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<heinvanhee@skynet.be>
Rejoinder from the authors of the interview (*)
Karel Arnaut & Hein Vanhee, Ghent University (Belgium)
<karel.arnaut@rug.ac.be> & <heinvanhee@skynet.be>
In connection with Jean-Luc Vellut's reaction to an
interview with Jan Vansina that we published in August
2001, we wish to clarify and correct two points that
seem to concern us directly as authors of the
interview.
Firstly, one of our objects of inquiry consisted of the
different ways in which Belgians have engaged in
historiography of their (ex-)colony. While we
distinguished, for the sake of analysis, within this
literature three currents, Vellut reads in our
discussion a denunciation of academic historiography
for having deliberately organised silence around "the
dark chapters" of Congolese history. While such
accusations, as we observed, have popped up regularly
in postcolonial discourse - and have been repeated
recently by best-selling author Adam Hochschild - those
who read the interview carefully will agree that
nowhere in our text this argument was presented as our
own.
Secondly, Vellut suggests that Vansina's name was
misused in order to lend authority to a text destined
for joyful consumption by anticolonials. In the
absence of a further definition of this (dated)
category, this is a political argument. Let us just
say that our interview was carefully submitted to
Vansina for approval before the online publication of
both the Dutch and English versions.
If there is "a method and an agenda" behind the
questions we ask, then it is our conviction that the
accommodation of the colonial past in contemporary
discourse, the tension between scholarly and popular
representations of that past, and the diverse
institutionalisations of historical narratives about
the colony are relevant and legitimate objects of
research.
(*) submitted on 26 February 2002 to the editors of
_Forum_, the bulletin of the Belgian Association of
Africanists, where the interview with Vansina was first
published.
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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