<gondola@macalester.edu>

Here's the English version which is slightly different from the
French one. Those who are interested in this discussion may find
my French version more compelling and better worded.


Having had a two-year long dialogue with Catherine Coquery-
Vidrovitch (CCV) concerning the future of French Africanism, I
can't help but appreciate the fact that she has brought this
discussion to the attention of non-francophones.  I would have
appreciated if she had more clearly and appropriately
contextualized her considerations, however.

First, a peripheral question.  I am against CCV's notion about
the African psyche, that:  "Our African partners have very great
politenes, akin to oriental courteousness [...] one never
contradicts; to say no is rude."  This notion lends strength to
the idea that it is up to others to fight the battles for
Africans because Africans themselves do not know how to make
their voices heard.  According to CCV, Africans are not even
able to say no.  As a historian of colonization, CCV should not
be able to ignore the categorical "no" that Africans have put
forth, sometimes violently, often opaquely and evasively (but
nonetheless determined), throughout the history of African
colonization.  I find this remark, at the very least, misplaced
and pointless.  I find it even contradicting her following
statement that "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."

Two concepts that CCV underscored in her expose also caught my
attention. One concerns the authenticity of the scholars who
deal with Africa, and the other concerns their legitimacy.  I
think that neither the African scholar (who has a tendency to
legitimize his/her work from the sacro-sanct position as
"insider"), nor the white scholar (who boasts of an erudition
that sometimes uses Africa as a field of experimentation of
theories developed elsewhere) has a superior approach.  Our
intellectual and even our cultural paths make us all hybrid
scholars.  In which category should we put a white scholar who
has spent most of her youth in Africa and makes annual research
trips to her African "domain"?  What about an African scholar
who was educated in France for two decades, teaches in the U.S.,
and does not always have the opportunity to go back to Africa as
often as he wants?  The distance vis-a-vis the African object is
not "racial" (white africanist vs. African scholar), or physical
or cultural.  In my opinion, it is what I call une distance du
coeur (a distance of the heart), a voluntary exile that remains
paradoxical and pathological.

To tell the truth, this distance will never be shortened by
repeatedly visiting Africa.  Going to Africa does not
necessarily guarantee that the final result of the research will
be legitimate and representative.  As an African, I am not
embarrassed to confess that I was trained as a historian through
my acquaintances with the works of French Annalists.  What do I
remember from them?  I learned that the chronicling of history
is, first and foremost, a friendship between the historian and
his/her object.  In 1953, Lucien Febvre urged his students at
L'Ecole Normale Superieure to "live history:" "Don't be content
to stand idly by, watching the furious sea.  Roll up your
sleeves and help the sailors at the task." "History only makes
sense to us historians," writes Antoine Prost (who taught me at
the Sorbonne), "when we stand in the shoes of those whose lives
we are writing about." The French historian, Henri-Irenee Marrou
wrote 40 years before Prost, "the term empathy does not come
close to the real picture: between the historian and his/her
object there must develop a friendship if the historian wants to
understand(1)."  I am repeating here lessons that are well known
to all of us.  However, I would argue that the discipline of
African studies would have more to gain if it applied these
principles instead of being oblivious of them.  Applying such
principles is the only way to avoid the snares of a distant
history detached of its real object but nevertheless imperial
and unquestionable.

CCV writes that there is no longer an "implacable urgency" for
western Africanists to write the history of Africa.  This
statement is very problematic.  Has the history of Africa landed
on the planet of erudition, far from the miasmas of passion and
militant history?  I'm not so sure. Moreover, I find this notion
questionable.  CCV seems to falsely oppose erudite history
(which she characterizes as being rigorous and convincing) to
militant history (which she finds only passionate and engaging).
 As a matter of fact, I have always found it mind-boggling that
most of the great history books I've ever read manage to be both
militant and erudite.  Which means that to chronicle history is
not only to unravel the details of past events, to discover
dates or to interrogate ancient ruins.  It's more than that.
It's to bring back to life men, women, the poor, the
downtrodden; to imagine them in their struggles and in their
aspirations; to represent them in their misery and their
grandeur; to reenact their victories and unveil their
weaknesses.  How can we do this without resorting to both
passion and rigor?

Whether we accept it or not, history is political by nature.
First, to quote Lucien Febvre again, history is first of all a
science of the present that cannot escape the debate of its
times.  Second, the relationship between the prince and the
scribe has never really ceased.  I learned with much fright, for
example, that the late French president Francois Mitterrand
declared to some of his circle that a genocide in Rwanda "is not
really important(2)."  And he said this in the summer of 1994
when the killings in Rwanda were at their climax.  As passionate
of history as he was, Mitterrand, the former minister of
colonies of the Fourth Republic, indulged himself in
contemplating a deformed image of Africa created by French
africanists.  How could it otherwise be, when in the middle of
the Rwandan crisis French africanists themselves chose sides?
They undertook a sort of microcosmic genocide by allying
themselves with the Tutsi or the Hutu instead of trying to make
sense of what was going on in Rwanda.

The African scholars, who are not "genetically" immune from this
distance du coeur, have to avoid the criticisms Ngugi wa Thiongo
makes of African writers.  He defined, with reason, African
literature written in European languages as Afro-European
literature(3).  Ngugi cites this very pathological and
unfortunate response given by L. S. Senghor to the question,
"Why then do you write in French?"  To this question, Senghor
responds: "parce que nous sommes des metis culturels, parce que,
si nous sentons en negres, nous nous exprimons en francais,
parce que le francais est une langue a vocation universelle...
parce que le francais est une langue de gentillesse et
d'honnetete [...] Car je sais ses ressources pour l'avoir goute,
mache, enseigne, et qu'il est la langue des dieux [...] Et puis
le francais nous a fait don de ses mots abstraits-si rares dans
nos langues maternelles-, ou les larmes se font pierres
precieuses. Chez nous les mots sont naturellement nimbes d'un
halo de seve et de sang; les mots du francais rayonnent de
mille feux, comme des diamants. Des fusees qui eclairent notre
nuit(4)."  How ironic it is, when we consider that the author of
these lines is one of the fathers of the Negritude movement?

It's true that Mamadou Diawara and Paulin Hountondji (but there
are many others who are less well known but should be mentioned
as well) should be praised for having the courage to restore an
authentic context and situation to their intellectual/scientific
discourse by refusing exile to the West.  And on this point I
totally agree with CCV. However, I return to a banal yet
unavoidable idea that Jan Vansina also mentions in his book
_Living With Africa_.  What would French history be like if it
were produced in Pakistan by Pakistani scholars?  What would be
the history of the Founding Fathers and Jim Crow if, by chance,
it were the monopoly of the Chinese?  Just take a moment to
think about it.  Really.  Doesn't it give you goose bumps?  But
we are so used to seeing African history through the eyes of
those in Paris, Cambridge and Madison.  And we are now so
shocked to come to terms with the possibility that this history
may now be claimed by Africans themselves and change hands.

As for the "globalization of knowledge" that CCV refers to (and
which she heralds as an opportunity for Africans to participate
in the accounting of their of own history), let me offer a big
NO.  Globalization, Catherine, does not mean uniformization and
delocalization.  The knowledge about Africa still has its same
places of production, i.e., Western scientific institutions.  It
is shaped by the same paradigms that you say are redolent of
ideas borrowed from the "Bibliotheque Coloniale."  Only a
handful of African scholars are co-opted within these
institutions that are still controlled by Westerners who dictate
most of the paradigms.  And here I want to introduce a
fundamental distinction between Europe (France, Belgium and
England) and the United States.  In France, for example, French
africanists reign supreme over a domain that is reserved for
them and use "francocentric" premises to control the history of
a whole continent. In France, there are more than 100 historians
in African studies who hold academic positions but only one of
these is a native of Africa, Elikia M'Bokolo!  No wonder that
African scholars, trained in France, are running to the U.S.
One can say whatever one wants about the U.S., but at least the
U.S. is recognizing the competence of these Africans without any
blatant paternalism.  It's not so much a matter of scale (France
is so small to tell the truth) but a matter of vision and
pragmatism.  France has been beaten at that game (perhaps
because she remains so nostalgic about her colonial past and has
managed to preserve any kind of ties she could.) and tries now
to globalize her failure.  She would be better off sweeping her
own doorstep. In spite of all the ambiguities of her expose, CCV
should be praised for her audacity to recognize that an upheaval
is taking place.

        **********

(1) These quotes are taken from Antoine Prost, _Douze lecons sur
l'histoire_ (Paris: Seuil, 1996).

(2) Read Patrick de Saint-Exupery, "Quatre ans apres, de
nouvelles questions sur la politique africaine de la France.
France-Rwanda : un genocide sans importance..." _Le Figaro_, 12
janvier 1998, p. 4.

(3) Ngugi wa Thiong'o, _Decolonizing the Mind. The Politics of
Language in African Literature_ (London: James Currey, 1986, p.
27). The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu also advocates the
recourse to African languages in order to comprehend what he
terms the "conceptual idiosyncrasy" of African cultures; Read,
_Cultural Universals and Particulars. An African Perspective_
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 136 et sq.).

(4) Introduction to _Ethiopiques_ (1954), quoted in Ngugi, p.
32.

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