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**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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