DAVID SIMO
The writing of global history is always the consequence and the product of a consciousness of that reality. This reality today is one of great compression of time and space, of intense mobility and of a permanent exposure, through the media, to human experiences in all corners of the world. But it is practiced from institutions and in a discourse that function according to some mechanisms which are themselves inscribed in a given tradition. While the product of globalization, the writing of global history as a university practice seeks to be part of a tradition it wants, indeed, to modify or to transform.
This writing intends to provide a platform for a plural narration of subjective experiences of the past of all human groups, but each group has its own mode of narration of past experiences. That is why it is important to bear in mind what the Indian economist G. Balachandran writes: “New is not the same as distinct. Hence it is also necessary to be alert to whether, in encountering global history/ies, we are hearing distinct new voices narrating their own stories as they experience/d them. Or are we in the presence of a master ventriloquist re-telling a master narrative in several seemingly different voices?” (2011: 7)
Some analysts such as Abolade Adeniji (2005), who scrutinize African historiography and African intellectual history in search of examples of global history writing, too quickly conclude that there was no such tradition. This follows an approach that favors a particular model of writing history. As Mamadou Diouf (2000) stresses, there are several ways to deal with the past and we should avoid creating too tight a bulkhead between writing history in universities and other forms of narrating experiences. So here I am interested in any attempt to structure the past in order to submit seemingly chaotic events to an interpretative work that recreates them and elucidates the structures or relational systems of implication between them. I will be taking into account the narratives that implicitly or explicitly integrate Africa into the history of humankind, or into the history of the given oikoumene Africans were confronted with, or which compare implicitly or explicitly African history with that of other peoples. Such an undertaking cannot claim or even aim to be exhaustive. The examples I present here do not intend to reconstruct a full tradition, merely to indicate traditions; they are not used in a normative sense to indicate what is suitable and what is problematic. My aim is simply to make visible some efforts by Africans to think the globality of their different times, and to position themselves in that globality. My aim is also to make intelligible their constraints and objectives when they do this work. Some believe that we should reconstruct a genealogy of the writing of history in Africa which includes all intellectuals of African descent, including early Christian theologians like St Augustine and theorists of American modernity like W.E.B. DuBois. I will not follow this path and I shall address narratives developed on African soil, preferably by Africans.
Conversion, the Emergence of a New Cosmology and Self-Rewriting
Throughout its history, Africa has been embedded in several projects of globalization that have confronted it with new universalist and teleological visions. We often underestimate the intellectual challenge posed by these adventures. Several authors have stressed the almost anthropological desire of any group to create symbolic orders to position and orientate themselves in the world. The desire to create coherence in order to escape the vertigo of chaos forces one to continuously update the narrative of the self, its trajectory, and its objectives.
If a dominant narrative emerges, especially one that ignores or marginalizes you, there is an almost natural reflex to reject this narrative or to rephrase it so as to position yourself in it. In general, the narrative of the self intends to strengthen internal consistency and establish a sense of solidarity; in situations where there is a challenge or even a total dismissal of the prevailing narrative, the narrative of self enters into a debate with the new powerful and dominating discourse.
Africa has gone through three major globalizing processes which integrated it brutally into a new world order in which it found itself relegated to the periphery. These processes were Islamization, Christianization, and colonization. Africans clearly have produced narratives of resistance and rejection of these new orders, but they have also engendered a reformulation of new symbolic orders which reproduced the logic and the language of the dominant discourses, while modifying them to include Africa and the African in a more honorable position in the new world order. These reformulations must necessarily be regarded as part of an original mode of global history writing by Africans – even though they use a narrative matrix borrowed from the dominant discourse and seem to focus on parochial experiences. I will present here two examples of such narratives, reacting first to the Islamization of parts of Africa in the sixteenth century, and then to the Christianization of other parts in the nineteenth century.
The first example is the tarikh (“chronicle”) genre which emerges in the second half of the seventeenth century and which is emblematic of the manuscripts of Timbuktu. The tarikh genre was “centered upon the task of making historical sense of the political and social upheavals brought about by the Moroccan invasion of 1591” (Moraes Farias 2008: 97). Two famous documents pertaining to this new literary genre are the Tarikh al-Sudan (Chronicle of the Sudan) by Abd al-Rahman al-Sadi (1653) and the Tarikh al-fattash (Chronicle of the Researcher) by Mahmud b. al-Mutawakil Kati (1657–1669). To these manuscripts, which are well known and still preserved in Timbuktu, we shall add other written chronicles which are not currently available, but which have been used by some African historians, for example those of the Mande and of the Fulani of Futa Jallon or Fouta Toro.
In a lecture delivered in Timbuktu in 1997 on Islam and West Africa, Seydou Camara mentioned a text from the historical tradition of the Mande people in which the Jabati from the Kela Centre formulated a new history of the Mande people as constituted by the following phrases (1997: 117):
The creation of the Universe and the origin of Humanity.
The conquest of Khaybar.
The beginning of the mansaya (monarchy) in the Mande.
The saga of Sunjata.
The mottos and genealogies of the heroes of the main Mande clans.
The list of the thirty Mande “families.”
The settlement and hegemony of the Keyita Kandasi in the Niger Valley.
As we can see, such a cosmology mixes historical fact and myths of origins and reconstructs a history of Mandes to integrate them into a trajectory corresponding to an Islamic vision of teleology. Thus a connective logic appears whose final objective is to legitimize the ruling dynasty and to reconcile it with the dominant order. Diagne observes:
In the rewriting of their origins, the Mande present themselves as the descendants of the royalty from Khaybar who converted to Islam after their military defeat. The function of this narrative is quite clear. First, it transforms the conversion of the Mande to Islam and its cosmology into an epic which took place at the very beginning of the Muslim religion, as part of the early Islamic saga in the Arabian Peninsula. Second, it legitimizes the mansaya as the continuation of an ancient tradition of royalty in Khaybar (a process of legitimization which is the usual role of myths). (2008: 21)
Some historians have interpreted this rewriting as a sign of a break with the pagan origins of Mandes and a willingness to reinvent oriental ancestors to fit within the new oikoumene, centered in the Middle East. Diagne denied such a narrow interpretation and instead emphasized the overall significance of a new cosmology, which was to anchor the community through a new historical narrative in a global Islamic world, that is to say the umma, which implies a new geography, new places of memory, new memory of places, a new temporality.
For Diagne, the text of the Mande, like other manuscripts of Timbuktu which mix dynastic developments, biographies, genealogies, collective developments, and sociological considerations, creates a new philosophy of time: as creative movement, as the idea of becoming, in short, as teleology. Diagne quotes another Timbuktu scholar whose views show clearly that the intellectual endeavor expressed in the chronicles is not just a reproduction of a given narrative, but also its criticism and its modification. Ahmad Baba writes in his work, Mi’raj al-su’ud, “There is no difference between one race and another.” This is an unequivocal dismissal of Islamic narratives which pretend that the enslavement of black people was a natural consequence of some curse against the descendant of Ham, one son of Noah, a narrative which naturalizes slavery and leads to “disparagingly calling black people ’abid (slaves), as is even today the case” (Diagne 2008: 26).
The second example of Africans reformulating processes of globalization comes from a historiography that developed in the nineteenth century, with two leading scholars who created a genre that others then perpetuated. The first scholar was Carl Christian Reindorf, pastor of the Basel Mission, who published in 1895 a document entitled History of the Gold Coast and Asante: Based on Traditions and Historical Facts, Comprising a Period of More Than Three Centuries from about 1500 to 1860. The second author was the Reverend Samuel Johnson, who completed a manuscript in 1897, published only after his death, with the title “The history of the Yoruba, from the earliest time to the beginning of the British protectorate.” From these titles, it is clear that the two pastors intended to reconstruct the history of their respective peoples, the Ashanti and Yoruba. How can micronational history be regarded as a kind of global history writing? For the same reasons as the chronicles discussed above. Indeed, the project of writing a history of a people is here an attempt to position oneself in a new cosmology and a new global community. As noted by Diagne, “conversion is not only entering a new religion with its creed, dogmas and rituals. As the Latin etymology indicates, to convert is to get totally turned around. That means a new self-reappraisal following the adoption of a new cosmology. One visible aspect of conversions has been a radical change in the discourse of identity” (2008: 21).
The writing of the history of their people by new converts and pastors is inscribed in this logic. It aims at positioning themselves in a new trajectory charted by the new religion. Unlike the tarikh genre, the two pastors do not mix facts and myths. On the contrary, they are concerned about accuracy, authenticity and truth, all of the requirements they internalized by reading historians, anthropologists and other observers, including Europeans who had written about their people and whom they quote extensively. But they also realize the importance of the hermeneutic problems of understanding the “facts.” They are also aware of the difficulty of access to sources and conclude by arguing that a greater legitimacy should be accorded to their own narration of their people’s history. Thus Reindorf wrote in his preface:
A history of the Gold Coast written by a foreigner would most probably not be correct in its statements, he not having the means of acquiring the different traditions in the country and comparing them with those which he may have gathered from a single individual. Unless a foreigner writes what he witnesses personally, his statements will be comparatively worthless, as it is the case with several accounts of the Gold Coast already published. Hence it is most desirable that a history of the Gold Coast and its people should be written by one who has not only studied, but has had the privilege of initiation into the history of its former inhabitants and writes with true native patriotism. (1895: iii–iv)
As we can see very clearly, there are already in this text the different requirements that nationalist writings of African history would later assert. To write this kind of history becomes an act of patriotism. But unlike other approaches that are part of the resistance and rejection of the new symbolic order and of the new cosmology, the goal here is only to restore the truth of this history, without questioning the new colonial perspective. The author then states: “If a nation’s history is the nation’s speculum and measure-tape, then it brings the past of that nation to its own view, so that the past may be compared with the present to see whether progress or retrogression is in operation; and also as a means of judging our nation by others, so that we may gather instruction for our future guidance” (1895: iv).
The writing of the past here does not at first sight correspond to a desire to work out glorious ancestries, but corresponds to the presentation of a reality which has to be transformed. The knowledge seems to be serving the project of integration into a new Christian and colonial order. Even if writing History is focusing on oneself, it is already a conversation with the Other and with the ongoing process of globalization. Patriotism is not here nativistic, in the sense of being based on the defense and protection of endangered values. This, in any case, is how his fellow European missionaries read Reindorf’s text. J.G. Christaller, who published the manuscript at the time, wrote in an introductory note:
But the superstitions, cruelties, horrors and atrocities in the private and public life of heathenish nations are also brought to view in too many instances of this History of the Gold Coast, and this ought to impress natives and Europeans with thankfulness for the changes already effected and with the conviction of the necessity of continuing and increasing every effort to bring the various tribes more under the influence of true Christian religion and civilization. (Reindorf 1895: ix)
The writing of history thus brings elements of Christian legitimization for present and future. But this writing of history is not confined to the development of a new teleology in which the past would be a step beyond, a goal which has to be achieved. It also reveals the existence and the presence of a history and as such is a challenge to Christian cosmology since that tended to hold a thesis of the absence of a history and culture for these peoples. The requirement of accuracy and the claim of a right to tell one’s own story stems from a critique of the dominant discourse. Why would people fight to restore the truth of the past if they did not believe there was something important they had to know about it and perhaps even save? In this sense, these pastors and historians were revising the new dominant cosmology and teleology, and it is on the basis of these revisions that African theology could later claim the enculturation of Christianity: its transformation to take into account traditional cultural practices in Africa. The project in which these historians were engaged, then, is a global history for two reasons. It is a comparative history, since their history of the African peoples was written in comparison with a Christian history of Christianity which provided the categories and trajectory. It corresponds at the same time to mimicry in the sense of Homi K. Bhabha (1994), because it seems to reproduce a narrative, but in fact it transforms it to record its own intentionality, its own objectives and its own teleology.
Defining Africa’s Position in the World as Permanent Preoccupation
The examples we have analyzed so far are symptomatic of the evolution of historiography in the twentieth century, especially since independence. Today, as in the past, several departments of African universities claim to teach the history, culture, geography, and politics of different regions of the world. Different social sciences departments indeed offer courses on Europe, Asia, and America, according to their various fields. But in general these areas do not constitute real fields of research within the African academy. The reason for the general lack of interest shown by African academic institutions and African intellectuals in writing about and teaching other parts of the world is quite simple. After independence, most African intellectual energy has been focused on researching African sociopolitical, historical, cultural, and geographical reality. This activity has appeared to be urgent and indispensable. Achille Mbembe summarizes the objectives of this endeavor in the following critical words:
The first ritual contradicts and refutes Western definitions of Africa and Africans by pointing out the falsehoods and bad faith they presuppose. The second denounces what the West has done (and continues to do) to Africa in the name of these definitions. And the third provides ostensible proofs that – by disqualifying the West’s fictional representations of Africa and refuting its claims to have a monopoly on the expression of the human in general – are supposed to open up a space in which Africans can finally narrate their own fables. This is to be accomplished through the acquisition of a language and a voice that cannot be imitated, because they are, in some sense, authentically Africa’s own. (2002a: 244)
To do research on Europe, for example, was perceived by many as an activity that perpetuated, in some sense, the colonial extraversion which was about to be overcome and which would keep Africans away from themselves. This largely explains the fact that there are so few experts on Europe or other parts of the world in the African academic disciplines just mentioned.
Interestingly, however, in the philological disciplines there is a true tradition of research on different parts of the world. This philological domain is not my focus in this essay, but in these disciplines there is a serious attempt to discuss and historicize not only European discourses but also American ones. (See Northrop, final chapter of this volume.) Until now, most of these philological departments were oriented towards American, Commonwealth, French, English, Spanish, and Arabic studies. There are also different projects to create Chinese departments throughout Africa. Such a department is already functioning in the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and in the University of Maroua in Cameroon. The creation of these Chinese departments is motivated by the growing political and economic relations between most of the African states and China. These departments are funded by the respective African states, but they are supported by the Chinese state, which sends teachers. The evolution and the importance of these departments cannot yet be appreciated. Anyway, from this philological perspective, there is a true attempt to develop a discourse from an African point of view on some parts of the world. But even these discourses are mainly interested in the evaluation of the general historical relationship between Africa and the world, and participate in the general effort of positioning Africa in the world.
Since talking about oneself is conceived as self-positioning in the world, what place have Africans assigned themselves in the world and what is the idea of the world that prevails? In African historiography and other African discourses, it is possible to identify two basic modalities of defining the being-in-the-world of Africa and the Africans. The writing of global history has thus favored two major discourses on self and the world and two major ways of writing history itself. Generally speaking, the first way is interested in what the world and more especially Europe has done to Africa, while the second is interested in what Africans have done in the world.
What the World Has Done to Africa
Africa as product of world history
What are the basic assumptions of this approach? The worldliness of Africa, its being-in-the-world, is not seen as the result of an African initiative or will, but as the result of different universalizing projects initiated and conducted by forces which come from elsewhere. The three main forces, as I noted in the opening section of this chapter, are Islam, Christianity, and colonization. To these forces, which gained power over the structuring of imagination, bringing social, economic and political transformations and therefore producing an empirical reality to be observed in the daily life of Africa today, should be added the slave trade, which is also a modality of linking Africa to the rest of the world. If we consider only these four moments as modalities through which Africa became part of the world and was integrated in the world history, Africa indeed appears as a product of world history and not as its agent. When approached from this perspective, the history of the worldliness of Africa begins in the fifteenth century.
It must also be stated once more that this approach is not inscribed in the paradigm governing mainstream historiography in Europe, which is based on the geopolitical myth of the uniqueness and centrality of the North Atlantic world. But it is oriented towards what the world has done to Africa and not towards what Africa has done in the world. As such, of course, this approach has consequences in the way Africa and the Africans are defined. It thus has serious implications for the way Africans perceive themselves in the world: the way they see themselves in world history. This focus on the last five centuries, and especially on events and forces like the slave trade, Islam, Christianity, and colonization as central modalities of African participation in world history, has nurtured a perception of history as traumatic experience and a process of loss.
Books like How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney 1973) are very characteristic of this discourse. Just at the beginning of colonization, as the first Africans were converted to Christianity, there were some African voices, as we have seen, presenting European influences as positive, as something that would help Africa move towards civilization and culture. But very rapidly the tonality changed. As soon as Africans took up the dialogue and could emancipate themselves from the colonial discourse, they started developing a critical appraisal of what was happening to them. Being-in-the-world was, from this point onward, experienced mostly as traumatic, as violence.
History as a discipline, but also literature and other forms of the academic arts and humanities, have worked out different forms and modes of violence that were at the basis of the colonial experience and the way Africans experienced it. This violence was economic, political, social, and physical. There are extensive writings on the way Africans were exploited, deprived of their land, subjugated, killed, harassed, and so on. Many historical studies focus on the ways foreign rule restructured African economy, society, and juridical systems. There are many novels, poems, theatrical plays, and essays presenting psychological and physical suffering, humiliation, depersonalization, and loss of freedom, dignity and orientation due to colonial action and to the exposure to a wider world it made possible. The history of Africa’s integration into the capitalistic world economy and into the international world political system appears clearly as a history of suffering and loss. Africa and Africans appear as victims of the world. All these well-documented facts and experiences have founded a general discourse of victimization. This discourse systematizes historical facts and experiences and works out a fundamental logic which underlines the history of Africa in the world. Even new developments leading to what is called “globalization” are interpreted to confirm the general principle that Africa is not a subject of world history but its object and victim. Any exposé which shows how slavery, colonization and globalization have deprived Africa of any initiative, autonomy and opportunity for action, then, will be generally considered by an African audience as an accurate and correct analysis of historical reality.
But there are some critical voices that challenge this way of thinking. The most powerful is that of Mbembe (2002a). He characterizes the discourse of victimization as a vision of history as sorcery. The idea of sorcery implies a conception of life where forces beyond one’s control represent a permanent danger to one’s autonomy and life. Mbembe seems to offer three critiques of this mainstream mode of self-writing and conception of world history. The first critique is aimed at what he calls the “fixation on the past and the frenetic claim to the status of victim” (2002b: 635). In his polemical approach, Mbembe seems at times to criticize historical approaches and to privilege a synchronic approach to reality. But he himself constantly proceeds to a genealogical analysis of present reality (Mbembe 2000). He is surely aware of this ambiguity. That is why he adds a second critical point where he questions the interpretation of facts in the discourse of victimization. Mbembe challenges the claims of this discourse to provide the only way of giving sense to past facts, and instead proposes other modes of decoding them and developing different visions of history. We will present and discuss this mode later.
The third critique by Mbembe is philosophical and ideological. He questions the state of mind and the type of attitude favored in the discourse of victimization. He interrogates the status of the African subject when the world is decoded in such a way that the “African subject cannot express him- or herself in the world other than as a wounded and traumatized subject. What does it mean if we stress that nothing is happening in Africa because history (the slave trade, colonization, and apartheid) has already happened and anything more would be nothing but a repetition of those originary events?” (2002b: 630). In order to answer these questions, Mbembe refers to the concept of “slave morality” as developed by Nietzsche. He is not ready to establish a total equivalence between the state of mind structured by the discourse of victimization and the “slave morality,” but he postulates the proximity of both.
But this critique is excessive and does not take into account the variety of responses given to the process of depravation and reification. Not all discourses which treat the integration of Africa in the world economy and world politics as successive acts of violence and dispossession can be considered as having a view of history as sorcery, where Africans do not demonstrate any will, where they are only victim and not actors. The assertion of what has been done to Africa does not necessarily implicate a slave mentality, or the consciousness that history repeats itself eternally and cannot be given a new direction. This assertion of wounds inflicted by history is, most of the time, more likely to be a dialectical moment which founds another moment, that of resistance.
Global history as history of resistance
In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, suggests three steps towards the emancipation of colonized peoples, and especially of Africans (Sartre 1963). In fact he is mostly interested in analyzing elite discourses, where the signs of this emancipation are visible. In the first step, Sartre says, the colonized confront the colonizers with their contradictions. The colonized person reproaches Europeans with their own inhumanity: in other words, he or she has assimilated Europeans’ own principles of humanity sufficiently to use them as criteria to judge Europeans themselves. Although they are critical, these voices thus bear witness to the deeper European success in changing the mind of the colonized, and making colonial subjects adopt European ideals.
In the second step, according to Sartre, “a new generation came to the scene, which changed the issue” (Sartre 1963: 8). The writers and poets of this generation were most interested in showing the difference between Europeans’ values and their own identity. The most radical change then came with the third generation, which developed a nationalist and revolutionary discourse and challenged Europe directly.
For Sartre the main change in this discourse is neither the tone of expression nor the character of the claim. It is rather the target group of the speech, those to whom it is directed. Whereas in the first two steps the speech is directed to Europeans, in the third it is directed to the colonized themselves.
For the fathers, we alone were the speakers; the sons no longer even consider us as valid intermediaries: we are the objects of their speeches. Of course, Fanon mentions in passing our well-known crimes: Sétif, Hanoi, Madagascar: but he does not waste his time in condemning them; he uses them. If he demonstrates the tactics of colonialism, the complex play of relations which unite and oppose the colonists to the people of the mother country, it is for his brothers; his aim is to teach them to beat us at our own game. In short, the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice. (Sartre 1963: 16)
This is a very interesting way to read different discourses in Africa. They appear as different steps towards emancipation, as difference modes of resistance, each having its shortcomings, but each demonstrating the will of Africans to become the subjects of history. Therefore the different discourses from Negritude to Fanon, from Fanon to Mundimbe and from Mundimbe to Mbembe, from pan-Africanism to African Renaissance, from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, can be read historically as different ways of posing and treating Africa’s inscription in world history by examining possibilities of overcoming marginality and reification.
One could interpret in a similar vein this discourse, not only to reconstruct a genealogy of critical writings as sign of Africans’ own presence, but also to reconstruct the continuity of different forms of resistance, cultural resistance, military resistance, political and intellectual resistance to subjugation and imperialism.
This approach might be considered as a “polemical definition” of Africa’s relationship to the world (Mbembe 2002a), but not every polemic about relationship to the world ends up in nativism.
What Africa Has Done in the World
The Afrocentric approach
The father of the Afrocentric definition of the worldliness of Africa is the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop. His most influential book, Nations nègres et culture, was written in the 1950s. Its contributions were then extended in the 1960s by other books which have also become classics in Africa. Cheikh Anta Diop has also attained great influence in some circles in America – those calling themselves “Afrocentric,” and whose members have developed a full theory of Afrocentrism which goes beyond the theses of Cheikh Anta Diop.
What are these theses and their underlying theoretical links? Cheikh Anta Diop addressed the following basic topics:
· The African and negroid origin of humankind and civilization.
· The Negro origins of Egypt and Numid civilizations.
· The importance of Negro thought for the emergence and development of Western civilization, especially in the sciences, literature, and arts.
· The identification of migration-streams and the formation of ethnic groups in Africa.
· The linguistic relationship (of lineal descent) between Egypt and black Africa.
· The “true” origin of the Semitic world.
· The delimitation of a black cultural world which extends as far as West Asia in the Indus Valley.
· The formation of African states on the whole continent – after the decline of Egypt.
· The continuity of historical and cultural links between Egypt and other African states from the ancient period through today.
· The existence of a common artistic foundation in Africa.
· The capability of African languages to express scientific and philosophic thoughts.
There are at least three ways of analyzing this historical narrative. The first is what we might identify as a realist epistemological approach. The second is a relativistic approach, while the third could be called the discursive analytical approach.
The first of these alternatives, the realist epistemological approach, asks questions about the scientific basis of the narrative. And in this regard there is an ongoing discussion, especially since the publication of Martin Bernal’s several books (1987; 1991; 2006) under the general title Black Athena, in which some critics reject Afrocentrism generally as mythical and ideological and therefore nonscientific (Howe 1998; Fauvelle-Aymar et al. 2000), while other critics are more balanced in their appreciation (van Binsbergen 2000). Most critics agree about the poor scholarship of many Afrocentric publications. They note that conclusions are often largely contained in the opening pages, and that authors develop the tendency thereafter to fill the gaps with assumptions that derive from the already-defined central theme. But there are some voices that ask us to consider Afro-centrism as at least a testable hypothesis, and to confront it with empirical facts and not simply to dismiss it out of hand as contradicting hegemonic paradigms (Van Binsbergen 2000).
The second approach, of relativism, does not engage in this discussion of the objectivity or nonobjectivity of narratives, but rather stresses the point that knowledge formation is always political and historically contextual. In this sense, every historical narrative is strategic and therefore more or less mythical. The Afrocentric narrative is thus compared to other historical narratives and especially to the Eurocentric whitening of ancient Greece, which, according to Martin Bernal (1987), followed the same logic as the Afrocentric narrative. Through a process of selection of historical facts, Greece is presented as an autonomous culture which emerges out itself, and with this myth thus constructed, Europe could be made to appear as the cradle of civilization.
The third approach, which I label discursive, follows Foucault in simply suspending the question of truth. It is, rather, interested in the premises that render a narrative true for some people and, even more, why this narrative is elaborated. By developing a long-term perspective, the Afrocentric approach opens the opportunity of analyzing the impact of the last few centuries as merely a periphery of its own – once seen in the context of the overall history of Africa – a periphery which has had an undeniable impact on the contemporary position of Africa in the world but doesn’t definitively push it to the margins of overall world history. This approach makes it possible to think of continuities that have not been annihilated by the momentary situation of today. It also makes it possible to think about Africa’s relationship to other continents and other cultures not as a relation of pure exteriority. It follows a logic that transcends the economy of alterity, and postulates that nothing developed in Europe, Asia and America is actually totally alien or strange to Africa, since it, too, has its deeper roots in Africa. It makes it possible to think of the globality of the world as in this sense nonproblematic. But such possibilities are not always consequently thought, because this discourse is contaminated by another logic, that of difference and alterity.
Changing the shape of the world
The subtitle to The Wretched of the Earth, the English version of Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre, is The Handbook for Black Revolution That Is Changing the Shape of the World. The intent of this subtitle is to indicate the epochal importance of decolonization. African nationalism and even anticolonial struggle have come under critical scrutiny. Their contradictions, their expectations and especially their results, the emergence of postcolonial states, have been analyzed, and the judgments provided are often rather negative. But the importance of decolonization and of its underlying ideas cannot be overestimated as far as world history is concerned. It was the end of an epoch. It was a process that changed the shape of the world. And the actors in this process were people of the global South: a category that includes Africans too.
In the writings of Fanon, but also in those of Amilcar Cabral (1975) and other African nationalists and theoreticians of liberation, the central impetus is not hate, nor is it rejection of the other. The emancipation movement is not driven by the will to cut oneself off from the world or to seek a place outside the international net. On the contrary, most theoreticians in Africa consider the emancipation of colonized peoples as a universal project. The aim was not merely to gain sovereignty in the former colonies, but also to change the world and to inaugurate another type of international relations. The last sentences of Fanon’s book are very clear on this point:
But if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries … Moreover, if we wish to reply to the expectations of the people of Europe, it is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of their society … For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (1963: 315)
Of course, it is fair to ask if this proposition has been realized; but that is not my point here. I wish simply to indicate the spirit that animated some actors and legitimated the writing of world history by some scholars who have stressed the central role of the Third World in world history over the past 50 years. The Kenyan writer, playwright, and scholar Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1993) has proposed a view of world history centered on changes in perspectives, on the development of new ideas and a consciousness to which writers from the South have contributed. He summarizes this process in the expression “moving the center.”
Ngugi interprets the history of the world since the 1960s “as a struggle to shift the base from which to view the world from its narrow base in Europe to a multiplicity of centers” (1993: 6). For him the achievement of this struggle has been the successful challenge to Eurocentrism, a development which has contributed first of all to a freeing, at least to a certain extent, of the “genuinely universal” (1993: xvii) “in the West imprisoned by Eurocentrism” and to an opening of spaces for new narrations. This movement between nations or continents had been prolonged by “the need to move the centre from all minority class establishments within nations to the real creative centres among the working people in conditions of gender, racial and religious equality” (1993: xvii).
Ngugi thus links the different international efforts towards increased freedom and equality with internal national struggles for changes in social relationships and personal mentalities. What he proposes is a writing of world history wherein global processes both engender and boost local processes. And in these processes, Africans among others will play a central role. Resistance and opposition to hegemony and homogenization in the global scene, which he considers as still present, are the prerequisites for this international and internal emancipation and progress, since “conditions of external domination and control, as much as those of internal domination and oppression, do not create the necessary climate for the cultural health of any society” (1993: xvi).
The view of this Kenyan writer is universalist. It doesn’t oppose the local and the global, but rather combines both levels to construct a vision of the shared history and projection of humanity as a whole.
I am an unrepentant universalist. For I believe that while retaining its roots in regional and national individuality, true humanism with its universal reaching out, can flower among the peoples of the earth, rooted as it is in the histories and cultures of the different peoples of the earth. Then, to paraphrase Marx, will human progress cease to resemble the pagan idol who would drink nectar but only from the skulls of the slain. (1993: xvii)
The insistence on the role of the Third World and especially Africa on reshaping the world through a process of moving the center is simply one way of inscribing oneself as actor in world history. The second way, which does not contradict, but rather completes or prolongs it, is the idea of coproduction of the modern world. Ngugi wa Thiong’o expresses this clearly: “The modern world is a product of both European imperialism and of the resistance waged against it by the African, Asian and South American peoples” (1993: 4). This idea is central to the postcolonial discourse which renews and reorients different discourses emerging in the 1950s and 1960s and aims at challenging central Western philosophical epistemes. One of these epistemes is a conception of history as a process of influence and diffusion, as a teleological movement in which humankind is steadily remade and transformed, moving towards perfection and progress. These principles structure narratives in which the Western world is the main if not the unique actor of these transformations. In these narratives, the relation between the Western world and the rest of the world can only be that of conversion, transformation, and assimilation. Imperialism was thus legitimized as a burden, as a duty to transform the other and to integrate him or her in the historical process.
The idea that the modern world is a coproduction of imperialism and the resistance of the South challenges these Eurocentric conception of world history and tries to interpret the encounter of Europeans with others in the colonial process as an active enterprise on both sides.
Postcolonial historiography is concerned with analyzing changes over time not only in the colonized world but also in the North by relating them explicitly or implicitly to the heritage of colonialism. But these changes are interpreted not as influence and dissemination, but rather as the result of a tension between two forces. The forces on the side of the colonized world are called resistance and one of these forces, in Africa, is what Mbembe calls “heretical spirit.”
In Afriques indociles, published as early as 1988, Mbembe developed a position in opposition to the then common assumption that Africa had been thoroughly transformed by colonialism and suffered mightily from this transformation. He developed the thesis that it is rather the African who transformed the principles and ideas that European colonialists tried to inculcate. Especially with regard to Christianity, he defended the idea that Africans installed their meanings in the very heart of Christians’ dogmas and symbols and therefore transformed them thoroughly.
Since then he has developed this idea of an African “heretical spirit” to propose a reading and writing of the archive of the present. He, for example, examines what has become of the three major universalizing projects whose aim was not only to propose a system of knowledge, but also to have authority over what “Africa” signifies and therefore to “state the conditions under which Africa could become part of the universalizing project of modernity” (Mbembe 2002b: 632). All these projects, of course, wanted to transform Africa. But what happened? Mbembe takes the example of Islam and shows the same heretical spirit still at work:
Likewise, Africans have responded to the Islamic project by means of creative assimilation. In these cultures marked by orality, the hegemony of the Book is made relative. The doctrinal core is interpreted and recited in a way that largely leaves open to negotiation the question of what constitutes an Islamic society or government. … Two factors explain this fluidity. The first involves the ability to extend and disperse across space – and thus negotiate long distances. In West Africa, for example, several networks link the Arab-Berber and the Negro-African Worlds. The brotherhoods are dispersed around geographical poles from which they can extend outwards. Migrations and long-distance trade are therefore organized across borders and even across continents. (2002b: 637)
From this analysis it appears plain that the original universalizing project of transformation and integration of Africa in a modernizing teleology was actually transformed into an African globalization project which reinvented its objectives and established new networks. The purpose of Mbembe is to counter the nativistic – what he calls Afro-radical – discourse, which he criticizes as fixated on the past, and instead to formulate a “correlation between geography (an accident) and destiny” (2002b: 636). Instead of a thesis that the encounter between Africa and the world is an “open wound,” a destabilizing and totally negative experience, Mbembe asserts that the effective practice of social actors proceeded according to the principle of composition. He therefore defends the idea that contemporary cultural abilities allow Africans to treat the past as a kind of open-ended negotiation.
Mbembe thus develops a conception of world history as shared history, as a process of entanglement which produces not only negative effects, like asymmetry and hegemony, but also creativity, new possibilities. World history, in his hands, is therefore not teleology, but an open-ended process.
I have presented here several different modalities, different ways Africans both experience the world and write about it. Not all modalities are discussed here, of course; and even those presented are not discussed in full detail. But this discussion shows, it seems to me, how reading and writing the relation between local and global has been fully part of Africans’ experience of international processes, and also an anticipatory discourse that aims at defining what should become of these processes – while working to transform them.
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