**AFRICA FORUM is presented by Professor Catherine Coquery-
Vidrovitch, l'Universite Paris VII-Denis Diderot. This English
version was preceded by the French original. Replies are welcome
in either langauge.**--[P.L.]


Date: 19 Nov. 1998
From: Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Universite Paris VII Denis Diderot
      <coqueryv@ext.jussieu.fr>


AFRICA FORUM : "On Africanism [viewed from France]"

by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch


The white Western Africanist researcher must be acutely
conscious of the fact that, for the people of the South,
everything that s/he is saying or writing could be held against
her/him, and interpreted in a negative sense. This
susceptibility is extreme. It is explained by history, by their
very acute sense of having been cheated for centuries, of still
being cheated.

This means that one must always be on the look out for the
"Bibliotheque coloniale," and not hesitate to recognise that
more often than is reasonable, even the most considerate of
researchers of the North commit, at the very least, some errors
of taste.

Our African partners have very great politeness, akin to
oriental courteousness: one never contradicts; to say no is
rude; to express discomfort in the face of inconvenience is not
the done thing.

But so many imponderables are not well understood by the Western
scholars, too sure of their own legitimacy, the bearers of the
good word! Their arrogance, so interiorized, that they are not
even conscious of, provokes the vengeance of a new generation of
African researchers, made all the more virulent by those among
them who lack the means to struggle, due to the fact that they
have not had the chance to go out of their country, or had the
chance too late to fill the lacuna of their formation not easily
reversed: not enough lectures; not enough knowledge, most
assuredly, but also a lot of justified rancour; the passion may
outweigh the rigour, but that is revealing and may be effectual.

One must remain so humble in front of that which one does not
understand well for a multitude of reasons, among which is the
weight of the cultural heritage of the observer, that is to say,
the viewpoint in which s/he is placed by her/his birth and
her/his own history.

In the end, if the new African generations, with the impetuosity
of their convictions, proclaim 'loud and strong' that the people
of the North are of no use any more (and this for certain would
hurt me, as each has her/his own ego) then that only signifies
that history is a social science which lives, which evolves, and
that one historian, or an historical school, had had their time.

Our role, as historian and as witness, is to take into account
this spirit of the times, to analyse it, to understand it, to
integrate it into our thoughts. Is that not the nature of
history?

For a white westerner, writing the history of Africa is not a
neutral activity. But it no longer has (as at the time of
decolonization and desegregation) an implacable urgency as it
has still for the Africans.

Besides, this is why Western Africanism can only be an
additional contribution, even if it proclaims itself as
essential, even if it continues to claim a guaranteed erudition
which often may be real for a number of reasons.

On the other hand, the militant aspect is urgent and always
deeply rooted among African researchers. This is also the case,
for different reasons, for African American intellectuals. Being
French, I will not risk buying into that. But the search for
roots, and the legitimate bitterness of the African Americans
not necessarily endows them, nevertheless, with a 'sixth sense'
to understand better than others African realities. African
American realities are not the same, because history in fact
caused cultures to diverge. Nevertheless, between blacks and
whites there remains, vis a vis the apprehension of Africa, an
irreconcilable difference inherited from history, which makes us
not entirely from the same planet.

What is left to the militant of the North eager to be useful to
the South? Beyond taking attentive and exacting actions on
immediate and extremely grave problems like the rise of racism,
xenophobia, and the closing of our borders to the majority of
people of the South, *proletarians and intellectuals alike, what
is one to do?

We must first do our own housework: explain tirelessly to our
compatriots that their heads are full of mortal prejudices that
the media are continually propagating with disheartening
potency.

The recent case of the Congo is an obvious example. Apparently
none of the media had the idea that not everything was played at
the level of external military interventions, but that the
Congolese themselves have their own messages to give, a fact of
political conscience nearly totally passed over without any
mention by the media.

Paulin Hountondji, an eminent philosopher from Benin, is correct
to observe that the African researcher of today, on the national
or international level, plays a role similar to the illiterate
informant of the past; just as the interpreter had the function
of informing the colonial inquirer, so then the African
researcher, published or not, has the primary role to serve
Africanist research; even individualized, his works, edited by a
savant of the North, contribute to the enrichment of the
libraries and the knowledge-base of the North. The North only
recognized from Africa the exotic domain of an "ethno-
philosophy," against which Hountondji was the first to revolt.

More generally, unequal exchange exists in the scientific domain
as well as in the economic sphere. Not only external communities
want to ignore the intellectual quality of African
intellectuals. African societies themselves happen to recognize
with difficulty those intellectuals born in their own bosom
whence, for example, a colloqium like the "Intellectuels
africains entre savoir(s) et societe(s)," held in Ouagadougou in
January 1998. It will be like this as long as the epicentres of
research do not develop themselves primarily by and for the
South. In the face of the scarcity of books and libraries, the
possibilities offered by the Internet will play a key role:
African researchers in the social sciences are not mistaken in
that.

Whence the importance of Pan-African realizations of information
and the utility of projects, like those of Hountondji in Benin
or Mamadou Diawara in Bamako, to found in Africa, and for
Africans, an Institute of Research just as elitist as the
American Princeton Institute: Africans have the right, like all
others, to demand excellence, which in the North is only
recognized to them as an individual title. But beware! He who
speaks about elitism does not speak of identical criteria. We
should add to that the "Bibliotheque coloniale": knowledge on
Africa has been solidly built up since the beginning of
colonization and because of it; it has been elaborated hand in
hand with colonial imperialism. This is not a critical point of
view: it is a fact. The social sciences are a reflection of
their time: ethnology and ethnography were born of and with
colonization, anthropology corresponded to decolonization, and
African history, occurring as the daughter of the former, became
possible only with independence. This history, which set fire to
all the wood, consequently nourished itself on previous colonial
works. This created various concepts that are still corrupting
scientific life, not having been reviewed or amended,
"deconstructed," as we say today. H-AFRICA recently demonstrated
this, in reminding us that Baumann and Westermann, which still
implicitly feeds ethnographic understanding of African
ethnicity, is the result of a considerable German work
elaborated by Baumann, Westermann, and Thurnwald in 1940, at the
moment when Nazi Germany was preparing to return as a colonial
power.

Yet, it is easier to demolish than to reconstruct, and it is
needless to assert, when it is not the case, that the evidence
brought from one side is irrefutable. The case is obvious in the
polemics around the very engaging but not necessarily convincing
theses of Martin Bernal and their refutation by Classicists. The
two parties seem to forget that it is scientific doubt that
advances science, and that their mutual intransigence weakens
their theses instead of supporting them.

Anyway, the time of scientific paternalism is past.
Globalization of knowledge at least has this advantage: African
historians have at last the opportunity to participate in it. We
should learn to listen to them. Africanists no longer have one
object to study: Africa. Specialists of Africa, whatever side
they are from, have one subject to study: Africans, themselves
or others.



NOTES

(1). On two antagonistic positions, see the updated: Molefi Kete
Asante, _The Afrocentric idea_ Rev. and expanded ed.
(Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1998), and its
counterpoint, Stephen Howe, _Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and
Imagined Homes_ (London: Verso, 1998). See also the Kenyan
novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, _Moving the centre : the struggle
for cultural freedoms_  (London : J. Currey ; Portsmouth, N.H. :
Heinemann, 1993).

(2). Paulin J. Hountondji, _Combats pour le sens: Un itineraire
africain_ (Cotonou: Les Editions du Flamboyant, 1997), p. 167.


[N.B. This text is an abstract of a more detailed article that
will appear in the journal _Le Debat_ in 1999].

H-Africa would like to thank Nicole Livar for the translation.

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