sexualities” from “Africa”’ to Readings in Sexualities from Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), pp. 1–18 (p. 5). 113 Spronk and Hendricks ‘Introduction’, p. 5.

‘Customs’

225

a given social order can be conducted. The opposition established by Bastide in Sociologie et Psychanalyse between ‘socialized’ and ‘libidinal’ sexualities responds to this need to understand the way in which sexual taboos and prohibitions contribute to social cohesion and order.114 The notion of libidinal sexuality is used by Balandier to explore the effects of ‘the empire of Eros’ (AA, 28) on African everyday life and gender relations in the Lebou community of Dakar. Balandier remarks that prostitution has been induced by ‘the mercantile spirit and the laws of our economy’ (AA, 31). He explains that Western capitalism routinely blurs the divide between the sacred, on the one hand, and carnal materiality on the other: ‘I remember noticing sometime or other a poster extolling some feminine undergarment which had not hesitated to use a model who bore an embarrassingly close resemblance to Queen Elizabeth’ (AA, 28). Balandier notes that African societies are not ready to withstand such a degree of desecration. The introduction of a monetary economy in this part of the world has transformed the rules underpinning kinship. With her newly acquired economic independence, the female prostitute escapes a social order in which: The circulation of persons, rather than of goods, forms the fabric of human intercourse. In this sense, the role of the woman within a simple or complex system of matrimonial exchanges become fundamental, as Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrated in a work […] which has become a classic. Once in the system, the woman is strictly subject to the rules that govern it. (AA, 26–27)

Even though Balandier warns that he has ‘no intention of defending Negro conservatism’ (AA, 29), this classic anthropological explanation leans towards the preservation of the inter-clannish rules of reciprocity in which women were regarded as bargaining chips. Prostitutes, female adulterers, and by extension salaried and emancipated local women – that is, all women operating outside the boundaries of the tribal order – pose a threat to traditional societal structures. Balandier goes further, however, by arguing that this move towards ‘female emancipation’, with its underlying focus on ‘her emotional life’, is a process that ‘society cannot assimilate without serious disturbance’ (AA, 28). If the examination of change is a salient feature of this book, it seems that Balandier is not ready to consider native women as potential agents of cultural and political transformation. In this regard, he is quite close 114 Roger Bastide, Sociologie et Psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 1950).

226

Past Imperfect

to the viewpoint defended by the co-directors of Les Statues meurent aussi and Cheikh Anta Diop and their insistence that women were above all figures of fecundity and guarantors of timeless traditions. African women, he contends, are defined by their ‘reproductive capacity’ (AA, 33) and, at various points in Afrique ambiguë and in the volume on the Third World,115 he is eager to put forward the idea that if the West is driven by the production of goods, Africa’s speciality is the reproduction of humans (AA, 142).116 This important focus on sexuality and the code underpinning the survival of traditional gender relations does not show Balandier in a progressive light. And yet, in all areas discussed so far – his ‘dynamic’ and ‘post-tribal’ theorization of the ‘colonial situation’ and his examination of the human and natural ravages wrought by industrial capitalism – he advocates ideas that have since decolonization been disseminated by postcolonial and ecocritical thought. His inability to take on board the specific (colonial) situation of African women resonates – however this view will need to be qualified – with the all-too familiar masculinist approach adopted by many male anti-colonial figures such as Fanon.117 Fanon’s depiction of interracial relationships in Peau noire, masques blancs is a case in point. He rightly argues that the selection of a life partner of another race is not a politically innocuous act. Via the examination of various fictional characters (from novels by René Maran, Mayotte Capécia, and Abdoulaye Sadji), Fanon concludes that their choices are all ascribable to colonial racism and alienation. However, Fanon’s explanation remained biased: in choosing a white partner, black men fulfil their will to dominate and to appropriate ‘white civilization and dignity’118 whereas their female counterparts are allegedly driven by a feeling of inferiority.119 In this explanatory model, women give and men take and this opposition between giving and taking also reflects, as argued by Anne McClintock, Fanon’s ‘Manichaeanism’.120 Indeed, there is in Peau noire and Les Damnés de la terre a clear tendency to maintain 1 15 See Balandier, ‘Le Contexte socio-culturel’, pp. 290–291. 116 An argument later developed by Jack Goody in Production and Reproduction: A Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 117 See Christiane P. Makward, Mayotte Capécia, ou l’aliénation selon Fanon (Paris: Karthala, 1999). 118 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1967]), p. 45. 119 Ibid., p 42. 120 Anne McClintock, ‘“No Longer in a Future Heaven”: Gender, Race and

‘Customs’

227

colonized women outside the realm of historical agency and if Fanon somewhat reverses this position in ‘L’Algérie se dévoile’,121 their revolutionary agency is, at best, a ‘designated agency’: This theory is not […] a theory of feminist spontaneity, for women learn their militancy only at men’s invitation. There is a designated agency – an agency by invitation only […] Female militancy, in short, is simply a passive offspring of male agency and the structural necessity of war.122

This perceived passivity is one of the paradoxes of modernity, a process which whilst being turned towards the future, calls upon the past, and traditional rituals, to cement the homogeneity of the community. The homo faber, as already mentioned in this book, needs the homo conservator and it seems that this compensatory mechanism alluded to by Aleida Assmann applies to Balandier’s focus on the reproductive role of tribal women. Balandier witnesses the historical transformations paving the way for the constitution of African national identities. His analysis of the respective roles assumed by men and women in this development is clearly Manichaean for he seems to be confirming a gendered temporality in which women occupy the atavistic slot and are figured as the guardians of the ‘national archaic’.123 Balandier’s overdetermination of the tribal agency of African women is evidence of his inability to escape the discursive framework of the late 1950s, a period in which women were still largely considered the ‘second sex’ even though some early francophone figures such as the Nardal sisters would advocate assimilation – and féminisme colonial – as a means of escaping traditional patriarchy.124 When one looks back at francophone African fiction, for example, there is no doubt that initiation rituals have been explored to comment on wider political issues generated by colonial modernity. In Batouala,125 Nationalism’, in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (eds), Dangerous Liaisons, pp. 89–112 (pp. 94–95). 121 Frantz Fanon’s chapter ‘L’Algérie se dévoile’, in Sociologie d’une révolution. L’an V de la révolution algérienne (Paris: Maspero, 1968), pp. 16–50. 122 McClintock, ‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’, p. 98. 123 Ibid., p. 93. 124 See Emily Musil Church, ‘In Search of the Seven Sisters: A Biography of the Nardal Sisters of Martinique’, Callaloo, 36.2 (Spring 2013), 375–390 (p. 380). On this topic, see also: T. Deanan Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 125 René Maran, Batouala. Véritable roman nègre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1921).

228

Past Imperfect

the failed circumcision ceremony is used by René Maran to discuss the ruination of traditional customs ‘under the colonial gaze’.126 In Les Soleils des indépendances, Salimata’s excision exemplifies the consolidation of a new phallocentric postcolonial order.127 In this respect, her refusal to adhere to the letter of this order, and her decision to regard ‘the sacred custom of initiation as an empty act of mutilation’, foreshadows ‘one of the great causes of African feminism’.128 Balandier’s defence of clitoridectomy is also the product of a specific Zeitgeist. His position is articulated from the point of view of cultural relativism and he also challenges here former arguments disseminated by missionaries and colonial functionaries for whom excision (but also polygamy and forced marriages)129 was described as ‘barbaric’ and dismissed as an expression of paganism.130 Like Fanon, then, Balandier is conscious that the gendering of the colonial question was part and parcel of a long-term strategy to reorder ‘the labor and sexual economy of the people, so as to divert female power into the colonial hands and disrupt the patriarchal power of the colonized men’.131 In chapter II (‘Traditions’), which partly focuses on the Kono ethnic group of Lola (Guinea), Balandier offers a description of the cultural and political context in which this important rite of passage is undertaken. He insists on the communal and festive significance of the practice and on its association with musical and choreographic performances in which men and women are ascribed distinct roles prefiguring their future incorporation in the local reproductive politics. As Afrique ambiguë is not a scholarly publication, Balandier does not systematically refer to anthropological literature but his account of the cultural implications of clitoridectomy resonates with previous anthropological research on 126 Eleni Coundouriotis, Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 32. 127 Ahmadou Kourouma, Les Soleils des indépendances (Paris: Seuil, 1970). 128 Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 228. 129 Who, of course, did not always agree: see Côme Kinata, ‘Les administrateurs et les missionnaires face aux coutumes au Congo français’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 175 (2004), 593–607. 130 Dominique Arnaud, ‘Will the Third Millennium Be Circumcised? An Interview with Chantal Zabus’, in Chantal Zabus (ed.), Fearful Symmetries: Essays and Testimonies around Excision and Circumcision (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 199–209 (p. 201). 131 McClintock, ‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’, p. 97.

‘Customs’

229

the custom. In Dieu d’eau (1948), Ogotemmêli had revealed to Marcel Griaule the foundational dimension of excision in the Dogon mythology. After creating the sun and the moon, Amma, the almighty male God, threw a lump of clay away from him. As a result of this action, the earth was formed: It is a body […] This body […] is feminine. Its sexual organ is an anthill, and its clitoris a termite hill. Amma, being lonely and desirous of intercourse with this creature, approached it […] At God’s approach the termite hill rose up, barring the passage and displaying its masculinity. It was as strong as the organ of the stranger, and intercourse could not take place. But God is all-powerful. He cut down the termite hill, and had intercourse with the excised earth.132

This famous scene presents itself as the translation of a sociological order in which the original androgynous state of women must be removed – or ‘cut’ – in a move to separate the sexes and establish male supremacy.133 In the canonical Les Rites de passage (1909),134 Arnold Van Gennep had already defined ritual bodily mutilations (such as circumcision, excision of the clitoris, infibulation, subincision of the penis but also scarification, tattoos, and earlobe and septum perforations)135 as socially significant operations whereby separations between groups are enacted: The mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite of separation (this is the idea behind cutting, piercing etc.) which automatically incorporates him [or her] into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces, the incorporation is permanent.136

Balandier holds the view that clitoridectomy contributes to greater social cohesion. He also subscribes to the belief that the clear gender 132 Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas, with an introduction by Germaine Dieterlen (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 17. 133 Elisabeth Bekers, Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000 (Madison.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), p. 11. 134 A. Van Gennep, Les Rites de passage (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1909). 135 For a detailed discussion on the cultural representations (in Africa and beyond) of these practices and a focus on Griaule and Van Gennep, see Chantal Zabus (ed.), Fearful Symmetries: Essays and Testimonies around Excision and Circumcision. 136 Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London: Routledge, 2004 [1960]), p. 70.

230

Past Imperfect

separation generated by this custom underwrites the permanency of a traditional reproductive and matrimonial order. These rituals, in his words, ‘increase the unity of the female group and create a better equilibrium in relations between the sexes’ (AA, 98); by regulating the future relations between wives and husbands, this rite of passage ‘satisfies all aspirations to fecundity’ (AA, 99). In this endorsement, Balandier attempts to take his readers away from the gruesome representations that these rituals have stirred among westerners – ‘we are inclined to see them as a kind of human “butchery”’ (AA, 98) – and to demonstrate that it would be unfounded to treat them as ‘“gratuitous” savagery’ (AA, 99). This argument has temporal implications for Balandier reminds his readers that these practices are part and parcel of contemporary Africa rather than the legacies of a primitive past. He does not ignore the risks involved in these procedures but he prefers to delve into the operational resourcefulness of native practitioners who have developed efficient techniques (including musictherapeutic techniques) aiming at controlling fears, allaying pain, and converting suffering into a means of galvanizing group identity:137 ‘I do not doubt that such a procedure is effective in the long run; a real preparation for surgery which divests clitoridectomy of its frightening character’ (AA, 95). However, and this is reminiscent of the way in which he was exploring vernacular know-how and creativity (as seen in the previous section), Balandier is also keen to reflect on the potential benefits that the West could draw from the Other’s science: We have just discovered some equivalent procedures in the psychological treatment and exercise preparatory to painless childbirth. If progress is possible in the realm of mastery and utilization of the body, it is from those civilizations poorest in the instruments born of technical imagination and experience that we must learn its secrets. This should encourage us to be less presumptuous, by showing that we have explored – and with what disquieting success! – only a limited sector of human activity. Methods and treatment of unimaginable intricacy and effectiveness are offered us by men who are too conveniently dismissed as savages because their hands are empty of the complex tools and their sky unclouded by the smoke of factories. (AA, 95)

1 37 See Pamela Khanakwa, ‘Male Circumcision among the Basigu of Eastern Uganda: Practices and Conceptualizations’, in Axel Fleisch and Rhiannon Stephens (eds), Doing Conceptual History in Africa (New York: Berghahn, 2016), pp. 115–137.

‘Customs’

231

The reference to obstetrics is important as childbirth was one of the areas where Western medicine had been at its most active, intrusive, and regulatory in the colonies.138 The idea that ‘we’ could learn from these other techniques signals a significant shift and the acceptance that ‘progress’ is not unilateral and can be enriched by alternative practices. Echoing Lévi-Strauss, Balandier implies that human societies all have their own specific strengths and that progress occurs where these are shared and disseminated.139 He tends also to domesticate clitoridectomy and to draw analogies with Western institutions. In this regard, he suggests that the ‘initiatory enclosure […] recall[s] our boarding schools for young girls’ (AA, 99). Taking to task the Church, he adds that the sexual education imparted to young Kono women is much more rigorous – ‘the development of the instincts follows a plan whose effectiveness is unquestionable’ (AA, 99) – and completely free of ‘guilty experimentation’ (AA, 99). Balandier’s exploration of clitoridectomy, albeit a symptom of rampant masculinism, is not a blind endorsement of tribalism (AA, 38). Afrique ambiguë proposes a rejection of colonialism but its author knows that the system that will supersede the colonial order will need to be predicated on traditions and the African intellectuals to whom he refers in this book – notably Malek Bennabi and Abdoulaye Ly140 – defend an analogous point of view. From an ideological point of view, there is no doubt that Balandier’s position with regard to clitoridectomy is of its time. Elisabeth Bekers identifies three significant moments in the interpretation of the practice: In the 1960s, the early post-independent years, authors are ‘circumscribing’ or carefully writing around the physical operation but extremely cognizant of the communal significance of female genital excision, especially in the context of decolonization. From the 1970s onward African writers integrate their denunciations of the practice into their fierce criticism of the phallocratic gender politics of their own excisionpracticing societies. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, a

1 38 See Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 139 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), chapter V, ‘The Idea of Progress’, pp. 20–23. 140 Malek Bennabi, Vocation de l’Islam (Paris: Seuil, 1954); Abdoulaye Ly, Les Masses africaines et l’actuelle condition humaine (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956).

232

Past Imperfect

third group of writers, mainly women from the African diaspora, situate their outraged reactions against what they perceive as an outrageously brutal, misogynistic practice in a much broader, international context.141

Balandier’s position undoubtedly mirrors the first trend. His approach, however, remains dynamic and predicated on an ambition to record the changes brought about by the ‘colonial situation’. He remarks that the excision ritual, ‘after being prohibited because of its physical risks, reappears with new vigor and purpose’ (AA, 96). With regard to the wearing of sacred masks in other Kono initiation ceremonies, he registers fundamental mutations: ‘The torch of tradition has been seized by young hands, for ends in which political preoccupations play a vital role, ends of which the ancient creators of the choreography could have had no inkling’ (AA, 99). Balandier does not provide a detailed description of these ceremonies but his suggestion that the transformation of the traditional choreography has a political origin resonates to some degree with what Fanon would argue later in ‘On National Culture’. In this text, first delivered at the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1959 in Rome and then published in The Wretched of the Earth, the Martinican thinker argues that anti-colonial struggle often acts as the dynamic force behind cultural reinvigoration. The phenomenon is all-encompassing and affects most cultural and intellectual activities. Native writers who ‘during the period of repression’ had been a ‘consuming public’ became creative agents (‘producers’).142 This process is also tangible in ‘the oral tradition – stories, epics and songs of the people – which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change’.143 Fanon identifies the same correlation and ‘upward-springing trend’ in handicrafts, dancing, and – even more to the point if we return to Balandier’s remarks about Kono initiations – in ‘traditional rites and ceremonies’.144 If he contends that ‘[i]n the colonial situation, culture […] falls away and dies’, Fanon also maintains throughout this piece that ‘the fight for national existence […] sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation’.145 It is probably worth remembering that although 141 Bekers, Rising Anthills, p. 25. 142 Frantz Fanon’s chapter ‘On National Culture’ in The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 166–199 (p. 192). 143 Ibid., p. 193. 144 Ibid., p. 196. 145 Ibid., pp. 196–197.

‘Customs’

233

Afrique ambiguë was published in 1957, Balandier looked back at events that took place from the late 1940s to the beginning of the 1950s and collected facts and anecdotes indicating that decolonization was impending. Similarly, Fanon is interested (in The Wretched of the Earth) in identifying the signs of decolonization in the midst of African revolutionary praxis – ‘On National Culture’ opens with a quote by Sékou Touré: Well before the political and fighting phase of the national movement an attentive spectator can thus see the manifestation of a new vigour and feel the approaching conflict. He will note unusual forms of expression and themes which are fresh and imbued with a power which is no longer that of invocation but rather of the assembling of the people, a summoning together for a precise purpose.146

Balandier certainly falls into this category of ‘attentive spectators’ who throughout the 1950s register the locals’ ‘revival of initiative’147 – ‘reprise d’initiative’148 – a phrase he often used and which echoes Mudimbe’s ‘Reprendre’ (see Chapter II). Although Balandier successfully records signs of change – what Max Gluckman called ‘rebellion rites’149 – and a new cultural impetus in the African societies that he examines, he does not share Fanon’s militant and, it must be said, dichotomous optimism; nor does he say that these manifestations are driven by a ‘precise purpose’, and a political one, as will be analysed in the next section. The creativity and ‘reprise’ identified by Balandier amongst the colonized is invariably predicated on a desire – again ‘ambiguous’ rather than ‘precise’ – to allay the suffering induced by colonialism and reassert their lost authority. Change for Balandier is the product of a delicate interaction between traditions and the new social and cultural conditions generated by colonial modernity. This interaction is messy and its effects are haphazard and even though Balandier was intellectually receptive to the Marxian mindset of the 146 Ibid., p. 196. 147 Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa, p. 17. 148 Georges Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire. Dynamique des changements sociaux en Afrique centrale (Paris: PUF, 1955), p. xi. In the English version, The Sociology of Black Africa, this phrase is translated as ‘revival of initiative’ (p. 17). 149 See Julien Bonhomme, ‘L’art de la dérobade. Innovations rituelles et pouvoir colonial en Afrique centrale’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 951–972 (p. 952).

234

Past Imperfect

post-war period150 – his use of the word ‘situation’ partly originates in Sartre’s and Max Gluckman’s works151 – he refuses, unlike Fanon, to ascribe change to a neat dialectical movement; nor is he prepared to accept, again in contrast to Fanon, that what ‘sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation’ can be attributed solely to ‘the fight for national existence’. Indeed, in Balandier’s examination of decolonization there is a greater focus placed on daily life intimate practices, ethnicity, and religion and on the geographical and cultural reconfigurations that these factors could potentially bring about. The various insurrectional grassroots movements that emerged in the Kongo area (in the former French and Belgian Congo but also in Angola),152 lend themselves particularly well to this type of investigation. The contacts between Ba-Kongo people and Europeans are long-standing and started in earnest with the Christianization of the Kongo royal family after the first Portuguese expeditions in this part of Africa at the end of the fifteenth century.153 Located along the Atlantic coast of Central Africa, the former Kongo kingdom stretched over a vast territory including parts of today’s DRC, the Republic of Congo, Angola, and Gabon. By focusing on this ethnic group, Balandier was able to ‘pratiquer une anthropologie de l’actuel’ [practise an anthropology of the present] and approach Kongo traditions over the longue durée and from a transcolonial perspective since the two main Kongo centres were located around Brazzaville and Léopoldville (Kinshasa).154 What is important here is the fact that the territorial reorganization of the region engendered by colonialism had not been completely successful in undermining this Kongo cultural identity.155 150 See Emmanuel Terray, ‘Anthropology of the 1960s and African Studies: Outline for an Appraisal’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 249–256 (pp. 250–251). 151 Mann, ‘Anti-Colonialism and Social Science’, p. 110 n. 75. 152 See Anne Mélice, ‘La Désobéissance civile des Kimbanguistes et la violence coloniale au Congo Belge (1921–1959)’, Les Temps Modernes, 658–659 (April– July 2010), 218–50 (p. 239). 153 Balandier wrote a book on this ancient precolonial kingdom: Le Royaume de Kongo du XVe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2013 [1965]). With regard to this early evangelizing process, see the second chapter, ‘Le roi chrétien’, pp. 31–54. 154 Balandier, Conjugaisons, p. 280. 155 Ibid., p. 277.

‘Customs’

235

In the former French Congo – Congo-Brazzaville – the Ba-Kongo were exposed earlier, and more extensively, to European modernity (Christianization, urbanization, industrialization, and alphabetization). As a result of this process, they ‘supplied’ most of their ‘literates’ to the colonial administration in Brazzaville.156 The Ba-Kongo also embraced ‘modern forms of political organization’ from the interwar period onwards.157 André Grenard Matswa (or Matsoua), one of the most significant messianic leaders to emerge from this context, played a key role in the development of early anti-colonial sentiments in this region. As the founder of the Amicalist movement, Matswa, a Kongo-Lari from the French Congo, set in motion a partly political and religious process which would pave the way for the independence of Congo-Brazzaville. He assumed clerical positions in the French Congo and then in France, where he acquired French citizenship. He took part, as a tirailleur, in the War of the Rif in Morocco and this experience, as argued by Phyllis Clark, sparked his anti-colonialism.158 While living in Paris, he founded the Association amicale des originaires de l’A.E.F. in 1926 (also referred to as ‘L’Amicale’),159 a pan-Africanist association advocating justice and emancipation for the African diaspora in France and the rejection of the daily violence generated by the Code de l’indigénat in French Africa.160 The Amicale was funded by private donors and the GovernorGeneral of Afrique Occidentale Française (AEF) but its statutes stipulated that it should remain ‘secular’ and ‘nonpolitical’.161 In 1929, however, the Amicale became more overtly political when Matswa decided to send a delegation to AEF to collect significant support funds ‘from chiefs, villagers, and évolués in Brazzaville’.162 Matswa’s political activities, in addition to his growing popularity in AEF (in Bangui, Libreville, and Brazzaville),163 aroused the suspicion of the 1 56 Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa, p. 354. 157 Ibid. 158 Phyllis Suzanne Clark, ‘Passionate Engagements: A Reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s Private Ancestral Shrine’, Research in African Literatures, 31.3 (2000), 39–68 (p. 45). 159 Ibid., p. 46. 160 See Meike J. de Goede, ‘Duress and Messianism in French Moyen-Congo’, Conflict and Society: Advances in Research, 4 (2018), 199–213 (p. 203). 161 Ibid., p. 202. 162 Ibid. 163 Victor T. Le Vine, Politics in Francophone Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004), p. 188.

236

Past Imperfect

French authorities and Balandier shows that his trial in Brazzaville in April 1930 (for ‘embezzlement’)164 provoked widespread riots.165 The colonial authorities proceeded to confiscate what was wrongly regarded as swindled moneys and decided to compensate Matswa’s ‘victims’ who, as Amicale members, had freely contributed to this fund.166 For decades, as explained by Balandier, Ba-Kongo Amicalists refused to accept any gifts or subsidies from the colonial administration as they feared that any such grant would constitute an ‘indirect attempt’ to return the money that had been ‘seized in 1930’.167 Matswa then served a prison sentence in exile in Fort Lamy, in Chad, from where he would escape and return to France.168 When the war broke out, he enrolled in the French army to fight the Germans in Lorraine only to be rearrested in 1941 ‘for allegedly disseminating pro-German propaganda’.169 In January 1942, Matswa died in the colonial prison of Mayama. His body, secretly buried in the prison graveyard, was never properly mourned or returned to his relatives ‘to be buried in conformity with consecrated rites’.170 Since none of his followers saw him dead, it was assumed that he had not died and that he would soon return. Until his death, Matswa’s actions within the Amicale had been understood in political terms. However, his disappearance engendered a new discourse in which he was transformed ‘from the worldly leader of an emancipatory movement into a prophet who announced liberation in apocalyptic terms. He became the messenger of God, who would deliver a new world order, one of justice, equality, and freedom’.171 By the same token, Balandier is of the view that the Amicalist movement became chiefly a religious phenomenon after Matswa’s death,172 and that “Jesus Matswa’ was regarded by the masses as ‘the “Saviour”’.173 As such, this new cult increasingly reflected the Ba-Kongo’s ambition 1 64 Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa, p. 390. 165 Ibid., pp. 397–399. 166 de Goede, ‘Duress and Messianism in French Moyen-Congo’, p. 202. 167 Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa, pp. 397–398. 168 Clark, ‘Passionate Engagements’, p. 46. 169 Le Vine, Politics in Francophone Africa, p. 188. 170 Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, ‘The Bones of the Body Politic: Thoughts on the Savorgnan de Brazza Mausoleum’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35.2 (March 2011), 445–452 (p. 447). 171 de Goede, ‘Duress and Messianism in French Moyen-Congo’, p. 200. 172 Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa, p. 395. 173 Ibid., pp. 402–403.

‘Customs’

237

to ‘not only recover control of those sacred techniques indispensable in their eyes to the health and wealth of every society, but also to regain their former freedom of action [and] re-establish their self-esteem’ (AA, 203–204). Balandier’s focus on female circumcision and other initiation rites (‘rebellion rites’) conveys therefore his determination to bear witness to a type of bottom-up disobedience to colonialism that had been so manifest among Matswa’s followers. It is deeply political and is evidence of his commitment to endorse an indigenous ‘politics of the womb’, to cite the eponymous study by Lynn Thomas.174 The title of this book makes explicit reference to Jean-François Bayart’s ‘politics of the belly’ and to Bayart’s contention that hunger and the predatory greediness of African politicians can be used as frameworks to explain African poverty and neocolonial nepotism.175 By focusing on the womb – ‘another, specifically gendered, part of the abdomen’ – Thomas intends to examine ‘the particular capacities and powers attached to the female belly […] to demonstrate the centrality of reproductive struggles to African history’.176 She demonstrates that excision became a major site of contestation in British-ruled Kenya when colonial authorities organized campaigns to discredit this ‘barbaric’ and ‘repugnant’ custom177 and promoted ‘hospital births for some excised parturients’ while ‘many central-Kenyan women viewed excision as facilitating childbirth’ and were suspicious of the new medical order forced upon them by the colonial regime.178 Interestingly, Thomas also examines the ‘widely unsuccessful attempt’ of the colonial government to outlaw excision during the Mau Mau insurgency of the 1950s.179 She explains that the ban was defied by adolescent girls who decided to circumcise themselves. In this context of high political tension and brutal colonial repression, it would be tempting to ascribe their defiance to a strict logic of anti-colonial resistance. Thomas argues, however, that their disobedience was not a simple return to ritual orthodoxy but a type of ‘reprise’ 174 Lynn Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 175 Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: the Politics of the Belly, trans. by Mary Harper, Christopher Harrison, and Elizabeth Harrison (London: Longman, 1993). 176 Thomas, Politics of the Womb, p. 15. 177 Ibid., p. 16. 178 Ibid., p. 17. 179 Ibid.

238

Past Imperfect

(what Mudimbe calls ‘reprendre’, see Chapter II). It also constituted, she contends, a ‘profound departure from the past’ as these women transformed the procedure to signify their opposition to their elders and bring the traditional circumcisors ‘to stop abusing them and to recognize their initiation as proper’.180 As already established, Balandier’s own reading of female circumcision leaves little agency to Kono female participants. However, it must be pointed out, before moving to the next section, that he is also interested in revealing the complex reconfiguration of ritualistic practices which, while being used as weapons to question the authority of the colonial regime, were also the strategies of a wider but more surreptitious reformation of traditional customs. The social actors encountered by Balandier are operating on several fronts and grappling with issues that often both precede anti-colonial resistance and exceed traditional allegiances. African Prophets and Reprises So far, I have examined the way in which Balandier records and deplores the ravages wrought by the colonial situation – industrialization and the introduction of a ‘libidinal’ sexuality being two significant examples. The effects of colonialism are multifaceted and closely linked to the deep social and cultural ‘devastation’ and ‘dispossession’ inflicted on Africans and their culture and environment. Balandier, however, is also able to identify endogenous techniques and practices which, while rooted in the past, could form the basis of future-orientated projects, mitigate colonial hegemony, reinvigorate Bantu values, generate change, and form the basis of an African modernity. There is therefore a tendency here to relativize the all-encompassing power of colonial modernity and to advocate a less dichotomous understanding of ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’ – a dichotomy which, as seen previously, Koselleck never deemed absolute. I shall now attempt to explore further how these methods of reappropriation and ‘reprises’ play out in urban settings and in situations where native intellectuals – often unassimilated or little assimilated, like Benoît Ogoula Iquaqua181 – operate at the intersection between religion and politics. 1 80 Ibid., p. 75. 181 Georges Balandier, ‘L’utopie de Benoît Ogoula Iquaqua’, Les Temps modernes, 84–85 (October–November 1952), 771–781.

‘Customs’

239

It will be argued here that these processes, without being translations per se, have nonetheless a translational dimension. Translation will thus be regarded here as a metaphor for the encounter between colonized and colonizers. This idea, in turn, will be premised on the assumption that the colonial venture, by virtue of its being a profoundly discursive process, also involved textual confrontations which invariably reflected the ‘ethnocentric violence of translation’182 and, hence, the unequal relationships between cultures and languages.183 What will be at stake, then, is the increasingly precarious epistemological primacy of the colonial ‘source’ text during this era of decolonization for, as argued by Karin Barber, English texts written in a (post)colonial context can only be grasped if indigenous texts are fully acknowledged, ‘not as shadowy, vaguely-delineated, value-laden “oral heritage” in the background, but as a modern, mainstream, heterogeneous, hybrid and changing mode of discourse, created and recreated daily by the majority of the population’.184 Like most of his contemporaries, Balandier did not speak any African languages, a state of affairs which led him, according to Wyatt MacGaffey, to misconstrue certain Ki-Kongo concepts.185 As a result, he was accompanied by African interpreters,186 a role assumed by the novelist Abdoulaye Sadji during Balandier’s first mission in Senegal.187 The linguistic question, however, resurfaces at various points in Afrique ambiguë, which is unsurprising if one considers how conscious Balandier was of the dangers of ethnocentrism and how mindful of the methodological posture to adopt when conducting fieldwork. The ethnologist, he argues, must attempt to ‘obliterate his origins’ and ‘mitigate his foreignness’ 1 82 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 2008 [1995]), p. 16. 183 See also: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986); Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko (eds), Translation and Power (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Christina Schaeffner and Susan Bassnett (eds), Political Discourse, Meaning and Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010); Philippe van Parijs, Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 184 Karin Barber, ‘African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism’, Research in African Literatures, 26.4 (1995), 3–30 (p. 26). 185 Wyatt MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets: Religion in a Plural Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 245. 186 Copans, Georges Balandier, p. 43. 187 As confirmed to me by Jean Copans in an email (sent 19 October 2017).

240

Past Imperfect

if he wishes to ‘enter the indigenous system’. His main difficulty is one of ‘communication’ and he should aim to act as an ‘eloquent witness’ and ‘interpreter’ of the cultures submitted to his scrutiny (AA, 10). This ideal scenario is more often than not rendered problematic by the intercultural pitfalls of the profession, however. Communication and translation are reciprocal operations involving different actors and (con)texts and their development is contingent on a process of mutual exchanges. In chapter VII of Afrique ambiguë, Balandier provides a detailed account of his meeting with Nganga Emmanuel,188 the prominent Kongo religious leader, and demonstrates why this basic reciprocal transaction-cum-translation fails to operate in this instance. Encounters between black and white dignitaries were usually initiated by a ceremonial whereby each party would exchange gifts and take on simultaneously the roles of givers and receivers. In this case, however, Nganga Emmanuel presents Balandier (the Maussian anthropologist!)189 with a gift but turns down the Frenchman’s offering. This rejection is an act of passive disobedience which reflects the long-standing strategy adopted by Matswa’s followers to thwart any covert attempt by French administration to return the money that had been confiscated as a result of the Matswa trial in 1930. For Balandier, this refusal is the concrete manifestation of a new balance of power in which the traditional colonizer-colonized hierarchy is challenged. Mindful of the translational approach highlighted above, it could also be argued that Nganga Emmanuel’s rejection amounts to a de-canonization of the colonial source text: In forcing his gift on me, he was forcing my loyalty and friendship; at the very least he was neutralizing me. In refusing mine, he retained all his freedom of maneuver; he had made no commitment in my behalf [sic], he had not compromised himself. So runs Bakongo logic, which in this case was accompanied by a determination not to receive anything from the hand of a white man. (AA, 205)

Ironically, the ‘interpreter’ feels that he is now the object of the other’s inquisitive gaze: ‘Never until that moment had I realized how irrevocably my race and my membership in a particular social system could classify me automatically, apart from my intentions and desires’ (AA, 205–206). 1 88 Referred to as ‘Nganga E.’ in The Sociology of Black Africa. 189 See Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. 337–338.

‘Customs’

241

This Fanonian realization demonstrates that the ‘colonial situation’ was defined at the beginning of the 1950s by a new set of factors and power relations. In this scene taking place in Brazzaville, Balandier feels reduced to the racial part of his being. This reduction – he is white at the expense of other signs – amounts to a partial and partisan translation in which words and idioms are divested of their polysemy. As such, it bears witness to the fact that ‘[t]ranslation is not an innocent, transparent activity but is highly charged with significance at every stage; it rarely, if ever, involves a relationship of equality between texts, authors or systems’.190 Balandier finds himself indebted and coerced to pledge his loyalty to the Congolese religious leader. Notions of indebtedness191 and loyalty (or fidelity)192 are supremely translational for they conjure up a world of cultural dependency in which canonical texts – or artefacts, as seen in Chapter II, dedicated to Les Statues meurent aussi – command unconditional respect and are the foundations of future knowledge production. In this paternalistic dictatorship of the Ur-text, translators are mere epigones – unquestioning receivers – and it is of course paradoxical that Balandier, in this interview, should assume this subservient position: he receives but is prevented from giving. As argued by Dipesh Chakrabarty, dialogues can rarely become ‘open-ended’ and ‘nonteleological’ in a colonial context or in a situation,193 taking place then but also now in the twenty-first century, where progress and knowledge production are understood in historicist terms: A dialogue can be genuinely open only under one condition: that no party puts itself in a position where it can unilaterally decide the final outcome of the conversation. This never happens between the modern and the 1 90 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, ‘Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars’, in Bassnett and Trivedi (eds), Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–18 (p. 2). 191 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’, in Quinzièmes Assises de la Traduction littéraire (Arles 1998) (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999), pp. 21–47 (p. 24). 192 See Lori Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2000 [1985]), pp. 314–330; and Paul F. Bandia, Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2008). 193 Chakrabarty quoted by Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 75.

242

Past Imperfect

nonmodern because, however noncoercive the conversation between the transcendent academic observer and the subaltern who enters into a historical dialogue with him, this dialogue takes place within the field of possibilities that is already structured from the beginning in favor of certain outcomes.194

Although Balandier (‘the transcendent academic observer’) certainly initiated this conversation in a spirit of ‘noncoercive’ openness, it is doubtful that he succeeded in overcoming the epistemological constraints of the colonial situation; the ‘subaltern’ (Nganga Emmanuel), on the other hand, only escapes colonial dependency through a reversal of its terms. As already established in this chapter, Balandier’s early writings are underpinned by an exploration of the notion of dependency which, in his own words, can be either ‘negative’ (or ‘accepted’) or ‘positive’, that is, engendering reactions ‘de dérobade, de refus ou de révolte’ [of prevarication, refusal or rebellion] on the part of the indigenous populations.195 Balandier’s examination of linguistic issues is conducted in a context of accelerated acculturation at a time when the French authorities were attempting, in the framework of the newly established ‘French Union’ of 1946 (a reconfigured French Empire in which the word ‘colony’ was replaced by ‘overseas’ territories and departments)196 to consolidate the role of the French language and pave the way for francophonie, an enterprise often deemed neocolonial.197 Balandier notes, however, the ‘inadequate’ nature of ‘our instruction’ and, commenting on the situation in Poto-Poto (Brazzaville), he adds that ‘[w]ith makeshift schools we have turned out makeshift scholars who, deprived of their very ancient and very vivid means of expression, often sound like tape recorders playing to themselves’ (AA, 188). Balandier ascribes this 1 94 Ibid. Allen is citing a passage from Chakrabarty’s Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). My emphasis. 195 Balandier, ‘Sociologie de la dépendance’, p. 152. 196 See Jacques Frémeaux, ‘French Unity: The Dream of a United France (1946–1960)’, in Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas (eds), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, trans. by Alexis Pernsteiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 333–340. 197 Gabrielle Parker, ‘Francophonie and Universality: The Evolution of Two Intertwined Notions (1961–2006)’, in Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas (eds), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, trans. by Alexis Pernsteiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 562–573.

‘Customs’

243

psittacism to the haphazard pedagogical methods applied in this part of the colony and, above all, to the fact that pupils ‘become the victims of undisciplined reading’ and fall prey to ‘the dealers in quick learning and the purveyors of occultism’ (AA, 188). Interestingly, he draws an analogy between their peculiar use of language and the linguistic experiments conducted by the French playwright Alfred Jarry in his famous Ubu roi (1896). Widely considered as one of the remote precursors of Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theatre of the Absurd, Jarry invented a world in which language fails to fulfil its basic communicative function and where speech acts are reduced to the production of stereotypes couched in irrelevant registers. A sense of incongruity pervades this play in which words are randomly used and appear to be often disconnected from their referents. Ubu roi is a satire in which the grotesque and the macabre are deployed to explore political greed and despotism. The play is disconcerting and ‘ubuesque’, an adjective formed from the eponymous character and conveying a sense the absurdly ludicrous. Although it is set in a topological and ontological no man’s land, Jarry insists on making use of an undifferentiated and indiscriminate Poland to develop his intrigue of political coups and arbitrary assassinations.198 The play mixes archaic phrases with scatological expressions and draws upon Shakespearean motifs from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, and The Winter’s Tale to depict the political vicissitudes of King Ubu and his acolytes. The drama also offers an examination of the way in which language and power intersect and how verbose language is employed to signify the absence of political idealism and mask intellectual vacuum. ‘Jarry and the literary school of which he was the inspiration’ (AA, 189) is referred to here by Balandier to comment on political texts disseminated by religious leaders and followers of the African churches founded by figures like André Matswa and Simon Kimbangu, the Kongo preacher who was imprisoned for life after announcing the end of Belgian colonial rule and the arrival of a black Jesus.199 Their writings, Balandier argues, are incongruous translations indiscriminately mixing formal and 1 98 Nicholas Salazar-Sutil, “‘Set in Poland, That Is to Say Nowhere’: Alfred Jarry and the Politics of Topological Space’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz (eds), Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 114–126. 199 On Kimbangu, see MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets; and by the same author, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular

244

Past Imperfect

informal registers and assembling fragments borrowed from administrative French and betraying ‘a freely assimilated missionary education’ (AA, 189). By the same token, he reflects on Nganga Emmanuel’s liturgical accommodations: The elements of plagiarism in Nganga E.’s systems are clear enough, and it is easy to distinguish the borrowings from Christianity. Making the sign of the cross (dimbu dyala krwa) was retained but the words were changed to: ‘In the name of the Father, and of André Matswa and of Simon Kimbangou.’200

This type of adaptation, or ‘plagiarism’, is reminiscent of what Balandier calls the ‘African baroque’ in his discussion on African art (see Chapter II), that is, a new artistic language in which ‘the objects disseminated by our industrial civilization are incorporated into a context of values and meanings which is often alien to the utility habitual with us’ (AA, 123). Although Balandier does not question the immense – and historic – significance of their political struggle (as it is, in fact, one of the most prominent issues covered in Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire), he argues, however, that the ‘curious style’ of this literature gives ‘the impression of mere verbal exercises’ (AA, 189). But is that what they really are? As I shall now attempt to demonstrate these uncanny translations are also the sites of creative reappropriations on the part of the colonized. Like most French Africanists of his generation, Balandier’s ethnographic missions were supported by funds allocated by the French state and its scientific agencies such as the Office de la recherche scientifique d’outre-mer and the Institut français d’Afrique noire. 201 With some of his closest collaborators – for example, Paul Mercier – Balandier would advocate, on the basis of a scientific habitus inaugurated by Malinowski in Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa in the late 1930s (see Chapter I of this book), a ‘committed sociology’ which would attempt to bridge theoretical and practical concerns. 202 He was a scholar but also an expert on whose knowledge – but also ‘“applied” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). See also Martial Sinda, Le Messianisme congolais et ses incidences politiques (Paris: Payot, 1972). 2 00 Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa, p. 454. 2 01 See Benoît de L’Estoile, ‘Enquêter en “situation coloniale”. Politique de la population, gouvernementalité modernisatrice et “sociologie engagée” en Afrique équatoriale française, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 863–919 (p. 867). 2 02 Ibid., p. 899.

‘Customs’

245

studies’203 – the colonial administration would routinely call to shape new policies and manage the territories under its jurisdiction. 204 It is a well-known fact that colonial authorities committed enormous resources to collecting data on the empire and its populations and that the notorious ‘colonial library’ resulting from this exercise became one of the most efficient instruments for the ‘invention of Africa’. 205 When Balandier started his career as an Africanist, he proceeded, among other investigative undertakings, to submit his native ‘subjects’ to Rorschach psycho-diagnostic tests. It was thought that this methodology would enable colonialists to assess the intelligence of their subjects and gain deeper insight into the locals’ psychology, potential psychological disorders, and personality. Rorschach tests and other projective tests – e.g. Horn-Hellersberg and mosaic tests – had gradually become part and parcel of the methodological arsenal of social anthropology in colonial settings. 206 This trend had been given a major impetus by scholars such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University during the Second World War, when a research project (‘Research in Contemporary Cultures’) commissioned by the US government was initiated to investigate the concept of ‘national character’, at a time when the understanding of cultural differences between the various nations involved in the war became an issue of strategic importance. 207 Balandier notes that he quickly became suspicious of the interpretative efficacy of these tests. This critique is another dismissal of ethnocentrism and of ‘our technical mastery’ (AA, 38). Like some of his contemporaries (he 2 03 Benoît de L’Estoile, ‘Rationalizing Colonial Domination? Anthropology and Native Policy in French-Ruled Africa’, in Benoît de L’Estoile, Frederico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud (eds), Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 30–57 (p. 52). Benoît de l’Estoile argues here that Balandier failed ‘to be elected to the Collège de France because he lost the contest to Claude Lévi-Strauss – who was to argue that ethnology was more valuable when it was “pure” rather than “diluted”’ (p. 53). 2 04 Copans, Georges Balandier, pp. 54–55. 2 05 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p. 175. 2 06 See Heather Macdonald, Cultural and Critical Explorations in Community Psychology: The Inner City Intern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), particularly chapter 4, ‘The Colonial Archive, Stereotypes, and the Practice of Psychological Assessment’, pp. 55–89. 2 07 William O. Beeman, ‘Introduction: Margaret Mead, Cultural Studies, and International Understanding’, in Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux (eds), The Study of Culture at a Distance (New York: Berghahn, 2000 [1953]), pp. xiv–xxxi.

246

Past Imperfect

refers here to the psychologist Roseline Barbé208 and the physician André Ombredane, who had published articles in the Revue Internationale du Rorschach), 209 Balandier became conscious of the cultural inadequacy of this methodological apparatus (AA, 38). He is also close to Fanon and the latter’s realization that the thematic apperception tests (TATs) conducted at the Blida-Joinville hospital were too ‘culture-bound’ to yield reliable results among his Algerian patients. 210 This reflection is epistemologically driven and resonates with other attempts by African thinkers, such as V.Y. Mudimbe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kwasi Wiredu, and Felwine Sarr, to examine the connections between extroversion and alienation and question the applicability, for non-Westerners, of systems of thought primarily developed in the West. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss Freudian psychiatrist born in 1884. 211 Ultimately, his inkblots reflect specific conditions of possibility: The problem with traditional European-American theories of personality functioning is that even unconscious mechanisms and structures are based upon Eurocentric lifestyle norms, values, and beliefs. The Rorschach test […] is anything but a culture-free test. Additionally, it should be noted that Freud believed that Africans had a stronger id […] and a weaker ego […] and superego […] compared to Europeans. 212

Along similar lines, Balandier wonders whether it is scientifically tenable to assume that the personality assessment methodologies perfected by Rorschach and others were valid in Africa: ‘How can we be sure that our instruments for measuring the mind, taken out of their element, still give satisfactory results?’ (AA, 38). These analytical grids – and their culture-specific grammars – fail to convey African complexity. Balandier acknowledges here that the colonial translation has stalled, and that Africa will not reciprocate the gift and pledge 2 08 In L’Empire des hygiénistes. Vivre aux colonies (Paris: Fayard, 2014), p. 254 (note 1), Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison shows, however, that she still wrote (in 1951) that ‘the IQ of Africans is almost without exception inferior to that of white people’. 2 09 See his obituary ‘André Ombredane (1898–1958)’ by Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger, 149 (1959), 278–280. 210 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2012), p. 232. 211 See Naamah Akavia, Subjectivity in Motion: Life, Art, and Movement in the Work of Hermann Rorschach (London: Routledge, 2013). 212 Macdonald, Cultural and Critical Explorations, pp. 63–64.

‘Customs’

247

loyalty to the Ur-Text and the taxonomies informing its epistemological deployment. This last quotation throws up an interesting translational issue: ‘taken out of their element’ poorly renders the original ‘dépaysés’ [‘Quelle certitude avons-nous que nos instruments à mesurer l’esprit donnent encore, dépaysés, des résultats satisfaisants?’]. 213 Alongside its compounds – the verb dépayser and the noun le dépaysement – this adjective/past participle (dépaysés) is an untranslatable. Of course, ‘taken out of their element’ gives the idea but does not quite carry over the more dramatic connotations of the original. ‘When uprooted’, ‘when displaced’, or ‘when relocated’ – although not as economical as the source – would translate more accurately the sense of spatial remoteness and unfamiliar translocation. Balandier notes an analogous dépaysement in the natives’ idiosyncratic use of the French language: Observing the French diction of my Lebou Friends, I noted the existence of a slight difference in our usage of the same words […] I should like to emphasize the frequency of a schematic and in a certain sense artificial use of our language, even in more advanced students. Literary teachers on the secondary level ascribed this deviation to what they term ‘dictionaryitis’. Words do not have the same density, nor do they always occur in the same semantic fields, when they are our instrument of communication and when they become those of the French-speaking African. From the outset, therefore, we run the risk of missing the nuances. (AA, 39)

Here, it seems that the French language has been submitted to a process of denaturalization as its usage in Africa is deemed artificial and deviant – an adjective, as seen in Chapter III, rich in ‘glottopolitical’ connotations. Balandier records a partial breakdown of communication between the ‘teachers’ and their ‘more advanced students’ and, hence, the failure of a certain type of paternalistic education. Given the utilitarian role played by language in the French colonial project, 214 there is no doubt that this remark is aimed at highlighting the disconnect between French words in Africa and in France. French educators in the colonies, as argued by Georges Hardy, one the most energetic advocates of the civilizing mission in the first part of the twentieth century, had 213 Balandier, Afrique ambiguë, p. 49. 214 See Cécile Van den Avenne, De la bouche même des indigènes. Échanges linguistiques en Afrique coloniale (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2017); and Laurent Dubreuil, Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression, trans. by David Fieni (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

248

Past Imperfect

the duty to encourage their African pupils to use clear and precise French as they were destined to take on clerical positions in the colonial administration. 215 Therefore it was imperative to dissuade them from using hyperbolic style, and accumulating images and ‘mots qui ne veulent rien dire’ [meaningless words]. 216 The École Normale William Ponty in Senegal, the most significant incubator of West African elites during the colonial period, 217 complied with this teaching philosophy in which clarity was favoured over literary and aesthetic pursuits. The school nonetheless produced African writers but, by and large, these early figures – Ousmane Diop Socé and Abdoulaye Sadji spring to mind – remained the representatives of what has been referred to as ‘littérature d’instituteurs’ [school teachers’ literature], that is, a type of literary production characterized by a high degree of linguistic compliancy and stylistic normativity. 218 At a time when Présence africaine was developing strategies to curtail the cultural dependency on mainland France, Balandier’s linguistic anxieties – indeed, it is fair to say that he does not welcome this situation in which ‘nuances’ are missed – anticipate works by Yambo Ouologuem, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Sony Labou Tansi and their own creative denaturalization and reterritorialization 219 of the French language. This reflection on language takes place in a quasi-revolutionary context – Balandier uses the expression ‘religious war’ (AA, 203) to describe the activities of the new churches founded by Matswa and Kimbangu – and at a moment when ethnic groups such as the Ba-Kongo and the Fang were reasserting their right to self-determination. 220 This 215 Georges Hardy, Une conquête morale. L’enseignement en A.O.F. (Paris: A. Colin, 1917), pp. 193–194. 216 Ibid., p. 193. 217 See Tony Chafer, ‘Education and Political Socialisation of a NationalColonial Political Elite in French West Africa, 1936–47’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35.3 (2007), 437–458. On Georges Hardy, see also Nicholas Harrison, Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), pp. 98–99. 218 See Bernard Mouralis, Littérature et développement (Paris: Silex, 1984). 219 On this much-discussed Deleuzian concept applied to African literature, see Grant Farred, ‘What Weight Can a language Bear? Translatability and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, special issue: ‘Translation of African Thought and Literature’, pp. 425–437. 220 Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa, pp. 16–17.

‘Customs’

249

politico-theological process is also eminently translational for it takes place at the crossroads between languages, traditions, discourses, and their narratives and histories. Prophetic movements in sub-Saharan Africa emerged in times of collective crisis. This phenomenon was, as argued earlier in this chapter, particularly acute in the three colonies inhabited by the Ba-Kongo. In light of increasing social unrest (itself fuelled by systemic racial discrimination), the early years of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of dissident figures who used ‘the language of the Bible to express their frustrations’. 221 Simon Kimbangu’s messianism was ambiguous because if it advocated some of the principles underpinning Kongo cosmogony, it also fought traditional religions – witchcraft and magic – in the name of the ‘restoration’ of a Christian ‘moral order’. 222 Colonial authorities failed to harness the pro-Christian dimension of Kimbanguism and, instead, suppressed it because they found themselves unable to control it. 223 Thus, the colonial situation – whether in French, Portuguese, or Belgian Africa (where Kimbanguism first developed in 1921) – became the terrain of a renewed religious fervour fuelled by the sense of alienation and dispossession experienced by the colonized. It appears that they were increasingly reluctant to tolerate God’s whiteness. Nganga Emmanuel (nganga means ‘priest’ in Kikongo, 224 but also ‘healer’ or ‘magician’)225 decided to leave the Catholic Church after befriending André Matswa. 226 Subsequently, he militated against ‘inequality’ and took part ‘in the first anti-white demonstrations’ but was deported to Chad by the colonial authorities. He also discovered that ‘servants of Christ did not side with the Bakongo’ and, after realizing that the ‘God 221 MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture, p. 10. 222 Ibid. 223 Ibid. 224 Mélice, ‘La Désobéissance civile’, p. 221. On this term, see also: Jean Pirotte, ‘De l’éclipse au retour? Regards historiens sur le flux et le reflux des religions africaines’, Histoire et missions chrétiennes, 3.3 (2007), 23–42 (p. 27). 225 MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets, p. 194. 226 On Matswa, in addition to the sources mentioned earlier in this chapter, see Lucette Woungly-Massaga, La Révolution au Congo. Contribution à l’étude des problèmes politiques d’Afrique centrale (Paris: Maspero, 1974); on Matswa and Simon Kimbangu as examined by Balandier, see Serge Mboukou, ‘Arpenteur, paysagiste et scrutateur de mondes en changement. Georges Balandier et l’observation impliquée des dynamiques ambiguës de la modernité’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 933–949.

250

Past Imperfect

worshipped within those walls was first of all French, his claims took on political overtones’ (AA, 205). In Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire, Balandier had already provided a sustained analysis of these messianic movements. With regard to Matswanism 227 and Kimbanguism, but also earlier analogous phenomena such as the ‘Ethiopian movement’ studied by the French anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt at the turn of the century, 228 Balandier identifies several recurring characteristics. Millenarianism mainly developed in extensively Christianized urban centres, particularly in industrialized zones – above all mining areas – where locals had been most exposed to labour exploitation and racial segregation. 229 These movements were also fuelled by a sense of ethnic identity which rendered obsolete the former clannish allegiances and generated protonationalist sentiments transcending the colonial borders as in the case of Kimbanguism. 230 These prophetic movements were modernist and enacted a sort of religious Aufhebung in the sense that they often both preserved and rejected elements of traditional cults, 231 and attempted to reassemble them with indigenized biblical elements. In an article dedicated to Sony Labou Tansi, who was reportedly initiated into Kongo secret societies, Phyllis Clark suggests that the type of religious syncretism displayed by Kimbanguism ‘represented an attempt to retain some sense of continuity with traditional beliefs that were being undermined by the institutionalization of a foreign value system’. 232 By the same token, Clark suggests that Kimbanguists ‘justified their religious practices […] with reference to the Bible, but explicit links to customary values were dissimulated in order to escape the severe repression at the hands of colonial authorities’. 233 This process of indigenization disrupted the 2 27 See Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara, trans. by David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 [1985]), pp. 194–195. 228 Maurice Leenhardt, Le Mouvement éthiopien au sud de l’Afrique de 1896 à 1899 (Cahors: Imprimerie de A. Coueslant, 1902). See also: James Clifford, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992 [1982]), p. 24. 229 Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa, p. 412. 230 Ibid., p. 414. 231 Ibid., pp. 415–416. 232 Clark, ‘Passionate Engagements’, p. 49. 233 Ibid.

‘Customs’

251

order on which colonialism had envisioned to export and translate its norms in sub-Saharan Africa. It also produced a supplement which cannot be exclusively ascribed to the logic of the original biblical texts. Interestingly, the ‘devotional literature’234 produced by the modern-day African prophets grew in a context in which Western evangelists were competing against one another. Indeed, Christianity never spoke with one voice on the continent and evangelization was conducted by churches with conflicting interests and agendas: the Catholic Church, and its many rival missionary orders, but also Protestant churches. 235 African messianic movements exploited these divisions to express their frustrations with the colonial order. Balandier shows that the members of the Ethiopian movement called upon the sacred authority of the Old Testament to discredit the view held by missionaries that polygamy and circumcision were ‘pagan’ practices. 236 Although an import of Western origin, the Bible, like language, became a weapon to target the colonizers themselves: ‘un savoir qui se retourne très aisément contre le colonisateur’ [a knowledge which can easily be used against the colonizer]. 237 It remains important to add, as pointed out by Wyatt MacGaffey, that the relationship between the Church and Kongo prophets was marked by a high degree of ‘ambivalence’ for the missionaries were ‘simultaneously the benevolent fathers […] bringing the gospel, and the enemy, depriving the Africans of the “true” gospel to the benefit of Europeans’. 238 Although not intellectuals in the classical sense of the word, these prophets – like their contemporaries Fanon, Césaire, and Senghor but with fewer means and in more trying circumstances – were also expressing their intention to overcome the unequal basis of the colonial situation: they ‘used, with great strategic skill, the cultural gap that separated them from the colonizers’. 239 Their battle was ‘politically 234 Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa, p. 415. 2 35 Ibid., pp. 412–413. 236 Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire, p. 425. This section, ‘Aperçus sommaires sur les mouvements prophétiques en Afrique du Sud’ [Brief overviews of the messianic movements in South Africa], pp. 421–427, was not included in the English version of the book. 237 Ibid., pp. 429–430. This particular clause was not included in the English translation. 238 MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets, p. 106. 239 Georges Balandier, Political Anthropology, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1970), p. 160.

252

Past Imperfect

significant’ but fought ‘in an indirect way [and] under cover of an apparently unpolitical traditionalism and neo-traditionalism’. 240 There is, however, no triumphalism here and no attempt to idealize these clandestine exegetic practices which act ‘like an image of this disturbed society’ (AA, 162). Balandier insists that these responses of the colonized are often haphazard and marked by the precariousness of indigenous living conditions, and that they can, as a result, serve ‘revolutionary’ but also ‘reactionary’ goals (AA, 161). They are, in other words, ambiguous, as they anticipate the various ideological paths adopted by post-independence regimes. To return to Balandier’s analysis of African art – as examined in Chapter II – these critical reappraisals of Western culture are the signs that ‘all may not be lost’ (AA, 117) and attest to the fact that ‘Africa was recovering her balance in order to begin again’ (AA, 128) – the French original of Balandier’s text, as mentioned in Chapter II, says ‘l’Afrique se “reprend”’241 – a turn of phrase first mooted by Senghor in ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ and announcing Mudimbe’s ‘Reprendre’ and the latter’s examination of political and artistic change in sub-Saharan Africa from the late 1940s to the postcolonial period. By means of a ‘doctored legend’ (AA, 164) from the Fang area of Gabon, Balandier demonstrates that the incorporation of biblical episodes into tribal legends fulfilled a number of functions. First, it played a very practical role as these biblical norms were taken over to provide an organizing framework ‘in the most diverse realms, ranging from the campaign against adultery and excessive dowries to the regulation of petty commerce’ (AA, 161). More fundamentally, however, these references are pride- and equality-restoring instruments: The Bible, which presents the Africans with a society comparable to their own, provides the possibility of transcending the inferiority they have suffered, of denying their state of ‘savagery’. By identifying with the people [of] the Book, 242 they can re-establish an equality which in their eyes is the condition of all future progress. (AA, 164)

Balandier adds that this desire to be associated with a prestigious historical civilization resonates with other attempts ‘in certain Negro

2 40 Ibid. 2 41 Balandier, Afrique ambiguë, p. 174. 2 42 I took the liberty of amending the translation here as ‘peuple du Livre’ was erroneously translated as ‘the people in the Book’; Balandier, Afrique ambiguë, p. 224.

‘Customs’

253

intellectual circles’ (AA, 164) to draw on ancient Egypt to articulate the historicity of African civilizations – and there is no doubt that he is thinking here about Cheikh Anta Diop, who is mentioned elsewhere in the book. This analogy is interesting and reveals that intellectual creativity – this desire to read, interpret, translate, recycle, and discard sequences of the Western cultural legacy – was not limited to exclusive university cenacles and it is thus easy to understand why Balandier uses the phrase ‘literature of resistance’ to qualify the ‘sacred texts’ produced by the ‘native messiahs’ (AA, 211). The innovations (religious and otherwise) elicited by the shock of civilizations provoked strong reactions in colonial circles, where they were either ‘ridiculed as a childish parody’ or ‘feared as signs of subversive intent’ (AA, 164). In this regard, Balandier recalls that some religious Fang movements borrowed their hierarchical titles – e.g. ‘president-in-chief’, ‘governors’, ‘assessors’, ‘majors’, and ‘commissaries’ – from colonial military and administrative organizations and that these disconcerting appropriations – indeed, these titles were displaced from their natural registers – ‘show a new desire for terms vividly expressing the idea of power and a need to “possess” the name in order to arrive, by a kind of magical process of the imagination, at the reality’ (AA, 164). The ambivalence of these cannibalizing practices is, incidentally, neatly captured by Jean Rouch’s ethno-documentary Les Maîtres fous (1955), in which Hauka priests impersonate the language and reproduce the insignia and sartorial markers of colonial officials to take hold of their authority and restore their own self-respect.243 The new discourses, cultural grammars, and languages generated by this wholesale borrowing baffled many a colonizer. Balandier reports the dissatisfaction of a French Catholic priest in the face of Bakongo religious schisms: All our troubles come chiefly from men who once had our confidence and are using our teachings to supplant us […] They combine everything in their ceremonies: fetishes, fits of possession, prayers they have stolen from us, gestures copied from the priest’s, processions that imitate ours. It’s disgraceful! They no longer want us as interpreters of God. They say that we alone enjoy the benefits of our intercession. (AA, 203).

The priest acknowledges a painful reality – and one that Balandier had experienced in his encounter with Nganga Emmanuel – that his former Bakongo parishioners will no longer accept the gift of his own 2 43 Jean Rouch (dir.), Les Maîtres fous (Films de la Pléiade, 1955).

254

Past Imperfect

exegesis. The great efficacy of these messianic churches is that they both ‘imitate’ the Christian organizational structures and are ‘reminiscent’ of the traditional rituals. In the French, Balandier uses the two verbal forms ‘imitent’ and ‘rappellent’244 to describe this dual process whereby the translation of the source is accompanied by a pledge of fidelity to the African text. Some of the most noteworthy contributions of the churches founded by Matswa and Kimbangu include, in Balandier’s words, the creation of ‘a language suited to the cultural level of the Congolese peoples’ and the development of ‘innovations’ which maintained their ‘familiar sociological landscape’ (AA, 216). This reterritorialization of the colonizers’ dépaysé language is not without its caveats, however. Foreshadowing some of the issues that have plagued African identity politics until today, Balandier warns that these politico-theological movements – and their underlying ‘xenophobia’ (or, at best, ‘anti-racist racism’ to use Sartre’s famous expression) – could easily slip into ‘mysticism’ and generate a bigoted ‘return to the past’ (AA, 217). From a temporal perspective, it is true that the disappearance of Matswa, for instance, had a profound effect on the Ba-Kongo’s ability to envisage their future. His long-awaited return never took place and heralded a new messianic time. Matswa became a saviour in absentia, and a similar process can be observed amongst Kimbangu’s followers. As there was no evidence of his death, Matswanists would demand the return of his bones until the independence of the Congo: When the colonizers declared that he was dead, the people demanded proof, socially constructing their challenge by transfiguring a name through the evocation of bones. At the regular elections held over a 15-year period, almost a third of voters in the isolation of the polling booths wrote on their ballot papers, like a magic spell, the word ‘bihissi’. The word means ‘bones’ in one of the Congolese vernacular languages. This terse inscription implies not just a substantification but a demand: ‘Since you (the colonizers) claim Matswa is dead, then show us his bones, or give us them back’. Showing the bones would prove the death; but the colonizers did not do that. In the absence of a definitive answer, writing the questioning word bihissi enabled the absent body of Matswa to be engendered. The Congolese thus converted Matswa into a saviour, in a messianic cult where he appears as both Christ and the inheritor of the lost kingdom of Kongo. 245

2 44 Balandier, Afrique ambiguë, p. 295. 2 45 Bazenguissa-Ganga, ‘The Bones of the Body Politic’, p. 447.

‘Customs’

255

This re-temporalization of the Congolese political horizon of expectation found its most evocative expression in the work of Sony Labou Tansi, who was, as intimated by Phyllis Clark, regarded as ‘a spiritual guide for the Kongo-Lari community in Brazzaville’.246 Indeed, his novels and plays are replete with prophetic figures who, whilst negotiating the strictures of European linear time and Kongo cyclical historicity, 247 are ambiguously located between biological death and symbolic revival. In these accounts of Congolese – and Kongo – political life under the neocolonial order, Sony Labou Tansi would invariably comment on the temporal legacies of colonialism, a system whose administrative structure was predicated on the difficult cohabitation of ‘two sectors’: ‘the customary and bureaucratic sectors which co-existed alongside one another with very different cosmologies’248 and temporal regimes. On a different but not unrelated note, the ‘mere verbal exercises’ mentioned earlier by Balandier with regard to Matswanism and Kimbanguism signals the postcolonial perpetuation of the ‘bureaucratic order’ established during the colonial era; 249 and, equally, the locals’ tendency to appropriate the colonial hierarchical nomenclature conjures up the threat of a violent political culture – Achille Mbembe’s postcolony – in which the incongruous, the grotesque, the stereotype, the parody, the simulacrum, and the hyperbole would become the main features underpinning the relationship between the ‘commandement’ and its subjects. 250 ***** This chapter has focused on Balandier’s most famous book and has registered the way in which Afrique ambiguë, which freely mixes sociological reflections, anthropological observations, cultural annotations, and personal memories, situates Africa and Africans in 2 46 Clark, ‘Passionate Engagements’, p. 50. 2 47 Ibid, p. 64 n. 24. 2 48 Ibid., p. 49. 2 49 Dominic Thomas, Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 132. 250 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), see chapter III, ‘The Aesthetics of Vulgarity’.

256

Past Imperfect

the turbulent political context of the 1950s. The book presents itself as a painstaking repudiation of racism and ethnocentrism even though it inevitably bears the marks of the time in which it was written, as illustrated by Balandier’s defence of clitoridectomy. Balandier does not pontificate about sub-Saharan Africa and nor does he pretend to tell his readers what Africa is and how Africa should be read. This essentialist posture would go against his ambition to break away from tribal anthropology and lay down the foundations of a ‘contemporary sociology of black Africa’. The African here and now that Balandier experiences in Senegal, Guinea, Gabon, Cameroon, or Congo lives a life that cannot be easily inventoried and broken down into the minimal units of an all-encompassing structure. Like Sartre and Fanon, who were writing at the same time but under very different conditions, Balandier focuses on the lived experiences of the Africans whom he observes and encounters. Afrique ambiguë also continues, but on the other side of the Atlantic, the mournful discussion initiated by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques. Like his Americanist colleague, who reviewed Sociologie des Brazavilles noires positively, Balandier regrets the disappearance of traditional cultures and the process of cultural uniformization engendered by Western colonialism, progress, and globalization. His outlook is less damning than Lévi-Strauss’s, however, and he is more inclined to argue that the idea of cultural disappearance may not be as final as it may seem. Afrique ambiguë offers a familiar catalogue of woes: the exploitation of the locals, the scars inflicted by forced migrations, the ecological ‘slow’ violence and ‘ruination’ caused by intensive industrialization, and the eradication of African customs. Sixty years after its publication, this book still speaks our language and demonstrates that the colonial situation – and the imbalances produced by this situation in the Third World, the developing world, the BRIC and the BRIICS economies – is still dictating the agenda now. However gloomy Balandier’s assessment might sound, there is also a sense that in the midst of subjugation and humiliation, the colonized are able to articulate their discontent. The ‘voiceless’ championed by ‘Terre humaine’ (Jean Malaurie’s book series) do, in fact, have a voice; and they use it creatively. If Balandier despairs at the psittacism of assimilated locals, Sartre’s well-documented ‘mensonges vivants’, he also maps out a fascinating proliferation of dissenting voices in areas where Christianity is well established and long-standing, such as the Kongo region which

‘Customs’

257

was first evangelized at the end of the fifteenth century. Balandier’s early enthusiasm for negritude and Présence Africaine takes an interesting direction for, implicitly, he equates the locals’ reappropriation – and reformation – of the Bible to an exegetic enterprise. Balandier recalls that the negritude precursors were first given a frosty reception by the colonial establishment: ‘Their fervent proselytism disturbed a conservatism which was comfortably retired into its shell and had little interest in the gifts of men it has assigned itself the mission of educating’ (AA, 247; my emphasis). The dialectical relationship between givers and receivers is crucial in this process of cultural ‘reprise’ and, as argued in this chapter, the modern African prophets’ uprising – ‘reprise d’initiative’ – was premised on a determination to read, interpret, translate, but also recycle, manipulate, and parody the colonial Ur-Text with their own resources, memories, cosmogonies, and interpretative grids. Calling on Sartre’s authority, Balandier remarks that negritude is ‘the literary answer to that messianic and popular hope which inspired Christianized Africa’ (AA, 248). The suggestion that negritude is the ‘answer to’ – rather than the premise of – African millenarianism is an unusual and refreshing perspective and one which certainly goes against conventional histories of decolonization in which the achievements of the ‘founding fathers’ of negritude – on the editorial board of Présence Africaine but also during the two Congresses of Black Writers and Artists in Paris and Rome – are given a prominent position and favoured over the actions and performances251 of little-known and often unpublished native intellectuals. Balandier’s contribution to the analysis of the colonial situation – the ‘colossal provocation of his “sociology of Black Africa”’252 – is considerable. His exploration of men such as Kimbangu and Matswa foreshadows other important works by Johannes Fabian, 253 Benoît Verhaegen, 254 Achille Mbembe, 255 and V.Y. Mudimbe256 251 See David Murphy (ed.), The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). 252 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 43. 253 Johannes Fabian, Jamaa: A Charismatic Movement in Katanga (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). 254 Benoît Verhaegen, Rébellions au Congo, 2 vols (Brussels: CRISP, 1966). 255 Achille Mbembe, Afriques indociles: christianisme, pouvoir et état en société postcoloniale (Paris: Karthala, 1988). 256 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, Tales of Faith: Religion and Political Performance in Central Africa (London: The Athlone Press, 1997).

258

Past Imperfect

on the links between Christianity, African churches, decolonization, and what the Congolese theologian Kä Mana called ‘christianisme de la catastrophe’ in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. 257 African prophets were significant political characters but Balandier refrains from idolizing them for, if they were figures of hope who prophesized better futures, they invariably failed to harness this hope and convert it into credible political projects. Ultimately, political and religious change, as recorded in Afrique ambiguë, remains ‘incomplete’ (i.e. imperfect). While Balandier insists that these initiatives interrupted the colonial continuum and hindered its logic, it is clear that it did not produce outright emancipation. In the last chapter (‘Landmarks’) added to the 1962 second edition, Balandier reflects on the recent political decolonization of Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Belgian Congo. He mentions here the emergence of new prophets – Ahmed Sékou Touré, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, but also the recently assassinated and subsequently mythified Patrice Lumumba – and surmises that the future of the continent will depend on its leaders’ ability to revisit and reinterpret African history: ‘A free Africa is looking to her distant past for the roots of her modern personality and sometimes for suggestions for her future boundaries – except where, contrariwise, she is learning to know her past better the better to condemn it’ (AA, 259). The English translation of this quote is a little clumsy. 258 ‘Roots’, in the plural, accurately renders the idea behind enracinement, a term suggesting a dynamic and developing process and the vision of Africa’s multi-rooted cultural and identitarian past. ‘Condemn’, on the other hand, does not properly translate contester, a verb implying a debate and a situation whereby arguments are challenged or questioned. Thus, the issue here is one of critical interrogation: the past, argues Balandier, will continue to be appraised by Africans to understand how temporal processes have shaped Africa, as an idea, but also as a real space with frontiers and evolving traditions. This examination of traditions – e.g. of what has been handed down to us from past generations – is a serious activity but one which must also 257 François Kabasele Lumbala Kä Mana, La Nouvelle évangélisation en Afrique (Paris: Karthala/Clé, 2000), pp. 84–85. 258 ‘L’Afrique indépendante renoue avec son passé lointain, elle y recherche l’enracinement de sa personnalité moderne et parfois la suggestion de ses frontières futures; à moins, qu’à l’inverse, elle n’apprenne à mieux le connaître pour mieux le contester.’ Balandier, Afrique ambiguë, p. 360.

‘Customs’

259

be conducted critically. This exercise, as argued by Kwasi Wiredu, must be driven by an attempt to decolonize concepts: By conceptual decolonization I mean two complementary things. On the negative side I mean avoiding or reversing through a critical conceptual self-awareness the unexamined assimilation in our thought (that is, in the thought of contemporary African philosophers) of the conceptual frameworks embedded in the foreign philosophical traditions that have had an impact on African life and thought. And, on the positive side, I mean exploiting as much as is judicious the resources of our own conceptual indigenous schemes in our philosophical meditations on even the most technical problems of contemporary philosophy. 259

The emergence of an African modernity has depended on the ability of African philosophers, but also policymakers, cultural actors, and ordinary citizens, to reflect on (and partly reverse) the process of extroversion to which the continent has been subjected in the past two hundred years. By using a biblical structure to reintroduce a Kongo cosmogony and Kongo rites – ‘oracular predictions and revelation, ecstatic manifestations, prophylactic blessings, spiritual healing, and “war” with hostile spiritual forces’260 – modern Kongo prophets were able to contest the hegemony of imported conceptual frameworks. This cannibalizing process, in turn, had the effect of challenging the hierarchy between rule givers and rule takers and to transform the colonial source text. The period immediately after the Second World War was rich in such experiments. The dependency mechanisms that had hitherto defined the relationships between the colonizers and the colonized were increasingly jettisoned. Although development and Westernization remained key tenets, this post-war period was also characterized by the emergence of a discourse arguing that development should be achieved with endogenous resources and tools since it also became widely accepted that ‘Europe underdeveloped Africa’. 261 Against those who contended that development would be engendered through ‘a generalized subordination of South to North’, another school of thought held the view that ‘the world economy, far from being a source of progress for all who participated in it, made the 2 59 Kwasi Wiredu, Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy: Four Essays (Ibadan: Hope, 1995), p. 22. 2 60 Clark, ‘Passionate Engagements’, p. 49. 2 61 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972).

260

Past Imperfect

rich richer and the poor poorer’. 262 By looking at the overlaps between culture, the environment, and dependency (in its political, religious, and economic aspects), there is no doubt that Balandier belonged to the latter category of thinkers.

2 62 Cooper, Africa Since 1940, pp. 91–92.

Conclusion ‘Decolonization: A Work in Progress’ Conclusion That time implies succession I do not deny. But that succession is first presented to our consciousness, like the distinction of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ set side by side, is what I cannot admit. If we cut it up into distinct notes, into so many ‘befores’ and ‘afters,’ we are bringing spatial images into it and impregnating the succession with simultaneity: in space, and only in space, is there a clear-cut distinction of parts external to one another. I recognize moreover that it is in spatialised time that we ordinarily place ourselves. Henri Bergson1

The main authors examined in this book were driven by an ambition to use scholarship to challenge the Eurocentric prejudices of the ‘colonial library’. They were representative of a more inclusive – i.e. dialogical – Franco-African community of scholars and therefore part of a sociological process, as described by Georges Balandier in ‘La Situation coloniale’, where interactions across racial and social divides, though still unequal, triggered methodological change and fresh intellectual insights. The encounter between French scholarship and sub-Saharan Africa was gradually institutionalized. This process was accelerated during the Third Republic with the creation of the museums mentioned in this study (the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro and Musée de l’Homme) and the development, in the early years of the twentieth 1 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. by F.L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001 [1910]), pp. 260–261.

262

Past Imperfect

century, of Africanism, of which Maurice Delafosse, building on some of the theories tested by predecessors such as Louis Faidherbe and Onésime Reclus, became one of the most prolific figures. The period (and the authors) under consideration here participated in the consolidation of this institutionalized framework after the Second World War and in a context gradually transformed by the rise of transnational bodies such as the United Nations. Indeed, the role played by UNESCO in the fight against racism and in the constitution of an African historical field was crucial in generating a ‘reorientation of history told from the perspective of colonial powers to the viewpoints, lives and activities of African peoples’. 2 As members or stakeholders of the various scholarly agencies (publishers and university departments) alluded to in these four chapters – the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, the Musée de l’Homme, the Office de la recherche scientifique d’outre-mer, and Présence Africaine – they were in a position to shape the new research priorities of the post-war era and contribute to the emergence of a more internationalist agenda, the influence of Anglo-American anthropological literature on Balandier’s early work being exemplary of this trend. These authors also bore witness to these new intellectual conditions which, whilst offering a better status to African scholars, were characterized by enduring ethnocentric assumptions (again on both sides of the racial divide) and commitment to a progressive and developmentalist conception of human history. The post-war ‘colonial situation’ coincides with a profound reassessment of ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’. I have attempted here to rely – loosely – on these Koselleckian metaphors to explore the temporal regimes informing anti-colonialism and decolonization. This book has privileged four closely interconnected ‘objects’ – history, art, language, and customs – to examine how time – ‘clock’ but also ‘lived’ time – can facilitate an understanding of the way in which past, present, and future were problematized in the period leading to the political independence of francophone sub-Saharan Africa. Tradition and modernity became the key terms to measure one’s ability and preparedness to reject or embrace Western progress and development. The interesting aspect, however, is that this binary – rejecting or 2 Ruth Bush, ‘Making History: Performances of the Past at the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts’, in David Murphy (ed.), The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), p. 98.

Conclusion

263

embracing – rarely appears absolute, as will be briefly illustrated now by returning to the two most prominent thinkers of this study, Cheikh Anta Diop and Georges Balandier. These two contemporary figures of post-war Africanism were also convinced and ‘committed’ (engagés) anti-colonialists and there is no doubt that their writings, endorsed by Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs, participated in the decolonization of Africanist knowledge. Anti-colonialism, as a concept, remains contested and definitionally elusive. If they both vehemently denounced the alienating effects of colonialism, Balandier and Diop continued to be partly dependent on colonial conditions of possibility. Balandier, who, incidentally, sat on Diop’s doctoral thesis panel, 3 was also employed by the French state and, as such, was engaged in the production of knowledge – for instance, the work he conducted with INED – ‘that most represents an applied, even colonial social scientific inquiry’,4 a point also made by Wyatt MacGaffey with regard to Balandier’s over-reliance on missionary sources in his explorations of African messianisms. 5 Diop’s profile is equally problematic. Although hailed by Aimé Césaire as one of the most significant black thinkers of his generation, 6 Nations nègres et culture and L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire remained partly dependent on evolutionist schemata and even racist views disseminated by the promoters of the notorious Hamitic hypothesis. Both authors favoured a return to history but their historization of Africa (and African studies) followed different methodological paths. As exemplified by his various forays into the autobiographical genre (from his only novel Tous comptes faits to Afrique ambiguë and, later, Conjugaisons), Balandier, who once said that he had had ‘une vie dans l’histoire’ [a life in history],7 insisted on examining the colonial situation 3 See Georges Balandier, Conjugaisons (Paris: Fayard, 1997), pp. 242–243. 4 Gregory Mann, ‘Anti-Colonialism and Social Science: Georges Balandier, Madeira Keita, and “the Colonial Situation” in French Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55.1 (2013), 92–119 (p. 111). Balandier, significantly, authored L’Anthropologie appliquée aux problèmes des pays sous-développés (Paris: Cours de Droit, 1955). 5 Wyatt MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets: Religion in a Plural Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 246. 6 Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1995 [1950]), pp 33–34. 7 Quoted by Nadège Mézié, in ‘Tous comptes faits: roman de (la) jeunesse de Georges Balandier’, L’Homme & la société, 207 (2018), 243–252 (p. 250).

264

Past Imperfect

from the perspective of the lived experience of its main protagonists.8 This posture is informed by the very discipline – ethnology – in which Balandier started his African career, but also, and as importantly, by a desire to break away from the discipline’s inherent violence and crude utilitarian foundations. Balandier’s Afrique ambiguë is also ‘a tribute paid by the ethnographer for the violence of having sought to constitute other people as objects’.9 Like L’Afrique fantôme and Tristes tropiques, ‘it is a reminder as well as a confession; an eyewitness account of the irresolvable contradictions that this culture carries within itself and that those it has constituted as its others have helped to reveal’.10 Diop’s approach, as seen in Chapters II and III, could not be more different. Where Balandier explores the African ‘present past’, and the effects of colonial modernity on environmental ‘slow violence’, daily life, gender relations, sexuality, material culture, messianic experiments, and linguistic usages, Diop’s anti-colonialism is above all informed by a reappropriation of the remote past and the argument that this past (and its material and immaterial signs) should be preserved, curated, but also promoted to the status of ‘adversary’ instruments to modernize Africa, stymie Senghorian francophonie, and endeavour to bypass neo-colonial ‘progress’. In this demonstration, in which the temporal implications of the ‘floating gap’ (Vansina) is completely overlooked, Diop makes the case for the negro origins of ancient Egypt and an absolute line of descent between this ancient civilization (its rituals, worldviews, societal constructs, and language) and contemporary Wolof and Serer cultures. Although underpinned by the works of some early supporters of the blackness of Egyptians such as Herodotus, Volney, Naville, and Amélineau, Diop’s historical thesis is overwhelmingly directed against the Western Egyptological tradition and its efforts to ‘falsify’ and ‘whitewash’ Egypt’s ancient past. Whilst taking to task Western scholars, the Senegalese historian continues to rely on their works and their translations of ancient texts – in Greek, Latin, and Arabic – at the expense of contemporary African and African-American proponents of the historical, cultural, and civilizational anteriority of a black 8 See André Mary, ‘Ethnographie de soi sous le “zéro équatorial”. Le chantier autobiographique de Georges Balandier’, L’Homme, 225 (2017), 11–40. 9 Vincent Debaene, Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature, trans. by Justin Izzo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 323. 10 Ibid.

Conclusion

265

Egypt – and here the theses defended by E.W. Blyden, Amy Jacques and Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois, or Carter G. Woodson spring to mind.11 However, it remains doubtful that mid-century racial criteria and taxonomies would have made much sense to ancient Egyptians, whether Egypt was constituted of blacks, whites, or a mixture of these two notional ethno-racial groupings.12 Diop’s examination of ‘nations nègres’ and attempts to retrieve the essential traits of their ‘culture’ (in the singular) relies on the idea of an original cradle, that is, of a spatial and temporal matrix where Africanness rhymes with rigour. Chris Marker and Placide Tempels – and also, but to a lesser extent, Joseph Ki-Zerbo – became the backers of this ‘politics of otherness’ which continued to tap into diffusionist and functionalist theories. Against rigour, and an overly ‘ordered’ (ordonné) descriptions of African cultures, Balandier promoted vigour and change and the idea that contemporary anthropologists should focus on social ‘contradictions’ and ‘conflicts’, and favour ‘historical time’ rather than ‘mythical time’.13 This examination of the African now and contention that this present is not timeless but fractured and the product of multiple singular experiences is also a means to analyse how and why Africans societies were affected – disrupted and changed – by the advent of colonial modernity. ‘Progress’ and ‘development’ are the other terms used, often critically, by Balandier to appraise colonial alienation but also pay tribute to indigenous know-how. In this examination of African cultures, traditions are seen not so much as being rigorous as vigorous. This distinction goes a long way to relativize the opposition between tradition and modernity. In fact, Balandier insists that the pastness of tradition – and its ‘invention’ by anthropologists – is never absolute but constantly submitted to transformative processes and reprises. In this sense, Balandier’s thought, whilst being shaped by post-war existentialism (and its examination of the intersubjective relations between selves and others), is also part and parcel of a wider critical vein in which the study of African modernity is conducted outside the teleological categories of Western modernity. But how can one escape modern teleology? Describing African messianisms as the ‘phase préliminaire’ of political nationalisms, Robert Buijtenhuijs, 11 See Aaron Kamugisha, ‘Finally in Africa? Egypt from Diop to Celenko’, Race and Class, 45.1 (2003), 31–60. 12 Ibid., p. 46. 13 Georges Balandier, ‘Tendances de l’ethnologie française (I)’, Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie, 27 (1959), 11–22 (p. 15).

266

Past Imperfect

one of Balandier’s former students, would argue that Balandier had remained trapped in evolutionist thinking.14 There is no doubt that the end of the Second World War constitutes a watershed in the history of colonialism. The United Nations’ drive to promote the political emancipation of ‘non-self-governing’ and ‘trust’ territories bears witness to the new geopolitical configuration heralded by this era. In the wake of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials, this period was also marked by an ethical and indeed legally binding attempt to define notions of genocide and crime against humanity. The authors analysed in this book all adhere to the idea that the reassessment of the French (and Belgian) colonial past – including slavery and the slave trade (as argued by Ki-Zerbo and Théodore Monod) – would pave the way for anti-colonial emancipation. That said, one must add that this period, whilst displaying all the signs of a historic moment, is still haunted by its colonial past (i.e. its ‘present’ – or ‘hot’ – past). Indeed, the distinction between the past and the present is somewhat irrelevant here, as illustrated by Henri Bergson’s reflection on the spatialization of modern time (see the epigraph to this conclusion, above). My aim in this book was, it goes without saying, to try and refrain from any evolutionist and teleological triumphalism and to give proper attention to the epistemological legacies of the ‘long’ nineteenth century. The period under scrutiny was still reliant on colonial discursivity and its allochronistic assumptions and, interestingly, these received ideas – the current ‘coloniality of power’ analysed by decolonial thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano15 and Walter Mignolo16 – have continued in some quarters to inform the way in which African history, art, languages, and traditions or customs are conceived until today. I have sought ‘to relate pasts and present dynamically’.17 As argued by the decolonial scholar Ramon Grosfoguel, decolonization, as a process, is elusive: it started with the first colonial ventures four hundred and fifty years ago but despite the political decolonization of the 1950–1960s, humanity is still 14 See Julien Bonhomme, ‘L’art de la dérobade. Innovations rituelles et pouvoir colonial en Afrique centrale’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 951–972 (p. 953). 15 Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural Studies, 21.2–3 (2007), 168–178. 16 See Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 17 Gary Wilder in Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 13.

Conclusion

267

largely shaped by a ‘colonial power matrix’.18 The Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020 testify to the longevity of this ‘matrix’. From a temporal perspective, then, the issues examined in this book are marked by some degree of indeterminacy: they belong to the past because irrevocably linked to a specific chain of events and writings published in the period 1945–1960, but they also speak to us now. The idea that imperialist metanarratives can still be of use to understand our present is forcefully made by Duncan Campbell in It for Others, a documentary reprising the anti-colonial arguments of Les Statues meurent aussi. These past events help us to remember our present and I am deliberately referring here to Remembering the Present, Johannes Fabian’s study of Katangese genre painting. Some of Tshibumba Kanda Matulu’s paintings clearly make reference to the period of Belgian rule but not so much to remember that past as reflect on the violent present in postcolonial Zaire: ‘Ostensibly, these are memories of the Belgian colonial past but every user then figured out that, while the reference was the past, the connotation was the present, namely Mobutu’s oppressive regime.’19 ‘Progress’ is still a concept in use to measure Africa’s ‘transformation’ in areas ranging from industrialization, agricultural production, the technological-scientific sphere, climate change, the Global Hunger Index (GHI), human rights, justice, ethics, and education. 20 Although it is now rarely called upon in its developmentalist (colonial, historicist) sense, at least at a conscious level, it is nevertheless still part of the (econometric) lexis of the many NGOs and transnational agencies – such as the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Trade Organization – responsible for the management of globalization. Progress, then, the modern concept examined by Koselleck to appraise the role of experience and expectation and the notion of historical change, has not lost its relevance and some argue that the related concept of development has ‘allowed for an internationalization of colonialism, as the one-to-one 18 Quoted by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni in Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2013), p. 3. 19 Johannes Fabian, ‘Key Note Lecture’, delivered at the symposium ‘Popular Imagination: Fiction with a Message’, Tropenmuseum, 22 September 2011, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uPpjpU1488 [accessed 19 June 2020]. 20 See Carlos Lopes, Africa in Transformation: Economic Development in the Age of Doubt (Cham: Springer International, 2019).

268

Past Imperfect

relationship of metropole to colony was transformed into a generalized economic subordination of South to North, of Africa and Asia to Europe and North America’. 21 Since the advent of anti-colonial thought, and later postcolonial and decolonial theories, however, the absoluteness of this reference has been increasingly challenged, not least in the field of economics, where it has been established that the informal sector, as argued by Felwine Sarr with regard to the Mourides of Senegal, is better suited to the development of a ‘relational economy’ based on endogenous sociocultural characteristics. 22 One of the main objectives of this book has been to reflect on the contribution of certain post-war thinkers to this debate. The arbitrary and non-evidential introduction of the modern idea of progress in the early years of Western colonial expansion – the fallacy of misplaced concreteness mentioned in Chapter I – responded to a clear need to dominate and provide justification for this domination. As such, progress became a self-congratulatory device employed by the missionaries, ethnographers, colonial administrators, linguists, and museum curators referred to in this study. The confiscatory logic informing this gesture has also been part and parcel of what Amy Allen, in The End of Progress, calls the ‘normative decisionism by means of which European Enlightenment theorists congratulated themselves on being more civilized, developed, and advanced than Native Americans and other colonized subjects’. 23 Though still tainted by developmentalist dichotomies, Tempels’s ethnophilosophical dissection of Bantu philosophy is driven by a determination, as argued by Alioune Diop in his preface to Tempels’s famous book La Philosophie bantoue, to reassess and rehabilitate African worldviews in a post-Holocaust world. C.A. Diop, who is also keen to remind his readers of the ravages of Nazi barbarism, goes further than the Belgian missionary as he takes it upon himself to prove, by means of signs and facts resurrected from the remote past, that the Greek miracle was, in fact, inspired by African models. This bold move foreshadows Fanon’s argument that ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from 21 Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 91. 22 Ibid, pp. 123–124. 23 Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 22.

Conclusion

269

the underdeveloped peoples.’24 Although their perspectives are different – Fanon focuses on material dispossession and C.A. Diop on historical falsification – they are both intent on highlighting the exploitative methods of Western imperialism and thus challenging a history which had hitherto been equated to a narrative of incremental human progress. Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of progress in Race et histoire deviates from this neat and homogenized narrative as the French anthropologist argues throughout this short UNESCO-sponsored pamphlet that progress is neither a totality nor a monolith. Lévi-Strauss challenges the reliability of the concept as it is often used – to congratulate cultures and civilizations heading in the same direction as ours. He also shows that Westerners tend to favour technological-scientific progress over other forms of progress, and he insists that each culture has its own specialities and that according to the ‘criterion chosen’ (the ‘ability to overcome […] inhospitable geographical conditions’, the understanding of the ‘connexion between the physical and the mental’, or the ‘cultivation of plants without soil’) the West, for all ‘its mastery of machines’, has made less progress. 25 Real progress, suggests Lévi-Strauss, is contingent on the ability of human cultures to create coalitions with other cultures whilst maintaining their diversity. Balandier’s praise of indigenous resources and techniques is predicated on an analogous premise. As illustrated by his analysis of prophetic movements in Central Africa, progress – in the most basic sense of the world, i.e. the march towards a better future – is no longer compatible, from the perspective of these modern-day African prophets, with the secular and religious conditions generated by colonialism. Balandier’s Afrique ambiguë registers the realization of some semi-assimilated intellectuals that this white mythology does not concern them and will not facilitate their own entry into a better future. Balandier’s description of his encounter with Nganga Emmanuel is symptomatic of this situation. The irony of his name – Nganga Emmanuel is, literally, the Kongo priest/healer/magician named after the white Christian God (Emmanuel) – captures this difficulty of reconciling two traditions and lifeworlds. In his description of Bantu philosophy, Tempels , like most Catholic missionaries after the publication of the apostolic letter Maximum Illud by Pope Benedict XV in 1919, was of the view that Bantu 24 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Penguin, [1961] 2001), p. 81. 25 Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, pp. 27–28.

270

Past Imperfect

values could become the cornerstone of a comprehensive evangelization of Africa. 26 Tempels operates in a static world, that of the ‘invention’ of the native, and is thus convinced of a mission in which the gift of Westernization has become the only possible horizon of expectation for ‘incipient human beings in need of tutoring’. 27 Balandier’s assessment, on the other hand, is much more circumspect. His meeting with Nganga Emmanuel takes place in the ‘colonial situation’, a shifting terrain in which the very definition of the native has increasingly become a subject of scientific contestation. Facing one another, and poised to enter a dialogue, the two interlocutors – Balandier and Nganga Emmanuel – are nevertheless aware that their ‘situation’ remains unequal and predicated on terms and norms ensnared in developmental theories. The authors analysed in this book were all intent on pursuing progressive goals of emancipation. Their works enable us to look back at the period 1945–1960 but also to ascertain how and why these intellectuals were in the process of imagining the conditions under which sub-Saharan Africa would develop after colonialism. These attempts are, with some caveats, aimed at producing better futures. Balandier’s new anthropology developed in the wake of Max Gluckman’s work in South Africa and crucially benefited from the intellectual input of the immediate post-war era. Indeed, there is no doubt that his rejection of Marcel Griaule’s approach resulted from existentialism and its proponents’ denunciation of ontological determinism. By privileging conflicts and contradictions (i.e. the present and the future) over timeless order, Balandier was instrumental in envisaging the emergence of the ‘African man’ – an issue examined by his first article in Présence africaine (‘Le noir est un homme’). His treatment of clitoridectomy is, it must be said, far less future-orientated but is interesting in hindsight for it anticipates, on part of (African) feminists, the development of the ‘politics of the womb’. If his exploration of gender and sexuality remains traditional and marked by a disproportionate interest in puberty rituals, fecundity, and heteronormative marriage customs, he also reads these classical anthropological sites against the backdrop of urbanization. His brief discussion of prostitution in African urban settings, for instance, is of the utmost significance for it allows us now to measure how much 26 On these issues, see my Le Congo belge et son récit à la veille des indépendances. Sous l’empire du royaume (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), pp. 242–244. 27 Valentin Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 68.

Conclusion

271

the research has progressed in areas that would have been deemed too aberrant or outrageous in the 1950s – and here (recent) works by Saheed Aderinto, 28 Ashley Currier, 29 Oyèrónké Oyéwùmí, 30 Sylvia Tamale, 31 or Chantal Zabus32 come to mind. Similarly, Balandier’s reflection on African industrialization and tin extraction prefigures the large body of scholarly works on the long-term environmental ravages of imperialism. By the same token, and to return to the gender issue, C.A. Diop’s focus on African matriarchy is instructive to identify changes in the literature since the 1950s for here, too, a binary reading of gender roles – matriarchy vs patriarchy – has been superseded by more fluid constructions as exemplified by the work of Ifi Amadiume on ‘male daughters and female husbands’33 or Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu. Diop’s promotion of Wolof (and Serer) to build an African modernity rather than assimilate modernity constitutes another important strand of this emancipative move and demand for ‘linguistic justice’. 34 In Something Torn and New, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o contends that this project of linguistic ‘restoration’ demands ‘a grand alliance of publishers, translators, financiers, and governments’. 35 He also argues that this ‘return’ to Africa of all intellectual works produced in the diaspora should be all-encompassing: It needs to be a major project throughout years to come. Afro-Caribbean and African-American thought translated into African languages would be a monumental spiritual return comparable in impact to that of 28 Saheed Aderinto, When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). 29 Ashley Currier, Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 30 Oyèrónké Oyéwùmí, The Invention of Woman: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 31 Sylvia Tamale, African Sexualities: A Reader (Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 2011). 32 Chantal Zabus, Out in Africa: Same-Sex Desire in Sub-Saharan Literatures & Cultures (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013). 33 Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed, 1987). 34 See Philippe Van Parijs, Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 35 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009), p. 126.

272

Past Imperfect

Europe’s recovery of its classical heritage […] if translated into African languages the works by these authors would create a shared heritage across the continent and diaspora. In time, translations of what is produced in the diaspora would become routine, part of an ongoing remembering practice. 36

Cheikh Anta Diop’s call for a renaissance of African languages has since then generated notable responses. Boubacar Boris Diop’s Céytu series (as seen in Chapter III) is exemplary of this trend. C.A. Diop’s rejection of the francophonization of West African literary culture resonates with other experiments to counter the hegemony of the Parisian publishing centre. 37 Like Amadou Hampâté Bâ, who, whilst demonstrating all the attributes of linguistic evolution within the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, militated, in the footsteps of his Sufi teacher Tierno Bokar, for an Africanized version of Islam in Hausa and Fula (rather than French or Arabic), C.A. Diop also attempted to elevate local languages to the status of progressive knowledge and independence producing instruments. Issues of (mis)appropriation and reappropriation are of the utmost significance to understanding the temporal echoes highlighted in this book, that is, the many resurgences of the colonial in the postcolonial and reprendre (Mudimbe) of traditions. The link between the documentaries Les Statues meurent aussi and It for Others illustrates this sense of continuity and bears witness to the fact that the moral and ethical questions posed by Les Statues regarding issues of artistic patrimony have not been answered yet. In their Restituer le patrimoine Africain, Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy show that the plundering of European artworks by Napoleonic armies at the beginning of the nineteenth century was regarded by the vanquished as a ‘crime contre l’humanité’ [crime against humanity]. 38 After the French defeat at the battle of Waterloo, these European pieces, which in the meantime had become 36 Ibid., p. 127. 37 See Ruth Bush, Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization, 1945–1967 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016); Claire Ducournau, La Fabrique des classiques africains. Écrivains d’Afrique subsaharienne francophone (1960–2012) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2017); Audrey Small, ‘Imagining Twenty-first-century Literature via Print Publishing: Problems for “Francophone” Literature and the Case of Guinea’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 50.3 (2013), 399–410. 38 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Restituer le patrimoine africain (Paris: Philippe Rey/Seuil, 2018), p. 20.

Conclusion

273

the ‘inviolable’39 legal property of museums and private collectors, were returned to their original owners on moral and ethical (rather than legal) grounds and because, ultimately, this was deemed to be the proper course of action ‘entre peuples civilisés’ [between civilized peoples].40 Despite this precedent, and Emmanuel Macron’s personal endorsement of this process of restitution, it seems that the legal owners of African objects in France and beyond still pay lip service to African claimants. This need for restitution – of time lost, stolen artefacts, usurped words, and distorted customs – is perhaps, and to conclude, the most tangible sign that decolonization is still a work in progress.

39 Ibid., p. 21. 40 Ibid., p. 22.

Bibliography Bibliography

Aanza, Sinzo, Généalogie d’une banalité (La Roque d’Anthéron: Vents d’Ailleurs, 2015). Abrams, Lynn, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2016). Adam, Barbara, Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). Adande, Alexandre, ‘L’Impérieuse nécessité des musées africains’, in Georges Balandier and Jacques Howlett (eds), L’Art nègre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2010 [1951]), pp. 163–166. Aderinto, Saheed, When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). Aggarwal, Kusum, Amadou Hampâté Bâ et l’africanisme. De la recherche anthropologique à l’exercice de la fonction auctoriale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). Agier, Michel, ‘Un pont sur la Manche. Vers une anthropologie situationnelle’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 921–932. Akavia, Naamah, Subjectivity in Motion: Life, Art, and Movement in the Work of Hermann Rorschach (London: Routledge, 2013). Aliyu, Abubakar Sadiq, Timothy Alexander Mousseau, Ahmad Termizi Ramli, and Yakubu Aliyu Bununu, ‘Radioecological Impacts of Tin Mining’, Ambio, 44 (2015), 778–787. Allen, Amy, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Allen, Thomas M. (ed.), Time and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Alzoubi, Mamoun F.I., Richard Wright and Transnationalism: New Dimensions to Modern American Expatriate Literature (New York: Routledge, 2018). Amadiume, Ifi, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed, 1987). Amselle, Jean-Loup and Emmanuelle Sibeud (eds), Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie, l’itinéraire d’un africaniste (1870–1926) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998).

276

Past Imperfect

Anderson, Benedict R., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006). Apter, Andrew, Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Apter, Emily, ‘On Translation in a Global Market’, Public Culture, 13.1 (2001), 1–12. Arnaud, Dominique, ‘Will the Third Millennium Be Circumcised? An Interview with Chantal Zabus’, in Chantal Zabus (ed.), Fearful Symmetries: Essays and Testimonies around Excision and Circumcision (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 199–209. Assmann, Aleida, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). ——, ‘Transformations of the Modern Time Regime’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 39–56. Bâ, Amadou Hampâté, Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar. Le sage de Bandiagara (Paris: Seuil, 1980). Bâ, Amadou Hampâté and Marcel Cardaire, Tierno Bokar. Le Sage de Bandiagara (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1957). Bâ, Mariama, Bataaxal bu gudde nii, trans. by Arame Fall and Mame Younouss Dieng (Paris: Éditions Zulma, 2016). Balandier, Georges, ‘Le Noir est un homme’, Présence Africaine, 1 (1947), 31–36. ——, Tous comptes faits (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1947). ——, ‘O. Mannoni: Psychologie de la Colonisation’, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 9 (1950), 183–186. ——, ‘Où l’ethnologie retrouve l’unité de l’homme’, Esprit, 166.4 (April 1950), 596–612. ——, ‘La Situation coloniale: approche théorique’, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 11 (1951), 44–79. ——, ‘Contribution à une sociologie de la dépendance’, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 12 (1952), 47–69; reprinted in Sens et puissance as ‘Sociologie de la dépendance’, pp. 151–168. ——, ‘L’utopie de Benoît Ogoula Iquaqua’, Les Temps modernes, 84–85 (October–November 1952), 771–781. ——, L’Anthropologie appliquée aux problèmes des pays sous-développés (Paris: Cours de Droit, 1955). ——, Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire. Dynamique des changements sociaux en Afrique centrale (Paris: PUF, 1955). ——, Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires (Paris: Armand Colin, 1955). ——, ‘Analyse du problème’, in Balandier (ed.), Le ‘Tiers monde’. Sous-développement et développement, preface by Alfred Sauvy (Paris: PUF, 1956), pp. 135–137.

Bibliography

277

——, ‘Brèves remarques pour conclure’, in Balandier (ed.), Le ‘Tiers monde’. Sous-développement et développement, preface by Alfred Sauvy (Paris: PUF, 1956), pp. 369–380. ——, ‘Introduction de la première édition’, in Balandier (ed.), Le ‘Tiers Monde’. Sous-développement et développement, preface by Alfred Sauvy (Paris: PUF, 1956), pp. 13–17. ——, ‘Le Contexte socio-culturel et le coût social du progrès’, in Balandier (ed.), Le ‘Tiers monde’. Sous-développement et développement, preface by Alfred Sauvy (Paris: PUF, 1956), pp. 289–303. ——, ‘Les Littératures de l’Afrique et des Amériques noires’, in Raymond Queneau (ed.), Histoires des littératures, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1956), pp. 1536–1567. ——, ‘Tendances de l’ethnologie française (I)’, Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie, 27 (1959), 11–22. ——, Afrique ambiguë (Paris: Plon, 1962 [1957]). ——, Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision, trans. by Helen Weaver (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966). ——, Anthropologie politique (Paris: PUF, 1967). ——, ‘The “Colonial Situation” Concept’, in The Sociology of Black Africa: Social Dynamics in Central Africa, trans. by Douglas Garman (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 21–56. ——, Political Anthropology, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1970). ——, Sens et puissance (Paris: PUF, 1971). ——, Histoire d’autres (Paris: Stock, 1977). ——, Conjugaisons (Paris: Fayard, 1997). ——, ‘Extraits d’Histoire d’autres de Georges Balandier’, Gravidha. Revue d’anthropologie et d’histoire des arts, 10 (2009), 170–173. ——, ‘Les conditions sociologiques de l’art noir’, in Georges Balandier and Jacques Howlett (eds), L’Art nègre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2010 [1951]), pp. 59–67. ——, Le Royaume de Kongo du XVe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2013 [1965]). Balandier, Georges and Jacques Howlett (eds), L’Art nègre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2010 [1951]). Bandia, Paul F., Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2008). ——, ‘Cheikh Anta Diop: Translation at the Service of History’, in John Milton and Paul Bandia (eds), Agents of Translation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), pp. 209–227. Barber, Karin, ‘African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism’, Research in African Literatures, 26.4 (1995), 3–30.

278

Past Imperfect

——, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Bassnett, Susan and Christina Schaeffner (eds), Political Discourse, Meaning and Translation (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010). Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi, ‘Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars’, in Bassnett and Trivedi (eds), Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–18. Bastide, Roger, Sociologie et Psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 1950). ——, Les Religions africaines au Brésil: vers une sociologie des interpénétrations de civilisations (Paris: PUF, 1960). Basu, Paul (ed.), The Inbetweenness of Things: Materializing Mediation and Movement between Worlds (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Batchelor, Kathryn, Decolonizing Translation: Francophone African Novels in English Translation (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2009). Bayart, Jean-François, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, trans. by Mary Harper, Christopher Harrison, and Elizabeth Harrison (London: Longman, 1993). Bazenguissa-Ganga, Rémy, ‘The Bones of the Body Politic: Thoughts on the Savorgnan de Brazza Mausoleum’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35.2 (March 2011), 445–452. Becker, Jérôme, Vie en Afrique, ou trois ans dans l’Afrique Centrale, 2 vols (Paris: J. Lébègue, 1887). Beeman, William O., ‘Introduction: Margaret Mead, Cultural Studies, and International Understanding’, in Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux (eds), The Study of Culture at a Distance (New York: Berghahn, 2000 [1953]), pp. xiv–xxxi. Beke, Dirk, ‘Land-Law in Central Belgian Africa’, in Jaap de Moor and Dietmar Rothermund (eds), Our Laws, Their Lands: Land Laws and Land Use in Modern Colonial Societies (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1994), pp. 57–67. Bekers, Elisabeth, Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). Bennabi, Malek, Vocation de l’Islam (Paris: Seuil, 1954). Bennett, Norman R., Arab versus European: Diplomacy and War in Nineteenth-Century East Central Africa (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986). Bentouhami, Hourya and Elsa Dorlin (eds), Actuel Marx, 55 (2014), special issue: ‘Frantz Fanon’. Bergson, Henri, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. by F.L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001 [1910]).

Bibliography

279

Bertillon, Alphonse, Ethnographie moderne. Les races sauvages (Paris: G. Masson Editeur, 1883). Bertina, Arno, Des lions comme des danseuses (Lille: Éditions La Contre Allée, 2015). Bevernage, Berber and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking Up Time: Negotiating the Borders Between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). Bhabha, Homi, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 121–131. Blanckaert, Claude (ed.), Le Musée de l’Homme: histoire d’un musée laboratoire (Paris: Muséum national d’histoire naturelle/Éditions Artlys, 2015). Blier, Suzanne Preston, Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, c. 1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Bloch, Maurice, ‘New Foreword’, in Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. by Pamela Powesland, with a new foreword by Maurice Bloch (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), pp. v–xx. Bloomfield, Leonard, Language (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1933). Bonhomme, Julien, ‘L’art de la dérobade. Innovations rituelles et pouvoir colonial en Afrique centrale’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 951–972. Bontinck, Frans (ed.), Aux Origines de la philosophie bantoue. La correspondance Tempels-Hulstaert (1944–1948), Bibliothèque du Centre d’études des religions africaines X (Kinshasa: Faculté de Théologie catholique, 1985). Boukari-Yabara, Amzat, Africa Unite. Une histoire du Panafricanisme (Paris: La Découverte, 2017 [2014]). Brelsford, Vernon, Primitive Philosophy (London: J. Bale, Sons & Danielsson Ltd, 1935). Brennan, Timothy, ‘From Development to Globalization: Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Theory’, in Neil Lazarus (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 120–138. Brenner, Louis, Controlling Knowledge: Religion, Power, and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). ——, ‘Introduction’, in Amadou Hampâté Bâ, A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar, ed. by Roger Gaetani, preface by R. Gaetani and Fatima Jane Caswit/author’s preface to the 1980 French ed. (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2008), pp. xv–xxvii.

280

Past Imperfect

Brown, Mark, ‘Turner Prize 2014: Duncan Campbell Wins Britain’s Prestigious Art Award’, Guardian, 1 December 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2014/dec/01/turner-prize-2014-duncan-campbell-wins [accessed 22 July 2015]. Bulmer, Martin, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Burns, Alan, Colour Prejudice, with Particular Reference to the Relationship between Whites and Negroes (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948). Burroughs, Robert, African Testimony in the Movement for Congo Reform: The Burden of Proof (London: Routledge, 2018). Bush, Ruth, Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization, 1945–1967 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). ——, ‘Making History: Performances of the Past at the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts’, in David Murphy (ed.), The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 97–112. Calçada, Miquel, ‘Analysis of the Algerian War of Independence or Les Événements: A Lost Opportunity for Peace’, Journal of Conflictology, 3.2 (2012), 52–61. Calvet, Louis-Jean, Linguistique et colonialisme. Petit traité de glottophagie (Paris: Payot, 1974). ——, La Guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques (Paris: Payot, 1987). Camara, Babacar, Marxist Theory, Black/African Specificities, and Racism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). Campbell, Duncan (dir.), Bernadette (2008). —— (dir.), It for Others (2013). Cardaire, Marcel, L’Islam et le terroir africain (Dakar: IFAN, 1954). Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). Cavaillé, Jean-Pierre, ‘Les borborygmes des patois africains’, Mediapart, 9 January 2014, https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/les-batailles-de-legalite/ article/090114/les-borborygmes-des-patois-africains [accessed 4 July 2018]. Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California press, 1984). Césaire, Aimé, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, preface by André Breton (Paris: Bordas, 1947 [1939]). ——, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1995 [1950]). ——, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land/Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, trans. by Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard, introduction by Mireille Rosello (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1995). ——, Nawetu deret, trans. by Boubacar Boris Diop (Paris: Éditions Zulma, 2016).

Bibliography

281

Chafer, Tony, ‘Education and Political Socialisation of a National-Colonial Political Elite in French West Africa, 1936–47’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35.3 (2007), 437–458. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). ——, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, with a new preface by the author (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 [2000]). Chamarette, Jenny, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi/Statues also Die’, Sense of Cinema, 52 (2009), http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/les-statuesmeurent-aussi/ [accessed on 27 July 2015]. Chamberlain, Lori, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2000 [1985]), pp. 314–330. Chaudemanche, Alice, ‘Une saison en wolof’, Études Littéraires Africaines, 46 (2018), 59–72. Cheah, Pheng, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Cheza, Maurice, ‘L’Accompagnement armé des missionnaires dans l’Afrique des Grands Lacs’, in Jean Pirotte (ed.), Les Conditions matérielles de la mission. Contraintes, dépassements et imaginaires, XVIIe –XXe siècles (Paris: Khartala, 2005), pp. 93–103. Clark, Phyllis Suzanne ‘Passionate Engagements: A Reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s Private Ancestral Shrine’, Research in African Literatures, 31.3 (2000), 39–68. Clifford, James, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992 [1982]). ——, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Cole, Teju, ‘The White Savior Industrial Complex’, The Atlantic, 12 March 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-whitesavior-industrial-complex/254843/ [accessed 19 June 2020]. Colleyn, Jean-Paul, ‘Georges Balandier, du village lébou au monde global’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 819–823. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Combe, Sonia, Archives interdites. Les peurs françaises face à l’histoire contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994). Conklin, Alice, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

282

Past Imperfect

——, ‘The New “Ethnology” and “La Situation Coloniale” in Interwar France’, in Emmanuelle Saada (ed.), French Politics, Culture and Society, 20.2 (2002), special issue: ‘Regards croisés: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Colonial Situation’, 29–46. ——, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Connell, John, ‘“Trouble in Paradise”: The Perception of New Caledonia in the Australian Press’, Australian Geographical Studies, 25.2 (October 1987), 54–65. Coombes, Annie E., Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). Cooper, Frederick, ‘Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa’, in Nicholas B. Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 209–246. ——, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). ——, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). ——, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). Cooper, Frederick and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Cooper and Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1–56. Cooper, Sarah, Chris Marker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). Copans, Jean, ‘La “situation coloniale” de Georges Balandier: notion conjoncturelle ou modèle sociologique et historique?’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 110 (2001), 31–52. ——, Georges Balandier. Un anthropologue en première ligne (Paris: PUF, 2013). ——, ‘Les soixante-dix ans (1946–2015) d’écriture buissonnière de Georges Balandier’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 833–861. Coppinger, William, Progress in Africa (Washington City: Colonization Building, 1889). Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara, trans. by David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 [1985]). ——, ‘Présence Africaine: History and Historian of Africa’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 59–94.

Bibliography

283

——, ‘Contribution de Georges Balandier à la genèse de l’histoire africaine de langue française’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 825–832. Corrigan, Timothy, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Coundouriotis, Eleni, Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) Crahay, Franz, ‘Le Décollage conceptuel: conditions d’une philosophie bantoue’, Diogène, 52 (1965), 61–64. Cronin, Michael, ‘Translation Studies and the Common Cause’, Modern Language Open, 1 (September 2018), 1–7, https://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/articles/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.225/ [accessed 19 July 2019]. Crosby, Alfred, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 [1986]). Cruise O’Brien, Donal B., The Mourides of Senegal: The Political and Economic Organization of an Islamic Brotherhood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Currier, Ashley, Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Damas, Léon Gontran, Poètes d’expression française, 1900–1945. Anthologie (Paris: Seuil, 1947). Debaene, Vincent, ‘La Collection Terre humaine: dans et hors de la littérature’, March 2007, https://www.fabula.org/atelier.php?La_collection_Terre_ humaine%3A_dans_et_hors_de_la_litt%26eacute%3Brature [accessed 3 September 2019]. ——, Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature, trans. by Justin Izzo (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). De Groof, Matthias (ed.), Lumumba in the Arts (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020). Delafosse, Maurice, Haut-Sénégal-Niger. Le pays, les peuples, les langues, l’histoire, les civilisations, with a preface by M. le Gouverneur Clozel, 3 vols (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1912). ——, Esquisse générale des langues de l’Afrique, et plus particulièrement de l’Afrique française (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1914). ——, La Langue mandingue et ses dialectes (malinké, bambara, dioula), 2 vols (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1929–1955). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan, foreword by Réda Bensmaïa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Derrida, Jacques, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967). ——, Archive Fever: Freudian Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). ——, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’, Quinzièmes Assises de la Traduction littéraire (Arles 1998) (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999), pp. 21–47.

284

Past Imperfect

Desjardins, Thierry, Nouvelle-Calédonie. Ils veulent rester français (Paris: Plon, 1985). ——, ‘A hue, à dia et à vau-l’eau’, 15 December 2013, http://www.thierrydesjardins.fr/2013/12/a-hue-a-dia-et-a-vau-leau/ [accessed 5 July 2018]. Diabaté, Moustapha: ‘Du sous-développement au blocage au développement’, Présence Africaine, 79.3 (1971), 17–33. Diagne, Souleymane Bachir, L’Encre des savants. Réflexions sur la philosophie en Afrique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2013). ——, ‘Philosophie africaine: histoire d’une expression’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), International Journal of Francophone Studies, 18.2–3 (2015), special issue: ‘Francophone African Philosophy and the Aftermath of the Empire’, 385–394. Dieng, Amady Aly, ‘L’abolition de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises d’une commémoration à l’autre, Présence Africaine, 157 (1998), 28–30. Diop, Alioune, ‘Niam n’goura ou les raisons d’être de Présence Africaine’, Présence Africaine, 1 (1947), 7–14. ——, ‘Niam M’Paya ou de la fin que dévorent les moyens’, preface in Placide Tempels, La Philosophie bantoue, trans. by Antoine Rubbens (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1949), n. pag. Diop, Boubacar Boris, Murambi, le livre des ossements (Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions ivoiriennes, 2000). ——, ‘Le Dilemme des écrivains africains: qui a peur du wolof?’, Le Monde diplomatique, 756 (March 2017), 17. Diop, Cheikh Anta, ‘Quand pourra-t-on parler d’une renaissance africaine?’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, 57–65. ——, The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa: The Domain of Patriarchy and Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962). ——, Parenté génétique de l’égyptien pharaonique et des langues négroafricaines: processus de sémitisation (Dakar: IFAN – Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1977). ——, Nations nègres et culture. De l’antiquité nègre égyptienne aux problèmes culturels de l’Afrique noire aujourd’hui (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1979 [1955]). ——, L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire. Domaines du patriarcat et du matriarcat dans l’antiquité classique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1982 [1959]). ——, Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State, trans. by Harold J. Salemson, with an interview by Carlos Moore (Westport, CT: Africa World Press Edition/Lawrence Hill & Company, 1987).

Bibliography

285

Diop, Papa Samba, ‘Introduction à l’œuvre de Boubacar Boris Diop: du français au wolof’, Études Littéraires Africaines, 46 (2018), 19–29. Dorlin, Elsa and Hourya Bentouhami (eds), ‘Dossier Frantz Fanon’, Actuel Marx, 55 (2014), 12–118. Dozon, Jean-Pierre, ‘Georges Balandier et la reconstruction d’Après-guerre de la sociologie française’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 809–818. Dreyfus, Martine and Caroline Juillard, Le Plurilinguisme au Sénégal. Langues et identités en devenir (Paris: Karthala, 2004). Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg, 1903). Dubreuil, Laurent, Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression, trans. by David Fieni (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Ducournau, Claire, ‘The Ambivalent Portrayal of Colonialism in the Memoirs of Amadou Hampâté Bâ’, Research in African Literatures, 46.3 (September 2015), 68–84. ——, La Fabrique des classiques africains. Écrivains d’Afrique subsaharienne francophone (1960–2012) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2017). Durkheim, Émile, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Le système totémique en Australie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912). [Dutrieux, Pierre] Association Internationale Africaine, Vocabulaire françaiskisouahili (Brussels: Verhavert, 1880). Eboussi-Boulaga, Fabien, ‘Le Bantou problématique’, Présence Africaine, 66 (1968), 4–40. Errington, Joseph, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ‘Introduction: Philosophy and the (Post)colonial’, in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 1–21. ——, (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997). Fabian, Johannes, Jamaa: A Charismatic Movement in Katanga (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). ——, ‘Missions and the Colonization of African Languages: Developments in the Former Belgian Congo’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 17.2 (1983), 165–187. ——, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938, foreword by Edward Said (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). ——, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ——, Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

286

Past Imperfect

——, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects, with a foreword by Matti Bunzl (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 [1983]). ——, ‘What is African Popular Art doing in a Museum: Key Note Lecture’, Symposium ‘Popular Imagination: Fiction with a Message’, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, 22 September 2011, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=3uPpjpU1488 [accessed 19 June 2020]. Faidherbe, Louis, Essai sur la langue poul, grammaire et vocabulaire (Paris: Maisonneuve et Cie, 1875). Fanon, Frantz, L’An V de la Révolution algérienne (Paris: François Maspero, 1959). ——, Les Damnés de la terre, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Maspero, 1961). ——, Sociologie d’une révolution. L’an V de la révolution algérienne (Paris: Maspero, 1968). ——, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Penguin, [1961] 2001). ——, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann, forewords to the 2008 edition by Ziauddin Sardar and Homi K. Bhabha (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1967]). Farred, Grant, ‘What Weight Can a Language Bear? Translatability and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 81.3 (2018), special issue: ‘Translation of African Thought and Literature’, 425–437. Faty, El Hadji Abdou Azi, ‘Les enjeux du processus de grammatisation du Pulaar vus à partir de la grammaire de la langue Poul (Faidherbe, 1882)’, Glottopol, 20 (2012), 55–68. Fauvelle, François-Xavier, L’Afrique de Cheikh Anta Diop, preface by Elikia M’Bokolo (Paris: Khartala. 1996). Faye, Mbayang Sarr, ‘Un pari réussi avec d’énormes défis à relever: la collection Ceytu traduit “Une si longue lettre” en wolof’, 15 April 2016, http:// www.seneplus.com/culture/un-pari-reussi-avec-denormes-defis-relever [accessed 28 June 2018]. Ficquet, Eloi and Benoît Hazard, ‘Lignes de force et traits de fuite d’un père fondateur’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 795–807. Firth, Raymond, Elements of Social Organization (London: Routledge, 2004 [1951]). Fleisch, Axel and Rhiannon Stevens (eds), Doing Conceptual History in Africa (New York: Berghahn, 2016). Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). ——, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 2002).

Bibliography

287

Fraiture, Pierre-Philippe, Le Congo belge et son récit à la veille des indépendances. Sous l’empire du royaume (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). ——, La Mesure de l’autre. Afrique subsaharienne et roman ethnographique de Belgique et de France (1918–1940) (Paris: Éditions Honoré Champion, 2007). ——, V.Y. Mudimbe: Undisciplined Africanism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). ——, ‘An Untimely Concept: Decolonization and the Works of Mudimbe, Mbembe and Nganang’, in Axel Fleisch and Rhiannon Stevens (eds), Doing Conceptual History in Africa (New York: Berghahn, 2016), pp. 213–236. Fraiture, Pierre-Philippe and Daniel Orrells (eds), The Mudimbe Reader (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016). Fraser, Douglas, Primitive Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962). Frémeaux, Jacques, ‘French Unity: The Dream of a United France (1946–1960)’, in Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas (eds), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, trans. by Alexis Pernsteiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 333–340. Freund, Bill, Capital and Labour in the Nigerian Tin Mines (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981). Fritzsche, Peter, ‘The Ruins of Modernity’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders Between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 57–68. Frobenius, Leo, Atlantis: Volksmärchen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas, 12 vols (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1921–1928). Gagné, Natacha and Marie Salaün, ‘L’Effacement du “colonial” ou “seulement de ses formes les plus apparentes”? Penser le contemporain grâce à la notion de situation coloniale chez Georges Balandier’, Revue Internationale d’Anthropologie Culturelle & Sociale – CARGO, 6–7 (2017), 219–237. Gaines, Kevin, ‘Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana: Black Radicalism and the Dialectics of Diaspora’, Social Text, 19.2 (2001), 75–101. Galton, Francis, Finger Prints (London: Macmillan, 1892). Gautier, Émile-Félix, L’Afrique noire occidentale. Esquisse des cadres géographiques (Paris: Librairie Larose, 1935). ——, L’Afrique blanche (Paris: Fayard, 1939). Gentzler, Edwin and Maria Tymoczko (eds), Translation and Power (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). Gheerbrant, Alain, L’Expédition Orénoque-Amazone, 1948–1950 (Paris: Gallimard, 1952). Ghosh, Amitav, The Hungry Tide (London: HarperCollins, 2004). Gide, André, Voyage au Congo. Carnets de route (Paris: Gallimard, 1927).

288

Past Imperfect

Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). Glick, Thomas F., ‘The Anthropology of Race across the Darwinian Revolution’, in Henrika Kuklick (ed.), A New History of Anthropology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 225–241. Glissant, Édouard, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981). ——, Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). Gluckman, Max, Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand (Manchester: Manchester University Press/The Rhodes-Livingston Institute, 1958 [1940]). Gobineau, Arthur de, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie de Paris, Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1884 [1853–1855]). Goede Meike J. de, ‘Duress and Messianism in French Moyen-Congo’, Conflict and Society: Advances in Research, 4 (2018), 199–213. Goldwater, Robert, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986 [1938]). Goody, Jack, Production and Reproduction: A Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Gray, Chris, Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile Obenga (London: Karnak House, 1989). Greenberg, Joseph, The Languages of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). Griaule, Marcel, Les Arts de l’Afrique noire (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1947). ——, Dieu d’eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli (Paris: Les Éditions du Chêne, 1948). ——, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas, with an introduction by Germaine Dieterlen (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). Grove, Richard H., Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Guillaume, Paul and Thomas Munro, La Sculpture nègre primitive (Paris: G. Crès, 1929). Gyekye, Kwame, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Hardy, Georges, Une conquête morale. L’enseignement en A.O.F. (Paris: A. Colin, 1917). Harney, Elizabeth, In the Shadow of Senghor: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). ——, ‘Constellations and Coordinates: Repositioning Postwar Paris in Stories of African Modernisms’, in E. Harney and Ruth B. Phillips (eds), Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 304–334.

Bibliography

289

Harootunian, Harry, ‘Remembering the Historical Present’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (Spring 2007), 471–494. Harrison, Nicholas, Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). Hartog, François, ‘The Modern Régime of Historicity in the Face of Two World Wars’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 124–133. ——, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. by Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956). Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. (from the 7th German ed.) by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). Hiddleston, Jane, Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). Hitchcott, Nicki, Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fictions after 1994 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Hölscher, Lucian, ‘Mysteries of Historical Order: Ruptures, Simultaneity and the Relationship of the Past, the Present and the Future’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 134–151. Houis, Maurice, ‘Egyptien pharaonique et langues africaines, un dossier ouvert’, Afrique et langage, 13 (1980), 69–79. Hountondji, Paulin, Sur la ‘philosophie africaine’. Critique de l’ethnophilosophie (Paris: Maspero, 1977). ——, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, trans. by Henri Evans with the collaboration of Jonathan Rée, introduction by Abiola Irele (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996 [1977]). ——, ‘From the Ethnosciences to Ethnophilosophy: Kwame Nkrumah’s Thesis Project’, Research in African Literature, 28.4 (1997), 112–119. Howe, Stephen, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London: Verso, 1998). Howlett, Jacques, ‘Le Nègre dans le monde moderne’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, 52–53. ——, ‘La philosophie africaine en question’, Présence Africaine, 91.3 (1974), 14–25.

290

Past Imperfect

——, ‘Les fétiches sont beaux aussi’, in Georges Balandier and Jacques Howlett (eds), L’Art nègre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2010 [1966]), pp. 79–81. Hunt, Lynn, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002). ——, ‘Globalisation and Time’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 199–215. Hunt, Nancy Rose, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). ——, ‘An Acoustic Register: Rape and Repetition in the Congo’, in Stoler (ed.), Imperial Debris, pp. 39–66. ——, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Irele, Abiola, ‘In Praise of Alienation’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 201–224. Jennar, Raoul Marc, Comment Malraux est devenu Malraux: de l’indifférence politique à l’engagement (Perpignan: CapBear Éditions, 2015). Jézéquel, Jean-Hervé, ‘Les professionnels africains de la recherche dans l’État colonial tardif. Le personnel local de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire entre 1938 et 1960’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 24 (2011), 35–60. Johnson, Christopher, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Jules-Rosette, Bennetta, ‘Conjugating Cultural Realities: Présence Africaine’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 14–44. Kä Mana, François Kabasele Lumbala, La Nouvelle évangélisation en Afrique (Paris: Karthala/Clé, 2000). Kamugisha, Aaron, ‘Finally in Africa? Egypt from Diop to Celenko’, Race and Class, 45.1 (2003), 31–60. Kanda Matulu, Tshibumba and Johannes Fabian, ‘Conversations: Tshibumba Kanda Matulu and Johannes Fabian’, in Matthias De Groof (ed.), Lumumba in the Arts (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020), pp. 339–360. Kemedjio, Cilas, ‘Abiola Irele and the Anti-Négritude Generation: “In Praise of Alienation”’, Journal of the African Literature Association, 14.1 (2020), 43–57. Kennedy, Raymond, ‘The Colonial Crisis and the Future’, in Ralph Linton (ed.), The Science of Man in the World Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), pp. 306–346.

Bibliography

291

Khanakwa, Pamela, ‘Male Circumcision among the Basigu of Eastern Uganda: Practices and Conceptualizations’, in Axel Fleisch and Rhiannon Stephens (eds), Doing Conceptual History in Africa (New York: Berghahn, 2016), pp. 115–137. Kinata Côme, ‘Les administrateurs et les missionnaires face aux coutumes au Congo français’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 175 (2004), 593–607. Ki-Zerbo, Joseph, ‘L’Économie de traite en Afrique noire ou le pillage organisé (XVe–XXe siècle)’, Présence Africaine, 6.11 (1956), 7–31. ——, ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, Présence Africaine, 5.16 (1957), 53–69. ——, ‘General Introduction’, in UNESCO General History of Africa: Methodology and African Prehistory, vol. 1 (London: Heinemann Educational Books1981), pp. 1–23. Kjersmeier, Carl, Centres de styles de la sculpture africaine, trans. by France Gleizal (Paris: Éditions Albert Morancé, 1937). Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1983]). ——, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010 [1979]). Kourouma, Ahmadou, Les Soleils des indépendances (Paris: Seuil, 1970). Lamouchi, Noureddine, Jean-Paul Sartre et le Tiers Monde. Rhétorique d’un discours anticolonialiste, avant-propos by Jack Cornazi, preface by Geneviève Idt (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). Landes, David S., Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, rev. ed. (London: Viking, 2000). Languille, Sonia, ‘Ward Secondary Schools, Elite Narratives and Nyerere’s Legacy’, in Marie-Aude Fouéré (ed.), Remembering Julius Nyerere in Tanzania: History, Memory, Legacy (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota, 2015), pp. 303–337. Latour, Bruno, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991). Laurière, Christine, ‘1938–1949: un musée sous tensions’, in Claude Blanckaert (ed.), Le Musée de l’Homme: histoire d’un musée laboratoire (Paris: Muséum national d’histoire naturelle/Éditions Artlys, 2015), pp. 46–77. Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave, Baay sama, doomu Afriq, trans. by Daouda Ndiaye (Paris: Éditions Zulma, 2016). Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier, L’Empire des hygiénistes. Vivre aux colonies (Paris: Fayard, 2014). Leenhardt, Maurice, Le Mouvement éthiopien au sud de l’Afrique de 1896 à 1899 (Cahors: Imprimerie de A. Coueslant, 1902). Leiris, Michel, L’Afrique fantôme. De Dakar à Djibouti (Paris: Gallimard, 1934).

292

Past Imperfect

——, ‘Message de l’Afrique’, in M. Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, 5–6. ——, ‘L’ethnographie devant le colonialisme’, Les Temps Modernes, 58 (1950), 357–374. ——, Race et civilisation (Paris: UNESCO, 1951). ——, Cinq études d’ethnologie (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1969). Le Lay, Maëline, ‘Africanizing Classical European Playwrights: Shakespeare and Molière’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 81.3 (2018), special issue: ‘Translation of African Thought and Literature’, 493–512. Lemaire, Charles, Vocabulaire pratique: français, anglais, zanzibarite (Swahili), fiote, kibangi-irébou, mongo, bangala (Brussels: Charles Bulens, 1897 [1894]). Lepsius, Richard, Standard Alphabet for Reducing Unwritten Languages and Foreign Graphic Systems to a Uniform Orthography in European Letters (London: Williams and Northgate, 1855). L’Estoile, Benoît de, ‘Rationalizing Colonial Domination? Anthropology and Native Policy in French-Ruled Africa’, in Benoît de L’Estoile, Frederico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud (eds), Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 30–57. ——, Le Goût des autres. De l’exposition coloniale aux arts premiers (Paris: Flammarion, 2010 [2007]). ——, ‘Enquêter en “situation coloniale”. Politique de la population, gouvernementalité modernisatrice et “sociologie engagée” en Afrique équatoriale française, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 863–919. L’Estoile, Benoît de, Frederico Neiburg and Lygia Sigaud (eds), Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Le Vine, Victor T., Politics in Francophone Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004). Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Race et histoire (Paris: UNESCO, 1952). ——, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952). ——, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955). ——, ‘Compte rendu: Balandier (Georges) – Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires’, Revue française de science politique, 6.1 (1956), 177–179. ——, The Savage Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966). ——, Conversations with Lévi-Strauss, ed. by Georges Charbonnier, trans. by John and Doreen Weightman (London: Cape, 1969). ——, Race et histoire (Paris: Denoël, 1987 [1952]). Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, La Mentalité primitive (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1922).

Bibliography

293

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, http://www. perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059 [accessed 25 January 2021]. Lindsay, Ivan, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity until the Present Day (London: Unicorn Press, 2014). Lopes, Carlos, Africa in Transformation: Economic Development in the Age of Doubt (Cham: Springer International, 2019). Luard, Evan, A History of the United Nations: The Age of Decolonization, 1955–1965, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1989). Ly, Abdoulaye, Les Masses africaines et l’actuelle condition humaine (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956). ——, La Compagnie du Sénégal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958). Lydon, Ghislaine, ‘Saharan Oceans and Bridges, Barriers and Divides in Africa’s Historical Landscapes’, Journal of African History, 56.1 (2015), 3–22. McClintock, Anne, ‘“No Longer in a Future Heaven”: Gender, Race and Nationalism’, in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (eds), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 89–112. Macdonald, Heather, Cultural and Critical Explorations in Community Psychology: The Inner City Intern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Macey, David, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2012). MacGaffey, Wyatt, Modern Kongo Prophets: Religion in a Plural Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). ——, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). Mac Giolla Chríost, Diarmait, The Irish Language in Ireland: From Goídel to Globalisation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005). MacKenzie, John M., The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008 [1988]). McLaughlin, Fiona, ‘Senegal: The Emergence of a National Lingua Franca’, in Andrew Simpson (ed.), Language and National Identity in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 79–97. Makward, Christiane P., Mayotte Capécia, ou l’aliénation selon Fanon (Paris: Karthala, 1999). Malaurie, Jean, Les derniers rois de Thulé (Paris: Plon, 1955). Malinowski, Bronislaw, Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1938). Malraux, André, La Voie royale (Paris: Grasset, 1930). ——, Psychologie de l’art. Le Musée imaginaire (Paris: Albert Skira, 1947).

294

Past Imperfect

Mann, Gregory, ‘Anti-Colonialism and Social Science: Georges Balandier, Madeira Keita, and “the Colonial Situation” in French Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55.1 (2013), 92–119. Mannoni, Octave, Psychologie de la colonisation (Paris: Seuil, 1950). Maran, René, Batouala. Véritable roman nègre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1921). Marechal, Philippe, De ‘Arabische’ campagne in het maniema-gebied (1892–1894). Situering binnen het kolonisatieproces in de onafhankelijke Kongostaat (Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique centrale, 1992). Marker, Chris, Commentaires 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1967). —— (dir.), Sans Soleil (1982). ——, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi: commentaire du film’, in Elena MartínezJacquet et al. (eds), Les Statues meurent aussi: Ode au grand art africain: Les Statues meurent aussi (Arquennes: Primedia SPRL, 2010), pp. 27–32. Marker, Chris, Alain Resnais, and Ghislain Cloquet (dirs), Les Statues meurent aussi (1953). Marquard, Odo, Zukunft braucht Herkunft. Philosophische Essays (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003). Martínez-Jacquet, Elena, ‘Un Hommage au premier manifeste esthétique sur les arts d’Afrique de l’histoire du cinéma’, in Martínez-Jacquet et al. (eds), Ode au grand art africain: Les Statues meurent aussi (Arquennes: Primedia SPRL, 2010), pp. 18–23. Martinon, Jean-Paul, ‘The Birth of Language or The Necessity of Rule’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 81.3 (2018), special issue: ‘Translation of African Thought and Literature’, 413–424. Mary, André, ‘Ethnographie de soi sous le “zéro équatorial”. Le chantier autobiographique de Georges Balandier’, L’Homme, 225 (2017), 11–40. Maurice, Danielle, ‘Le musée vivant et le centenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage: pour une reconnaissance des cultures africaines’, in Ana Lucia Araujo and Anna Seiderer (eds), Conserveries mémorielles, 3 (June 2007), special issue: ‘Passé colonial et modalité de mise en mémoire de l’esclavage’, 69–83, https://journals.openedition.org/cm/127 [accessed 5 April 2019]. Mauron, Claude, Frédéric Mistral (Paris: Fayard, 1993). Mazrui, Alamin M., ‘Shakespeare in Africa: Between English and Swahili Literature’, Research in African Literatures, 27.1 (Spring 1996), 64–79. Mazrui, Ali A. and Alamin M. Mazrui. The Power of Babel: Language & Governance in the African Experience (Oxford: James Currey, 1998). Mbembe, Achille, Afriques indociles: christianisme, pouvoir et état en société postcoloniale (Paris: Karthala, 1988). ——, ‘Ecrire l’Afrique à partir d’une faille’, Politique Africaine, 51 (1993), 69–97. ——, La Naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun, 1920–1960. Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (Paris: Khartala, 1996). ——, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Bibliography

295

——, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’, trans. by Steven Rendall, Public Culture, 14.1 (2002), 239–273. ——, Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (Paris: La Découverte, 2010). Mbiti, John, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1969). Mboukou, Serge, ‘Arpenteur, paysagiste et scrutateur de mondes en changement. Georges Balandier et l’observation impliquée des dynamiques ambiguës de la modernité’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 933–949. M’Bow, Amadou-Mahtar, ‘A Plea for the Return of an Irreplaceable Cultural Heritage to Those Who Created It’, 7 June 1978, file:///C:/Users/Piw/ Documents/PUBLICATIONS/African%20philo%20and%20decolonisation%20Monograph/All%20Chapters%20April%20May%202020/ PealforReturn_DG_1978%20Amadou-Mahtar%20M’Bow.pdf [accessed 12 May 2020]. Mead, Margaret and Rhoda Métraux (eds), The Study of Culture at a Distance, with an introduction by William O. Beeman (New York: Berghahn, 2000 [1953]). Meillassoux, Claude, Anthropologie économique des Gouro de Côte d’Ivoire: de l’économie de subsistance à l’agriculture commerciale (Paris: Mouton, 1964). Mélice, Anne, ‘La Désobéissance civile des Kimbanguistes et la violence coloniale au Congo Belge (1921–1959)’, Les Temps Modernes, 658–659 (April–July 2010), 218–250. Memmi, Albert, Portrait du colonisé: précédé du portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Corréa, 1957). Merle, Isabelle, ‘“La situation coloniale” chez Georges Balandier. Relecture historienne’, Monde(s), 4 (September 2013), 211–232. Meschonnic, Henri, ‘The Europe of translation’, Translation Studies, 1.1 (2008), 34–40. Mézié, Nadège, ‘Tous comptes faits: roman de (la) jeunesse de Georges Balandier’, L’Homme & la société, 207 (2018), 243–252. Miano, Léonora, La Saison de l’ombre: roman (Paris: Grasset, 2013). Mignolo, Walter D., The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Miller, Christopher L., Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985). ——, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990). ——, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Monaville, Pedro, ‘A History of Glory and Dignity: Patrice Lumumba in Historical Imagination and Postcolonial Genealogies’, in Matthias De Groof (ed.), Lumumba in the Arts (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020), pp. 62–77.

296

Past Imperfect

Monénembo, Tierno, Le Roi de Kahel (Paris: Seuil, 2008). Monod, Théodore, ‘Étapes’, Présence Africaine, 1.1 (1947), 15–20. ——, ‘Un Homme de Dieu: Tierno Bokar’, Présence Africaine, 8–9 (1950), 149–158. Montel, Étienne, Éléments de la grammaire bambara avec exercices appropriés, suivis d’un dictionnaire bambara-français (Saint-Joseph de Ngasobil: Imprimerie de la mission, 1887). Moor, Jaap de and Dietmar Rothermund (eds), Our Laws, Their Lands: Land Laws and Land Use in Modern Colonial Societies (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1994). Moore, Carlos, ‘Conversations with Cheikh Anta Diop’, Présence Africaine, 149–150 (1989), special issue: ‘Hommage à Cheikh Anta Diop’, 374–420. Mounin, Georges, Histoire de la linguistique des origines au XXe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1970). Mouralis, Bernard, Littérature et développement (Paris: Silex, 1984). ——, ‘Présence Africaine: Geography of an “Ideology”’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 3–13. ——, ‘L’Usage de l’antiquité chez Cheikh Anta Diop et l’ombre menaçante de Senghor’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), International Journal of Francophone Studies, 18.2–3 (2015), special issue: ‘Francophone African Philosophy and the Aftermath of the Empire’, 215–234. Mudimbe, Valentin Yves, ‘Héritage occidental et conscience nègre’, Congo-Afrique, 26 (June–July 1968), 2–14. ——, ‘L’Un et ses autres’, in L’Autre Face du royaume. Une introduction à la critique des langages en folie (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1973), pp. 25–31. ——, L’Odeur du père: essai sur des limites de la science et de la vie en Afrique noire (Paris: Présence africaine, 1982). ——, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). ——, ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Art’, in Susan Vogel (ed.), Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (Munich: The Center for African Art and Prestel, 1991), pp. 276–287. ——, (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). ——, ‘From “Primitive Art” to “Memoriae Loci”’, in The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 55–70. ——, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). ——, Tales of Faith: Religion and Political Performance in Central Africa (London: The Athlone Press, 1997). Murphy, David, Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film & Fiction (Oxford: James Currey, 2000).

Bibliography

297

——, ‘Birth of a Nation? The Origins of Senegalese Literature in French’, Research in African Literatures, 39.1 (2008), 48–69. ——, (ed.), The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). Musil Church, Emily, ‘In Search of the Seven Sisters: A Biography of the Nardal Sisters of Martinique’, Callaloo, 36.2 (Spring 2013), 375–390. Mwanza Mujila, Fiston, Tram 83 (Paris: Éditions Métailié, 2014). Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Inoperative Community, trans. by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, ed. by Peter Connor, foreword by Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Nanni, Giordano, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Natalis, Ernest, La Langue swahilie (Liège: Éditions F.U.L.R.E.A.C/Université de Liège, 1965). Naville, Édouard, L’Évolution de la langue égyptienne et des langues sémitiques: l’écriture, la grammaire, le démotique et le copte, l’araméen et l’hébreu (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1920). Ndaywel è Nziem, Isidore, Histoire générale du Congo. De l’héritage ancien à la République Démocratique (Paris-Bruxelles: Duculot, 1998). Ndiaye, Pap, ‘Présence africaine avant “Présence Africaine”. La subjectivation politique noire en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, Gradhiva, 10 (2009), special issue: ‘Présence Africaine. Les conditions noires: une généalogie des discours’, 64–79. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J., Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2013). Ngom, Fatoumata, Le Silence du totem (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986). ——, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009). Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Nyerere, Julius, Freedom and Socialism/Uhuru na Ujamaa (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968). Nzegwu, Nkiru Uwechia, Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006). Oakes, Leigh and Yael Peled, Normative Language Policy: Ethics, Politics, Principles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). O’Dwyer, Jules, ‘Reorienting Objects in Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Les Statues Meurent aussi’, Screen, 58.4 (2017), 497–507.

298

Past Imperfect

Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World, with additional chapters by Hartley, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2012). Orlow, Uriel (dir.), The Visitor (2007). Orrells, Daniel, ‘Oedipus in Africa: Mudimbe and Classical Antiquity’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), International Journal of Francophone Studies, 18.2–3 (2015), special issue: ‘Francophone African Philosophy and the Aftermath of the Empire’, 235–261. Oruka, Henry Odera, Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1990). Oyéwùmí, Oyèrónké, The Invention of Woman: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Parker, Gabrielle, ‘Francophonie and Universality: The Evolution of Two Intertwined Notions (1961–2006)’, in Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas (eds), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, trans. by Alexis Pernsteiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 562–573. Payot, Daniel, L’Art africain entre silence et promesse (Strasbourg: Les Éditions Circé, 2009). Pirotte, Jean, ‘De l’éclipse au retour? Regards historiens sur le flux et le reflux des religions africaines’, Histoire et missions chrétiennes, 3.3 (2007), 23–42. Pugach, Sara, Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). Quijano, Aníbal, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural Studies, 21.2–3 (2007), 168–178. Ramutsindela, Maano, Transfrontier Conservation in Africa: At the Confluence of Capital, Politics and Nature (Wallingford: Cabi, 2007). Ranger, Terence, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in Eric Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1983]), pp. 211–262. Reclus, Onésime, France, Algérie et colonies (Paris: Hachette, 1886 [1880]). Resnais, Alain (dir.), Nuit et brouillard (Argos Films, 1955). —— (dir.), Toute la mémoire du monde (Films de la Pléiade, 1956). —— (dir.), Hiroshima mon amour (Argos Films, 1959). ——, ‘Les Statues meurent aussi et les ciseaux d’Anastasie: Propos d’Alain Resnais, recueillis par René Vautier et Nicole Le Garrec’, in MartínezJacquet et al. (eds), Ode au grand art africain: Les Statues meurent aussi (Arquennes: Primedia SPRL, 2010), pp. 35–41. Resnais, Alain and Robert Hessens (dirs), Guernica (Panthéon Production, 1950).

Bibliography

299

Rettová, Alena, ‘Translation as Destruction: Kezilahabi’s Adaptation of Heidegger’s “Being”’, in Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (ed.), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 81.3 (2018), special issue: ‘Translating African Thought and Literature’, 439–457. Rey, Alain, Le Robert. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 3 vols (Paris: Le Robert, 1998). Ricard, Alain, The Languages & Literatures of Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2004). ——, Le Kiswahili, une langue moderne (Paris: Karthala, 2009). Robin, Georges (with Pierre Bozio), Commandant rebelle. Algérie, 1958: de l’obéissance à la révolte (Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1998). Rodney, Walter, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: BogleL’Ouverture Publications, 1972). Rosello, Mireille, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Rouaud, Jean, ‘Mort d’une certaine idée’, in Michel Le Bris et Jean Rouaud (eds), Pour une littérature-Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), pp. 7–22. Rouch, Jean (dir.), Les Maîtres fous (Films de la Pléiade, 1955). Rousseau, Madeleine, ‘En marge de l’histoire ancienne de l’Afrique’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, 19–20. ——, ‘La Musique et la danse en Afrique occidentale,’ in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, 21–22. ——, ‘La Philosophie des nègres’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, 9–12. ——, ‘Rencontre de l’Europe avec l’Afrique’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, 35–40. Rousseau, Madeleine and Olivier Le Corneur, ‘Quels sont les styles de l’art nègre?’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, 23–29. Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994 [1993]) ——, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, with a new afterword (London: Penguin, 1995 [1978]).

300

Past Imperfect

Salazar-Sutil, Nicholas, “‘Set in Poland, That Is to Say Nowhere”: Alfred Jarry and the Politics of Topological Space’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz (eds), Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 114–126. Samaddar, Ranabir, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Sarr, Felwine, Afrotopia (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2016). Sarr, Felwine and Bénédicte Savoy, Restituer le patrimoine africain (Paris: Philippe Rey/Seuil, 2018). Sarraut, Albert, La Mise en valeur des colonies françaises (Paris: Payot, 1923). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Paul Morihien, 1946). ——, ‘Orphée noir’, in Léopold Sédar Senghor (ed.), Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ‘avant-propos’ by Charles-André Julien (Paris: PUF, 1948), pp. ix–xliv. ——, Portrait of the Anti-Semite, trans. by Erik de Mauny (London: Secker & Warburg/Lindsay Drummond, 1948). ——, Black Orpheus, trans. by S.W. Allen (Paris: Présence Africaine, n.d.). ——, Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, presentation and notes by Arlette Alkaïm-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1996 [1946]). ——, ‘Colonialism Is a System’, in Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. by Azzedine Haddour, Terry McWilliams, and Steve Brewer, preface by Robert Young, introduction by Azzedine Haddour (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 36–55 ——, ‘Preface’, in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 2001 [1961]), pp. 7–31. ——, L’Être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, rev. by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 2003 [1943]). ——, Critique of Dialectical Reason I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. by Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. by Jonathan Rée, foreword by Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 2004). Schoelcher, Victor, Esclavage et colonisation, texts selected and annotated by Émile Tersen, foreword by Charles-André Julien, introduction by Aimé Césaire (Paris: PUF, 1948). Schuhl, Pierre-Maxime, ‘André Ombredane (1898–1958)’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger, 149 (1959), 278–280. Schwab, Raymond, Vie d’Anquetil-Duperron, preface by Sylvain Lévi, with two essays by Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (Paris: E. Leroux, 1934). Scott, David, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). ——, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Segalen, Victor, Les Immémoriaux (Paris: Plon, 1956 [1907]). Senghor, Fatou Kandé (dir.), Giving Birth (2015).

Bibliography

301

Senghor, Léopold Sédar, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ‘avant-propros’ by Charles-André Julien, preface, ‘Orphée noir’, by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: PUF, 1948). ——, ‘Some Thoughts on Africa: A Continent in Development’, International Affairs, 38.2 (April 1962), 189–195. ——, Liberté, I. Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964). Serequeberhan, Tsenay, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1994). Sharpley-Whiting, T. Deanan, Negritude Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Sibeud, Emmanuelle, Une Science impériale pour l’Afrique. La construction des savoirs africanistes en France (1878–1930) (Paris: E.H.E.S.S., 2002). ——, ‘The Metamorphosis of Ethnology in France, 1839–1930’, in Henrika Kuklick (ed.), A New History of Anthropology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 96–110. Sinda, Martial, Le Messianisme congolais et ses incidences politiques (Paris: Payot, 1972). Small, Audrey, ‘Publishing in African Languages and the Question of a National Literature: The Case of Senegal and Guinea’, ASCALF Bulletin, 21 (2000), 29–43. ——, ‘Imagining Twenty-first-century Literature via Print Publishing: Problems for “Francophone” Literature and the Case of Guinea’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 50.3 (2013), 399–410. Smith, Etienne, ‘Merging Ethnic Histories in Senegal: Whose Moral Community?’, in Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola (eds), Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), pp. 213–232. Spronk, Rachel and Thomas Hendriks, ‘Introduction: Reading “Sexualities” from “Africa”’, in Spronk and Hendricks (eds), Readings in Sexualities from Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020). Stoczkowski, Wiktor, ‘Racisme, antiracisme et cosmologie lévistraussienne. Un essai d’anthropologie réflexive’, L’Homme. Revue française d’anthropologie, 182 (2007), 7–51. Stoler, Ann Laura, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality’ and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). ——, ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination’, Cultural Anthropology, 23.2 (2008), 191–219. ——, ‘Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France’, Public Culture, 23.1 (2011), 121–156. ——, (ed.), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Taguieff, Pierre-André, La couleur et le sang. Doctrines racistes à la française (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 1998).

302

Past Imperfect

Tamale, Sylvia, African Sexualities: A Reader (Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 2011). Tanaka, Stefan, ‘Unification of Time and the Fragmentation of Pasts in Meiji Japan’, in Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past, and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 216–235. ——, ‘History without Chronology’, Public Culture, 28.1 (2015), 161–186. Tansi, Sony Labou (Ntsoni Marcel), La Parenthèse de sang (Paris: Hatier International, 2002 [1981]). Taoua, Phyllis, African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). ——, ‘In Praise of Cultural Comparisons: Abiola Irele’s Contributions as a Cosmopolitan, Multi-Lingual Africanist’, Journal of the African Literature Association, 14.1 (2020), 90–102. Tchokothe, Armand (ed.), Études Littéraires Africaines, 46 (2018), special issue: ‘Qui a peur de la littérature wolof?’ Tempels, Placide, La Philosophie bantoue, trans. by Antoine Rubbens, preface by Emile Possoz (Élisabethville: Lovania, 1945). ——, La Philosophie bantoue, trans. by Antoine Rubbens (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1949). ——, Bantu Philosophy, trans. (and with a foreword) by Margaret Read (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959). ——, La Philosophie bantoue, trans. by Antoine Rubbens, preface by Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Alioune Diop (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2013 [1949]). Terray, Emmanuel, ‘Anthropology of the 1960s and African Studies: Outline for an Appraisal’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 249–256. Tersen, Émile, ‘Victor Schoelcher’, Présence Africaine, 1.6 (1949), 15–21. Thomas Dominic, Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Thomas, Lynn, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Topan, Farouk, ‘Tanzania: The Development of Swahili as a National and Official Language’, in Andrew Simpson (ed.), Language and National Identity in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 252–266. Towa, Marcien, Essai sur la problématique philosophique dans l’Afrique actuelle (Yaoundé: Clé, 1971). Triaud, Jean-Louis, ‘Haut-Sénégal-Niger, un modèle “positiviste”? De la coutume à l’histoire: Maurice Delafosse et l’invention de l’histoire africaine’, in Jean-Loup Amselle and Emmanuelle Sibeud (eds), Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998), pp. 210–232.

Bibliography

303

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). ——, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, with a new  foreword by Hazel V. Carby (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015 [1995]). Tylor, Edward Burnett, Primitive Culture, with an introduction by Paul Radin (New York: Harper, 1958 [1871]). Um Nyobé, Ruben, Écrits sous maquis, introduction and notes by Achille Mbembe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989). ——, Le Problème national Kamerunais, introduction by A. Mbembe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). Van Beurden, Sarah, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). Van den Avenne, Cécile, De la bouche même des indigènes. Échanges linguistiques en Afrique coloniale (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2017). Van Gennep, Arnold, Les Rites de passage (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1909). ——, The Rites of Passage, trans. by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London: Routledge, 2004 [1960]). Van Parijs, Philippe, Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Van Reybrouck, David, Congo: The Epic History of a People, trans. by Sam Garrett (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [2010]). Vansina, Jan, De la tradition orale: essai de méthode historique (Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Central, 1961) . ——, Art History in Africa: An Introduction to Method (London: Longman, 1984). ——, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1985). Vellut, Luc, ‘Ressources scientifiques, culturelles et humaines de l’africanisme en Belgique. Perspectives sur un patrimoine d’outre-mer et sa mise en valeur’, Cahiers africains, 9–11 (1994), 115–144. Venuti, Lawrence, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 2008 [1995]). Verbeken, Auguste, ‘La Poésie nègre du Congo’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, 13–18. Verdin, Philippe, Alioune Diop: le Socrate noir (Paris: Lethielleux, 2010). Verhaegen, Benoît, Rébellions au Congo, 2 vols (Brussels: CRISP, 1966). Vincent, Cédric, ‘“The Real Heart of the Festival”: The Exhibition of L’Art nègre at the Musée Dynamique’, in David Murphy (ed.), The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 45–63.

304

Past Imperfect

Visweswaran, Kamala, ‘The Intervention of Culture: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race, and the Critique of Historical Time’, in Robert Bernasconi (ed.) with Sybol Cook, Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 227–248. Vogel, Susan (ed.), Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (Munich: The Center for African Art and Prestel, 1991). Vogel, Susan, Robert Pemberton, Jean-Paul Colleyn, Ron Street, and Jon Shaver (dirs), Fang: An Epic Journey (First Run/Icarus Films, 2001). Waberi, Abdourahman, Aux États-Unis d’Afrique (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 2006). Wane, Ibrahima, ‘Kàddu – The Echo of Dissonant Discourse’, trans. by David Leye, The Chimurenga Chronic, 9 April 2018, http://chimurengachronic. co.za/kaddu-the-echo-of-dissonant-discourse/ [accessed 7 March 2020]. Wartelle, Jean-Claude, ‘La Société d’anthropologie de Paris de 1859 à 1920’, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 1.10 (2004), 125–171. Werbner, Richard P., ‘The Manchester School in South Central Africa’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 13 (1984), 157–184. West-Pavlov, Russell, Temporalities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). White, Owen and James Patrick Daughton (eds), In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Willey, Ann Elizabeth, ‘Language Use and Representation of the Senegalese Subject in the Written Work of Ousmane Sembène’, in Sheila Petty (ed.), A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembène (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 118–153. Wilson, Emma, Alain Resnais (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Wiredu, Kwasi, ‘On Defining African Philosophy’, in Tsenay Serequeberhan (ed.), African Philosophy: The Essential Readings (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1991), pp. 87–110. ——, Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy: Four Essays (Ibadan: Hope, 1995). ——, ‘Formulating Modern Thought in African languages: Some Theoretical Considerations’, in Valentin Yves Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 301–332 Wirth, Jason M., ‘Beyond Black Orpheus: Preliminary Thoughts on the Good of African Philosophy’, in Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook (eds), Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 268–285.

Bibliography

305

Woungly-Massaga, Lucette, La Révolution au Congo. Contribution à l’étude des problèmes politiques d’Afrique centrale (Paris: Maspero, 1974). Wright, Richard, ‘Preface’, in Madeleine Rousseau and Cheikh Anta Diop (eds), Le Musée vivant, 36–37 (November 1948), special issue: ‘1848 Abolition de l’esclavage – 1948 Evidence de la culture nègre’, p. 3. ——, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in Land of Pathos (New York: Harper, 1954). Wright, Sue, Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Yildiz, Yasemin, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Post Monolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Young, Robert J.C., White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990). ——, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). ——, ‘The Afterlives of Black Athena’, in Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon (eds), African Athena: New Agendas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 174–187. Zabus, Chantal, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). ——, (ed.), Fearful Symmetries: Essays and Testimonies around Excision and Circumcision (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008). ——, Out in Africa: Same-Sex Desire in Sub-Saharan Literatures & Cultures (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013). Zalasiewicz, Jan, ‘Jan Zalasiewicz on the Age of Man’, 7 January 2017, https:// www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b088fcgz [accessed 23 August 2019].

Index Index Index

absolute time, 33–34 Académie Française, 194 Adande, Alexandre, 113 administering powers, political initiative, 1–2 advancement, 1, 3 aesthetic authenticity, 96 aesthetic functionalism, 25–26 aesthetic influences, mutual, 8 aesthetic sense, source of, 7–8 Africa ambiguity of, 32 invention of, 11, 245 original purity, 6 polarized interpretations, 11–12 African baroque, 130, 244 African consciousness, 69 African culture contemporary significance of, 8–9 return to, 13–14 African modernity, 148, 201, 238, 259, 265, 271 African renaissance, call for, 13 African uniqueness, 180 Africanism, 22, 31, 141, 149–150, 262 Africanité, 7, 107 Africanity, 16 Africanization, 130, 195 Africanness, 115, 116, 135 Afrique ambiguë (Balandier), 28–30, 63, 96, 137, 142, 201–260, 264 autobiographical stance, 210–212

background, 202–209 chapter VII, 240–242 on colonial ruination, 210–223, 256 context, 202–203 defence of FGM, 209, 227–238, 256 examination of negro art, 123–130 on messianic movements, 209, 248–255, 257–258, 269 opening chapter, 210 publication, 201–202 on sexuality, 223–226 subtitle, 202 on Surrealist appropriation, 124 temporal perspective, 207–208 on women, 225–227 Afrique Equatoriale Française, 21 Afrique Occidentale Française, 21, 235–236 Ahidjo, Ahmadou, 129 aims and objectives, 19–23 Algerian war of independence, 89 alienation, 126, 130, 209 colonial, 21, 29 cultural, 69 language and, 189–190 Allen, Amy, 24, 44, 268 allochronism, 11, 27, 51, 91 American Colonization Society, 37 anatomical observation, 160–161 Anderson, Benedict, 149 Anthropocene, the, 213

308

Index

anthropology, original sin of, 59 anthropometry, 128 anti-colonialism, 2–4, 34, 101–102, 114–115, 137, 263, 264 anti-essentialism, 6 anti-racist racism, 122, 139 anti-Semitism, 81 art production, 135 artistic creativity, 129–130 artistic power, source of, 7–8 assimilated blacks, suspicion of, 12–13 assimilation, 75, 130, 140, 153 Assmann, Aleida, 42, 57, 227 Association amicale des originaires de l’A.E.F., 235 Association Internationale Africaine, 162–163 Association Populaire des Amis des Musées (APAM), 4–5, 9–10 authenticity, 13–14, 113–114, 132 Aymard, André, 10 Ayrault, Jean-Marc, 197–198 Bâ, Amadou Hampâté, 27–28, 147, 168, 170–173, 182, 202, 272 Bâ, Mariama, 193 Bachelard, Gaston, 174 backwardness, 71–72 Balandier, Georges, 15, 19, 22, 22–23, 31, 91, 94, 113, 133, 135, 137, 141, 166, 184, 199 African collaborators, 169–170 Afrique ambiguë, see Afrique ambiguë (Balandier) analysis of colonial doctrine, 81–82, 204–205 and change, 233–234 on colonial ruination, 210–223 Conjugaisons, 215 contribution, 257–260, 263, 270–271 critique of decolonization, 216–223 critique of ethnocentrism, 245–246 critique of imperialism, 214–223

on cultural anthropology, 82–83, 86–87 defence of FGM, 29, 209, 227–238, 256 early writings, 242, 262 examination of African millenarianism, 129 examination of negro art, 123–130 explicatory model, 80–81 and Fanon, 81–82 funding, 244 and Gluckman, 83–84, 86–87 ‘La Situation coloniale’, 25, 36, 78–90, 101, 207, 261 and the language question, 239–248 ‘Le Noir est un homme’ [The Black Is a Man], 203 Le ‘Tiers Monde’, 205–207, 219 ‘Les Arts perdus’, 26 and Mannoni, 87–89 on messianic movements, 248–255, 257–258, 265–266, 269 methodological shift, 215 methodologies, 244–247, 263–264, 265–266 multidisciplinary approach, 206–207 and Nazism, 211 rivalry with Lévi-Strauss, 84–85 on sexuality, 223–226 Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire, 204, 248–255 ‘Sociologie de la dépendance’, 204–205 Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires, 84–85, 256 sociology of decolonization, 83 on women, 225–227 Bantu Philosophy (Tempels), 76, 104–113, 142, 268, 269–270 Alioune Diop’s preface, 104–106 and Les Statues meurent aussi, 106–113 worldview, 106–111 Barbé, Roseline, 246

Index Barber, Karin, 239 Bastide, Roger, 223–225 Bayart, Jean-François, 237 bearing witness, 67 beauty, 97 Becker, Jérôme, 162–163 being, 96 Bekers, Elisabeth, 231–232 Benedict, Ruth, 245 Benedict XV, Pope, 269 Bennabi, Malek, 231 Bérard, Victor, 117 Berlin Conference, 1884–1885, 37 Bertillon, Alphonse, 128 Bertina, Arno, 103 Biblical time, 43 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 114 biopolitics, 145, 161 biopower, 90, 224 black consciousness, 91 black culture holistic definitions, 6 Sartre on, 64–65 Black Islam, 172–173 Black Lives Matter movement, 67, 267 Black Orpheus (Sartre), 64–65, 75, 105, 110, 139, 166, 195 Bleek, Wilhelm, 157–158 Bloch, Ernst, 208 Bloch, Maurice, 89 Bokar, Tierno, 170–173, 272 Bopp, Franz, 159 Borborygme, 198 Brelsford, Vernon, 76, 221 British Museum, 26–27, 140 Brugsch, Karl-Heinrich, 177 Buijtenhuijs, Robert, 265–266 Burns, Alan, 58–59 Cabral, Amílcar, 98 Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie (journal), 204 Calvet, Louis-Jean, 145 Cameroon, 128–129

309

Campbell, Duncan, 94, 97–98, 103, 143, 267 It for Others, 26–27, 94, 97–98, 103, 137–141, 143, 267, 272 cannibalizing practices, 253, 259 canonical literature, 31 capitalism, 31, 64, 113, 225 colonial, 24–25, 34 Cardaire, Marcel, 27, 147, 172, 173 Cathedral Notre Dame des Victoires, Dakar, 122 Centre d’Études africaines de la VIe section de l’EPHE, 22 Certeau, Michel de, 46–47, 48, 49 Césaire, Aimé, 10, 58, 72, 87, 192, 211 Céytu project, 192–194, 272 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 34, 241 Charter of the United Nations, 1, 3, 12, 74–75 Cheah, Pheng, 30–32 Chicago School of Sociology, 82 childbirth, 231, 237 Christian salvation, and progress, 45 Christian time, 43–50 Christianity, 44 indigenization, 250–251 religious war, 248–255, 256–257 civilizational achievements, 75 civilizations, clash of, 79 civilizing mission, 247–248 Clark, Phyllis (Phyllis Taoua), 250, 255 Clifford, James, 168–169 clock-time, 36–38 Cloquet, Ghislain, 25, 93 coevalness, denial of, 50–51 cold societies, 63 Cole, Teju, 210 colonial alienation, 21, 29 colonial assimilation, 75 colonial assistantship, model of, 3 colonial capitalism, 24–25 colonial doctrine, 81–82 colonial education, 75 colonial hierarchy, 8

310

Index

colonial language policies, 146 colonial library, the, 116, 122, 130–137, 149, 245 Eurocentrism, 22, 261 colonial modernity, 24, 91, 152, 208, 222, 227–228, 233, 238, 264–265 colonial ruination, 210–223, 256 colonial situation, the, 19–20, 29, 78–90, 113, 120, 123, 141, 199, 204, 212, 221, 241, 262–263, 270 epistemological possibilities, 21 language and the language question, 168–173 colonial transformations, 79 Colonial University of Antwerp, 149 colonial violence, 94 colonialism, 19, 67, 77, 134, 190 compartmentalized, 79–80 opposition to, 2 pseudo-rationalizations, 90 psychology of, 88 racisme, 102 Sartre on, 80 stability of, 90 temporal legacies, 255 colonialist gaze, 26 Colston, Edmund, 67 Comaroff, Jean and John, 46 Combe, Sonia, 51 commodification, 26–27, 98, 99–104 communitarian values, 76 communitarianism, 198 compensation theory, 57 completeness, 44 conceptual decolonization, 188, 259 conceptual history, 40 Confédération générale du travail, 10 confiscatory process, 71, 268 Congo, the, missionaries, 46–50 Congo Free State, 145, 152 Congo Museum, Tervuren, 50 Congresses of Black Writers and Artists, 257

contemporaneity, denied, 11 Cooper, Frederick, 23, 83 Copans, Jean, 80 Coppinger, William, 37 cranial typologies, 160 creative denaturalization, 248 creative reappropriations, 97 creative writing, and scholarship, 30–32 creativity, 30 crimes against humanity, 72–74, 266 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre), 60 cultural achievement, 117 cultural alienation, 69 cultural anthropology, 42–43, 86–87 decolonization, 23 emergence of, 51 Eurocentrism, 50–51 historicization of, 19–20 institutionalization, 50 and sociology, 82–83 cultural anti-colonialism, 9 cultural artefacts, production of, 30 cultural autonomy, 148 cultural decolonization, 20–21 cultural devastation, 56 cultural dispossession, 29, 56, 209 cultural diversity, 59–60, 63–64 cultural emancipation, 75–76 cultural gardens, 57, 85 cultural hegemony, 36 cultural homogeneity, 117 cultural identity, 181–182 cultural irrelevance, 101 cultural liberation, 193 cultural miscegenation, 12–13 cultural status quo, 15–16 cultural transformations, 88 cultural unity, 26, 115–123 The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa (Diop), 26, 115–123, 142, 220 aims and objectives, 115 anti-colonial force, 116 and cultural homogeneity, 117

Index Egyptology, 120–121 and matriarchy, 117–118 pan-Africanist agenda, 115–116 strength, 116 use of the future, 118–119 cultural values, 69–70 culture change, 79, 84 culture contact, 79 cumulative history, 61–63, 90 curatorial practices, 21, 25, 26–27, 101, 127–128 aesthetic agenda, 52–53 arrangement, 56 confiscatory, 55–57 historical methodology, 53–54 living lies, 103–104 and museum policy, 52 objectification, 141 political power, 51 positivist terminology, 53–54 state-funded institutions, 36 time regime, 50–57 curatorship, 3 customs, 22, 28–30 Dakar, Cathedral Notre Dame des Victoires, 122 Damas, Léon Gontran, 3 Debaene, Vincent, 28 decentring process, 78 decolonization, 103, 119, 207–208, 212, 257–258, 266–267 Balandier’s critique of, 216–223 conceptual, 259 cultural, 20–21 of linguistic practices, 28, 183–184, 196, 197–199 sociology of, 82–83 decolonization movements, 34–35 degeneracy, 131–132 Delafosse, Maurice, 22, 27, 53–54, 145, 147, 162, 163–167, 175–176, 177, 262 dependency, 204–205, 242, 248, 260 dependency complex, 87–89

311

Derrida, Jacques, 156 Desjardins, Thierry, 198 deterritorialization, of philosophy, 107 detribalization, 215 development, 61, 204, 208, 259, 265 developmentalist discourses, 20 developmentalist tropes, 34 Diagne, Pathé, 181–182, 191–192 dialects and vernaculars, 146, 147–148, 148–173 dialogue, 241–242 Dieterlen, Germaine, 85 difference, discourse of, 136 diffusionism, 120, 166, 174, 175 Diop, Alioune, 66, 72, 112, 115, 125, 170, 203, 211 Bantu Philosophy preface, 104–106 Diop, Boubacar Boris, 192–196, 272 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 5, 8, 10, 12, 12–14, 75, 94, 96, 125, 131, 166, 202, 215, 226, 253, 263, 268–269 and alienation, 189–190 anti-colonialism, 264 core objectives, 187 critique of Senghor, 187 The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa, 26, 115–123, 142, 220 French university mentors, 116 glottopolitics, 199 and Hamitic theory, 176–178 historical thesis, 264–265 linguistic agenda, 126, 147–148, 173–197, 197, 220, 271 methodological framework, 119, 173, 264 Nations nègres et culture, 28, 64, 125–126, 147–148, 174–189 pan-Africanist agenda, 115–116 pedagogical programme, 184–187 political commitments, 174, 186–187 on sources, 70 use of the future, 118–119 Diouf, Abdou, 194 dispensable citizens, 213 disposable people, 213

312

Index

dispossession, 215, 219, 238, 269 École Normale William Ponty, Senegal, 191, 248 ecological imperialism, 214–223 Egyptocentric thesis, 28 Egyptology, 120–121 Egyptomania, 156 Einstein, Albert, 185–186 Élisabethville, Le Hangar art studio, 131 Eluard, Paul, 10 Emmanuel, Nganga, 240–242, 244, 249, 253–254, 269 endangered cultures, 202 environmental racism, 216 Ethiopian movement, 250 ethnocentric risk, 104 ethnocentrism, 105, 206–207, 211, 245–246, 256 ethnophilosophy, 69, 97 Eurocentric universalism, 21 Eurocentrism, 2, 20, 22, 162, 174, 215, 261 cultural anthropology, 50–51 time and temporality, 49–50 Europe-Africa complementarity, 16 European culture, 100 evangelizing practices, 108 événements, 89, 91 evolution, 61 evolutionism, 166 false, 61 existentialism, 5–6, 16, 21, 26–27, 80, 265, 270 expectation, 35, 40–45, 145, 175 experience, 25, 35, 40–45, 111-112, 133, 142, 175 Fabian, Johannes, 11, 39, 50–51, 57, 151, 152, 163, 168, 178, 208, 267 Faidherbe, Louis, 27, 145, 160–161, 167, 181, 262 false evolutionism, 61 Fanon, Frantz, 15, 26, 35, 36, 58–59, 72, 81–82, 87–88, 91, 97–98, 101,

102, 103, 114, 124, 125, 129, 137, 211, 226–227, 232–234, 246, 263, 268–269 female emancipation, 225 female genital mutilation, Balandier’s defence of, 29, 209, 227–238, 256 Ferry, Jules, 43 Firth, Raymond, 222 Floyd, George, killing of, 67 forbidden archives, 51 Foucault, Michel, 39, 121 Francocentrism, 21 francophone poetry, 3 francophonie, 30, 153–156, 182, 193, 195, 264 Fraser, Douglas, 100 freewill, 7 French Africanism, 19 French colonialism, responses to, 2 French Revolution, 44–45, 55 French scholarship, 22 French Union, 242 Fritzsche, Peter, 36, 55–57, 78 Frobenius, Leo, 25, 71, 95–96, 110, 111, 134, 166, 175 Front Populaire, 9–10 functionalism, 166 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 117 Galton, Francis, 128 Gautier, Émile-Félix, 146 gaze, 138, 240–241 genocide, 72–73, 266 Geschichte, 40 Gheerbrant, Alain, 208 Ghosh, Amitav, 31–32 Gide, André, 2–3, 211 Gilroy, Paul, 73 Glissant, Édouard, 195, 214 global society, 80 globalization, 38, 267 glottophagia, 27, 145, 184 glottopolitics, 30, 163–170, 173–197, 199

Index Gluckman, Max, 19, 36, 86–87, 166, 234 Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand, 83–84 Gobineau, Arthur de, 7–8, 53 Godard, Jean-Luc, 98 Goldwater, Robert, 104 Greenberg, Joseph, 181 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), 37, 38 Griaule, Marcel, 14, 85, 168–169, 174, 229, 270 Griaulian anthropology, 25 griots, 70 Grosfoguel, Ramon, 266–267 Grove, Richard, 219 guardianship, 3, 29, 209 Guernica (film), 99 Guillaume, Paul, 134 Guinea-Bissau, 114 Haiti, 155–156 Hamitic theory, 95–96, 146, 157–158, 167, 176–177, 181, 197 Hamy, Ernest-Théodore, 54–55 Hardy, Georges, 247–248 Harootunian, Harry, 24 Hartog, François, 34, 42, 44, 45 Hegel, Auguste, 42 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 42, 64–65 Heidegger, M., 41, 188 Hessens, Robert, 99 heteroglossia, 154, 154–155 heterotemporality, 34 Hiroshima mon amour (film), 99 ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’ (Ki-Zerbo), 36, 69–78, 175, 215 historical difference, 35 historical distinctiveness, 78 historical materialism, 42 historical methodology, 53–54 historical progress, 24 historical recovery, 133 historical time, 23–24, 33–34, 39 historicism, 34

313

historicity African, 91 chronological segmentation, 133 one-sided, 36 regimes of, 33–34, 42–43, 44, 78, 91 history Africanization of, 77–78 models of, 61–63 place of, 60 and race, 60–61 history writing, sources, 54 Holocaust, the, 21, 72–73, 91, 215, 266 homogenization, 59 horizon of expectation, 35, 40–45, 145, 175 hot past, 77–78, 91 hot societies, 63 Hountondji, Paulin, 107 Howlett, Jacques, 17–18, 135 humanism, 105 humanitarianism, 3 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 158, 159 Hume, David, 65 hybridisme, 113 hybridity, 201 Ibn Battuta, 70 The Idea of Africa (Mudimbe), 46–50 identity politics, 35, 254 Ife, 95 IMF, 221, 267 immobility, 50 imperial debris, 29, 209 imperial discursive cartography, 31 imperialism, 64, 213–214 acceleration of, 36–37 imperialization, of time and temporality, 35–36, 36–50 inauthenticity, 102–3, 104, 124 indebtedness, 241 India, 31–32 indigenous purity, 12 Indochina, 2

314

Index

Industrialization, 6, 212–223, 238, 271 initiation rituals, 227–228, 232, 237 Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) , 21, 22, 27, 67, 147, 170, 244, 262 Institut National d’Études Démographiques, 205–207 institutionalization, 22 internationalization, 267–268 Iquaqua, Benoît Ogoula, 238 Irele, Abiola, 189–190 irruptive violence of time, 39 Islam, 121, 170–173, 272 It for Others (film), 26–27, 94, 97–98, 103, 137–141, 143, 267, 272 James, C.L.R., 5, 211 Japan, 114 Jarry, Alfred, 243 Jeanson, Francis, 101–102 Jews, 102 comparison with Africans, 72–73 Julien, Charles-André, 146 just treatment, 3 Kagamé, Alexis, 187–188 Kanda Matulu, Tshibumba, 136, 267 Keita, Mamadou Madeira, 170 Kennedy, Raymond, 81 Kimbangu, Simon, 243–244, 248–250, 254 Kimbanguism, 29–30, 209, 248–250, 254, 255 Ki-Zerbo, Joseph, 25, 91, 265 account of African history, 69–78 on African backwardness, 71–72 agenda, 75–78 and cultural values, 69–70 ‘Histoire et conscience nègre’, 36, 69–78, 175, 215 on sources, 70–71 theoretical perspective, 69 UNESCO General History of Africa, 69

Kjersmeier, Carl, 14 Koselleck, Reinhart, 20, 23–24, 32, 66, 90, 105–106, 109, 169, 208, 267–268 comparison of Jews with Africans, 72–73 and time, 35, 38, 39–45, 49–50, 52, 57 Koulibali, Mamari, 76–77 La Philosophie bantoue (Tempels), 10–11, 25–26 ‘La Situation coloniale’ (Balandier), 25, 36, 78–90, 101, 207, 261 land misappropriation, 70, 71 language and the language question, 27–28, 111–112, 145–199, 220 and alienation, 189–190 Balandier and, 239–248 biopolitics, 145, 161 classifications, 155–163, 163–165 colonial policies, 146 the colonial situation, 168–173, 199 compilation of vocabularies, 151–152, 178–179 and cultural autonomy, 147–148 and cultural identity, 181–182 decolonization, 28, 183–184, 196, 197–199 Delafosse’s historical perspective, 163–167 dialects and vernaculars, 146, 147–148, 148–173 dialogue, 241–242 Diop and, 126, 173–197, 271–272 Egyptocentric thesis, 28 epistemological fallacy, 159–160 glottophagia, 145, 184 glottopolitics, 30, 163–170, 173–197, 199 Hamitic theory, 146, 157–158, 167, 176–178, 181, 197 hierarchy, 147–148, 156–163, 176, 192, 193 historical perspective, 163–167

Index historicity, 164–165 idiosyncratic use of French, 247–248 lexical borrowing, 163 linguistic deterritorialization, 195 linguistic exchanges, 155 linguistic renaissance, 13 linguistic homogenization, 148–149, 152–156 palabre, 150–151 post-Second World War era, 168–173 privileging, 146 racially driven theories, 146 religious war, 248–255 violence of translation, 239–241 language planning, 145 language policies, 21–22 late capitalism, 97–98 late colonialism, 98, 133–134 Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave, 192 Le Corbusier, 10 Le Corneur, Olivier, 14–15 Le Hangar art studio, Élisabethville, 131 Le Musée vivant(journal), 3–7, 9–10, 11–14, 17–18, 31 Comité d’honneur, 10 League of Nations, 2 Leenhardt, Maurice, 250 legends, 252 Leiris, Michel, 7–9, 28, 31, 60, 90, 166, 211 Leopold II, King, 68 Lepsius, Richard, 156–157, 158 Les Statues meurent aussi (film), 25–27, 30, 93–96, 122–123, 124, 128, 141, 143, 154, 180, 226, 241, 272 anti-colonialism, 114, 137 and Bantu Philosophy, 106–113 beauty, 97 censorship, 99 central thesis, 115 commentary, 99–100 commission, 93

315

and commodification, 98, 99–104 context, 139 critique of museums, 103–104 and decolonization, 103 dialogue between past, present, and future, 94–95 and existentialism, 26–27 functionalist dimension, 25–26 and inauthenticity, 102–3 and It for Others, 137–141 main postulation, 26 philosophical reflections, 96 piece selection, 112 political issues, 133–134 questions, 113–114 self-reflexive position, 98 specialists influence, 112–113 thesis, 99–101 view of African art, 111 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 8, 15, 25, 28, 31, 91, 208 on progress, 61–64 Race and History, 36, 59–64, 106, 174, 269 rivalry with Balandier, 84–85 The Savage Mind, 60 structuralism, 85 Tristes tropiques, 63, 202, 256 lexical borrowing, 163 L’Indochine enchaînée (newspaper), 2 linguistic classifications, 155 linguistic deterritorialization, 195 linguistic exchanges, 155 linguistic hierarchy, 147–148, 156–163, 176, 192, 193 linguistic homogenization, 148–149, 152–156 linguistic renaissance, 13 Lipchitz, Jacques, 10 literacy programmes, 194 littérature d’instituteurs’ [school teachers’ literature], 248 Littérature-Monde manifesto, 195–196 lived experience, 25 living lies, 103–104

316

Index

long nineteenth century, the, 20 looting, 95, 272–273 Le Louvre, 53 loyalty, 241 Lumumba, Patrice, 258 Luschan, Felix von, 165 Ly, Abdoulaye, 77, 231 McClintock, Anne, 226–227 Macey, David, 82 MacGaffey, Wyatt, 239, 251, 263 MacGregor, Neil, 140 Macron, Emmanuel, Ouagadougou speech, 27, 140, 273 Madagascar, 87–89, 91 magic, 249 Malaurie, Jean, 202 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 86, 244 Malraux, André, 2–3, 101 Mana, Kä, 258 Manchester School, the, 83–84 Mannoni, Octave, 87–89, 126, 204–205 Maran, René, 2 Marker, Chris, 25, 93, 98, 102, 104, 108–110, 112–115, 122, 133, 135, 138, 154, 202, 265 Marquard, Odo, 57 Marx, Karl, 35, 42, 65 Marxism, 182 masks, 232 matriarchy, 117–118, 224, 271–272 Matswa, André Grenard, 235–237, 243–244, 248–250, 254 Matswanism, 29–30, 209, 235–237, 248–250, 254, 255 Mauss, Marcel, 9, 80 Mbembe, Achille, 220, 255 Mbiti, John, 111–112 M’Bow, Amadou-Mahtar, 140 Mead, Margaret, 245 Meillassoux, Claude, 215 Meinhof, Carl, 157–158, 159, 165, 167, 181 Memmi, Albert, 101 memory boom, the, 67

Mercier, Paul, 244 Message de l’Afrique (Leiris), 7–9 messianic movements, 29–30, 209, 235–237, 248–255, 257–258, 263, 265–266, 269–270 methodological turn, 36 Métraux, Alfred, 8, 60 Miano, Léonora, 32 microhistory, 83–84 Mignolo, Walter, 266 millenarianism, 129, 250, 257 Miller, Christopher, 110 miscegenation, 12–13, 176–177 missionaries, 25, 35, 45–50, 211, 269–270 Mistral, Frédéric, 184 Mitterrand, François, 99 modern time, 24 modernity, 17, 33, 38, 50, 77, 113, 126, 184, 220, 235, 262 African, 148, 201, 238, 259, 265, 271 colonial, 24, 91, 152, 208, 222, 227–228, 233, 238, 264–265 shift to, 32 modernization, 6 Monénembo, Tierno, 32 Monod, Théodore, 27, 67–68, 72, 147, 170–172, 173 Montel, Étienne, 161 Moore, Carlos, 187 mother tongue, 147 Mpala, 47–49, 105 Mudimbe, V.Y., 13, 24–25, 35, 91, 94, 116, 157, 187–188, 205 The Idea of Africa, 46–50 The Invention of Africa, 121–122, 137 ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Arts’, 26, 96–97, 130, 130–137, 142–143, 233 multiculturalism, 198 multilingualism, 182 Munro, Thomas, 134

Index Murphy, David, 191–192 Musée de L’homme, 4–5, 7, 9, 10, 22, 36, 52–53, 57, 127–128, 262 Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, 36, 50, 52–53, 54–55, 57, 124 museum policy, 52–53 museumizing imagination, 52 museums, living lies, 103–104 mythical time, 85–86 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 221–222 Nanni, Giordano, 38 narratives of overcoming, 5 nations, 52 Nations nègres et culture (Diop), 28, 64, 125–126 and Hamitic theory, 176–178 linguistic agenda, 126, 147–148, 174–189 mother tongue, 147 subtitle, 191 vocabulaire, 178–179 Native Americans, 56 Naville, Édouard, 177 Nazism, 211 negritude, 9, 25–26, 65, 111, 125, 187, 190, 195, 257 negro art, Balandier’s examination of, 123–130 Negro fetish, the, 125 negro soul, 135, 142 negro worldview, 134 Négroni, Jean, 99–100 neocolonialism, 32, 140 Neuzeit, 40–41, 43, 57, 90 New Caledonia, 198 new time, 39–40 Ngom, Fatoumata, 103 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Nigeria, mining sector, 216–219 Nixon, Rob, 29, 212 normalizing project, 46 Nuit et brouillard (film), 99 Nuremberg trials, 72, 266 Nyerere, Julius, 196

317

Nzegwu, Nkiru Uwechia, 117 Office de la recherche scientifique d’outre-mer, 244, 262 Ombredane, André, 246 one-sided historicity, 36 ontological exceptionality, 10–11 Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, 194 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 267 Orientalism, 149–150 original purity, 6 Orlow, Uriel, 103 ORSTOM, 22 Otherness, politics of, 123, 136 Ousmane, Sembène, 181–182, 191–192 overcoming, narratives of, 5 pacification, 202 paternalism, 131 perfect order, 109–112 Petite Planète series, 202 petro-imperialism, 213 philosophy, deterritorialization of, 107 Picasso, Pablo, 10 Plon, 201–202 poetry, 194 policing techniques, 128 popular art, 136 positivist terminology, 53–54 postcolonial literatures, 30–32 Poto-Poto atelier, 130 Présence Africaine, 3, 21, 22, 36, 66–68, 93, 136, 139, 142, 172, 203, 248, 257, 262 Prime Meridian Conference, 1884, 37 primitive philosophy, 76 primitiveness, 88 progress, 33–34, 42, 50, 90, 222, 265, 267–269 and Christian salvation, 45 Lévi-Strauss on, 61–64 and reason, 18

318

Index

Sartre on, 64–65 and time, 41–42, 77 progress-based historical model, 19–20 provenance, 78 Queneau, Raymond, 212 Quijano, Aníbal, 266 race and racism, 60–61, 79, 81–82, 124, 256 anti-racist, 122, 139 environmental, 216 Race and History (Lévi-Strauss), 36, 59–64, 106, 174, 269 racial differences, 87 racial hierarchy, 8 racial oppression, 87 racial theories, 128 racisme, 43, 102 ‘Rapport sur l’intégration’ [Report on Integration], 197–198 Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, 174 Ratton, Charles, 112 Raynaud, Henri, 10 reappropriation, 238, 272–273 reason, and progress, 18 Reclus, Onésime, 27, 145, 153–155, 155–156, 262 Red Rubber Scandal, 73 redemptory model, 5 religious rituals, 22 religious war, 248–255, 256–257 remembering, 67 repatriation, 27, 140–141, 143 reprendre, 133, 136 ‘Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Arts’ (Mudimbe), 26, 96–97, 130, 130–137, 142–143, 233 Resnais, Alain, 25, 93, 99, 104, 112–115 restitution, 273 reterritorialization, 248 Rhodes, Cecil, 67

rhythmicality, 134 Ricard, Alain, 159 ritual bodily mutilations, 229 Rivet, Paul, 9, 52 Rivière, Georges-Henri, 9 Romain-Desfossés, Pierre, 131–133, 142 Rothberg, Michael, 73 Rouaud, Jean, 195 Rouch, Jean, 253 Rousseau, Madeleine, 5, 8, 8–9, 14–17, 18 Rwandan genocide, 32, 192, 258 Sadji, Abdoulaye, 239, 248 Said, Edward, 149–150 salvage ethnography, 55 Sans Soleil (film), 98, 114, 138 Sarr, Felwine, 75, 140, 218, 272–273 Afrotopia, 118–119, 126, 208, 219–221 Sarraut, Albert, 43, 213 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 13, 16, 17–18, 26, 35, 36, 69, 72, 91, 96, 103, 111, 124, 125, 234 anti-racist manifesto, 64–66 Black Orpheus, 64–65, 75, 105, 110, 139, 166, 195 on colonialism, 80 Critique of Dialectical Reason, 60 mensonges vivants, 256 Portrait of the Anti-Semite, 81–82 on progress, 64–65 Réflexions sur la question juive, 102 Sauvy, Alfred, 206 Savoy, Bénédicte, 140, 218, 272–273 Schlegel, Friedrich, 53, 158, 159 Schleicher, August, 159 Schmidt, Wilhelm, 175 Schoelcher, Victor, 68 Schwab, Raymond, 149–150 scientific objectivity, 59 Scott, David, 5

Index screen-memory, 73 secular time, 43–45, 49–50 Segalen, Victor, 202 self-determination, 248–250 self-government, 1–2, 3 selfhood, 103 Seligman, Charles G., 122 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 3, 7, 25, 64–65, 66, 112, 125, 134, 142, 166, 187, 194, 252 Serequeberhan, Tsenay, 107 sexual politics, 223–238 sexual violence, 224 sexuality, 223–226, 238, 270 situational anthropology, 84 slavery and the slave trade, 21, 31, 47–48, 67–68, 77, 134, 266 slow violence, 29, 208–209, 212–223, 256, 264 Smith, Grafton Elliot, 120 Socé, Ousmane Diop, 248 social cohesion, 229–230 social Darwinism, 43 social dynamism, 222 Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 42–43 sociology, 205 and cultural anthropology, 82–83 sources, history writing, 54 Soustelle, Jacques, 9 space, and time, 38–39, 91 space of experience, 35, 40–45, 111–112, 133, 142, 175 speech acts, 243 spirituality, 134 stationary history, 61–63, 90 stereotypes, 75, 81, 210–211, 224, 243 Stoler, Ann, 29 structuralist anthropology, 59–60 subjectivity, 96 sub-Saharan Africa, lack of knowledge of, 6 Sufism, 170–173, 220, 272 Surrealist appropriation, 124–125 syncretism, 122

319

Tanaka, Stefan, 38–39 Tansi, Sony Labou, 255 Tempels, Placide, 7, 16, 69, 93, 96, 123, 131, 166, 265 Bantu Philosophy, 76, 104–113, 142, 268, 269–270 La Philosophie bantoue, 10–11, 25–26 temporal politics, 47–50 temporal turn, the, 20 temporality. see time and temporality temporalization, 23, 46, 50 Terre Humaine series, 201–202, 256 territories, 52 Tersen, Émile, 68 Tervuren, Congo Museum, 50 Thiam, Sakhir, 182 Third World, the, 205–207 Thomas, Lynn, 237–238 time and temporality, 23–25, 33–36, 60–61, 90, 267 absolute, 33–34 Biblical, 43 Christian, 43–50 clock-time, 36–38 conception of, 20 and curatorial practices, 50–57 diverging, 38 Eurocentrism, 49–50 globalization, 38 historical, 23–24, 33, 39 imperialization of, 24–25, 35–36, 36–50 irruptive violence of, 39 modern, 24 mythical, 85–86 new, 39–40 past, present, and future, 39, 41–42 politics of, 47–50 and progress, 42, 77 secular, 43–45, 49–50 secularization, 41 and space, 38–39, 91 timelessness, 50 tin mining, 216–219

320

Index

Toute la mémoire du monde (film), 114 Touvalou, Kojo, 2 translation, violence of, 239–241 Travélé, Moussa, 169 tribal anthropology, inauthentic tenets of, 36 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 36, 90–91 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 120 under/development, 204 UNESCO, 8, 36, 57–59, 262, 269 Constitution, 58 Statements of Race, 59 unhoming, 130 United Nations, 262, 266 Charter, 1, 3, 12, 74–75 principles, 1 United Nations General Assembly, 2 United States of America, 56 urban life, 129–130 urbanization, 6, 223 Vacher de Lapouge, Georges, 8 Van den Avenne, Cécile, 155, 161–162, 167, 198 Van Gennep, Arnold, 229 Vansina, Jan, 70, 95, 133 floating gap, 133, 264

Verbeken, Auguste, 11–12 vital force, 105–106, 108–110, 123, 135 vitalism, 118 vocabularies, compilation of, 151–152, 178–179 Vogel, Susan, 103 Wahhabism, 172 walking rhetorics, 47–48 Werbner, Richard, 84 Western degeneracy, 131–132 Western hegemony, 55, 60–61 Western shortcomings, 8–9 Westernization, 215, 259 white blacks, 95–96 White Savior Industrial Complex. the, 210 Wiredu, Kwasi, 187–188, 189, 259 witchcraft, 249 women, agency, 225–227, 238 World Bank, 221 World Trade Organization, 267 worlding, 30–31 Wright, Richard, 5–7, 7 Young, Robert, 24 Zabus, Chantal, 30, 163