In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought [1 ed.] 1509540288, 9781509540280, 9781509540303

Table of contents :
In Search of Africa(s)
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1 Universalism in questions
2 On the universal and universalism
3 Race, culture, identity
4 Africanity, Afrocentrism, representation
5 The racial ban on representation
6 On cultural and linguistic specificities
7 On African languages and translation
8 An optimism of translation
9 On philosophy in Islam and on the question of a ‘West African Islam’
10 The political instrumentalization of a West African Sufi Islam
11 West African Sufism revisited
12 Thinking/creating Africa
13 On the non-existence of -Africa … -and of Europe
14 On Africa and pan-Africanism
15 Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s ‘desire for Africa’
16 Were human rights born in Africa?
17 On the charters of the Mandé
18 On various contemporary questions
Notes
Bibliography

Citation preview

In Search of Africa(s)

In Search of Africa(s) Universalism and Decolonial Thought

Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-­Loup Amselle Translated by Andrew Brown

polity

First published in French as En quête d’Afrique(s): Universalisme et pensée décoloniale, © Albin Michel, 2018 This English edition © Polity Press, 2020 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 101 Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-­13: 978-­1-5095-­4028-­0 ISBN-­13: 978-­1-5095-­4029-­7 (pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Names: Diagne, Souleymane Bachir, author. | Amselle, Jean-Loup, author. | Mangeon, Anthony, writer of preface. | Brown, Andrew (Literary translator), translator. Title: In search of Africa(s) : universalism and decolonial thought / Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle ; translated by Andrew Brown. Other titles: En quête de Afrique(s). English Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | “First published in French as En quête de Afrique(s): universalisme et pensée de coloniale, © Albin Michel, 2018”--title page verso. | Summary: “This important book by two leading scholars of Africa examines the relationship between politics, religion and identity in contemporary culture and the possibility of a new universalism. Erudite, wide-ranging and eminently readable, it will be of great interests to students, scholars, and general readers alike”-Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019029692 (print) | LCCN 2019029693 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509540280 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509540297 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509540303 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Postcolonialism--Africa. | Postcolonialism--Philosophy. | Decolonization-Africa. | Cultural relations. | Africa--Relations--Western countries. | Western countries--Relations--Africa. Classification: LCC JV246 .D5313 2020 (print) | LCC JV246 (ebook) | DDC 320.01--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029692 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029693 Typeset in 10.5pt on 12pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Contents

Foreword vii In focus: a comparative reading of Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle Anthony Mangeon Introduction 1 Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle   1 Universalism in questions 7 Jean-Loup Amselle   2 On the universal and universalism 19 Souleymane Bachir Diagne   3 Race, culture, identity 30 Jean-Loup Amselle   4 Africanity, Afrocentrism, representation 39 Souleymane Bachir Diagne   5 The racial ban on representation 45 Jean-Loup Amselle   6 On cultural and linguistic specificities 50 Jean-Loup Amselle   7 On African languages and translation 60 Souleymane Bachir Diagne   8 An optimism of translation 67 Jean-Loup Amselle v

Contents   9 On philosophy in Islam and on the question of a ‘West African Islam’ 71 Souleymane Bachir Diagne 10 The political instrumentalization of a West African Sufi Islam 87 Jean-Loup Amselle 11 West African Sufism revisited 96 Souleymane Bachir Diagne 12 Thinking/creating Africa 99 Souleymane Bachir Diagne 13 On the non-existence of Africa … and of Europe 106 Jean-Loup Amselle 14 On Africa and pan-Africanism 114 Souleymane Bachir Diagne 15 Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s ‘desire for Africa’ 118 Jean-Loup Amselle 16 Were human rights born in Africa? 120 Jean-Loup Amselle 17 On the charters of the Mandé 131 Souleymane Bachir Diagne 18 On various contemporary questions 136 Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle Notes 159 Bibliography 182

vi

Foreword In focus: a comparative reading of Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-­Loup Amselle Anthony Mangeon

Seeing double Let us warn the reader right away: while browsing the pages of these discussions, he or she will often see double, and for many reasons. Firstly, the two interlocutors, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-­Loup Amselle, often look at the issues they are addressing from different angles, and are not always concerned to reach complete agreement; secondly, they frequently take up views that they have developed elsewhere, in their previous books and articles; and, finally, their discussions regularly juxtapose and assess two theoretical and critical c­ urrents – p ­ ostcolonial studies and decolonial t­ hinking – ­whose outlines, and, above all, concrete differences, are sometimes difficult to discern. The preliminary remarks in my foreword are not an attempt to replace this ‘seeing double’ with a synthetic image, nor do they aim to show how, as they put forward their arguments, our two authors often glance sideways towards other points of view. I will merely note the framework in which postcolonial and/or decolonial studies have grown and developed, and explain that, while they follow their own paths, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-­Loup Amselle are ultimately quite close to such studies; this will make it easier to see what brings them closer to each other, and this book of discussions may help the reader to develop not an overview of all the questions tackled here, but simply a nuanced point of view that goes beyond traditional black and white distinctions.

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Looking through cultural spectacles The day will ­come – ­perhaps, indeed, in some academic or activist circles, it came a long time a­ go – w ­ hen we will talk of postcolonial studies and decolonial thought in the past tense. However, they have been a subject for discussion for only a score of years in France, and no doubt they could be seen, in the recent history of ideas, as part of a perspective specific to the early 2000s. It was with Jean-­Marc Moura’s Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Francophone Literatures and Postcolonial Theory), first published in 1999 and later reissued,1 and the collection of articles that he co-­edited the same year with Jean Bessière, Littératures postcoloniales et représentations de l’ailleurs (Postcolonial Literatures and Representations of Elsewhere),2 that this area of research started to cause a stir in the French academic world. As these two titles suggested, this new field was an offshoot of literary studies, establishing as it did a close link between literature, representations and ‘theory’. In ­fact – a­ nd the many genealogies drawn up since then have continued to insist on this point –, what is still called ‘postcolonial theory’ first saw the light of day in literary studies departments, initially in the English-­speaking world.3 Whether we take the pioneering work of the American-­Palestinian critic and historian of literature Edward Said, Orientalism, first published in 1978,4 or the equally pioneering collective work co-­edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, first published in 1989,5 the starting point and the critical issue remained the same. (Said’s work was translated into French in 1980, while The Empire Writes Back had to wait until 2012.) On the one hand, the question was how, in the era of European colonial expansion, a discourse on ‘the other’ developed, either seen from a scholarly point of view (the literature of ideas and the various human sciences), or envisaged in a more literary light (fiction, especially ‘exotic’ and then colonial literature) – a discourse that soon trapped that ‘other’ in a posture of radical difference from the Western world. But on the other hand, and more importantly, by a boomerang effect not anticipated by the colonizers, this very ‘other’ – or this ‘the same but otherwise’ – answered Westerners back in the very same languages and genres of discourse (literature, history, philosophy, etc.) that they had imposed on it, in order to develop a reverse picture, a critical image, of the European world. This is particularly emphasized by English-­speaking thinkers of Indian origin such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak6 and Homi Bhabha.7 viii

Foreword Postcolonial studies, in short, focuses on how colonial and imperial domination, by exercising itself in a double form, through power and knowledge, or through weapons and representations, in fact generated a reciprocal i­nfluence – n ­ ot just of the colonizers on the colonized, but also of the colonized on the c­ olonizers – t­ hat tended to confuse binary oppositions and the hierarchies between them. The very term ‘postcolonial’ is affected by this confusion, since it serves both as a historical ­marker – ­what comes after colonization and was produced by ­it – a­ nd as a critical project, aiming to get beyond schematic or dichotomous distinctions between the West and the non-­West, colonizers and colonized, colonial era and postcolonial era. It follows from this confusion that ‘the colonial’ – whether in the shape of mentalities or ­practices – ­has obviously been able to survive historical decolonizations and to persist into the postcolonial era, while, conversely, subjects of the various European empires w ­ ere – ­even in the p ­ ast – a­ ble to produce ‘postcolonial’ critical, political and poetic gestures. Though still in the colonial era, they anticipated a world to come that would shake off the forms of relationship and social conceptions that predominated in their time. So we can, for instance, produce a ‘postcolonial reading’ of the political and literary history of Haiti, which the Black revolution, leading to the abolition of slavery and independence from the French colonial metropolis, turned into the first truly postcolonial n ­ ation – e­ ven more than the United States, which, though it had indeed emancipated itself from British tutelage, still preserved slavery and a racial hierarchy as the basis of its economic and social relations. ‘Postcolonial’ thus becomes, so to speak, the equivalent of ‘anticolonial’. In particular, by maintaining the demand that the process of decolonization be brought to completion, going beyond the historical independence attained by former colonies formerly run by colonial powers such as Britain or France, this term easily lent itself to reappropriation by various militant circles, especially in the voluntary or communal associations that had emerged from or were caught up in the history of immigration. This is how we can identify a second stage in the emergence of a postcolonial paradigm in France. This stage came about in the mid-­2000s and was a combination of chance and the zeitgeist: January 2005 saw the launching of ‘the call of the Indigenous of the Republic’, which, a few months before the sixtieth anniversary of the Algerian uprising (it was put down by France in Sétif on 8 May 1945), aimed to establish the ‘foundations of postcolonial anticolonialism’ and to denounce the prevalence in the French nation of ix

Foreword forms of domination and discrimination inherited from the colonial period. Published a few weeks before the riots in the French suburbs in November 2005, the collective volume La Fracture coloniale (The Colonial Fracture),8 most of whose authors came from the worlds of local communities or scholarly activism such as ACHAC (the Association pour la connaissance de l’Afrique contemporaine, i.e. the Association for Knowledge of Contemporary Africa), in turn stirred up many echoes. In fact, it was only restating in postcolonial language a political slogan (‘la fracture sociale’ or ‘the social divide’) that had won Jacques Chirac his first presidential election ten years earlier. The years 2005–7 saw many journals – Esprit, Hérodote, Labyrinthe, Mouvement, Multitudes – devoting special issues to postcolonial studies, while the anthropologist Jean-­Loup Amselle led a charge that was as heroic and chivalrous as it was critical,9 followed by the political scientist Jean-­François Bayart.10 These soon met with a response in a new collective work from the ranks of ACHAC, Ruptures postcoloniales (Postcolonial Breaks).11 Tempers now seemed to be flaring between African i­ntellectuals – ­such as the Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf and the Cameroonian philosopher Achille M ­ bembe – a­ nd French Africanist intellectuals. It was on the basis of their training and their publications devoted to African studies, such as the Cahiers d’études africaines, edited by Jean-­Loup Amselle for nearly thirty years, and the review Politique africaine, founded by Jean-­François Bayart in 1980, that Amselle and Bayart conducted their critique of postcolonialism. In a certain way, the present book brings this dialogue back to the public stage, even if in actual fact it was never really interrupted, nor devoid of persistent misunderstandings. Where was the main point of friction and hence of discord? We could say, summarily, that the Africanists criticized postcolonials for trying to reinvent the wheel and thereby giving a new lease of life to some of the essentialist and culturalist quirks of their predecessors (Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi) at a time when Négritude and anticolonial critique were in the ascendant. Postcolonials, meanwhile, mocked the tendency of Africanists to reduce them to mere epigones of prestigious masters and ancestors, though they claimed to have a more complex filiation with these forebears than the mere phantasmatic projection of a new ‘strategic essentialism’ might suggest.12 x

Foreword Finally, the main issue of this disagreement was without doubt the following: to what extent could a true decentring be achieved, a shift away from the Western thought that had influenced the founders of anticolonial criticism themselves and a return to more autonomous, even autochthonous, traditions of thought? And to what extent was such a decentring envisageable or possible within Western thought itself? A secondary question was: could one ‘provincialize Europe’ by making it one pole of reflection and one tradition of thought among others, without the precedence or pre-­eminence it had enjoyed? Could other dialogues take place between various points and intellectual traditions of the global South, without systematically requiring Western mediation? It is undoubtedly the growing force and importance of these questions, together with an exponential polarization of the positions for or against postcolonial thought, which may explain the gradual shift to a new paradigm: that of decolonial thought. As Jean-­Loup Amselle explains on several occasions in the following conversations, the genesis of decolonial thought differs from that of the postcolonial theory first developed by Edward Said and Australian and Indian thinkers. Decolonial thought admittedly involves a similar circularity: we need to take into account the point of view of the colonized, a point of view underestimated by Western literatures (in both fictional works and the literature of ideas); in particular we need to adopt a ‘subaltern’ point of view or a view ‘from below’. But decolonial thought radicalizes this critical standpoint in a twofold way. Firstly, it traces the emergence of modern colonial hierarchies right back to the time of the discovery of the Americas (1492), and, secondly, it examines the implementation of a new formula of social domination and economic exploitation, a formula now indexed to the notion of race. These ideas are developed in concert by many South American thinkers, such as the Argentine semiologist Walter Mignolo, the Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, the Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel and the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. Brought together in an interdisciplinary research collective called ‘Group M/C’, decolonial theorists endeavour to demonstrate the interdependence of modernity/coloniality as two simultaneous phenomena linked in space and time up until the contemporary period. The decolonials also emphasize the collusion, if not the compromise, in this same modernity between, on the one hand, Cartesian rationality with its various dualisms and their hierarchical relations (between mind and body, man and nature, with the first terms systematically dominating the second), and, on the other hand, colonial reason xi

Foreword (where the European must himself overcome non-­Europeans, reducing them to an almost animal status of machine-­bodies, so as to have an exclusive right to human intellectual functions as his own domain). Two major consequences ensue for decolonial thinking: on the one hand, the progressive but precocious implementation of a capitalist world order organized for the sole benefit of Europe, mobilizing colonialism and racism as principles of the division and organization of labour on a global scale; on the other hand, the concomitant establishment of a Eurocentric episteme, or of a geopolitics of knowledge where the European point of ­view – a­ nd more exactly that of the Western White m ­ an – r­ eplaces God’s point of view as the only measure of all possible and universal knowledge, thereby relegating, de facto, all non-­Western intellectual traditions and forms of knowledge to the realms of belief, magical or primitive thinking and, at best, mere folklore. This unequal organization of the world continues today in other forms, since (despite the two waves of independence, in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in Africa and Asia in the twentieth century) global capitalism has merely given a new lease of life to the fundamentally dichotomous and hierarchical structures of the world system that divides the human population into Whites and non-­Whites, centre and periphery, North and South, superior and inferior, and so on. Taking note of this, decolonial thought, as its name indicates, proposes a radical decolonization that would involve, on the one hand, the rehabilitation of ancient and non-­ Western forms of economic and social organization, as well as the quest for new forms of solidarity between the various Souths and, on the other hand, a fundamental break with epistemological and cultural Eurocentrism and its claim to be the sole embodiment of scientificity and universality. This critique of Eurocentrism is admittedly not new: more than a century ago, the German-­born American anthropologist Franz Boas was already denouncing the ‘cultural spectacles’ (‘Kulturbrille’) of what he called ‘Nordicism’ in reference to the sense of superiority that the White man’s mastery over the forces of nature conferred on him.13 Boas emphasized how the advent of a truly scientific point of view would only be achieved by correcting these forms of conceptual myopia and, in particular, by getting rid of teleological illusions that viewed the White man as an empire within an empire, and his culture as the destination if not the destiny of all other cultures, ordained as these were to follow the path his model traced from barbarism to civixii

Foreword lization, from tradition to modernity, from community to individual and from despotism to democracy. Postcolonial thinking in its turn denounces this Eurocentrism as well as the binary oppositions and purely linear evolutions that it established between ‘the West and the rest’. But decolonial thought goes further insofar as it does not simply plead for ‘epistemological plurality’, that is, the recognition of traditional cosmologies and epistemologies as having the dignity of forms of knowledge every bit as legitimate as Western scientific-­technical rationality. It shows that these kinds of knowledge, often local, indigenous or ‘native’, are today highly valued, desired and more and more often appropriated by the Western economic and industrial powers themselves, in the context of a new transformation of global capitalism, moving from the exploitation of ‘natural capital’ (raw materials and the products derived from them) to the exploitation of a ‘human capital’ which now values the knowledge, skills and experiences of diverse social actors. However, this new age of capitalism, cognitive in some ways since it accords a central role to knowledge (including the most traditional forms of knowledge, suddenly promoted to the rank of the ‘intangible heritage of humanity’), never renounced what Enrique Dussel calls its ‘structural heterogeneity’, namely the consubstantiality and interdependence between modernity and coloniality; instead, it has reprogrammed it according to its new needs and objectives. Thus, biodiversity and traditional knowledge are the new ‘green gold’, part of what is now conceived of as sustainable development, and we are witnessing a new appreciation, in postmodern form, of other types of knowledge, non-­scientific, non-­rational and non-­Western, which had hitherto been excluded from the realm of legitimate knowledge. But in this new postmodern and postcolonial framework (in the historical sense of the term ‘postcolonial’), there is still a strict hierarchy between dominated South and dominant North, and the transfer of knowledge remains a one-­way street, with the pharmaceutical, agri-­ food and biotechnological industries granting themselves the right to document, to preserve and soon to patent traditional knowledge and genetic heritages for their sole benefit. From this point of view, postmodernity and postcoloniality do not in the least imply the end of modernity and of its colonial substratum; they are, rather, a reorganization and extension of these phenomena: ‘Just as coloniality is the other constituent face of modernity, postcoloniality is the xiii

Foreword structural counterpart of postmodernity. On this view, postcolonials are the new updated forms of coloniality in the postmodern stage of the history of the West,’ writes the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-­Gómez.14 Here, he agrees with the critique voiced in 1992 by the Anglo-­Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who waxed ironical about postcoloniality, writing: ‘Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Western-­style, Western-­trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.’15

Convergences The reader will indeed note, in the following pages, many convergences between the views of Souleymane Bachir Diagne, those of Jean-­Loup Amselle, and decolonial thought. In particular, the two thinkers share with decolonial thought a scathing criticism of Eurocentrism and its erroneous identification with the universal. They also declare themselves to be sceptical about so-­called ‘postcolonial breaks’, when these breaks merely invert the stigmas or values associated with non-­ Western worlds and thereby reinstate the usual hierarchies, such as the hegemonic domination of the West. Amselle’s critique of postcolonialism as the ‘new ruse of reason’ (p. 17), whether this reason be colonial or simply ‘ethnological’ (p. 33); Diagne’s parallel denunciation of ‘epistemological colonialism’ (p. 97); their shared willingness to ‘break with the Cartesian mechanical view that provided the enterprise of transforming “nature” into “natural resources” with its philosophy’ (p. 27); their desire to go back and produce a ‘history of philosophy in Africa’ integrated into the history of philosophy in the Western world and into ‘the history of philosophy in the Islamic world in general’ (p. 98) – all these points of agreement are so many decolonial gestures that mark real convergences between the two thinkers. These convergences are actually even more prominent when we explore their respective oeuvres. For that, we need to conduct a brief overview of their work: this will enable us to put the following dialogues into perspective, to draw the line of convergence where two parallel and distinct itineraries could finally meet.

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Foreword

Souleymane Bachir Diagne: a philosophy of translation One need merely glance at the bibliography of the Senegalese phil­ osopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne to discover that he is the author of an oeuvre as demanding as it is disparate, since it has three distinct aspects. First of all, it includes works on various European thinkers (George Boole, Henri Bergson), such as studies in critical epistemology on the type of thinking and logic inherent in mathematics, especially algebra (Boole, 1815–1864),16 followed by an edition with commentary of Boole’s Laws of Thought.17 Then come books devoted to philosophical practices in the Islam world: Islam and Open Society18 and Open to Reason.19 Finally there are the works on philosophical practices in Africa, such as African Art as Philosophy20 and, more recently, The Ink of the Scholars.21 Diagne is clearly working at the crossroads where different disciplines and different worlds meet, and he embodies a form of transcultural thought that straddles and ceaselessly interrelates continents and eras. When you look more closely, his work appears de facto driven by two imperatives: on the one hand, it strives to be rooted in ‘specific’ thought traditions (algebraic logic, the Muslim world, the African world), and, on the other hand, it aims to bring these traditions into dialogue with one another. Whenever he talks about Boole, Diagne reminds us, following Descartes, for example, that algebra came to Europeans via the mediation of the Arab world, so we need to constantly bear in mind the existence of other traditions of thought that make similar demands on rationality. All things being equal, and as if in a spirit of symmetry, Diagne stresses that the act of philosophizing as it developed in the Muslim cultural world itself came largely from the thinkers of ancient Greece with whom Arab and Persian thinkers entered into dialogue by translating their works. This dialogue was pursued in other Muslim areas: the Indian thinker Muhammad Iqbal, for instance, engaged in a veritable philosophical conversation with the works of European philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. Translation, of course, involves written traditions, and inevitable shifts of emphasis. Diagne looks back at the different intellectual disciplines that filled the shelves of the Islamic library, and focuses on three discursive practices: rational theology (kalam), philosophy (falsafa) and Sufism (tasawwuf). In his view, philosophical reflection goes beyond the limits of falsafa alone in order to manifest itself in xv

Foreword other discourses, or even other human practices, such as art. This means that two additional dimensions become important for him. Diagne pays particular attention to the question of the becoming-­ philosophical of languages: for him, all thought is built not only in a language, but also in the ordeal of its passage or its translation into another. Over the years, he has produced some remarkable analyses of the transformations of Arabic into a philosophical language (Open to Reason), via translations of Greek texts; and more generally he has investigated all the practices of philosophizing in non-­European languages, especially in African languages (The Ink of the Scholars). In tandem with this observation, which might border on a certain conceptual if not linguistic relativism, Diagne comes to a quite different and almost antithetical conclusion. Noting that, thanks to symbolic writing, thought can also be emancipated from the limitations of a given ­language – e­ specially in the context of algebra –, and can thus be transmitted otherwise than by oral means, he emphasizes what we could call a ‘cognitive universalism’ that always ultimately transcends differences in culture and language. Finally, this question of the symbolic underpinnings of language goes beyond the strictly linguistic dimension, since other practices can themselves proceed from a form of philosophizing and arouse thought in their turn. In the West, of course, as we know especially from the work of the art historian Daniel Arasse, ‘painting thinks’, it produces and stages thought through modes of non-­verbal figuration (such as framing, perspective and composition).22 But in his study of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Diagne shows that, in Africa, art (and, in particular, sculpture) is also a way of producing thought, or ‘a certain approach to reality’, just as ‘scientific knowledge is another [such approach]’. From this point of view, ‘“Negro art” is philosophy’, insofar as it is ‘interpretable as philosophical observations about the nature of the world’.23 What does African art, as philosophical expression, actually think about? Senghor’s answer lies in insisting on rhythm as the ordering force behind Negro style, while at the same time rhythm is mainly for him the manifestation of a ‘vital force’, or, more precisely, a vitalism of strengths. We can of course compare this answer with the one proposed by Muhammad Iqbal, who characterizes philosophizing in Islam as a ‘movement in thought’, as Diagne puts it in Islam et société ouverte. It is indeed a real tour de force on the part of Diagne to have drawn a comparison, in his Bergson postcolonial,24 between some xvi

Foreword of the key ideas in Iqbal and Senghor, and to have related them to the influence of Bergsonism on non-­European thought. In the Indian philosopher, says Diagne, ‘the juridico-­theological concept of itjihad, which is usually translated as “effort of interpretation”’ (p. 67), or as ‘movement in thought’, is seen as a way of ‘mobilizing Islam’ – in other words, ‘getting it on the move again’ – by leading it, via Bergson, to reconnect with its initial ‘vitalist philosophy’ (p. 79). Life must then be understood as a permanent renewal of the presence of God in the world, and the cosmology of the Qur’an as a ‘creative evolution’ according to a number of verses or sayings of the Prophet (the hadith), quoted on two occasions (pp.  85 and 111). Similarly, the Négritude of S­ enghor – ­who insists on emotion, who roots his outlook in a dynamic ontology (‘being is strength’, p. 47) and who highlights the importance of dance and rhythm as a ‘corporal cogito’ (p. 22) – flows directly from the ‘1889 revolution’ when Bergson, in his book of that year, Time and Free Will, underlined the primarily affective nature of the human mind. If Bergson arouses so much interest in Diagne, this is not only because he allows him to mediate between two such culturally distinct and religiously distant thinkers as the Indian Muslim Muhammad Iqbal and the Senegalese Catholic Léopold Sédar Senghor. Beyond his insistence on the emotional dimension, Bergson also attacked the opposition between primitive or pre-­logical mentality and civilized or rational thought in his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). In sum, Bergson is not only the thinker of the élan vital, but also the philosopher of the coexistence of opposites and their unification within every individual. From this point of view, we can call him ‘postcolonial’ avant la lettre, since, in Diagne’s view, he always insists on the hybridity inherent in the human being (both body and mind, affect and judgement, belief and rationality), and thereby rejects the artificial binary oppositions between Westerners and non-­Westerners disseminated by the ethnology of his time, as for example in the works of Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl. So, if I were to summarize Diagne’s philosophical position in my turn, I would be obliged to conclude that he himself embodies a paradoxical style of thought that flies in the face of the accepted ideas of his time. Against the common idea that Africa is the continent of orality, this Senegalese thinker keeps coming back to the ancient and dynamic presence of written t­raditions – ­including philosophical t­raditions – ­in Africa, as in the manuscripts of Timbuktu. Against the idea that languages and cultural identities are distinct entities with rigid xvii

Foreword contours, he shows that they are in fact always fluid, that they borrow from other entities some of their constitutive elements, and that they are defined by subjecting these entities to operations of translation. Finally, while admitting that one can be (or think) ‘Negro’, he never reserves this privilege solely to the ‘Blacks’ of Africa or its diasporas, but insists, on the contrary, on the importance of the interbreeding and pluralism within each individual, each culture. ‘In searching for origin,’ he wrote in his book on Senghor, ‘one is always brought back to the exploration of one’s own hybridity, to the discovery that one is “legion”’, so that ultimately ‘all human civilization is only such because of mixture’.25 This is a lesson that the reader will easily be able to draw from the following interviews, and this defence of an ‘originary syncretism’ will also clearly signal the close connections between the thought of Souleymane Bachir Diagne and that of Jean-­Loup Amselle.

Jean-Loup Amselle: an uncompromising anthropology As presented in the bibliography of his works, the oeuvre of Jean-­ Loup Amselle might also seem perplexing: by adding a new title almost every year, it is constantly opening up new horizons and objects of research. Yet despite its very profusion, and its both pioneering and iconoclastic character, the thinking that underlies it still has a powerful drive towards synthesis. It ultimately appears, in all the senses of the term, ‘uncompromising’. In the best anthropological tradition, nothing human is foreign to Amselle’s work, and the intellectual curiosity it displays is unbounded; but it is also intransigent with regard to a certain number of demands and principles. For example, it rejects all essentialism, and, like Diagne’s work, it opposes all the culturalizations or continentalizations of thinking that would trap thought in predefined predicates such as European thought, African thought, Black thought, Mestizo (or ‘mixed’) thought, and so on. Moreover, Amselle’s work aims to overcome binary oppositions and all hierarchies presented as natural, so as to defend a concrete universality of all cultures in their openness to others, or in their fundamental porosity with their surroundings. An anthropologist by training, Amselle in fact broke with the rigid categorizations of his discipline (race and ethnicity as fixed units), while at the same time refusing to analyse social and cultural phenomena on a strictly local scale. From his earliest works, Les Migrations africaines (The African Migrations)26 and Les Négociants xviii

Foreword de la savane (The Traders of the Savannah)27 up to his recent studies Psychotropiques (Psychotropics)28 and Islams africains: la préférence soufie (African Islams: The Sufi Preference),29 he has constantly probed the deployment of identities within extensive networks, including commercial systems that are spreading across the world in the contemporary process of globalization. From an epistemological point of view, his approach remains mainly genealogical, in other words, quick to spot significant paradigm shifts, the most important of which is certainly for him ‘the defeat of the continuum’.30 The various phases of European colonial expansion established a range of oppositional, hierarchical and binary schemas in the relations between the West and the rest of the world. These ethnological or raciological patterns then broke the great chain of entanglements, interweavings and concatenations that have always linked Europeans to other societies, cultures or epistemes. This ‘defeat of the continuum’ subsequently led to two major upheavals. Firstly, the cultures that were brought into contact with each other slipped into relations of gradual differentiation, or ‘schismogenesis’, to use a term taken from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson.31 They thus gradually became specialized in attitudes that were sometimes ­symmetrical – ­the notorious mimeticism and all the games with mirrors and reflections so often criticized by ­Amselle – ­ and sometimes complementary or mutually adapted (such as the  relations  of domination–submission, voyeurism–exhibitionism, ­assistance–dependence, highlighted by Bateson). These various feedback processes not only favoured the triumph of ‘ethnological reason’ on both sides of the relationship, but they also changed the dominant axis of identity constructions. For a long time, in fact, such constructions favoured horizontality by integrating ­themselves – i­n a dialogic, even polemical, w ­ ay – ­into networks or ‘chains of societies’ involving a series of lateral branchings or connections. In this context, the only verticalities stemmed, on the one hand, from the logics of empire or the distinction between ‘encompassed’ and ‘encompassing’ societies, and, on the other hand, from the inevitable class struggles in each society, struggles that could obviously take a racial turn, as in the slave societies of the New World. But after the end of colonial empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ‘in the post-­Cold War situation’, ‘vertical clashes’, according to Amselle, were soon reconfigured: the historicist and Marxist paradigm of class struggle was abandoned, even though this struggle stemmed directly from ‘race struggle’. The vertical paradigm was reinvigorated and decisively assumed greater importance than xix

Foreword lateral branchings or connections, or ‘horizontal conflicts’. From the old colonial relations we were left with ‘vertical, ethnic identities’ cutting across, fragmenting and now partitioning social bodies and intellectual, literary and artistic fields into so many ‘slices’ and ‘vertical gashes’. Today, we are witnessing a ‘return of race’, as well as a growing ethnicization of cultural relations and social conflicts, as Amselle has abundantly demonstrated in recent studies such as L’Ethnicisation de la France (The Ethnicization of France)32 and Les Nouveaux Rouges–Bruns (The New Extremists across Right and Left).33 The highlighting of these variable geometries of i­dentity – p ­ lotted against the two axes of verticality and horizontality, and their potential historical r­ eversals – a­ lso plays a part in another model, one that is equally important in Amselle’s epistemology: this is the geographical model and its often worldwide scale. Amselle, in fact, has never stopped practising a globe-­trotting anthropology on multi-­located sites, from Europe to the Africas and the Americas, and from India to Peru via Mali. The anthropologist thus links disparate worlds, and he pursues ‘channels’ and ‘networks’ at various points of the planet; his studies can therefore be read as extensive geopolitical coordinate systems. A third model structures these works, based on a socio-­linguistics, and more specifically a pragmatics, which constantly insists on the shifting nature of referents and on the fundamentally performative character of ethnonyms. This socio-­linguistic framework moved centre stage after Branchements (2001), which focused on ‘particularist derivations of signifieds in relation to a network of planetary signifiers’,34 while, following on from this, other studies (of contemporary African art, postcolonialism and new forms of primitivism) have tracked the various processes of ‘relexification’ of artefacts and concepts, and all the phenomena of ‘creolization’ or ‘code-­switching’ which characterize contemporary artistic, literary and intellectual practices. These three m ­ odels – h ­ istorical and dynamic, geometric and geographical, socio-­linguistic and p ­ ragmatic – u ­ ltimately lie within the same problematic: it is a matter of thinking first and foremost about the relations of force within societies, as well as between different societies, languages and cultures. The latter, in fact, as Amselle tells us, are not situated next to each other like Leibnizian monads without doors or windows: they take up their place in a moving whole that is itself a structured field of relations. […] The definition of a given

xx

Foreword culture is actually the result of an intercultural relation of force: the spatially dominant culture has the power to assign to other cultures their own place in the system, turning the latter into their subjected or determined identities. […] The system is not static, however: certain cultures that were once subjected become dominant while others, like stars, are born and then vanish.35

This issue of ‘relations of force’ is certainly Amselle’s major concern, and the keystone of his whole oeuvre. It is a theme he also explores in cultural and linguistic relations as well as in artistic, literary and intellectual productions.

From one dialogue to another So it is on the basis of their respective paths, but also of a certain number of shared concerns, that Diagne and Amselle have here followed a dialogue already initiated in several studies and public encounters.36 They tackle many themes: the question of universalism; the concepts of race, culture and identity; the role of languages in philosophical practice and philosophy in different cultural areas; the various conceptions of Islam, especially in West Africa; and finally the outlines of an Africa which can be thought of at the same time as singular and as plural. Each thinker looks back at his recent ideas on these themes, comparing and contrasting them with those of his interlocutor. However, it is important to warn the reader that it is not just two styles of thought, but also two opposite modes of address, that are coming into play here. Faithful to a certain polemical temperament and to a taste for straight talking that sometimes dispenses with oratorical precautions, Amselle opens the various debates by trying each time to drive his opponent into a corner and, in particular, to expose the essentialist, culturalist and differentialist logics that might underlie certain critical propositions in postcolonial and decolonial thinking on the relations between Africa and the West, language and thought, Islam and philosophy, culture and politics. The anthropologist thus adopts a resolutely chivalrous ­posture – ­in the sense that he enjoys crossing swords with an opponent. Conversely, without practising the cowardly art of ducking and diving, but striking back whenever he deems it necessary, Diagne refuses to don what he calls ‘the livery’ of the ‘Afrocentrist, particularist and essentialist’ thinker (p. 138). He then fuels the discussion in xxi

Foreword a less agonistic way, but one that is just as radical as Amselle, proposing a total ‘decentring’, one which ‘reject[s] all centrisms’ (p.  142), but rather highlights branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time. So let us wager that the publication of these conversations, which are often uncompromising but always stimulating, will spur other conversations. Anthony Mangeon is Professor of Francophone Literature at the University of Strasbourg. He is the author or editor of several books on the literatures of Africa, the West Indies and the Black Americas in their relation to knowledge, including: La Pensée noire et l’Occident: de la bibliothèque coloniale à Barack Obama (Cabris: Sulliver, 2010), Postures postcoloniales (Paris: Karthala, Lettres du Sud, 2012), Anthropolitiques: Jean-Loup Amselle, une pensée sans concessions (Paris: Karthala, 2015), Crimes d’auteur: de l’influence, du plagiat et de l’assassinat en littérature (Paris: Hermann, Fictions pensantes, 2016) and L’Empire de la littérature: penser l’indiscipline francophone avec Laurent Dubreuil (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, Plurial, 2016).

xxii

Introduction Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle

This book of epistolary exchanges, or rather of e-­mail exchanges, between the two of us, an anthropologist and a philosopher who, in some of our work, express a search for Africa(s), focuses on what might be called the question of the postcolonial. It is difficult, for many reasons, to date precisely the appearance of a postcolonial paradigm and to ascribe it to definite writers. First of all, this term has two distinct meanings: it refers to a phenomenon that occurred ‘after’ colonization and to a phenomenon that was to ‘counteract’ colonization and its aftermath in the contemporary world, both in the South and in the North. Secondly, postcolonialism must be plural: there are as many authors as there are postcolonialisms and, within this paradigm, literary people rub shoulders with political scientists and other specialists in the humanities and social sciences, and have often played the role of precursors. Be that as it may, the emergence of a postcolonial paradigm is doubtless to be situated in the aftermath of the Second World War. This paradigm was already gestating in a historical configuration where, even before the war, revolts and riots in countries under foreign rule indicated that this rule could no longer be maintained. The Brazzaville Conference called by de Gaulle in 1944 recognized that, if only thanks to the part played by the colonies in the liberation of Europe from Nazism, the colonial system would not survive unless it were re-­established on new foundations. This system was in fact doomed, as the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 would demonstrate. This was also the era when the two main victorious countries in the war, the United States and the Soviet Union, confronted each other as the dominant powers. For different reasons and in different 1

Introduction forms, they had both opposed old-­style colonialism as established by Europe. This was the time, in particular, when the United States assumed the hegemony over the rest of the planet previously held by Europe, and where as a corollary the notion of ‘cultural area’ replaced the old ‘savage/civilized’ binary on which the domination of European colonial powers over Africa, Asia and Oceania had been based. The  notion that there is a plurality of human cultures all equivalent to one another, a notion which lies at the heart of the American cultural anthropology of Franz Boas and his followers, also lay behind many postcolonial texts. Perhaps the most significant event for postcolonialism was the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, in 1955. It brought together twenty-­nine African and Asian countries and marked the entry onto the international scene of the decolonized countries of the so-­called ‘Third World’. In the final resolution of this conference, colonialism and imperialism in general were condemned, especially in France (then one of the two main colonial powers in Africa) and in the apartheid regime in South Africa. The participants also sought to define themselves as ‘non-­aligned’ with the two big blocs of the time, the Soviet bloc and the Western ­bloc – ­a desire that may also have expressed the wish to rid themselves of the ideologies dominant in each of these two areas. Some of the ideas developed at the Bandung Conference can be found in authors who, without defining themselves literally as postcolonial writers, may nevertheless be considered as precursors. We particularly have in mind Aimé Césaire and his famous ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’ (1956), in which he announced his resignation from the French Communist Party and simultaneously denounced the ‘omnilateral’ superiority of the West and the ‘emaciated universalism’ that it promoted. In this letter, we can read a desire to promote ‘cultural relativism’ and regenerate the Caribbean in contact with Black Africa, defined as ‘the mother of our Caribbean culture and civilization’. We can also, conversely, take seriously what Césaire himself says about his aims: a ‘universal’ that would be different from colonial paternalism or the fraternalism of the French Communist Party, a ‘universal’ that would be ‘rich with all particulars’. These two readings constitute one aspect of our discussion of the question of the universal. In the Anglo-­Saxon universe there is another major figure, also claimed today by postcolonials, namely the American-­ Palestinian writer Edward Said and his celebrated Orientalism (first published in the United States in 1978 and translated into French in 1980).1 2

Introduction In this book, Said drew on the work of Michel Foucault and on the analysis of mainly literary texts to show that the societies of the Near East and the Middle East, as we currently apprehend them, are the result of a construction and projection of Western and colonial stereotypes about social realities that are actually far richer and more complex. At the crossroads of the French- and English-­ speaking worlds, and also following in the wake of Foucault’s ideas, was Valentin Mudimbe’s magnum opus: The Invention of Africa (1988).2 In this fundamental work, Mudimbe set out to describe the rigid representations of Africa that then prevailed by forging the concept of the ‘colonial library’, which designated all the knowledge and texts relating to this continent produced by conquerors, missionaries and colonial administrators. In short, the genealogy of postcolonialism(s) is very varied, and the search for precursors could extend to infinity. However, as far as the development of the postcolonial paradigm is concerned, it is crucial these days to emphasize the importance assumed by meetings and collaborations between researchers and academics from India, Latin America and Africa. These meetings comprise first and foremost, of course, the ways in which these people read each other’s works. Then there are the physical meetings organized by institutions like CODESRIA3 in Africa, which, twenty years ago, in collaboration with the International Center for Ethnic Studies (ICES) based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, created a review published twice a year and dedicated to dialogue between researchers from Africa and Asia under the title Journal of Identity, Culture & Politics: An Afro-Asian Dialogue. We could also mention the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales or Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) in South America. Meetings between teachers and researchers from Africa, Asia and Latin America also take place in American universities, where, as is well known, many nationalities are to be found. So postcolonial studies has found a home in the major universities of the United States, giving birth to a whole series of outstanding works, all dominated by the idea, made famous by the American-­Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, of ‘provincializing Europe’.4 This involves making Europe one cultural area like any other, that is, rejecting the idea that it has any pre-­eminence in the field of knowledge, and thus denying it the privilege of naturally embodying universalism. Instead, it is the plurality of cultural spaces which is ­affirmed – ­African, Asian, Native 3

Introduction American and O ­ ceanian – ­as well as the equal dignity of endogenous systems of thought, philosophies, epistemologies and types of knowledge. In their critiques of Western domination over the rest of the planet, various types of postcolonialism have highlighted the significance of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization in the process of capitalist accumulation. In recent years, this paradigm has, however, also given way to another intellectual configuration, namely the ‘decolonial paradigm’. As part of this new paradigm, the pivotal year for the critique of capitalism is 1492, which simultaneously saw the ‘discovery’ or the ‘invasion’ of America, depending on one’s point of view, and the completion of the ‘Reconquest’ of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian rulers, which involved the end of Muslim Andalusia and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The system of domination thereby established is thus seen by decolonial authors not as linked to the ‘Industrial Revolution’ of the eighteenth century, but as arising from the invasion of America, the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain and the subsequent process of ethnic cleansing. This new intellectual configuration is essentially associated with such Latin American authors as Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano and Ramón Grosfoguel. Like postcolonial writers, they reject Western pre-­ eminence, and especially Hegelian Marxism, which, through the concept of ‘dialectic’, aims to provide the history of the world with a pre-­established, one-­directional meaning. Dussel prefers the notion of ‘analectic’, that is, a form of knowledge or an absolute value as expressed, for example, in the Native American concept of ‘Pachamama’. Based on this concept, Grosfoguel shows that we must go beyond a critique of the misdeeds of multinational mining companies and ponder the initial rape of ‘Mother Earth’ that their exploitation of earth’s resources merely prolongs. These new ‘decolonial’ ideas have found fertile ground in several French writers whose writings bring us back to the aforementioned question about Césaire’s dramatic resignation from the French Communist Party: does the decolonial question lead to prioritizing race over class? In particular, does the role played by the notion of ‘intersectionality’ obscure the class character of race and the social usage of postcoloniality? As the Haitian proverb reminds us: ‘Poor mulatto is Negro, rich Negro is mulatto.’ It will be clear that our dialogue and the contrasting positions it may set out on this or that point have highlighted the question of the universal that can be formulated in these terms: is the 4

Introduction postcolonial the first phase of a new universal, one which would be truly ­universal (as it would be inclusive), or is it, on the contrary, the denial of all universalism, the triumph of the particular and of fragmentation? This question is linked to that of human rights. In our discussion of these, our conversation highlights a difference of opinion over our assessment of the Kurukan Fuga and the Charter of the Mandé, the reconstructed texts of the oral tradition in which are listed the founding principles on which the Mali Empire, founded in the thirteenth century, was built. One author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, believes that the decolonial approach presupposes that the intellectuals of the continent also express their search for Africa in its languages. ‘Every language,’ he writes, ‘however small, bears its memory of the world.’5 What should we think of the demand to see African languages (maybe in a new light) as languages of creation and science? Are Ngũgĩ’s words and his approach based on a conception of different languages as monads closed off from each other? How are we to understand his assertion that, on the contrary, there is a language of languages and that this language is translation? Our search for Africa(s) could not of course fail to accord a full and urgent place to the religious question as it arises today, in the Sahel among other places, in all its sound and fury. So we have looked in detail at the historical record and discussed the notion of a West African Islam, peaceful and open, as contrasted with a strict, purist Islam from the Arab North. Does this contrast point to an intellectual and spiritual tradition which, while not specific to West Africa, has nevertheless coloured the Islam of this region? Or is it a variant of colonial discourse and its construction of a ‘Black Islam’? These are the main questions that have been the focus of our discussions on this theme. These discussions conclude by describing pan-­Africanism and its current meaning. What does it mean, now, to re-­embark on the pan-­ African project in an Africa which, despite the serious challenges it faces, has moved from being a ‘hopeless continent’ (the headline of an issue of The Economist devoted to Africa in 2000) to being a ‘hopeful continent’ (the headline of the same periodical in 2011 was ‘Africa Rising’)? Is this an essentialist repetition of the slogans of the past and the ritual invocation of a ‘United States of Africa’ as called for by previous authors such as Kwamé Nkrumah or Léopold Sédar Senghor? Is it a project paving the way to futures of which the history of pan-­Africanism was the promise? 5

Introduction Our diverging conclusions on this issue mark the end of our discussions, built on the shared conviction that all endeavours to establish communication between the different components of our planet are beneficial, because they consist in cutting down the real or imaginary barriers that fragment our world. This, at least, was the underlying aim of our dialogue.

6

1 Universalism in questions Jean-Loup Amselle

Universalism has been, and continues to be, rightly decried insofar as the conquest and colonization of Africa were carried out in the name of the eradication of ‘barbaric customs’ such as slavery, human sacrifice or female genital mutilation.1 What is described as ‘overarching universalism’ – a phrase that acts as a sort of frozen s­ yntagm – a­ nd the corresponding imposition of the rights of man, or, as we say today, human rights, continue to be propagated in the form of campaigns against female genital mutilation, against homophobia and against the treatment meted out to women in the South. These campaigns are led by major international organizations and NGOs, and are taken up in Africa by the ‘secular’ fractions of the elites in each country; they have the disadvantage of arousing the determined opposition of a significant number of the population, who are in favour of maintaining female genital mutilation or are hostile to the emancipation of women and averse to homosexuality. It is also well known that in many cases the legal prohibition of female genital mutilation does not stop this practice from being performed. Hostility towards any reform of what is supposed to be an immutable ‘tradition’ is also taken up and supported, in Mali, for example, by Muslim leaders of every tendency; they see it as a political marker for confronting the secular faction of the local bourgeoisie, which they describe as kowtowing to the West. So what is to some extent just a political issue between fractions of the ruling class is presented as a clash between Africa and the West, with the consequence of muddying the waters and fostering so-­called ‘postcolonial’ positions.2 This phenomenon became clear during Barack Obama’s visit to Dakar, Senegal, in 2013: while the American president was favourable to ‘coming out’ about one’s sexual orientations, whatever they were, 7

Universalism in questions the Senegalese president Malick Sall said homosexuality was not one of the ‘African traditions’ and that there was no question of decriminalizing it.3 The imposition from outside of a universalism of human rights in its different f­ orms – ­whether it be ‘the gay international’, as Joseph Massad put it with regard to homosexuality, or ‘femonationalism’, to use the term put forward by Black feminists4 – caused and continues to cause collateral damage within Southern countries, since the obligation to ‘come out’ as encouraged by the West has the effect, in both cases, of penalizing working-­class homosexuals and trapping women within an apparent patriarchal dictatorship. The importance of this damage should be relativized and a proper emphasis placed on the ‘agency’5 (the capacity of social actors to respond) of homosexuals in the South, especially in Muslim countries; and the same applies to women’s resistance to the injunctions of ‘White’ feminists from the North. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the imposition of a universalism of human rights is part of the aftermath of the colonial period6 and must, as such, be c­ ondemned –d ­ espite the ambiguities that ran through the Durban conferences in 2001 and 2009.7 Unfortunately, criticism of the unilateral imposition of human rights, of this overbearing Western universalism in all its aspects, often has the harmful e­ffect – n ­ ow as before, during the colonial ­period – ­of concealing the need to defend another type of universalism whose importance is obvious in the face of the excesses of cultural relativism associated with the denigration of reason, or what is now called decolonial ‘pluriversalism’.8 True, universalism must be rejected to the extent that it is only a Eurocentrism, and therefore a ‘particular’ opposing other ‘particulars’ seeking recognition. This does not, however, mean forgoing the quest for a unity of the different manifestations of capitalism on different continents or the search for potential communication and translation between different cultures. To begin with, let us introduce the postcolonial thinkers Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose theories are often based on culturalist premises which emphasize the irreducible specificity of different countries or subcontinents such as China or India. As I endeavoured to show in my book L’Occident décroché, Indian historians of the ‘subalternist’ school who initially based their analyses of popular resistance on the ideas of Antonio Gramsci later resorted to other authors such as Michel Foucault and Louis Dumont, thereby giving an essentialist and culturalist flavour to their apprehension of Indian social realities.9 Those who oppose this culturalist vision and claim to have discovered a redefined universal8

Universalism in questions ism are more discrete: they come from the same Southern countries, but they also teach in the United States. Here I will mention the Indian Marxist thinker Vivek Chibber, professor at New York University. A defender of universalism, he insists that the manifestations of capitalism are basically the same in the East as in the West, in India, Europe and the United States.10 In a similar way, Nivedita Majumdar showed that the almost exclusive focus on gender at work in the writings of Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha had the effect of masking the forms of acquiescence to the tradition that are in some cases demonstrated by so-­called ‘subaltern’ women, or of obscuring their class consciousness.11 The American-­ Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, meanwhile, uses other d ­ ata – b ­ asically, cultural d ­ ata – a­ nd has a different theoretical slant, but he too is just as committed, within the context of what he defines as a ‘cosmopolitanism’, to seeking values shared by many cultures. My own concept of universalism is close to his theoretical model.12 Another American-­Ghanaian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, is also clearly hostile to cultural relativism: he defends a universalist position based on the biological unity of the human species. For him, there is nothing impossible in the idea of translating Western concepts into African cultures (in this case, Akan)13 or African concepts into European languages, even though this latter transference is less common than the former. In this respect, he rejects the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, whose strong version, ‘linguistic determinism’, postulates that human actions are necessarily limited by the language in which they are expressed. He is also hostile to the idea of the ‘indeterminacy of translation’ put forward by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, for whom to understand a sentence is to understand a language. In both cases, Wiredu believes, the powerful influence of language on thought cannot legitimize any relativism.14 Souleymane Bachir Diagne goes even further.15 Indeed, he has developed a theory of the universalism of translation whose major sources of inspiration are Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s reading of Lévi-­ Strauss, and the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In the report he presented in 1958 to his colleagues with the aim of setting up a Chair in Social Anthropology for Lévi-­Strauss at the Collège de France, Merleau-­Ponty distinguished two kinds of universalism: overarching universalism and lateral universalism.16 By ‘overarching universalism’, Merleau-­ Ponty means the elementary, unconscious structures that Lévi-­Strauss detected in kinship, with a focus on the universality of the nature/culture distinction and of the 9

Universalism in questions prohibition of incest.17 To this formalistic mathematics of ‘atoms of kinship’ – a mathematics that is perfectly inhuman, being attached to no given society or c­ulture – M ­ erleau-­Ponty opposes a ‘lateral universalism’, based on the concreteness and richness of the society or culture that is the subject of the work of the ‘ethnographer’, a term which has in fact been largely abandoned by contemporary anthropology. As Merleau-­Ponty puts it: It’s about building a general reference system where the point of view of the native, the point of view of the civilized person, and the errors made by one about the other can find their place; it’s about constituting a broadened experience which may in principle become accessible to people of another country and another time.18

In this case, it is not a matter of applying a mathematical or logical apparatus on unconscious social actors from above, as a grammar is imposed on speakers, thereby flattening out all differences; rather, the aim is to establish an empirical communication between radically distinct cultural spheres. However, for Merleau-­Ponty, this process of communication goes further, since he maintains that anthropologists must not only apprehend exotic societies, but also free themselves from the force field of their own society so as to see their own culture as if it were another, rather like Montesquieu, who, in The Persian Letters, looks at French society from the outside, or like François Jullien, who uses Chinese culture to apprehend his own (French) culture. It is thus a kind of intercultural friction that Merleau-­Ponty is proposing, a friction which should also allow Western anthropologists to find the ‘savage side’ within ­them – t­he ‘savage mind’ (Lévi-­Strauss) which does not belong to so-­called ‘primitive’ societies alone, but is common to all societies.19 Interculturalism, or the translation of cultures into one other, is thus for Merleau-­Ponty a source of knowledge for human beings in general. One striking contradiction, however, deserves to be noted. Merleau-­ Ponty bases his theory on the existence of discrete cultures in the mathematical sense of the term ‘discrete’, that is, discontinuous. To conceptualize translation, or interculturalism, he needs a concept of the discontinuous, just as the thinkers of hybridity need to base their arguments on the hypothesis of supposedly ‘pure’ cultures. But there is another problem. Merleau-­Ponty’s position with regard to what might be called exotic otherness or the ‘oblique universal’, which he locates exclusively in India and China (the only civilizations he ­knows – ­and even then it is through their philosophical ideas 10

Universalism in questions alone), is not without its ambiguity, as is evident from his discussions of this topic in Signs,20 a work that was published in 1960, at around the same time as a report supporting Lévi-­Strauss’s candidacy for a chair at the Collège de France. Merleau-­Ponty follows an evolutionist tradition leading from Hegel to Husserl, and sees Indian and Chinese thought as a kind of unfinished ‘prematuration’ of Western thought, which, in his view, is alone capable of reaching universality. But, at the same time, he echoes Léopold Sédar Senghor21 and looks forward to Michel Foucault22 in the way he views this ‘prematuration’ as simultaneously a source of primitivism capable of regenerating a Western thinking based solely on the development of (frigid) reason, and thus able to ‘learn from them [these non-­European cultures] to rediscover the relationship to being’.23 It is surprising, in this respect, that Diagne did not view Merleau-­Ponty as a postcolonial author avant la lettre. An analysis of certain aspects of Merleau-­Ponty’s work demonstrates that considering certain societies as unfinished, owing to their occupying an earlier phase of the history of humankind, and viewing them in an ahistorical way, also turns this defect into a quality, a certain soulfulness that might be able to breathe fresh life into an enfeebled, withered West. All the ambiguity of what is called the ‘reversal of the stigma’ (the stigma of ‘Négritude’ in particular) is summed up by this episode in the history of thought, and it is the same ambiguity that we find in certain aspects of the various different types of postcolonialism.24 It is easy to understand why the work of Merleau-­Ponty, who championed Lévi-­Strauss and was attentive, for better and for worse, to exotic otherness, managed to seduce Diagne. Emmanuel Levinas is also a major philosopher on whom Diagne relies to develop his idea of the universalism of translation. It should be borne in mind that Levinas’s particularly rich and complex work combines, in a contradictory way, both a hymn to cultural diversity and a vision, or conception, inspired by Platonism. On the one hand, what Levinas acknowledges in Greek philosophy is a superiority of the (personal) other (autrui) over being, of ethics over ontology. For him, the ‘Greek’ is the man open to all seas, so that ‘the Good is a matter more of the delta than the source: it is the Greek element, also a source in its own way, but the pre-­eminent model of openness, interpretation and infinite translatability’.25 So the universality of the ‘Greek philosopher’ is the place where all cultures can potentially overlap and be translated into one another. Levinas thus presents us with the hypothesis of a de-­ Westernized, de-­ Platonized world, one that is not subject to the affirmation of the human regardless 11

Universalism in questions of culture and history, in a word, de-moralized. It is this relativist conception of culture, as expressed in some of Levinas’s works, which Diagne embraces. But, on the other hand, in Humanism of the Other, a book which plays a major role in Diagne’s argument, Levinas follows another line of thought, one that is strictly Platonic: The saraband of innumerable and equivalent cultures, each justified within in its own context, has created a world that is certainly de-­ Westernized, but it is also a world that is dis-­oriented. To see the meaning of a situation which precedes culture, to perceive language from the revelation of the Other [. . .] is to return to Platonism in a new way.26

After opening Greek philosophy up to the plurality of cultures, Levinas therefore dismisses cultural relativism and returns to what he refers to as the Other (Autre), the figure of the Divine that takes shape on the face of the Other-­as-­person (Autrui), a figure which in fact resembles the figure of the One. In Levinas, the overarching universal actually pre-­exists what he somewhat condescendingly calls the ‘saraband’ of cultures, the infinite shimmer of cultural diversity that in itself bears no real meaning. For our philosopher, this infinite wealth, this infinite diversity, in short the ‘noise’ that the cultures of the world make in their mad saraband, is an embarrassment for the serenity which should preside over our reflection on, and quest for, Being. For the author of Humanism of the Other, who constantly plays on the difference between ‘other’ and ‘Other’, the philosophy of Being is prior and superior to anthropology, in the sense that anthropologists give this term. For Diagne, cultural diversity, the infinite profusion and shimmer of all the cultures of the world, cannot be conceived as a ‘saraband’ – at best, a lascivious oriental dance, at worst (and this is doubtless the meaning intended here by Levinas), a way of making a noise, kicking up a racket. This is not Diagne’s view: he sees no contradiction between the quest for the universal and the appreciation of cultural diversity. Indeed, while he rejects ‘overarching universalism’ as understood by Merleau-­Ponty, that is, the search for categories or structures valid at all times, in all places and for all p ­ eople – ­categories derived from the questions about kinship or sorcery that the anthropologist forces onto his or her informers or that the West seeks to force onto the rest of the world (in the guise of human rights) –, he nevertheless declares himself be a staunch defender of universalism. But, for Diagne, this universalism is based on the possibility of 12

Universalism in questions a translation, that is, on the infinite translatability of all cultures into one other. So it is paradoxically in the dimension of cultural relativism that his quest for universality lies, as the purpose of his approach is to find ‘common ground’ for all cultures on an empirical basis. To this end, Diagne defines two kinds of translations: a vertical translation and a horizontal translation. The former concerns the reception of the suras of the Qur’an by the prophet Muhammad, this revelation being conceived as a translation of the divine language. The latter relates to the translation of different cultures and languages into one another. Taking into account the problem raised by the principle of the former kind of translation for anyone who is not a believer, we may wonder if the latter kind of translation does not benefit, in its optimism, from the truly religious posture of the former, to some extent as happens in Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’ of 1714.27 Indeed, unlike such writers as Édouard Glissant, François Jullien and Barbara Cassin, Diagne does not postulate any ‘opacity’ or ‘untranslatable’ residue underlying the relationship between different cultures: in his view, every culture is in principle commensurable, understandable, assimilable by any individual from another culture.28 This first difficulty is compounded by the question of whether this universalism of translation is based on the illusion of the separate purity of each culture. In other words, it could be that the infinite cultural diversity of the planet as it has been collected over the centuries by travellers, conquerors, missionaries, colonial administrators and ethnologists is actually, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, an ‘invention of tradition’.29 This desire to put different cultures on the same level paradoxically leads to hyper-­relativism. Apart from the question of postcolonialism or decolonial pluriversalism, it leads to a whole swathe of contemporary anthropology tilting towards ecological and anti-­ speciesist hyper-­relativism, a shift that is mainly carried out by disciples of Lévi-­Strauss who have abandoned that aspect of his work that is properly focused on universalism (notably The Elementary Structures of Kinship) and who are now engaged in ‘perspectivism’, a kind of ‘multinaturalism’ where the aims of the jaguar (the prey) are posed as equivalent to the aims of the Amazonian hunter pursuing it.30 Even though Diagne is not directly connected to this trend, his ecological perspective and hyper-­relativist tendencies are part of the same zeitgeist. The old cultural relativism of American anthropology to which Lévi-­Strauss was linked is thus put on the back burner, since man is no longer conceived, as he was by Descartes, as ‘the master and 13

Universalism in questions possessor of nature’; rather, nature itself, the Earth (Gaia), becomes a living creature, in line with the Amerindian notion of Pachamama, the ‘Mother Earth’, the emblem of several NGOs and of the anti-­ globalization movement ­ ATTAC – a­ notion that is promoted by both the philosopher Isabelle Stengers and the ‘decolonial’ sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel.31 In this perspective, the destruction caused to the environment in Central and South America is less the result of actions of multinational mining companies than an assault on ‘Mother Earth’. We seem to be straying from Diagne’s ideas, but in actual fact, as we will see later, there is a certain overlap between the Indianocentric ideas of Pachamama and buen vivir, on the one hand, and the Afrocentric positions on human rights set foward by Diagne as they appear in ‘the Charter of the Mandé’. And while Diagne admittedly does not go so far as to endorse the extreme positions of his Latin American colleagues, his hypothesis of the universalism of translation between different cultures nevertheless presupposes a hyper-­relativism that is found in both fields. The positions of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kwasi Wiredu and Souleymane Bachir Diagne on the relations between the universal and the particular may be different, but all share a conception which, despite being generous with regard to the possibility of a communication and thus a translation between African and Western cultures, ultimately rests on the initial postulate of the existence of discrete cultures; even when they are not considered ‘intact’ (as in Quine, for example), and unaffected by history, these cultures are nevertheless closed entities existing in some eternal way. Against this position, or rather these positions, I consider that it is appropriate to postulate the primacy of the whole over the parts: that is, the primacy of ‘chains of societies’, of ‘originary syncretism’, of ‘branchings’ and of cultural derivations. In my opinion, each culture is made of bits and pieces; it is a composite, so that there are no purely local identities. In my various works such as Au coeur de l’ethnie (At the heart of ethnicity),32 Mestizo Logics33 and Branchements (Connections),34 I have tried to show that, right from the start, the processes of identification involved, in whatever historical period, signifiers much more extensive than those of the local communities, and that these signifiers were reappropriated by social actors in the form of particularistic utterances. Indeed, the palette of the world’s cultures, as we know it today, or rather as it appears on the ethnic maps of Africa in particular, does not reflect a definite state of affairs, but rather a socio-­historical 14

Universalism in questions construction, the projection of a knowledge/power onto what is actually a continuous network of cultures and societies.35 As I have tried to show, the way different ethnic groups of West Africa have been recorded by colonial knowledge/power for the purposes of intellectual and political management resulted in the rending of the continuous fabric which had united these societies in the precolonial era.36 Cultural singularity is thus the product, in a colonial context that postcolonial authors should certainly not ignore, of the (generally speaking arbitrary) delimitation of ethnic groups and c­ultures – ­ a delimitation that results from a process of de-­ historicization, de-­Islamization and de-­politicization, in short of an ethnic cleansing effectuated in the intellectual and political field. This process prefigures the numerous cases of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocides that have occurred or are occurring now. What some authors propose under the humanist label of the universalism of translation is actually based on sewing back together entities previously torn apart by colonial knowledge/power. Viewing the ‘saraband’ of cultures as a timeless entity is thus tantamount to forgetting the historical process through which the multiple ethnic groups and cultures of the world have come to be what they are. Claiming that they can be grasped sub specie aeternitatis amounts to setting them up as so many essences and turning them into the prey of processes of ethnic cleansing that in other contexts are deplored. ­Everyone – ­or at least all those who are willing to accept the ­fact – ­knows that the categories of Hutu and Tutsi do not refer to immemorial ethnic groups, but that they are the product of the imposition of these categories by Belgian missionaries in Rwanda. These ethnic categories were themselves inspired by a reading of the works of François Guizot and Augustin Thierry dealing with the interracial war that, in the history of France, set the Franks against the Gauls!37 Before colonization, in Rwanda there were just Tutsi and Hutu kingdoms, and there was therefore no ethnic opposition, since they all spoke, and still speak, the same language, Kinyarwanda. Only with colonization and the identity cards on which one’s ethnic identity appeared did these categories emerge; the genocide of 1994 was thus to some extent a belated effect of the imposition of this colonial knowledge. Yet we need to go beyond the pure vision of the ‘invention of tradition’. We really need to ask why these categories imported and imposed by outside agents have ‘set’, in the way that concrete sets. One answer would lie in the strong similarities that existed between 15

Universalism in questions the political models in force in the France of the Ancien Régime and in precolonial Africa. In fact, the predominant theories of power in these two areas drew a contrast in each case between those who held political power from the outside and the indigenous masters of ritual and the soil, which corresponds exactly to the model of the ‘war of the two races’ (Franks versus Gallo-­Romans or Normans versus Anglo-­ Saxons) unearthed by Michel Foucault in Society Must be Defended.38 This is the new ‘matrix of universalism’, with its postulate of principles common to many cultures, that I would like to propose, based not on some speculative reflection, but on the study of concrete situations tackled both by empirical field study and by a close analysis of the texts that discuss it. There are two main ways of doing anthropology: one can either start from differences and end up with similarities, or start from similarities and consider differences as a ‘remainder’. It will be understood that it is this last way of doing anthropology that I prefer. This counter-­intuitive point of view can also be supported by the existence of many practices that straddle Africa and Europe, such as the use of clairvoyance by certain heads of s­ tate – V ­ aléry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand, for e­ xample – o ­ r even the religion of consumption which is reflected in an exponential growth in the amount of waste and which can be compared, mutatis mutandis, to the sacrifices made to fetishes in Africa. It is probably no coincidence that Marx characterizes capitalism as the reign of ‘commodity fetishism’, resorting to a concept based on the observations made by the Dutch merchant Willem Bosman on the coasts of Africa and later by Charles de Brosses. An equivalence is thus drawn between the way Africans worship certain objects called fetishes and the consumer goods that are worshipped in consumer societies. Both cases involve ‘partial objects’ that manifest the nature of ‘religion’ in force in both African ‘precapitalist’ societies and Western ‘developed’ societies.39 On this point, I share the position of some Latin American liberation theologians such as Hugo Assmann and Franz Hinkelammert.40 The critique of overarching universalism, as developed by Merleau-­Ponty and taken up by Diagne, cannot provide a path for the legitimate struggle of the old colonized peoples against the old colonial powers to follow, or for the struggle of African migrants and minorities fighting the discrimination imposed on them by the powers and governments of Western countries. Indeed, in my view this posture conceals two major pitfalls: it replaces class with race, religion and identity and thereby minimizes internal class conflicts in 16

Universalism in questions African countries (and in the countries of the South in general) and in the countries of the North. This is what the political and religious leaders of certain African countries do when they use female genital mutilation or the struggle against homosexuality (as they once used AIDS) to create an imagined conflict between practices described as foreign and as such to be condemned, and African ‘traditions’ that have remained fundamentally healthy. So I do not think it is relevant to ‘provincialize Europe’, as Dipesh Chakrabarty calls on us to do, turning it into just one more cultural area, as this would result in a formatting of the world as so many cultural areas impervious to one other.41 In my opinion, it is the quest for commonalities which must prevail over the affirmation of differences. In L’Occident décroché, I analyse postcolonialism as a critical trend led by Indian, African and Latin American thinkers. These thinkers undermine the legacy of colonial domination in the kinds of knowledge constructed by the social sciences concerning dominated societies. In that work, I undertake a critical presentation of this trend of thought, as well as the forces contesting the West. While exposing the arguments and the pathways of this movement, I try to show how some of these writers incline towards forms of primitivism and cultural essentialism, sometimes taking over colonial stigmas while attempting to reverse their meaning. Thus, postcolonialism seems to me to constitute, by means of a new ruse of reason, the surest way of establishing the hegemony of the West even as it seems to aim at reversing it. That is why L’Occident décroché cannot in any way, pace Diagne, be equated with defending the idea that ‘the West is [. . .] naturally the place of the universal’. Diagne also describes me as ‘paranoid’ and believes that I am ‘tilting against windmills’, but I could gently return the compliment.42 Nor am I ‘nostalgic for a universal that really existed and is threatened by postcoloniality’;43 my main aim is to affirm that there is a possibility of communication between cultures, or, rather, as all my works (based on fieldwork) strive to show, that it is not relevant to take every culture into consideration when trying to understand the history of humankind and that we must start from ‘chains of societies’ or branching ‘connections’ to show that local identities do not exist and never have.44 Therefore, in the final analysis, the demand made by postcolonial thinkers that Europe consider itself as a cultural area radically different from other cultural areas cannot fail to satisfy the European far right, which endeavours to seek exclusively Christian roots for this continent by ostentatiously ignoring Jewish, Muslim and Roma 17

Universalism in questions c­ ontributions. By criticizing universalism as ‘White’, as the Indigenous of the Republic do,45 or by endeavouring to ‘provincialize Europe’, postcolonial thinkers and their decolonial successors are forgetting that Europe is merely a political and intellectual construction aimed at excluding from its space everything it considers as not (or no longer) part of itself (i.e. non-­Christians) and as shunning all the continents (the migrants) from which it seeks to preserve itself. To define Europe as a distinct cultural area is therefore to render a great service to all European nationalists since this is the very idea they strive to promote. Just as the thinkers of the far right have as their stock in trade the idea of an eternal France, England or Germany, an intangible Europe of the nations, so they need to believe in the ‘African’ (who has not fully entered history) as well as in the durability of ethnic groups across the different precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods in the history of Africa. In short, the essential question here is that of difference: the difference between the African and European continents, and the difference between the many African ethnic groups and ­cultures – ­a problematic which ultimately forms the basis of the theme of translation which lies at the centre of Diagne’s thought.

18

2 On the universal and universalism Souleymane Bachir Diagne

To present my positions as I have expressed them in my writings and as I am developing them in this conversation, I am first going to discuss the difference between universalism and the universal as a starting point for what Immanuel Wallerstein called ‘a [truly] universal universalism’.1 I will then examine what it means in concrete terms to consider the question of the universality of human rights (and that of the rights of living beings in general); and I will finally examine the problem of racial and religious identities, as opposed to ‘class’. To begin, therefore, with the universal and universalism, I will say two things in order to make my positions clear. The first is that the universal is a question that I always link with the plurality of human languages. The second is that it is as a historian and a philosopher of mathematical logic that I started working on this theme.2 I set out from Leibniz, a philosopher whose importance for the question of the relations between the universal and plurality is considerable. Human beings, he says, exhaust themselves in endless discussions and arguments, thereby creating the feeling that they do not know how to make use of their u ­ nderstanding – ­the very faculty by which they should agree. However, says Leibniz, if everyone spoke the language of the understanding, without any interference, everything would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds; and starting out from premises that are understood in the same way by everyone, and applying procedures which everyone could be sure were obvious, everyone should be able to discuss all matters in such a way that their arguments would impose conclusions that would inevitably be agreed by all to have a necessary character. Why is this not the case? Because we do not argue by speaking the language of the understanding that should be the same for everyone, 19

On the universal and universalism that is, universal; rather, we speak in our (natural) languages, ‘imperfect in this respect that there are many of them’, as Mallarmé put it, and imperfect also in themselves, in their irregular grammars, for example: owing to the ambiguities with which they abound, the understanding cannot express itself alone in pure self-­transparency. The solution for Leibniz lies in adopting a language of signs. This is how he finds in the symbolism of algebra and in the mechanical nature of its procedures the only universal language that can rise above the empirical plurality of our languages. The English logician George Boole (1815–64), to whom I devoted my first work, later established the calculus ratiocinator that Leibniz aimed ­at – ­a ‘calculation of reasoning’ (or transformation of reasoning into calculation) which is in many ways the ‘universal’ language of our computers. There are two reasons why I am mentioning how I started out in algebraic logic. The first is that the only universal language is the mathematical language of signs. Thus, precisely because they know that the universal is found only in the language of mathematical logic, logicians since Leibniz have always considered as equivalent, that is, equally remote from the ideal, the empirical human languages that human beings speak on earth. Boole thought that, so long as everyone can recognize the mathematics that sleeps in them,3 it is possible to find, in all languages and in all dialects used on earth, elements of this universal language. Remember how the logician Quine airily dismissed the lucubrations of Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, who had thought it necessary to attribute to ‘primitives’ (as non-­Europeans used to be called not all that long ago) a pre-­logical mentality supposedly indifferent to the logical principle of contradiction. If you claim, Quine simply says, to have found a people that holds as true a proposition affirming one thing and its opposite at the same time and in the same respect, this is because the ‘translator’ of this proposition does not know what he or she is saying. The second r­ eason – ­and this now leads me away from the field of the history of logic alone, though it is still linked to my early ­work – ­is that since we are not machines and do not talk the ‘0 and 1’ binary language of computers (which we mainly owe to Boole, though, as in so many things, Leibniz is a precursor), we need to raise the question of the universal and its possibility not in some ‘beyond’ of the universal language of mathematical symbols but in the here and now of the factual plurality of our empirical and human, all-­too-­human languages. We can stipulate that a given language is universal and thereby overarches all the others. This stipulation involves declaring that 20

On the universal and universalism the Greek language is the Logos (simultaneously the Word, Reason and Being) outside of which other languages are merely ‘blah blah blah’, which is why we call them ‘barbarian’.4 It will be noted that Arabic, in a similar way, sets itself apart from ajami, a word that designates non-­Arabic in g­ eneral – i­ t was first used to refer to Persian, though these days it simply means the languages of non-­Arab Islamic societies. When a given language is declared to be the incarnation of the absolute and pre-­eminent model, the question of the universal becomes that of universalism. We will use the term ‘universalism’ to mark the position of anyone who declares his or her own particularity to be universal by saying, ‘I have the peculiarity of being universal.’ It is then perfectly justified to ask this universalism: ‘by virtue of what? by what right?’, and this is the question posed by barbarians (or subalterns) when they express their right to speak. I shall come back to this. The construction that sees the history of philosophy as essentially European and which sets ‘European humanity’ apart from and above all others (in Husserl’s language) restates the separation between those who speak the Logos and those who are considered ‘barbarians’ or ‘primitives’. Among the European nations themselves, the competition to decide on the ‘genius’ of their languages found its best expression in the famous essay by Antoine de Rivarol, who in 1784, together with Johann Christoph Schwab, shared the first prize awarded by the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences on the theme of the universality of the French language. Clearly, everything revolves around the question of which language best embodies the Logos or the ‘logical’. Thus the defenders of the universality of French, for example, argue that the order of words in this language is the faithful copy of the grammar of logical thought (as opposed to German, I imagine, which puts the verb at the end of the sentence)! But it is especially in a colonial situation that the great line is drawn between the humankind of the Logos and the others. In the colonial world, the imperial language imposes itself as the incarnation of Reason, and native languages (which cannot really have the status of languages) are defined in a negative way by their supposed shortcomings. So these languages will be described as lacking writing, as lacking abstract concepts, as lacking a future tense, as lacking the verb ‘to be’.5 Universalism in the sense I have just noted is perfectly evident in the ethnological approach put forward by Lévy-­Bruhl (though it should be noted that, later on, he revised his first ideas). He declared that, 21

On the universal and universalism outside Europe, what reigned was lack: Europe, which is constructed (because it is a construction) on the proclamation that its identity is Reason, Language and Being, defines those it constructs as others in terms of difference and lack with regard to the norm that it itself represents. This universalism is not the same thing as belief in the universal. It is important to draw this distinction, especially if we are to understand the position of Kwasi Wiredu, who says that there is indeed something universal, since what is human is, everywhere and identically, the human. I share his position. But does this mean that he is ‘universalist’? To return to the question of languages, Wiredu, reflecting on how the logician Alfred Tarski’s famous essay on the definition of truth would be translated into Akan (a language spoken in Ghana and Ivory Coast), highlights what the proposed definition owes to the fact that it is in English. If we compare English and Akan, philosophical problems that are presented as universal are really not universal, being linked to the language in which they are formulated.6 Wiredu shows both that a philosophical argument is relative to the language in which it is formulated, which is always one language among others and not the personified Logos, and that the philosopher must be a translator, must think from language to language, to use the title of my text mentioned by Jean-­Loup Amselle. Under these conditions, is Wiredu a universalist or a relativist? This is a false alternative. In fact, he insists that there is something universal, and at the same time he sets linguistic relativism against ­universalism – ­which, yet again, here means the erecting of the particular of one’s language into the universal of the Logos, and could just as easily be called ‘exceptionalism’. Once this difference between the affirmation of the universal and universalism has been established, we can come to the question of the postcolonial and examine precisely what the different authors associated with postcolonial studies have to say. What they have in common is mainly their demand that we think about the problems in the post-­ Bandung world7 – my name for a world which has moved beyond the universalism expressed, for example, by Husserl, who stated that the other ‘humanities’ had every reason to seek to become Europeanized while ‘we’ (Europeans) will never need to ‘Indianize ourselves’.8 It was by analysing the meaning of the universal in such a world that I came round to looking at the contrast between the thought of Emmanuel Levinas as it is expressed mainly in his work Humanism of the Other,9 first published in 1972, and that of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty. 22

On the universal and universalism What does Emmanuel Levinas say? In his view, to decry what he calls ‘Western civilization’ is to decry the universal, and a ‘de-­ Westernized’ world, after Bandung and the period of decolonization, is also, ipso facto, a ‘dis-­oriented’ world. For him, the world should not simply become ‘a saraband of innumerable and equivalent cultures’.10 Cultures must be ‘oriented’ by the universal, which is necessarily situated in the dimension of ‘verticality’, above them. And what comprises the exceptional character of ‘Western civilization’, what prevents it from being just one ‘province’ among the provinces of the world, is the fact that it alone stands vertically, in the direction of the universal; it is this which gives it both the anthropological vocation to understand the cultures of the world, which have never understood themselves, and the philosophical vocation to set out the rule by which they should all be regulated. The mission doubtless no longer consists in colonizing the rest of the world, but it is still a matter of cultivating it, since our era, states Levinas, deems that to cultivate should be different from to colonize. This is universalism, which is quietly identified with the exceptionalism of what is here called ‘Western civilization’. (I must point out here that what is called by this n ­ ame – a­ nd this goes for all other civilizations, t­oo – ­is basically a construction.) Apart from the Bible and the Greeks, says Levinas, there’s nothing but dance.11 We know that Kant, in his anthropological texts where he pronounces on different human groups, makes statements about what he claims to be the characteristics of the peoples under discussion that are prejudices unworthy of the philosopher of the ‘categorical imperative’ which enshrines the moral law. Similarly, Levinas forgets that he is the philosopher of the welcome given to ‘the other’ when he ponders the consequences for universalism of the irruption of the ‘Afro-­Asiatic masses’ onto the historical scene.12 To say that the postcolonial is nothing but an attack of particularisms against the universal is to ignore the fact that the real target is an out-­of-­date universalism whose discourse is nostalgia for a time when it was permissible to serenely view Europe alone as the stage of history where the drama of the universal was being ­performed – ­a drama that could then be expanded, by colonization, to the rest of the world. A postcolonial rewrite of the history of philosophy then shows, for example, that it is simply wrong for this history to consist of the single trajectory (‘the Bible and the Greeks’) which leads from Jerusalem to Athens, before taking us to Rome, and then to Heidelberg, Paris or London. Thus the translatio studiorum (i.e. the transfer/translation of the knowledge brought together in the Greek world under the 23

On the universal and universalism name of ‘philosophy’) has passed through many languages other than Greek, Latin and German, and has followed many routes, especially the route which started from Baghdad or Córdoba and led to Fez and Timbuktu.13 In his assertion that only the ‘West’ has the capacity to vertically receive the universal, Levinas derides what for him is a pure contradiction in terms: a ‘horizontal’ or ‘lateral’ universal that occurs when cultures and languages encounter one another. His target here is Merleau-­Ponty, who had indeed written that we are now living in a world (what I call the post-­Bandung world) where there is no longer any ‘overarching universal’, but where we need to aim for a ‘lateral universal’, based on encounter and reciprocity. It is worth at this point quoting Merleau-­Ponty, in his own words and at length, because his text on the two types of universal is important. [T]he equipment of our social being can be dismantled and reconstructed by the voyage, as we are able to learn to speak other languages. This provides a second way to the universal: no longer the overarching universal of a strictly objective method, but a sort of lateral universal which we acquire through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the other person through the self. It is a question of constructing a general system of reference in which the point of view of the native, the point of view of the civilized man, and the mistaken views each has of the other can all find a ­place – ­that is, of constituting a more comprehensive experience which becomes in principle accessible to men of a different time and country. Ethnology is not a speciality defined by a particular object, ‘primitive societies’. It is a way of thinking, the way which imposes itself when the object is ‘different’, and requires us to transform ourselves. We also become the ethnologists of our own society if we set ourselves at a distance from it.14

In my view, the invitations issued to us by the author in this passage set up the universal as a building site and as a horizon: they include the invitation to travel, which means decentring oneself and moving away from exceptionalism, and the invitation to learn other languages, which means leaving behind the universalism of the Logos to understand, firstly, that every language is one of many and, secondly, that the universal is evaluated in the trials of translation (Kwasi Wiredu). And I fully accept what Amselle says: for me, Merleau-­ Ponty’s thinking here is indeed ‘postcolonial’, in the sense that it is 24

On the universal and universalism a thinking of the post-­Bandung world, taking into account the way that this world is plural, woven of equivalent cultures and languages (which was for Levinas a figure of ‘disorientation’). In fact, this passage from Merleau-­Ponty is for me essential and his words here often play a part in my work, for two reasons. The first is that he is telling us (as against those who feel that we cannot question universalism, understood as a European exceptionalism, without completely turning our backs on the universal) that, on the contrary, the question of the universal is truly and seriously raised only in the post-­Bandung world, where that question is, as it were, flattened out, and no longer claims to occupy an overarching position. The other reason is that, on my reading, the ‘lateral’ universal must be understood as what I call a universal of translation.15 One might say that the universal is tested out and becomes conscious of itself in translation, in the linking of languages and in the reciprocity thereby established, in the sense that the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote that ‘the language of languages is translation’. To make such a claim does not mean naïvely thinking of languages as existing outside the relationship of domination that exists between them.16 Nor does it mean naïvely believing that translation will bring about full transparency between languages: translation is an incessant testing of the self by the other and a testing of the other by the self, carried out against a background of incomprehension, even untranslatability. The ‘mistaken views each has of the other’ are unavoidable, as Merleau-­Ponty writes in the passage I quoted; and as Amselle notes, Quine has taught us about the irreducible ‘indeterminacy’ of translation.17 In order to give concrete substance to this notion of horizontal universality, of universality in mutuality and reciprocity, I will now consider the question of human rights, in three stages. First, I will explain why the ‘Hunters’ Oath’ is important for the way human rights are conceptualized in Africa; second, I will give an illustration of what the universal can mean as a shared building site, using the example of environmental rights; finally, I will say a word about what I have written on the rights of non-­human living beings, as Amselle refers to this question in relation to what he considers to be the threat of hyper-­relativism. What is the ‘Hunters’ Oath’? Youssouf Tata Cissé, who described it, tells us that it is the viaticum of the West African brotherhood of ‘hunters’ that they recite when they are initiated and received into this ‘society’.18 The text of the oath was thus transmitted orally within the brotherhood throughout the centuries. 25

On the universal and universalism I always mention this text when I am discussing human rights in Africa,19 including the historical trajectory that, from 1960 to today, has led the African states in the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and then the African Union (AU) to adopt an African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and establish a court to try cases if these rights are violated. I am not comparing this ‘oath’ with another text, but showing that it constitutes a counter-­example, insisting on the individual life, on its value and the rights attached to it, in opposition to those who continue to say that ‘Africa’ basically acknowledges only the rights of the community and considers the individual almost only when he or she has duties vis-­à-vis the group. If we want to invoke ‘tradition’, then it must be noted that the ‘oath’ is an ancient text that contradicts the idea that Africa is essentially collective. For I think it important to say that rights are in priority attached to the individual, against all the reasons of state and reasons of ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’ – in whose name abuses might well be committed. By mentioning the ‘oath’, I am thus intervening in the discussion fostered in Africa by the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which endeavours to reconcile individual rights and the rights of the group in a way that seems to me unbalanced and benefits the group: this is what I wish to examine. The best illustration of my more general thoughts on the universal as a common building site, however, is the recent affirmation of ‘environmental rights’ and (against those who do not seem to believe in science or reason) the current struggle for the recognition of these new rights being conducted by all those who, throughout the world, say that climate change is taking place and that the earth we all inhabit together is endangered by our ways of producing and seeking to endlessly extend growth. This is something universal which everyone can help to build, with a view to a ‘common’ ground which has resulted in COP 21, the agreement reached at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Forums like the one that resulted in COP 21, or like the United Nations, where all countries have a voice (despite the unequal ‘weight’ of these voices), provide us with an illustration of what the universality of human rights means: on the one hand, they are expressed within a context of encounter and negotiation; on the other hand, and above all, everyone agrees on the universal character of their content, which is the expression of our common humanity. Environmental rights are coming into being, but what they say about the value of human beings, of their dignity and their responsibility, belongs to no particular epoch. 26

On the universal and universalism This brings me to Amselle’s critique of the ‘hyper-­relativism’ which places whole kingdoms (vegetable, animal, human) on the same level in the name of rights which ought to be of a similar kind for all living things. It so happens that I have written texts on this subject where I maintain that the environmental issue is the responsibility of human beings. So I do not believe in plant rights, but rather in a human duty towards nature in general20 – in an ecological humanism. I do believe that our own human future can find fulfilment only in our duty to humanize the earth, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it. In short, Amselle and I are in agreement: we must break with the Cartesian mechanical view that provided the enterprise of transforming ‘nature’ into ‘natural resources’ with its philosophy. But that must not mean dissolving humanity. Refraining from considering oneself to be the master and possessor of nature, imperium in imperio, does not mean denying to human beings their special place and role, ­or – ­above ­all – ­the responsibility that is theirs and that is identified with their very humanity. I now turn to the theme of identities, another important aspect of this question of the universal. I would like to say a word about how I understand Amselle’s defence of a universalism apparently threatened by fragmentation and ‘centrisms’ which, when religion is concerned, turn into ‘fundamentalisms’. He denounces, for example, what he calls the ‘ethnicization’ of France, and describes, in L’Occident décroché, a kind of convergence between the intellectuals of three continents who ‘decry’ universalism in the name of the identities of the ‘subalterns’: thus, postcolonials, whether Indian, African (the latter mainly grouped together, he says, in CODESRIA) or South American, ultimately agree among themselves in questioning the West, and this can only mean the triumph of the fragment over the universal. And Amselle never fails to insist on the role played, in his view, by American universities which constitute the natural place  where these ‘tricontinental’ intellectuals are often to be found  and from where they aggressively launch postcolonial studies. It seems to me that Amselle is here adopting a ‘left-­wing’ posture symmetrical to what Levinas said about the Afro-­Asian masses arriving on the scene of history. I say ‘left-­wing’ because his purpose is certainly not to defend a ‘so frequently decried Western civilization’, but to save the ‘universal’ social struggle from the fragmentation and dispersion that would result from the ethnicization of struggles. And I say ‘symmetrical’ because he shares with Levinas a certain identification of what is constructed as the ‘West’ and the universal. 27

On the universal and universalism In order to see what is at stake, we need to understand that basically it is a certain history that is being repeated here, associated with the names of Jean-­Paul Sartre and Aimé Césaire. In 1948, Sartre wrote a fiery preface to the anthology in which Léopold Sédar Senghor had assembled the poets of the movement he presented as ‘Négritude’.21 Sartre rightly stresses the force of decentring represented by this movement and this poetry, which, by showing that Black people can also put themselves at the centre and transform the White world into the object of their gaze, ultimately bears the promise of a world where no one will be on the periphery because, quite simply, there will no longer be any centre. But while Sartre declares this poetry and its power to be the most revolutionary of our time, he also says that the aim is no longer just to make language sing but to actually change the world and to bring about emancipation; the action that has history on its side is the action of the universal class, namely the proletariat of the centre. In short, dialectics properly understood always brings us back to the ‘real’ stage on which universal history is played out. No doubt Sartre is not reducible to this notion of a return to the true place of struggle and true emancipation: his political commitments and his writings testify abundantly to this. But the Eurocentrism which assumes itself as such, and thinks it has paid its dues by being ‘left-­wing’, is still alive and kicking. Slavoj Žižek is an extreme example.22 Let us compare this posture with Aimé Césaire’s approach. In 1956, Césaire addressed his famous letter of resignation from the PCF (French Communist Party) to Maurice Thorez. He expresses, of course, his grievances against the Soviet Union, with which the PCF was aligned, but he mainly says that he cannot find himself in the discourse of the P ­ CF – ­in that universalism. He takes care, of course, to specify that he does not intend to be trapped within his own particularism, but he also states that there is no question of him losing himself ‘in an emaciated universalism’ when he can see how ‘Black peoples’ are treated as Black peoples.23 In fact, when Césaire declares that the ‘fraternalism’ of communist universalism is no better than the ‘paternalism’ of colonial universalism, this is first and foremost because he is well placed to know that, when it comes to anticolonialism, the universalism of the left hardly demonstrated a resolute or constant commitment. Before the war, the philosopher Simone Weil was shocked to see that the workers who were citizens of France were unaware of (or ignored) the thousands of suffering workers who were mere subjects; and she added that the parties which spoke on their behalf were doing nothing to change 28

On the universal and universalism that: ‘And we, too,’ she wrote, ‘French people of “the Left”, we are responsible for the same burden of constraint and terror that has been weighing down the natives of our colonies for so many years.’24 And she recalled that 1931, when she discovered the ‘crime against humanity’ of colonialism, was also the year of the Colonial Exhibition, which only the Surrealists denounced with any zest. What Césaire says in his ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’, and what also appears to be in some ways a response to Sartre, is that without rejecting the universality of the fight against oppression in general, he refuses to be told that the direct response to the oppression he suffers in his identity is a distraction from the historical action of the universal class. Hannah Arendt says the same thing when she declares that, ‘When one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew’, and not as a German, as a citizen of the world, or even in the name of human rights.25 In L’Occident décroché, Amselle writes that identity-­ based responses were understandable in the 1950s and 1960s, but today, when these responses risk fostering murderous fundamentalisms and fanaticisms, we must return to universalism. The world as it is means we must respond to the discrimination that first and foremost assigns to us an identity from the outside. When the police believe that their mission is to police the city against you and those who are like you, it is understandable that the answer will be the movement that simply says, ‘Black Lives Matter’. Conversely, an examination of the status of the class of workers, that class which is supposed to bear the promise of every liberation, leads to the conclusion that, in a world where ethno-­nationalism and tribalism prosper, this class very frequently and mainly votes for parties that speak the language of identity, which evoke a return to that time when we felt at home, among similar people. That is what the world in which we live is like: they say ‘you’ to you and you can only reply ‘we’. So we cannot simply say ‘let’s get back to class’, as if we had to choose between a struggle of the type ‘Black Lives Matter’ and the social struggle of the universal. In short: the universal is not given, it is experienced in many different struggles and tested out in the yet to be deciphered way that these struggles converge and are conducted together, in solidarity, with the common aim of a shared emancipation.

29

3 Race, culture, identity Jean-Loup Amselle

Souleymane Bachir Diagne does not really respond to the objections I level at his theorizations and does not take into consideration the theoretical propositions that I put forward. Let me say straightaway that I am not seeking here to indulge in vain polemics; quite the contrary, I hope to find points of agreement between us, something which I think is both desirable and possible, and so take the argument forward.

Merleau-Ponty When it comes to Merleau-­Ponty, who occupies a central place in the structure of his thinking, Diagne does not take into account the ‘primitivism’ that I point out in this philosopher, especially his propensity to think that ‘other’ cultures or civilizations might be able to regenerate a West considered to have run out of steam. This idea comes from the notion of the ‘savage mind’ developed by Lévi-­Strauss, in whose anthropology this concept has an ambiguous status: to some extent it has a transhistoric quality and is thus found in so-­called ‘primitive’ societies and in Western society. We ought therefore to be able to rediscover its qualities within a world that we have (unfortunately) lost. But this primitivist nostalgia that I have constantly criticized in the field of anthropology, this desire to draw on societies or cultures that are supposedly close to the origin of humanity, has in my view an embarrassing reverse side: it can lead to a certain racism. Therefore, the notion of a ‘lateral’ or ‘oblique’ universalism does not seem to me to be a productive or progressive notion. The ideas of Merleau-­Ponty (like those of Levinas and even ­Sartre – ­I will be returning to the 30

Race, culture, identity latter) may belong, politically, to the time of the Bandung Conference (1955), but they also testify to a dated, frozen conception of ethnology, one which is in any case not mine, since I prefer a historicized vision of this discipline as defended by Georges Balandier. As against the conceptions of Marcel Griaule and Claude Lévi-­ Strauss, who emphasized the timelessness of ‘traditional’ societies, Balandier drew on Sartre’s philosophy to develop a ‘situated’ approach to African societies profoundly affected by colonization.1

Class and identity As regards the opposition between class and an identity dictated by race, gender or religion, Diagne links me to Sartre’s criticism of ‘Négritude’ in ‘Black Orpheus’, which is flattering, and to Maurice Thorez, which is less so. On this subject I would like to specify two or three things. (1) The emphasis on social class or classes is in my view interesting insofar as it puts forward an inclusive ­conception – s­omething that race, gender and religion conspicuously fail to do. This is amply evidenced by the principle of ‘unmixed’, that is, ‘non-­White’, gatherings defended in France by the Mwasi Nyansapo collective, but also by the far-­right splinter group ‘Riposte laïque’ (‘Secular Riposte’), which, in order to keep Muslims at bay, organizes ‘aperitifs with sausages and red wine’. Moreover, concerning the prominence afforded throughout the world to the principles of an identity based on race, gender and religion, Diagne ought to be particularly sensitive to the devastation caused by the implementation of this principle in Asia, Burma and India in particular, where Muslims are victims of real persecution fomented more or less directly by the ethno-­religious nationalist parties in power. To quote just one example, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India is a veritable Hindu fascist party whose resemblance to the French Rassemblement National (the former Front National) is striking. But, since our discussion will mainly concern Africa, it is not difficult to find equivalents on this continent, given what happened in Ivory Coast when Laurent Gbagbo was in power (2000–11): the Bété and the Baoulé began to drive out Muslim Dioula ‘foreigners’, some of whom could trace their lineage back to territory of what was not yet the Ivory Coast, that is, before the ancestors of the so-­called indigenous peoples. Another example would be the Rwandan genocide mentioned above. 31

Race, culture, identity (2) As regards Césaire and his famous letter to Maurice Thorez, the letter in which he announced his resignation from the French Communist Party, I believe that the mistake made by this great poet was precisely that he threw the universalist baby out with the bathwater. With all due respect to this major thinker and icon of anticolonial struggle, his shift from the universalist conceptions symbolized by Marxism to the culturalist conceptions represented by Négritude was a real wrench. I will simply refer here to what I said in L’Ethnicisation de la France (The Ethnicization of France).2

First phase: Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939) For a Caribbean author like Césaire who wishes to define his singularity in relation to the atomism of French citizenship while living far away from Africa, the recognition and visibility of his ‘Négritude’ could not fail to involve the mediation of the Africanist ethnology of the time, however deeply mired it was in racist and colonial stereotypes. Indeed, for Césaire, republican assimilation is an impossible dream since West Indian society so indelibly bears the stigmata of slavery and the colonial situation. His emancipation can only be effected by highlighting his singularity, that is to say, his African descent, and thus the establishment of cultural links with the ‘Black’ mother country. It was one of the main figures in the Africanist ethnology of the 1930s, the German writer Leo Frobenius, who would provide him with the certificate of Africanity necessary for the conceptualization of ‘Négritude’.3 So we may well ask whether the way Césaire reversed the stigma by taking the infamous term ‘nègre’ (‘Negro’ or even ‘nigger’) and reclaiming it as ‘spoils of war’ (the expression ‘spoils of war’, in reference to his reappropriation of the French language, comes from Kateb Yacine) is not imbued with all the prejudices to be found in Frobenius. It is easy to imagine that Césaire, just like Senghor at the same time, found in Frobenius ideas that allowed him to define the concept of ‘Négritude’. In the History of African Civilization, published in Germany in 1933 and translated into French in 1936, Frobenius, on the basis of materials collected on several scientific expeditions conducted across the continent of Africa, displays a culturalist essentialism that resonates powerfully with the critique of republican universalism at the heart of Césaire’s concerns.4 Indeed, Frobenius’s thinking follows an anti-­French and anti-­universalist vein inspired by Johann 32

Race, culture, identity Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, aspects of the work of Immanuel Kant and the geographer Friedrich Ratzel. Focusing on the inductive recognition of the different cultures and souls of peoples, this is a thinking which flies in the face of the universalist, abstract and deductive claims of Enlightenment philosophy, at least in the form to which this latter is often reduced. In this perspective, different Negro-­ African cultures are subsumed within a ‘continental style’, itself already present in ancient Egypt; its ­permanence – ­something which makes the paideuma (the souls of peoples) akin to the concept of ­race – a­ llows us to experience the creative and path-­breaking ideas of Western civilization as they express themselves, most strikingly, in the rock paintings of France and Spain. Frobenius’s ideas thus provide those who celebrate ‘Négritude’, first and foremost Césaire, with all the ingredients that allow them to engage in a radical questioning of the French Enlightenment by replaying the old scenario of an oppressed German Kultur struggling against a dominant French ‘Civilization’. And this contrast now comes with a new pan-­African and Afrocentrist spin, in line with the period of decolonization in which the theory of ‘Négritude’ took shape. It is therefore this essentialized, culturalized and primitivized vision of African cultures, of African culture as such, which provides Césaire with the means to reverse the infamous stigma of the Negro so as to better extol the charms of the alluring concept of ‘Négritude’.

Second phase: the Discourse on Colonialism (1950) In the Discourse on Colonialism,5 Césaire’s ethnology, or rather his ethnological reason,6 is part of a different configuration from what we find in his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land.7 As a member of the French Communist Party, Césaire proceeds, in this superbly written pamphlet, to lambast colonialism by identifying Nazism with colonialism, as did Hannah Arendt at the same time. Césaire, writing at the end of the Second World War, traces the genealogy of Nazism back to great French authors such as Ernest Renan and Joseph de Maistre and to the conquerors of Algeria such as Thomas Robert Bugeaud and Armand-­Jacques Leroy de Saint-­Arnaud; and he highlights the persistence of the colonial and racist spirit among colonial ministers such as Albert Sarraut and essayists such as Roger Caillois. His aim is to show that Nazism and colonialism share a common philosophy, and that this philosophy is not purely German. This ­position 33

Race, culture, identity was in line with the ideology of the French Communist Party at the time, which tended to see fascism everywhere, up to and including the coming to power of General de Gaulle in 1958. In contrast to his highlighting of the horrors of colonialism, Césaire gives us an Edenic vision of the precolonial societies of the Third World. They were communal societies, never societies of the many for the few. They were societies that were not only ante-­capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist. They were democratic societies, always. They were cooperative societies, fraternal societies.8

And, further on, in connection with precolonial African societies: ‘Once again, I systematically defend our old Negro civilizations: they were courteous civilizations.’9 It is mainly by concealing or, more likely, being unaware of the slavery internal to Africa and of the participation of Africans in the slave trade that Césaire is able to offer an enchanted image of the precolonial African world, the same world that was later subjected to European colonization. Continuing to rely on Frobenius, Césaire wants to show above all that Africans are ‘civilized to the marrow of their bones! The idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention.’10 Primitivism and anticolonialism, if not postcolonialism (I will come back to this), thus coexist peacefully in the Césaire of the Discourse since, ultimately, it is a question of seizing on the idealized vision of ‘traditional’ African societies and turning them into weapons of war against the colonizers and highlighting the ‘civilization’ of the former as against the ‘barbarism’ of the latter. The barbarians are not the ones we imagine, says Césaire ironically. However, this primitivism which, in 1950, was placed in the service of the anticolonial struggle would acquire a kind of autonomy by being turned against the French Communist Party.

Third phase: the letter to Maurice Thorez (1956) A few months after the publication of the famous Khrushchev report which revealed the crimes of Stalin, Césaire sent a letter of resignation to Maurice Thorez, then Secretary General of the French Communist Party: ‘I believe I have said enough to make it clear that it is neither Marxism nor communism that I am renouncing, and that it is the 34

Race, culture, identity usage some have made of Marxism and communism that I condemn.’11 This is, if not Césaire’s central argument, at least the one he most wishes to highlight, attacking the Stalinism, colonialism and paternalism (coyly renamed ‘fraternalism’) of the French Communist Party. But, beyond what appears as an alignment with Khrushchev’s position (which was also at the time known as the ‘Italian’ position), it seems that what we have here is much more than a simple aggiornamento or return to Marxist sources. In fact, it is other sources that the author of the Notebook of a Return to My Native Land seeks to draw on by returning precisely to his native land, or at any rate to the country that he sees as the ancestral home of the West Indies. Indeed, under the guise of denouncing the futility of the traditional ‘classist’ schema of the Stalinist communist parties that set the bourgeoisie against the proletariat while underestimating the importance of the middle classes, Césaire is taking aim at the profound singularity of the Black world of the West Indies on the geopolitical level (‘our situation in the world’), but also on the sociological, historical and cultural level. The result, for him, is the specificity of the struggle of colonial peoples and peoples of colour against the metropolises, a struggle that cannot be reduced to the confrontation of workers against the bourgeoisie. As a result, to forge the anticolonial unity of the Blacks, he deems it necessary for the latter to set up specific organizations and thereby withdraw from ‘White’ organizations. This withdrawal must be based on the rejection of the communist dogma of the ‘omnilateral’ superiority of the West as it was affirmed by Stalin through the opposition between ‘advanced peoples’ and ‘backward peoples’ – with the latter needing, of course, to be guided by the former. In tandem with this, it is necessary to promote the ‘cultural relativism’ disdainfully rejected by the French Communist Party and to regenerate the West Indies in contact with Black Africa, ‘the mother of our Caribbean culture and civilization’ and thereby to renounce an ‘emaciated’ universalism in which West Indians risk being absorbed. The justified criticism of the Stalinism, colonialism and paternalism of the French Communist Party therefore had its downside for Césaire, who was obliged to renounce universalism and withdraw into a particularist identity which to some extent prefigured postcolonial positions. It seems to me, however, that this renunciation was not necessary: to criticize the dogmatism of the French Communist Party in the name of the specificity of the class structure of West Indian society does not mean one has to give up the more general use of categories such as those deployed by Marxism. Let me make myself 35

Race, culture, identity clear: I am not out to defend, tooth and nail, historical materialism and the universality of its relevance, like some fetish to which one regularly pays sacrifice. On the other hand, the abandoning of universalism and the corresponding defence of the singularity or specificity of culture(s) seem to me to involve certain dangers, as these moves involve forgetting the conditions of production of each culture in relation with its close or distant counterparts. Beyond Césaire, we find the same rejection of universalism in Frantz Fanon, or more recently Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who both spoke on this subject in 2009, following the Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon movement in Guadeloupe. This was a ‘Collective Against Extreme Exploitation’, which, to a certain extent, appeared as a classic movement of trade union and political opposition, even if it took place in a neo-­colonial context:12 both Glissant and Chamoiseau sought to add an extra bit of cultural ‘soul’ to it, as if such themes as trade unionism, politics and economics were in themselves inadequate motive forces.

Philosophy and anthropology Having replied to Diagne’s critiques of my position, I would like to turn finally to the more general question of our points of v­ iew – ­these are very different, and it is probably this which explains our difficulties in communicating and our misunderstandings, despite our perfectly authentic desire, on both sides, to understand each other. Diagne is a philosopher who handles big ideas and big principles (the universal, translation, ecology) and who attempts to trace the genealogy of these concepts to ancestors or predecessors such as Leibniz, Bergson, Levinas and Merleau-­Ponty, who had no direct knowledge of exotic societies, particularly African societies. For my part, I am an Africanist anthropologist who is here striving to critically deconstruct some concepts that have been unfortunately imposed on African societies, such as ‘Négritude’, Bantu philosophy, Dogon cosmogony, and so on. In my opinion (and it is in this respect that my approach is truly anthropological), the big principles that Diagne deals with do not make sense apart from the contexts in which they operate, or rather, apart from the way these big principles are appropriated and manipulated by social actors and political actors in accordance with the conflicting interests that they strive to defend in the face of their opponents. So I am not merely philosophizing, but trying to examine how notions are embodied in social and political practices. 36

Race, culture, identity

Universalism as a matrix Diagne does not take into consideration my idea of universalism as a matrix, which seems to me more productive than ‘thinking from language to language’. I suggest we look again at this subject and think about ‘particulars’, especially the colonial construction of languages and the way postcolonials turn them back against their colonizers. In fact, I imagine that the idea that there may be ‘common ground’ shared by many cultures embarrasses Diagne, who endeavours to show the specificity of African cultures and languages (see his discussion of Tarski and Wiredu). Here lies the whole problem of cultural nationalism within which the postcolonial trend lies; it is accentuated still further in its decolonial version. Indeed, since the nineteenth century, these trends, represented by such figures as the pan-­Africanist Edward W. Blyden, the colonial ethnologists Leo Frobenius and Maurice Delafosse, and Booker T. Washington, have constantly brought to the fore the theme of an essentialized African identity.13 It is this long tradition in which Diagne situates himself, but it seems to me that he does not take into account the way my thinking has developed. He keeps referring back to my L’Occident décroché, but that book is over ten years old and focuses solely on different types of postcolonialism, as the subtitle of the work testifies. Since the publication of that book, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge, and we have now entered another paradigm, that of ‘decoloniality’, with authors such as Enrique Dussel, Ramón Grosfoguel, Aníbal Quijano and, in France, Houria Bouteldja. While postcolonialism focuses on the role of the slave trade, colonization and its consequences in the history of the West, the decolonial current is much more radical since it traces the history of the capitalist curse back to 1492, a pivotal date in world history, with the conquest of America, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the Reconquest of Spain led by the Christian sovereigns against the Muslims. This is why I have chosen examples that do not concern Africa strictly speaking, but Africa out of Africa, since decolonials focus on the fact that, on the one hand, Africa and Latin America were not completely decolonized, and that, on the other hand, what they call ‘the South of the North’ or, in plain and simple terms, the lower-­ class districts in our cities, where the ‘Natives’ live, have also not been decolonized. According to the Indigenous of the Republic and Houria Bouteldja, who clearly situate themselves in this ‘decolonial’ 37

Race, culture, identity problematic, the antagonism between social classes has given way to a racial-­type conflict between Whites and the others. This is in some ways close to the position expressed by Samuel H. Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations.14

38

4 Africanity, Afrocentrism, representation Souleymane Bachir Diagne

My work is indeed about what Jean-­Loup Amselle calls ‘big ideas’ such as the universal, translation and e­ cology – y­ es, that’s true. It’s also true that I learn more about these ideas from those I am happy to call ‘ancestors’, such as Leibniz, Bergson and Merleau-­Ponty. That they did not know Africa or do not talk about it is irrelevant to me. I do not have to ensure that I am thinking as an ‘African’ or about Africa, let alone that my references are related to that continent. On the other hand, the examples that I am now going to examine, so as to emphasize the notion of the universal that needs to be viewed as a common goal, do indeed concern being African or of African descent. So I would like to consider the question of universalism on the basis of two recent American episodes which I think can help us think about this issue, and in particular prevent us simplifying things. It is indeed a bit superficial to simply maintain that ‘identities’ and multiculturalism have come along to disturb a universalism to which it is now time to return. I repeat that I am for the universal, but the universal as a goal to be aimed at, a task to be carried out, and not as a given to which we need to return. The first episode I will describe hit headlines throughout the world: the demonstration of neo-­Nazis from the Ku Klux Klan and other White supremacists in Charlottesville on 12 August 2017, which was marked in particular by the murder by a fascist of a woman taking part in a counter-­demonstration. The second, very different, episode was quite widely reported; it involved the 2017 edition of the Biennale at the Whitney Museum, New York: this was the seventy-­eighth show of the kind in a museum that prides itself on having continuously put on the longest series of presentations of American art. The link 39

Africanity, Afrocentrism, representation between the two episodes is that the Whitney Biennale took place, as its spokespersons themselves wrote, in a particular context (reflected in the show itself) of ‘racial tensions, economic inequalities and political polarization’. Le Monde devoted at least one article to this episode in its supplement M le magazine du Monde, dated 4 April 2017, under the title ‘Aux États-­Unis, colère noire contre une artiste blanche’ (‘In the United States, Black anger against a White woman artist’). The events in Charlottesville showed in an excessive, exacerbated way the meaning of the ethno-­nationalisms (a more accurate term than ‘populisms’) which today constitute the most disturbing of the various negations of the universal. We may well be shocked to see, in 2017, in a university town, a parade of young Nazi striplings holding flaming torches and proclaiming ‘blood and soil’ and other fascist slogans, or seeing the Ku Klux Klan resuming its activities in the service of a reinvigorated David Duke. These are the grotesque aspects of ethno-­nationalism. (Steve Bannon himself, the representative of the alt-­right, has called these people ‘clowns’.) It is a movement that turns the notion of humanity in general, beyond the reality of the tribe, into an empty word. ‘Humanity!’ This is indeed a universal, the first universal of all, chosen by Jean Jaurès to be the title of the newspaper he founded in 1904 (L’Humanité); the ethno-­nationalisms that are currently flourishing are the very negation of this universal, which they replace with an aggregate of tribes. It is good to remember Jaurès’s editorial in the first issue of the journal, as it shows that for him the value of socialism lies in the fact that it unites and brings together people in their humanity against the forces that separate and divide them: Jaurès sees socialism as the promise of ‘reconciled nations’ that think of themselves as ‘portions’ of one common humanity. That is why ethno-­ nationalist movements threaten to bring to ­power – o ­ r have already done so, here and t­ here – ­parties and personalities that have turned the migrant, the one who is not from the tribe, into a bogeyman against which they ask their constituents to rally so as to form a defensive front of national identity. They only just failed to make their ideology triumph in a country, the Netherlands, that history (the history of philosophy in particular) considers as the very land of tolerance and the idea of humanity. The best symbol today of the standoff between the migrant and the ethno-­nationalist is the boat that young Europeans of the far right, calling themselves ‘Generation Identity’, chartered to sail out into the Mediterranean and block migrant boats. One might ask whether they intended to sink them. 40

Africanity, Afrocentrism, representation In his book of the same title, Amselle denounced this ‘ethnicization of France’ and deplored the way that current political demands too often turn on issues of identity rather than being thought in terms of universal categories such as ‘labour’. But the ethnicization of France is merely a particular and very Francocentric example of the worldwide tribalism that sees class struggle being replaced by the cultural wars of ethno-­nationalism. For example, parties that make multiculturalism into a bogeyman aim to turn elections into a referendum on issues such as that of immigrants and their religion. In such a context, the working classes seem to be voting against their own economic interests by seeing questions such as inequality of income, universal health cover, and so on, as of less importance than the ‘cultural values’ which ethno-­nationalist parties take as the be-­all and end-­all of their discourse. This is how in the United States the most right-­wing of the Republicans were long able to oppose the Democrats with a surreptitiously racialized discourse according to which any social programme (of which Obamacare is undoubtedly the best example at present) was a way of taking money from those who work hard (by implication, the Whites) and redistributing it to ‘those people’ whose nature it is to live off the welfare state. The Charlottesville demonstrators use this discourse of ‘culture’ and say to anyone who wishes to hear them that they are merely defending their heritage and their memory, symbolized, they claim, by the Confederate flag or by the statue of the Southern general and defender of slavery Robert Lee, which was due to be taken down. Hands off my totem! This discourse on culture, it must be said, can convince even people who do not necessarily recognize themselves in this type of extremism. When the German Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, declares, in opposition to the admirable position adopted by Chancellor Angela Merkel, that Islam is not German, he is not merely addressing the militants of the far right, but also those who, he thinks, will hear his remarks as cultural ‘common sense’. More interesting is the (sophisticated) discourse of a right wing that does not recognize itself in these fascist demonstrations and remarks, and which instead presents itself as ‘universalist’. This discourse sets out to defend not one memory in conflict with others (the memory of African-­Americans for whom the Confederate flag and statue are not an inheritance), but History with a capital ­H – ­that is, History as a universal. ‘Let’s not sin against history and its reason,’ say those who pose as defenders of this universal against actions viewed as iconoclastic, ‘even in its dark episodes such as slavery.’ This discourse of the universal, of the preservation of a history that needs to be known 41

Africanity, Afrocentrism, representation through its witnesses of stone and bronze, would have been credible if the statues and other monuments of the American South had not been conceived as a ‘response’ to emancipation and civil rights. Most of these monuments were erected either during a first period corresponding to the establishment of the Jim Crow laws at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, or during a second period corresponding to the enactment of civil rights, from the mid-­1950s to the mid-­1960s. They were thus not in the least the impassive witnesses of a History that would unite everyone within its truth. I will now consider, in contrast, the episode of ‘Black anger against a White woman artist’. Let me remind you what this involved: the Whitney Museum Biennale had exhibited an abstract painting by artist Dana Schutz entitled Open Casket. The ‘open casket’ in question was a reference to one of the tragedies that galvanized African-­Americans and drove them to fight for their civil rights: in 1955, a young Black teenager, Emmett Till, was accused of trying to flirt with a White woman; he was lynched and horribly mutilated by some of the supremacists then so common in the Mississippi area. (They were acquitted.) His mother insisted that the casket remain open so that in the marks of the suffering inflicted on her child, the unbearable face of barbarism might be forever laid bare. This is what Dana Schutz sought to express in her painting. She certainly did not expect the violent reaction that Open Casket triggered, or the protest against a White artist permitting herself to represent Black suffering. The protest took the form of protesters standing between the painting and the spectators. Above all, there was a petition launched by a British artist of African descent living in Berlin, Hannah Black, who collected many signatures on social networks (the possibility of signing the letter of protest was soon, after an initial moment of openness, reserved for Blacks only). Hannah Black explains how outraged she felt and why she thinks that this feeling should be shared by all who have in common the experience of what it means ‘to be Black’ in a context where it can cost you your life. It is also easy to understand how much her letter and her action provoked in many a feeling of outrage that an artist should be forbidden to express the feelings inspired in her by the tragedy of Emmett Till as well as the suffering and indomitable courage of the mother. Before deciding where the offence lies and who the offended party is, let us try to suspend our feelings and examine what is at stake and what this controversy tells us about the universal. 42

Africanity, Afrocentrism, representation In her open letter to the curators of the Biennial, Black evokes the ‘White gaze’ that, she said, had rested on Emmett Till’s open casket to produce this painting. What she denounces is the ‘White privilege’ of looking without being looked at, seeing without being seen, described by Jean-­Paul Sartre at the beginning of ‘Black Orpheus’.1 This gaze is the expression of the anthropological vocation that Europe arrogated to itself quite naturally, understanding other cultures on their behalf. The idea that Europe, having achieved self-­transparency, has the particularity of being universal and having the mission of explaining and speaking on behalf of the ‘others’2 – this is what is denounced in the evocation of the ‘White gaze’. For Black, the suffering to which the mutilated body of Emmett Till bears testimony must not be one of those objects which Schutz’s art explicitly aims to imagine and to represent. What she demands, in the face of the ‘White gaze’, is the privilege of ‘opacity’ described by Édouard Glissant. The key word here is ‘experience’. According to Hannah Black, there is a Black ‘experience’, which is not communicable, not universalizable, but opaque. She thus contrasts experience with a universalism considered to be the simple expression of Eurocentrism. By definition, experiences manifest an irreducible plurality as against the universalism that always aims to assimilate things to itself. In her brief reply, intended to avoid controversy, Schutz invokes a universal experience that goes beyond particular experience. To the reproach that she does not ‘know what it’s like to be Black in America’, she replies that she knows ‘what it’s like to be a mother’. There is no point in getting involved in an absurd debate about the question of which of the two ­experiences – ­being a mother or being ­Black – ­is more universal. It is the universality of the human experience (this is what the curators talk about in their response) and of the human imagination which is involved here. That we can experience a humanity beyond our ‘tribe’ is demonstrated by the universal of the creative imagination that is at work in art. That artists and writers can put themselves into the skin of those who do not look like them, those who are not close to them but are still their neighbours: this is what we discover in successful works of art. That the great myths, the great stories, are universal in the sense that they are found in all human cultures is a fact that we can acknowledge. So we can give meaning to the notion of a ‘world literature’ (as Goethe called it) which is not a simple juxtaposition of heterogeneous literatures expressing incommunicable ‘experiences’. The lesson to be learned from the notion of ‘world literature’ 43

Africanity, Afrocentrism, representation allows me to conclude. For what it tells us is that the plurality of the languages of creation can hover over the horizon of a common, universal language. For all that, far be it from me to denounce ‘experiences’ in the name of the universal. Believing that we simply need to return to universalism, to set this steady course against the ‘drifts’ of multiculturalism, means failing to understand that the universal is still to come, that it is a goal. It is not behind us, but ahead of us. Our period is the period that must invent, after a universalism indistinguishable from Eurocentrism, a truly universal universal, as Immanuel Wallerstein puts it. A universal of decentring. That, to be sure, is why I insist on the plurality of languages, but at the same time on the fact that between them there is always translation. And I do not see what, in my remarks or in what I have written on this question, would suggest that I deny the existence of a ‘common ground’, or that the latter ‘embarrasses’ me. Let me be clear: like Amselle, I do not think of cultures as insularities. Moreover, I am happier to talk about languages and their plurality than about cultures. As for the question of their openness to each other, of their being brought into ‘relation’ (the other term that one must always be thought along with that of ‘opacity’ when speaking of Glissant), yet again translation, as well as the open concept of ‘world literature’, indicates the nature of the task.

44

5 The racial ban on representation Jean-Loup Amselle

I totally agree with Souleymane Bachir Diagne on this last point, and I am glad that we come together on this important issue. I’m even more glad in that I have never advocated a return to the universal but simply raised the possibility of universality. I will follow the second example Diagne cites in support of his ­argument – t­he Whitney Museum exhibition with Open Casket by the ‘White’ artist Dana ­Schutz – ­by referring in turn to two examples of my own. The first is the controversy aroused by Exhibit B, the very similar work by the ‘White’ South African artist Brett Bailey. The second is the trans-­ racial experience of the American Rachel Dolezal, which, inter alia, I will use to try to develop a more general reflection on the deconstruction of race and skin colour.1

Exhibit B Exhibit B is a performance that stages the horrors of colonization and its aftermath on the basis of tableaux vivants embodied by silent extras. This performance was controversial because its designer, Brett Bailey, is a White South African and he was deemed to have reproduced the infamous ‘human zoos’ that appeared in the colonial exhibitions of unhappy memory. While this show had been given positive press reviews when it was put on at the Avignon Festival in 2013, then at the Cent Quatre in Paris, its reception at the end of 2014 provoked hostility: it sparked angry reactions, starting in Berlin, where Bailey’s project to represent, as a ‘White man’, the suffering of the ‘Blacks’ was criticized. This protest movement then continued in the United Kingdom, for example at the Edinburgh International 45

The racial ban on representation Festival, where Exhibit B was on the programme. The protest was led by a Black mother from Birmingham, and then continued by other speakers who judged the show to be s­candalous – t­hey thought it was an example of double standards and drew a parallel between the representation of Blacks in human zoos and that of Jews played by Germans wearing the clothes of deportees and with camp numbers tattooed on their skins. This protest movement, followed by a demonstration on 24 September 2014, led to the show’s cancellation by the Barbican Centre in London: this is an artistic and cultural site considered by its opponents as particularly emblematic of left-­wing ‘White’ high culture. The protest campaign was taken up in France by the historian John Mullen, and resulted in the creation of an online petition signed by twenty thousand people demanding the cancellation of the show and calling for a demonstration on 27 November 2014 outside the Gérard Philipe Theatre, where the first performance was due to be held. The petition and demonstration achieved their goal since the show was cancelled on the day of the premiere, and other demonstrations took place over the following days to ensure that its whole run, until 30 November, was called off. Although the show was in fact put on the following month, thanks to police protection, a gathering of opponents tried again on 7 December to prevent the performances being resumed and, on the following day, an emergency interim ruling was lodged by a collective of artists to get it banned. The case of the ‘Collective against Exhibit B’, which had been dismissed by the court on the grounds that the performance did not violate human rights, appealed against this decision before the Council of State, which confirmed the decision of the administrative tribunal. Opponents of Exhibit B, by bringing together a number of people identifying as ‘of African descent’, achieved their ends, namely to highlight the ‘institutional racism’ of a ‘White power’ monopolized by ‘people of European descent’.2 But it is worth noting that this protest movement, which succeeded in shifting the political debate to a racial base, could only develop against a background of rumour.

Rumour The protest movement against Exhibit B was in fact the result of a spreading rumour, since places for the show had to be reserved, so that the number of spectators was extremely limited. Thus, very few people managed to see the performance, and its denunciation, in par46

The racial ban on representation ticular by the movement’s leaders, relied solely on fantasies and the incantatory use of one fetishized expression, namely ‘human zoo’.3 While Brett Bailey’s whole aim had been to denounce the way natives had formerly been put on display in various colonial exhibitions and other botanical gardens as if they were fairground animals, he was reproached for wanting to perpetuate the way Black people were pent up in museum cages. By presenting Black extras, immobile and silent, staring at White spectators, this ‘White’ South African artist was in a way deemed to have accomplished what postcolonial writers criticize the West for, namely silencing of the voice of subalterns. What Bailey was criticized for, therefore, was the fact he was a ‘White’ who sought to represent Black suffering, something he was not entitled to do, and was monopolizing for his own benefit artistic resources that themselves were not granted, as they themselves stated, to Black artists. What is completely forgotten by the opponents of this performance who objected to its ‘racist’ character is the way this South African was trying to redeem the sins of his ancestors under the apartheid regime. So they demanded that it be banned in Saint-­Denis and Paris for the same reason as in London, namely double standards, on the basis that the controversial comedian Dieudonné’s 2014 show Le Mur (The Wall) at the Main d’Or had been banned, as, in the past, Mein Kampf had been banned!4 The explicit anti-­Semitism of Dieudonné, the Nazi manifesto of Adolf Hitler and Brett Bailey’s explicit anti-­ racism were thus all seen as being on the same level: this helped to build yet another wall of incomprehension and hostility between the different components of the population. So the opponents of this performance did not realize that the strength of Exhibit B, as a vector of denunciation of White racism and the horrors of the colonial and postcolonial eras, perhaps lay precisely in the fact that this was the work of a White person. The implication was that a White man was not entitled to represent the suffering of Blacks, any more than a German (even if he was Jewish?) could represent the Jews exterminated during the Second World War, following the argument advanced by the British sociologist Kehinde Andrews.5 In this racialist, if not racist, logic, each group or community would have to represent itself and would have the right to deny to any member of another group or another community the right to represent it. If we are not careful, an apartheid ­situation – ­precisely the situation criticized by B ­ ailey – w ­ ill result from this kind of argument. The refusal to cancel or ban this kind of show can, in its opponents’ eyes, only be the decision of a ‘White power’ deaf to the demands of ‘Black people’. 47

The racial ban on representation So there is a perfect similarity between the reactions that these two works of art, by Dana Schutz and Brett Bailey, aroused; and these reactions seem to me emblematic of the new situation in which Western societies are now stuck. If we do not take care, in the context of what I will call ‘the racial ban on representation’, each community or supposed community will soon claim a monopoly of the artistic or literary expression of its suffering.

Deconstructing race and (skin) colour I think it is important to deconstruct not only race, but also skin colour. Indeed, as different skin colours are constructions of the physical anthropology of the nineteenth century, it is essential to defend a constructivist attitude postulating a continuity between different phenotypes (black, yellow, red) and the variability of racial classifications according to the geographical and social position of the speakers. We need to ask what colour Blacks are, but also what colour Whites, Roma and Jews are. In the Maghreb, North Africans consider themselves as White in contrast to the Blacks, but are they considered as Whites in France? Are Roma really White in the view of Europeans who consider themselves to be White? And the same applies to Muslims and Jews. Muslims are not considered to be genuinely French and/or White by Marion Maréchal Le Pen, since they are not Christians. It’s the same for Jews, who, even if they consider themselves as Whites, are not seen as fully White by certain other French people.6 Making a Mohammed or a Moshe a ‘non-­White’ is therefore not so much about the colour of his skin as about his name. We must abandon the erroneous question of race and allegedly ‘visible’ minorities, as promoted by postcolonial writers, and look instead at colour, considered as a symbolic marker. Racism applies less to race than to the assignment of colour or a certain colour to certain social groups formed for the needs of the cause. But these colours, or this colour chart, this colour palette, are arbitrary: skin colour is social and cultural, and not racial. Islamophobia is not directed against the religion of Muslims, but their colour, and it is for this reason that we must not dissociate the struggles against these two forms of racism. The postcolonials have picked the wrong target. They aim at groups that are supposed to exist objectively, on the basis of the phenotype and racial profiling, whereas racism is a primary schema that takes many different forms, assigning colours or stains or blemishes to scat48

The racial ban on representation tered groups. Kevin Anderson reminds us that Marx knew full well that Irish workers, who for us in the twenty-­first century are White, were not considered to be ‘White’ by the British and North Americans in the nineteenth century.7 Another current example from the United States will illustrate our point. Rachel Dolezal, an American anti-­racist activist who is (was) White, was for years able to pass for (to pass herself off as) and to be considered ‘Black’ by dyeing her skin, curling her hair and integrating into the African-­ American community before being unmasked by her biological parents.8 But this trans-­racial phenomenon is seen as a problem by some African-­Americans, who view the opportunity offered to Whites to transform themselves into Blacks as a kind of White privilege which Blacks are deprived of. But this is to ignore the fact that it is possible to cross the colour line in the opposite direction, as Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain shows: here, an ‘African-­American’ with very light skin manages to pass for a ‘White’ after having served for several years in the US Navy.9 Again, the trans-­racial experience shows that compassion is possible. This compassion, the ability to share the suffering of others through a trans-­ racial experience or a work of art, allows us to maintain, as Diagne says, the idea of belonging to a common humanity. And if the term ‘humanism’ can still have any meaning, this is the meaning we should give it.

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6 On cultural and linguistic specificities Jean-Loup Amselle

After discussing universalism, we can now examine the opposite notion of particulars. Particulars, which the universal is supposed to erase by silencing them, include a number of institutions (in the sense that anthropology gives to this term), such as culture(s) and tradition(s), but in the forefront of these institutions we find language(s). I will first mention the title of the above-­mentioned work by Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars, a title which, despite the universalist conviction of its author, based on the possibility of translation between the different languages of the world (notably African and European), clearly shows the ambiguity of his aim, namely the insistence on ‘cultural universals’.1 Then I will quote something that Souleymane Bachir Diagne wrote on this subject: ‘We must start work on a universal of the encounter, a result of the plurality of languages, by being able to learn other languages on the basis of the so-­called “mother tongue”.’2 The question of language(s) is therefore central to relationships between the universal and particulars.

The non-existence of language(s) Regarding language(s), I will start by paraphrasing Sartre and stating that non-­existence precedes existence, that the non-­existence of languages, like that of cultures and traditions, precedes their existence. It is not because languages exist that we speak them, but, on the contrary, it is because they are spoken that they exist. People speak the languages they speak. 50

On cultural and linguistic specificities Admittedly, this seemingly tautological assertion is counter-­intuitive since everyone knows that everyone speaks one language, his or her ‘mother’ tongue, or a so-­called ‘second’ language, and that many speakers are multilingual, including Africans, which reinforces the certainty that languages do exist. And besides, are not the languages of the world, the thousands of languages that exist on the surface of the globe, in danger of disappearing, and has not Claude Hagège proclaimed that we need to stop languages from dying?3 I am not here going to counter the fear that languages are vanishing by pointing out that, while certain languages are indeed disappearing, others are appearing, such as Nouchi in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Nor do I wish to recall the distinction that I have established, in relation to African languages, between ‘encompassing’ and relatively homogeneous languages, linked to kingdoms and empires, and ‘encompassed’ languages, with large variations, typical of so-­ called ‘segmentary’ societies composed of clans and lineages.4 Some are spoken only in areas of very limited extent where people from neighbouring villages cannot understand each other, as with the Dogon of Mali, who sometimes resort to a ‘foreign’ language like Fulani to communicate; but this has nothing to do with the postulate that I am here defending of the non-­existence of language(s). The question is important since language(s) is/are at the heart of culture, tradition, identity and ethnicity. Does not the soul of a people reside in its language? We are particularly sensitive to this question in France, a former world power of the first order, whose language was universally spoken in the eighteenth century, though it is now slowly declining in the face of the relentless monopoly of Anglo-­American. France, which is no longer more than a second-­rate great power, can maintain its rank in the concert of nations largely thanks to francophonie, and therefore to its former colonies in Africa. France feels that its language and culture are now threatened in their very existence, which has given and still gives rise to the whiny reactions of our scholars and academicians quick to deplore the use of ‘franglais’ (in René Étiemble’s term) or to complain that French ‘civilization’, first and foremost its language, is now threatened by the supremacy of English-­speaking language and culture (in the view of Régis Debray). In short, beside the fantasy of the ‘large-­scale takeover’ of Western culture by Arab culture (Renaud Camus and Alain Finkielkraut), there is the no less widespread fantasy of the large-­scale takeover of French by English. And, as everyone knows, as language is the seat of culture and national identity, these are doomed to disappear sooner or later. As Hagège also states: ‘To impose one’s language is 51

On cultural and linguistic specificities to impose one’s thinking, and never, in the history of humanity, has a language been comparable in its worldwide extent to English today.’5 Underlying this conception of languages lies the idea of the equivalence between language and worldview, with each language monad, folded in on itself, enclosing a well-­defined cultural entity. American linguist Michael Silverstein has argued against this view; he separates languages from the territories they occupy, and especially from the different conceptions of the world that they are supposed to harbour.6 And here we come to the idea that I have long been defending: that of the non-­existence of purely local identities and the prevalence of global signifiers, cultural and linguistic chains within which individuals perform their choices to ultimately produce particularistic signifieds.7 If we accept this point of view, we realize that an individual does not so much speak French, English, Wolof, Bambara or Swahili; rather, from the linguistic corpus at his or her disposal, a corpus that is not a priori delimited and necessarily includes other languages, he or she makes linguistic choices of identification. The one qualification is that language users need to be understood by their partners in the language exchange, unless these users are to turn their discourse into an idiolect or, as we significantly put it, to no longer speak their own language, which must also be the language of others, but to speak ‘in tongues’. Language activity, or rather the passage to the linguistic act, is therefore the object of a translation, of the torsion of the available corpus and its transformation into an idiolect, that is, into a kind of language that, however individual, is still understandable by others, or at least whose incomprehensibility can be recognized as such. In the language exchange, all procedures of denigration, rejection and dismissal can thus be uttered by the actors. Consider, for example, the criterion of distinction drawn by the British between ‘U’ and ‘non-­U’ that enabled an Oxbridge-­educated aristocracy to assert its linguistic supremacy over the lower classes. But the greatest paradox is the way this deconstruction of European languages, which has long been conducted by sociologists of language and in some cases concerns African languages, as shown by the work of Cécile Canut and her students,8 is ignored by African writers, researchers and academics working in Africa or the United States. Defending African languages, teaching these languages and translating into them lie at the heart of the development of the postcolonial ideological and political demand expressed by those writers, academics and researchers who, in a movement comparable to that of ‘Négritude’, brandish African languages as a flag of identity. By writ52

On cultural and linguistic specificities ing in ‘their’ own languages, transcribed into the Latin alphabet, these writers can forge a link with their predecessors who wrote texts in African languages transcribed with Arabic characters (adjami) or with scripts which they themselves invented.9 One of the first to have demanded a return to writing and speaking in African languages was the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who, in Decolonising the Mind (1986), announced that he was saying goodbye to English and would now write only in Gikuyu, his mother tongue.10 This move, however justified, nevertheless raises the question of what a so-­called ‘mother tongue’ really is, especially in Africa, where the populations do not always speak the language assigned to them by their corresponding ethnonym and where the offspring of the elites often use French or English for their everyday purposes.11 Indeed, one may well wonder whether this abandonment of English by Ngũgĩ did not lead him to fetishize language and to see it as the receptacle of an innate and somewhat romantic cultural harmony, which in fact corresponds to the polysemy of the concept of mother tongue seen as a native, original, even Adamic language.12 But even though he later returned to English after his appointment as a professor at New York University, showing that it is not easy to reconcile fidelity to one’s land and mother tongue with the need to reach an audience wider than that of one’s own country, Ngũgĩ remained a beacon for postcolonial researchers and academics scholars who, like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, teach in the United States.13 On the francophone side, it was the Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop who first decided in 2003 to write novels in Wolof, the second official language spoken in Senegal. He subsequently created a collection of novels and translations of essays published in Wolof.14 Boubacar Boris Diop’s inspiration was Shaykh Anta Diop, one of the fathers of Afrocentrism, whose influence stems from the fact that he found solace in his childhood from reading Wolof poems transcribed into the Arabic alphabet. Furthermore, in order to show the ability of African languages to fully express concepts at work in Western languages and science, he has endeavoured to translate both French classics such as the Horace of Corneille and works of prestigious scholars such as Paul Langevin and Albert Einstein.15 We may fear that Boubacar Boris Diop’s enterprise may foster the dominance of what is known as the ‘Islamo-­Wolof model’ over the cultural life of Senegalese society. In reality, given the limited number of Senegalese readers of texts written in Wolof, it is television channels that must be held responsible for the domination of Wolof over languages such as Pulaar, among others. 53

On cultural and linguistic specificities Similarly, Mamadou Diouf, director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, gives priority to African languages conceived as a gateway to African studies, the underlying idea being that no one can take the course unless he or she speaks Wolof, Pulaar or Swahili.16 Although knowledge of one or more African languages is definitely an important factor for grasping African cultures, the fact remains that the emphasis on learning languages endorses the idea that the meaning of African languages is untranslatable, that is to say, ineffable in other languages; or, as I already suggested with regard to Édouard Glissant, that they contain a certain amount of ‘opacity’, and are thus partly inaccessible to the outside observer. Note, moreover, that this linguistic nationalism is not peculiar to Africa: it has cropped up just as much in the history of nationalism in Europe, with the collection and transcription of oral narratives into ‘national’ languages. This still happens in countries such as Finland, where Finnish is deemed to be understood and spoken only by Finns, that is to say, Finns ‘born and bred’. The situation prevailing in the United States has the particular feature that learning African languages can be seen as an instrument of American imperialism aimed against Africa. If a member of the Peace Corps who is heading off to work in a francophone country learns an African language, this corresponds to a political desire to have an impact on the African masses directly by marginalizing the language of the colonial power and thereby engaging in a process of linguistic purification.17 Be this as it may, Diagne has a conception of languages significantly different from mine. In his view, the important thing is to ‘think from language to language’, ‘to decentre oneself, to look at one’s language from another language, to consider one’s identity from what is not one’s identity’ – in short, to paraphrase Paul Ricœur, to ‘think of oneself as another’.18 The idea of thinking from language to language presupposes that we initially conceive of discrete or monadic languages, in this case pure native African ­languages – ­truly native, that is, not experiencing or undergoing any alterations from other African languages near or far, namely based on the postulate of the disjunction of the local or regional linguistic network in which the spoken language is situated, as performed by the subject. And this is without mentioning the impact of the ‘languages of Africa’ – French, English and Portuguese: that is, the colonial languages that Diagne distinguishes (arbitrarily, in my opinion) from ‘African languages’. Indeed, how can we separate, in today’s Africa, in this era of code-switching, the indigenous 54

On cultural and linguistic specificities wheat of Wolof, Bambara or Mossi from the chaff of French, English or Portuguese, and is this postulate in fact meaningful when it comes to past eras? And even this is to leave out Arabic, a language that sub-­Saharan speakers have appropriated for centuries. To want or claim to think from an African language to a Western language renews the fiction of a radical opposition between the West and Africa. Whereas for some years there has been an unhealthy debate about the transmission from Greek philosophy to Western philosophy via Arab philosophy, it may seem odd to try to abstract every African language from any external influence and thereby to strengthen a linguistic and cultural nationalism or ethnicism to which Diagne is in other respects totally foreign.19 Moreover, it is surprising, given his linguistic, cultural and religious background, that Diagne makes no reference to Arabic; we may well wonder what place it occupies in his distinction between ‘African languages’ (Wolof, Bambara, etc.) and ‘languages of Africa’ (French, English, Portuguese), while his compatriot and colleague Ousmane Oumar Kane highlights the centuries-­old existence of ‘non-­ Europhone’ intellectuals speaking in Arabic and/or African languages (Fulani, etc.), transcribed using the Arabic alphabet or other scripts invented by Africans.20 Did those Muslim intellectuals think, do they still think, in Arabic, in ‘their’ language, in both? Do they feel the need to ‘decentre’ themselves in order to think in their language ‘of origin’, a language whose identity is difficult to determine? I particularly have in mind those Wahhabi or rather Sunni imams from Mali whom I regularly meet and who speak both Bambara and Fulani, French and English. In what language do they think? And does this question have a meaning for them?21

The reversal of the linguistic stigma Regarding the issue of language(s), Diagne also refers to Émile Benveniste and his famous text on categories of thought and categories of language, a subject which had been previously discussed by the philosopher Alexis Kagame in connection with the idea that there is a Bantu philosophy of being.22 In this text, Benveniste says that since in the Ewe language of the Gulf of Guinea, there is no verb ‘to be’, it is impossible to philosophize in that language.23 But at the same time, the insistence on the impossibility or difficulty of translating from one language to another ignores the incessant traffic throughout history of concepts, notions and ideas through 55

On cultural and linguistic specificities languages, cultures and civilizations. Basically, translation proves that movement, appropriation and acculturation all take place; to rely, as did Diagne, on Benveniste’s view here (and the latter has been criticized for his linguistic determinism),24 reversing it so as to turn these defects or supposed shortcomings into positive qualities, seems to me questionable.25 Is it possible to philosophize, not on the basis of an African language, but on the basis of a specific language, whatever it may be, once the act of philosophizing rests on a body of texts and ideas whose extent cannot a priori be delimited? Diagne says in this connection that his argument does not bear on African philosophy, but on philosophy in Africa; not on Muslim philosophy, but on philosophy in Islam.26 Does this not mean accepting the idea that there are no national or ethnic philosophies outside the minds of nationalist or ethnicist philosophers? Is Dogon cosmogony, seen by certain African philosophers as a philosophy, really Dogon when it contains many elements from the Qur’an? Is it a properly Dogon philosophy or the co-­production of two philosophers: a Dogon sage, Ogotemmeli, and an ethnologist specializing in that population, Marcel Griaule? Does ‘Bantu’ philosophy exist outside the mind of the Belgian Catholic priest Placide Tempels or the Rwandan philosopher Alexis Kagame, and is not Akan philosophy mainly the philosophy of the American-­ Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu? In short, a language, that disseminated, collective creation dependent on the performance of its speakers and their speech acts, does not make a philosophy, something that is essentially individual.

For a geopolitics of languages But, beyond these critical and theoretical considerations, we need to ponder the question of the geopolitics of languages. So I will take as an example the relations between Pulaar and Wolof in Senegal, a case with which Diagne is very familiar.27 Indeed, African languages, as well as ethnic groups, are not juxtaposed as if on one-­dimensional ethnic maps; they are caught up in relations of power, whatever the period considered: the period of the kingdoms, that of colonization, then that of independent states. As Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal have shown, African languages, as we apprehend them today, are the result of a colonial construction based on three semiotic processes: ‘iconization’, that is, the mapping and flattening of these languages which leads to their essentialization; 56

On cultural and linguistic specificities fractal recursivity, that is, the way we think of internal relations within Africa on the basis of the relations between Africa and Europe; and erasure, which eradicates multilingualism and linguistic ­variation – ­as early as the precolonial era.28 With regard to the languages of Senegal, the work of these scholars shows in particular that Fulani has been arbitrarily separated by colonial authors from Serer and Wolof, and provided with a S­ emitic – ­that is, ‘civilized’ – origin. Serer, meanwhile, has been subjected to a process of linguistic purification and territorial assignment which has stripped it of character as a language of the peasant class, as opposed to the Wolof spoken by the aristocracy. Likewise, El Hadji Abdou Aziz Faty describes these processes at work more specifically with regard to the construction of the Pulaar language in its mirror relationship with Wolof. Here, it is indeed the model combining Islam and the Wolof language, which is commonly called the ‘Islamo-­ Wolof model’, which predominates over other minority religions (Christianity, polytheism) and other languages (Pulaar, Serer, Malinké, Diola, etc.). There is nothing natural about this dominance: it is not (or not only) the product of the demographic weight of Muslim and Wolof speakers, but the result of a state requirement making Islam a quasi-­universal religion (although Islam is dominant in Senegal, this does not make this country an Islamic republic) and Wolof the language of administration and civil servants. It is this Islamo-­Wolof model that gives the languages of Senegal their respective importance, and it is in relation to this model that a mirror image of a minority linguistic identity is f­ormed – t­he Pulaar identity – w ­ ­ hich in fact reproduces all the characteristics of the dominant language. Indeed, we find this same process of mirror construction in other contexts: for example, Amazigh identities (Berber, Tuareg) in the Maghreb in relation to pan-­Arab identity.29 As part of this process of standardization, the a priori heterogeneity and diversity of Pulaar dialects result in the formation of a homogeneous Pulaar language, standardized and essentialized. Several types of actors are working towards this standardization without being part of any concerted project: migrants who go back and forth between foreign countries and Senegal; NGOs; language brokers; and entrepreneurs of ethnicity who ‘sell’ Pulaar cultural and linguistic specificity to many donors on the basis of minority languages, called ‘mother tongues’, with all the uncertainties that the use of this term implies. In the case of Wolof, like Pulaar and many other African languages, it is a process of nativization and rooting that is at work, displaying 57

On cultural and linguistic specificities a certain kinship with the idea of ‘endogenous knowledge’: that is, strictly and exclusively African types of knowledge as they have been defined by Paulin Hountondji.30 I would like to emphasize that languages are historical, social and political creations, and that, as such, they form part of power relationships, chains of languages. Current African languages, in the form familiar to us, also result from their being enclosed within clearly demarcated borders in colonial times, so we must be careful not to represent these essentialized entities, which are in reality artificially stabilized historical products, as receptacles for categories of thought that have been established once and for all.31 To consider them any differently might well lead to specious arguments, such as attributing certain qualities to linguistic forms and establishing, for example, a link between, on the one hand, the fact that a particular language differentiates the human race from animals and, on the other, the nature of the speaker of that language, who would allegedly ipso facto pay more care and respect to human nature. I prefer to engage and to dialogue, if not with Africa, at least with individuals, with ‘interlocutors’ rather than the ‘informants’ (as they are called in traditional ethnology) who are supposed to be spokespersons for a culture or ethnicity. In my view, Diagne is one of those interlocutors; and, as far as possible, I try to address him, to converse with him as an individual, disregarding as far as possible his image as ‘a Senegalese-­American philosopher, a Muslim, and so on’. This is how I view the particular, and particulars and their relations with the universal. Even if this means repeating myself, I would like to emphasize the antinomy between the deconstructive anthropological approach with which I identify and a postcolonial philosophical approach (I am not thinking in particular here of Diagne) focused on finding a stable foundation, an intellectual anchorage, and thus a cultural, ethnic or national identity ultimately based on a language. It is therefore understandable that the anthropologies of Lévi-­Strauss and Griaule, centred on the highlighting of structural oppositions (north/south, east/west, masculine/feminine, hot/cold, etc.), or of cosmogonies and systems of thought, are better suited to our postcolonial thinkers than the historicized anthropology of the ‘colonial situation’ (Balandier), even if some are avowed followers of the latter. Thus, the deconstruction of categories, even colonial categories, appears as a ‘White privilege’ that colonized or ‘racialized’ people cannot permit themselves. It is clear, however, that the discourse on the necessary deconstruction of ethnic groups and the languages on which they are based is 58

On cultural and linguistic specificities becoming increasingly difficult to maintain in a number of African countries, such as Mali, which has been subjected to a process of intense ethnic reactivation, owing, inter alia, to the virtual disappearance of the state in certain regions.32 This is particularly the case in the centre of the country, where relations between transhumant pastoralists and farmers are tense owing to the extension of cultivated areas and the resultant reduction in rangelands where herds can graze. Therefore, the complementarity between the systems of production tends to bring out an ethnic antagonism between Fulani pastoralists and Bambara farmers, a situation which is far from being exclusive to Mali. But the ethnicization of the social and political realms does not concern Africa alone; it also has an impact on Europe, in France in particular, so that some postcolonial ideas could paradoxically be found to chime with the currently significant theme of French national identity. In this regard, it is piquant to note that the defence of African languages echoes that of the French language, even though the two approaches seem completely different. Both cases involve dominated languages, even if French is the language of a dominated imperialism, which distinguishes it from African languages. But these languages can be used by the dominant imperialism to undermine the domination of the dominated imperialism. And that is how they have been used in Africa, for many years, by the United States.

59

7 On African languages and translation Souleymane Bachir Diagne

To present my perspective on languages (languages of Africa and African languages) and on translation, I would first like to ask Jean-­ Loup Amselle and our readers to consider the following lines, in italics, which combine logico-­mathematical symbols and Wolof: A- Soo nee Te ni War nga ni

Vx [N(x)→B(x)] (1) Vx [S(x)→N(x)] (2) Vx [S (x)→B(x)] (3)

B- Li koy dëggel mooy lii. Gannaaw bepp x laa wax ci (1) suma neexee tann ni x=a. Koon ma daadi bind: N(a)→B(a) (1′) Dara terewul ma tannaat a=x ci (2) mu dikk S(a)→(a) (2′) Ma tannati a=x ci (3) mu jox ma S (a)→B(a) (3′) Leegi (1′) mooy batey ~N(a) ∨ B(a) (1′′) (2′) mooy ~S(a) ∨ N(a) (2′′) Suma weddee (3), weddi naa itam (3’) japp koon ni liy dëgg mooy ~[S (a)→B(a)] mooy S(a) ∧ ~B(a) (3′′) Ma bind ~S(a) ×

S(a) ~B(a) ~N(a) × 60

N(a)

B(a) ×

On African languages and translation Yoon yëpp tëju (my mandargaal ko ak ×) mooy wone ni munul nekk, mënu ma am (1) ak (2) te weddi (3). Konn dëggël naa la ma waroon dëggël If you are not familiar with the symbolic representation of the logical language of predicates and if you do not know Wolof, you will soon stop paying attention to this passage in italics. But, if you do know the language of predicates and the universal meaning of the symbols V, F(x), ~, ∨, ∧, then you will very quickly understand that this passage first poses the argument that says: If it is true that every individual x that has property N has property B and if it is true that any individual x that has property S has property N, it is necessarily true that any individual that has property S has property B.

If we want to give content to ­symbolism – ­to interpret it –, we will say, for example, that if all humans are endowed with reason and Swedes are humans, then Swedes are endowed with reason. The second part (B) of the passage is a demonstration of this syllogism on the basis of two methods: firstly, a constant value a is assigned to the variable x in the hypotheses and in the conclusion (one has the right to choose the same value since the properties under consideration concern any individual whatsoever); secondly, we reason by a reduction ad absurdum. We suppose the conclusion to be false (thus its negation is true) and we show that this results in contradictions marked here by the fact that the three branches which represent all possibilities arising from this supposition are closed (closure is indicated by ×): this means that we encounter contradictions materialized by having both S(a) and its negation ~ S(a) in the left branch, N(a) and ~ N(a) in the middle branch, and ~ B(a) and B(a) in the right branch. Yet again, a logician familiar with this so-­ called ‘tree’ method follows the demonstration by ignoring the sentences in Wolof if he or she does not understand that language. No doubt there is a certain playfulness in my proposal for this logico-­mathematical demonstration in Wolof, but its aim is to illustrate quite concretely two important and related points. The first point is that the formal language of predicates is always already translated, so the fact that I am conducting my little demonstration in Wolof is of strictly no importance. A Beninese or a Korean person familiar with the calculus of predicates who watches me writing it on the blackboard can ‘switch off the sound’ and still 61

On African languages and translation understand the formulas I write. Wolof is only a metalanguage, a language in which I comment on what I’m doing, when what I’m doing is happening in another language, that of logical signs. Calling a mathematical object a ‘ring’, and translating from French into Wolof by choosing in that language the word that corresponds to a ring is a matter of indifference to how one gives oneself the object ‘ring’, which involves enumerating all the formal properties that define it as such. Why is this remark important for our discussion of African languages? ­Because – a­ nd this is my second p ­ oint – t­ ranslating mathematics, or, indeed, the most theoretical aspects of physics, does not fundamentally present any particular difficulty. It is not the theoretical, abstract character of what is being translated that creates the difficulty of the operation: quite the opposite, one might say! We need only proceed by metaphors in the metalanguage in which we are commenting on what is happening in the symbolic language, as occurs in all languages, and speak as everyone else speaks of ring, filter, turnstile, rope, vector, and so on. From this point of v­ iew – ­and I am not ­joking – ­one could say that Shaykh Anta Diop may find it more difficult to cope with the literary passages than with the elements of the theory of relativity that he chose to translate into Wolof. And why is it so important to translate? More precisely: why is it necessary for many intellectuals from Africa that African languages become (again) modern languages of creation and science? Amselle expresses various forms of scepticism on this issue, and I would like to examine them here. Is the question itself being ruled out of order? What would it mean to argue against the procedures of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, of Shaykh Aliou Ndao or of Boubacar Boris Diop? (Contrary to what Amselle says, it was not Boubacar Boris Diop who paved the way for modern fiction writing in Wolof, but Shaykh Ndao, in whose footsteps Diop often says he is following.) I don’t know if the conclusion that follows from Amselle’s remarks is that their approach does not make sense and that all these fine folk ought to continue to write in English or French alone. But why should this be? Even if English and French also establish the identity of these writers (the works that they have all created in these ‘languages of Africa’ – as Elisabeth Mudimbe-­Boyi calls t­ hem – ­are the living proof of this), why would they not want to create in Wolof or Gikuyu? The starting point for any discussion of the language of literary creation is and must be that we do not have to justify ourselves for 62

On African languages and translation wanting to write in a language that we view as our own. Furthermore, what makes Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Boubacar Boris Diop talented writers is just the art of creating powerful works in different languages that they reveal to themselves by placing them at the service of their imagination. They are writing from language to language, as did Beckett, Kundera and so many others whose right to write in the language that their literary project demands nobody would think of questioning. Does Ngũgĩ’s choice of writing in Gikuyu mean that he ‘fetishizes’ ­this – ­his – language? Yes, but only if we agree that, generally, universally, a writer, whether from Costa Rica or Denmark, always ‘fetishizes’ the language in which he or she writes: every word he or she traces is a declaration of love for this language. Ngũgĩ declares his love for the Gikuyu language, as do Léopold Sédar Senghor in French and Serigne Moussa Ka in Wolof. What’s so strange about that? I am always wary of confining Africa to some alleged specificity. In general, this is a manufactured specificity, for the simple reason that we forget that what we say about the continent is perfectly generalizable: there is no reason to think that writers throughout the world write naturally in the language in which they create and that, if African writers write in Pulaar, in Serer or in Wolof, this means they are ‘fetishizing’ these languages. But Amselle argues that they believe in the ‘purity’ of these languages. I can’t see the link of cause and effect. I don’t know whether Boubacar Boris Diop, for example, ever wrote a word that would tend to show that in his eyes Wolof is a monadic reality and an incorruptible essence that does not owe anything to other languages, or to time and the transformation that it brings. There is no reason to think that the writers who write in African languages are more ignorant than others of the linguistics of these languages, of the way they belong to families and sub-­families, of the hybridizations they have undergone and continue to undergo, and so on. The most important of these hybridizations is certainly that between the many languages of the continent (from Swahili to Hausa or Wolof, etc.) and that other important African language, Arabic. Finding one’s literary expression in Gikuyu or Pulaar does not necessarily involve stating any metaphysical thesis about those languages! Nor does it involve supporting the ethno-­nationalist view of an inevitable coincidence between language, ethnic identity and nation! Where is the logic here? Do people create in African languages because they believe that in them, and in them alone, they will find their most authentic voice? Some writers say as ­much – ­often, in fact, those who write only in 63

On African languages and translation French or English while declaring (as has become commonplace) that they regret being ‘obliged’ to express themselves in a ‘foreign language’, thereby losing the total authenticity they would have desired. In my view, nobody is obliged to do anything, nobody needs to justify his or her choice of language; you can find your voice in any language, and that voice will be ‘authentic’ as long as the talent is there. Today many African p ­ hilosophers – ­ Paulin Hountondji, Kwasi Wiredu, Dismas Masolo and ­others – ­insist on the need to translate and write texts of philosophy in African languages. What is their motivation for this, and what is the motivation of those who judge the same to be true for mathematics or the natural sciences? I will consider a case that concerns me, since here I can speak only for myself and certainly not in the name of African philosophers who obviously do not form a homogeneous category. A few years ago, one of my PhD students at Northwestern University, Chike Jeffers, today a professor at Halifax, Canada, asked ten African philosophers to suggest contributions, on a subject of their choice, for an anthology of philosophy in African languages with a parallel translation into English by a translator other than the author. The result was the collective work he edited, published in 2013 by SUNY Press under the title Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy.1 Amharic (Messay Kebede), Luo (Dismas Masolo, F.  Ochieng Odhiambo), Gikuyu (Betty Wambui), Igbo (Emmanuel Eze), Akan (Kwasi Wiredu): these were the languages in the anthology, in addition to Wolof for my own contribution. In the form that it takes, this book, of course, has a ‘militant’ aspect, as an invitation to travel along the path indicated. This is the message of the foreword by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. What does it mean to write a text in Wolof about the nature of truth, as I did in Listening to Ourselves? It does not involve any thunderous proclamation on the nature or essence of Wolof: simply the belief that it is my responsibility to help to enrich the heritage of philosophical texts written in this language (my language), just as I write in French and in English. I will give an example to illustrate this idea that it is necessary, today, to enrich the heritage of texts. Gaston Berger University in Saint-­Louis, Senegal, offers a seminar on literature in the Wolof language that Boubacar Boris Diop held a few years ago. This course, which has been very popular with students, certainly needs to be developed. With this aim in mind, it is necessary to back it up with a rich corpus of contemporary texts that bear witness to a living theoretical literature. Who can enrich this corpus, in philosophy, if 64

On African languages and translation not philosophers who speak, among other languages, Wolof? This is just what it means to feel responsible for the language, to feel obliged to answer for it, to contribute to the corpus. And that’s what we do by producing texts in Wolof or by translating philosophical texts into that language. I will now answer three questions. The first concerns the relationship of domination between languages as referred to by Amselle when he speaks of the ‘Islamo-­Wolof model’; the second bears on African languages in relation to current research on the continent; the third examines the benefits of translating. It is Mamadou Diouf, now a professor at Columbia after teaching for many years at the University Shaykh Anta Diop in Dakar and then at the University of Michigan, who has endeavoured to analyse what he called the ‘Islamo-­Wolof model’ to gain a better understanding of the dynamics at work in Senegalese society. He has studied one of these dynamics, the accelerated progression of Islamization, coupled with the dazzling development of Wolof as a lingua franca, today spoken by nearly ninety per cent of Senegalese: this is the language of markets, playgrounds and cities. Wolof is not the language of an ethnic group; it is the language of all those many people who are not of a particular ethnicity (or not of one ethnicity rather than another). A person is Wolof because he or she speaks Wolof. It does not make much sense to see this dynamic as the result of the state’s imposing an Islamo-­Wolof model, as Amselle does. Which state is supposed to have ‘decided’ on this? The colonial administration? The regime of Senghor, a deeply Catholic Serer when the newly independent country was just starting out? The most important point raised by Amselle is that this model is likely to grow stronger if a literature in Wolof develops. Does this mean that Boubacar Boris Diop must refrain from writing in or having his work translated into Wolof and must therefore stick to French so as not to add to the demographic ‘disadvantage’ of Pulaar? This shows that the argument is faulty and that the ‘disadvantage’ is quite relative, since there is more literature in Pulaar than in Wolof, so long as we do not focus on Senegal. Indeed, there is a much richer literature written in Pulaar once we realize that it is a language used throughout West Africa, while Wolof is purely local. As for their daily use, as soon as Senegal is seen in the context of its regional environment, the relative importance of the languages changes. It is desirable that, like the Swahili spoken in southern Africa, one or two languages of West Africa should become official languages of the African Union. Mandé, a true cultural matrix 65

On African languages and translation of the region, and definitely Pulaar too, would be the obvious languages to fulfil this role. There is no reason to think that Wolof can do so. I now come to the question of the importance of African languages for researchers. American universities, and African studies programmes more particularly, insist on students learning African languages. This explains why at Columbia, the Institute of African Studies, directed until the end of the academic year 2016–17 by Mamadou Diouf, promoted the languages taught there by declaring in effect, cum grano salis, that no one could take the course if he or she did not speak Wolof, Pulaar or Swahili. It should be noted, contrary to what Amselle thinks, that French is considered by the Institute to be an African language: a student can fulfil the course requirements for the curriculum in African studies, as far as languages are concerned, by demonstrating skills in French or Portuguese. I will conclude with the question of the benefits of translating, of thinking from language to language. The Rwandan philosopher Alexis Kagame wrote that in his Kinyarwanda language the cogito of Descartes is untranslatable: in this language, you cannot say ‘I think therefore I am.’ He is clearly just referring to the fact that this absolute use of the verb ‘to be’ in the expression ‘I am’ to say ‘I exist’ is characteristic of certain languages that use the copula, of which Kinyarwanda is not one. But, if we do not focus on the effort of translating word to word, Descartes’s Discourse on Method along with the cogito can perfectly well be translated into Kinyarwanda as into any ­language – u ­ nless, that is, we believe in the essential incompleteness of certain languages as compared to others, a point that I have already mentioned. It is true, however, that this will necessarily involve mobilizing the resources of the language in a way that will teach us something about the cogito, about what its wording owes to the fact that it is in Latin or French, and also about the way in which Kinyarwanda inclines us to think. But this is what happens in any translation. Transferring meanings from one language to another is a form of decentring that can teach us many lessons. And to understand the benefits of translation, to think from language to language, you have to remember Goethe’s saying that a person who knows only one language does not actually know anything about even that one.

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8 An optimism of translation Jean-Loup Amselle

My conception of languages is the opposite of that held by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, since I postulate a continuity between different languages, cultures, ethnicities and identities, as I have already explained in my Mestizo Logics.1 So there is in my opinion no indeterminacy or impossibility of translation, since the meaning of the most untranslatable concepts can be explained, as Pascal Engel has shown,2 by the context. And besides, in this respect, the critique of ‘ontological nationalism’ laid at the door of Martin Heidegger concerning the imperious need to philosophize in Greek or German could be turned back against him, since, by insisting, as does Barbara Cassin, on the need to test philosophical concepts by the difference of languages, he erects Bantu philosophy, or what he takes to be such, into a kind of radically other point of view, capable of making it possible to pass a distanced judgement on Western philosophy.3 But the discrete or discontinuous nature of the world’s languages and the philosophies they c­ onvey – ­and in this expression I include, of course, the so-­called ‘Indo-­European’ ­languages – ­is, in my opinion, the result not of their intrinsic properties, but of their ‘grammatization’ and the way they are arranged in a dictionary, not to mention their classification into ­families – ­Indo-­European, Semitic, etc. – as happened in the nineteenth century. It was the transition to writing that froze the different languages of the world and, in this process, grammarians and linguists played a major role. In Africa, as I said before, this process took particularly brutal forms under the impact of the colonial and then postcolonial linguistic authorities. As regards the colonial period, we can only highlight the extremely questionable classifications drawn up by Maurice Delafosse in connection with West African languages, by ­combining 67

An optimism of translation an e­ volutionary approach and a naturalistic approach.4 This resulted in a set of linguistic demarcations specifying the language of each ethnic group, but also establishing a hierarchy between the most ‘primitive’ languages, from that of the Pygmies of the rainforest up to those of savanna societies, more developed because closer to Arab-­ Muslim societies. These linguistic categories and hierarchies still prevail in connection with the Bambara–Malinké–Dioula family, even though more recent research has undermined this colonial viewpoint. As for the current period, one of the finest examples of this process of inventing languages is the formatting of the Direction nationale de l’alphabétisation fonctionnelle et de la linguistique appliquée (National Directorate of Functional Literacy and Applied Linguistics), the main linguistic authority of Mali, which has seen the emergence of a new standard Dogon language subsuming the different dialects used in the Bandiagara region. When we think about languages, including African languages, we therefore need to bear in mind that these languages are not given sub specie aeternitatis, but that they are the result of a historical process that lies behind the form in which we currently grasp them. Unlike Diagne, I postulate a primary indeterminacy in the relation between languages, in the possibility of straddling several languages, which means that I am wary of the idea of linguistic miscegenation conceived as the mixture of two or several linguistic entities initially envisaged as separated. Language cannot ‘branch out’, in my view, other than in the form of an indefinite appropriation of the whole linguistic field by a given actor, in a given area and at a given time. This conception of language(s) also informs the way in which African languages are located in different national spaces. I maintain, in this respect, that Wolof is the unofficial language of the Senegalese state, if only because most officials speak it, just as Bambara is the unofficial language of the Malian state, because the vast majority of political personnel since independence have come from this language area. As far as Mali is concerned, this ‘Mandingization’ tends even today to include areas in the south of the country that have their own language (Bwa, Senufo, Minyanka) and use Bambara–Malinké only as a second language, or rather a form of ‘code-switching’ between the two. Thus a linguistic polarization tends to arise between the south, the centre and the north of the country, where other languages such as Peul (Fulfulde), Songhay and Tamasheq prevail. In the long run, where this process has not already started, there is the risk of an ethno-­linguistic division in which this country will split in two. The expression ‘Mandé Mansa’, used to designate the Malian president 68

An optimism of translation Ibrahim Boubacar Keita because of his supposedly Malinké origins, certainly cannot be suitable for a deeply divided country, part of which, Azawad, populated by Tuaregs, i­s – ­with or without the support of F ­ rance – fi ­ ghting for greater autonomy and even independence. So in my view the point is not to proclaim that Pulaar or Mandé should become the flagship language of West Africa, as no one can take this proposal into consideration unless due attention is paid to the respective place occupied by each of these languages in the different countries concerned. That is why I maintain that it is indispensable to have a geopolitics as well as a sociology of the linguistic space specific to each country. Languages, as well as other cultural institutions, are caught up in political, economic and social relations of power. They are the object of struggles between social actors who argue over them. And the task of researchers in the social s­ ciences – i­ n my view, at l­ east – i­ s to create a panorama of these relations of power, in other words to stop considering languages as immutable entities that perpetuate themselves unvaryingly through history and which could be described as constituting an intangible cultural heritage for those who, from time to t­ime – w ­ hen they perform language a­ cts – ­draw on their repertoire. I have already said that Diagne distinguished between two kinds of translation, a vertical translation and a horizontal translation. The first is related to the ‘descent’ of the Qur’an onto the prophet Muhammad, the second, resulting from the first, corresponds to the translation of different languages into each other. Regarding the descent of the Qur’an, Diagne elaborates a whole set of theological ideas which it is not within my competence to judge and which, as I said before, do not concern me at all since I am not a believer. I also have trouble following his reasoning, especially in this passage that I quote at length: The first [vertical translation] would be the dimension of an absolute translation, the translation of the infinite word, the entry of an infinite word into a human language. How can eternity enter time? How can infinity be embodied in the finitude of a human, all too human language? How can the divine word be said not only in so-­ called ‘sacred’ languages, those which have received revelation, but in all human languages since these languages receive the translation of the sacred word?5

As regards horizontal translation, Diagne follows Quine and his hypothesis of the indeterminacy of translation, especially in the 69

An optimism of translation movement from an ‘Indo-­European’ language to an ‘exotic’ language, African, Asian or ­Amerindian – ­one that in any case is distant from the first. That is what I deduce from the following passage: The second dimension of translation that I wish to examine is related to what the American philosopher Quine calls radical translation. Radical translation is the tendency to translate, for example, a statement in an Indo-­European language into a non-­Indo-­European language. Because of the proximity of European languages, translating French into English and vice versa does not pose the same problems as those which are encountered in ‘radical translation’, which involves, according to Quine, taking into consideration languages that are absolutely foreign to each other in terms of areas of civilization.6

I deduce from these two assertions that Diagne is placing himself in the context of the theme of Babel and the confusion of languages or, rather, that he is presenting an optimistic version of this biblical myth. According to him, there is indeed a discontinuity between languages, even if this is not the consequence of the desire of the builders of Babel to defy God, and of the punishment the latter inflicts on humanity as a result of this affront. The confusion of languages, for Diagne, is not irremediable since not only is there a possibility of translation and therefore of communication between the different linguistic communities, but in addition translation has the effect of ‘ennobling’ the receiving languages, as in the case of African languages, which can be enriched by the translation of the Qur’an.7 Muslim Babelism as viewed by Diagne therefore assumes that the different languages of the world are discrete entities or monads, separate universes. In his view, this is not a curse since there is always the possibility of passing from one language to another, even though exotic languages face a number of difficulties in accommodating ‘Indo-­European’ concepts.

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9 On philosophy in Islam and on the question of a ‘West African Islam’ Souleymane Bachir Diagne

With regard to Islam, it is the responsibility of Muslim intellectuals today to answer the question, ‘What should be done?’ For my part, in those aspects of my work focused on ­Islam – ­what Jean-­Loup Amselle calls my ‘Muslim philosophy’1 – I argue both that, on the philosophical level, we need to continue on the path indicated by the Indian philosopher-­poet Muhammad Iqbal,2 namely ‘the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam’ (this is the title of his main work),3 and also t­hat – ­and here I speak as a West African ­citizen – ­we should continuously revive, through education, the tradition of that region, formerly known as ‘Sudan’ in the Arabic chronicles: a pacifist Islam, tolerant and open.

What led me to write about Islam At Columbia, one of the courses I love to teach is on the history of ‘Western civilization’, which is obligatory for all second-­year students, whatever the discipline they have chosen to major in. This course was created under the title ‘Contemporary Civilization: Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West’, just after the First World War (in 1919), to give different generations of students a sense of the great texts making up the history of thought in the West. The aim was to remind the West of its identity, when it had just been torn apart in a deadly conflict. The programme of studies, a veritable speciality of Columbia, is periodically updated, but it remains, for the most part, a history of Western philosophy from Plato to the present day, ‘from Plato to NATO’, as we like to say. The list of authors studied in the first semester (which covers the period from Plato’s Republic 71

On philosophy in Islam to Rousseau’s Social Contract) includes the ‘big names’ of ‘Western’ philosophers one would expect, but also texts such as the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, the Qur’an, and authors such as Al-­Ghazali and Ibn Tufayl. Currently, the ‘great texts’ studied in the ‘medieval philosophy’ section of this ‘Western Civilization’ course are Deliverance from Error by Al-­ Ghazali, Hayy ibn Yaqzān by Ibn Tufayl and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles, Summa Theologiae and De Monarchia. If I am mentioning this Columbia course here, it is first and foremost to contrast it with the usual way the history of philosophy is taught. As a general rule, you can complete a philosophy course without ever having read anything by Avicenna, Al-­Farabi, Ibn Tufayl or ­Averroes – ­except, of course, if one signs up for a course in ‘Islamic philosophy’. It is good that such a course exists in philosophy departments, but it is worth noting that, in the case of the core curriculum at Columbia, bringing together as part of ‘medieval philosophy’ Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Tufayl and Al-­Ghazali is not merely a way of indicating that, parallel to Western thinking, an Eastern philosophical thinking developed: the message is that these traditions of thought are intertwined. The medievalist philosopher Alain de Libera is completely right to denounce ‘the failure to recognize the role played by thinkers of Islam in the history of philosophy’. He adds that this ignorance ‘provides [. . .] the supporters of a purely Western history of reason with a powerful rhetorical instrument’.4 This lack of knowledge leads one to study the texts of Western philosophers by ‘ignoring’, for example, the fact that some of Thomas Aquinas’s theses had been condemned because they had been declared ‘Averroist’: they bore the mark of the influence of the Muslim philosopher Averroes, whom Saint Thomas called ‘the Commentator’. To counter this ignorance, at Columbia, the study of the texts of Saint Thomas is logically conducted in relation with those of Averroes. The lesson to be learned from the bibliography of this important Columbia course on ‘Western Civilization’ is that this latter, like others, is not a closed geographical reality, but is open and plural. The philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzān by the Andalusian Ibn Tufayl is a constituent element of this, as are the work of another Andalusian, Averroes, and the work of Al-­Ghazali, who was born in Persia and taught in Baghdad. The West includes the East, and the civilization of Islam does not arrive in the West with immigrants and refugees: as is shown by archaeology in Spain, it springs from the very soil of the West. 72

On philosophy in Islam The history of philosophy should not be the history of what was constructed, at a certain point, as the history of philosophy within a ‘West’ that then became narrowly delineated and defined as an exceptional insularity, turning the expression ‘non-­Western philosophy’ into an oxymoron. It is against this discourse that we need to develop a history of philosophy that can be called ‘decolonial’ – that we need, in other words, to decolonize the discipline through another history of what it is, by thinking of it from the standpoint of languages other than European languages. (I refer here to what I have already said about the translatio studiorum and the role played by the Arabic language.) In other words, we need to counter the idea that thinking philosophically is the prerogative of ‘the West’ and that is essentially related to the languages of this region of the world.5 I returned to Senegal in 1982, after studying in France, with the idea of establishing, in the philosophy department of the University Shaykh Anta Diop in Dakar, a good syllabus in mathematical logic as well as in the history and philosophy of science. Shortly after, my colleagues and I thought it necessary to offer our students a course on the history of philosophy in the world of Islam, for two reasons. Firstly, there is the fact that Senegal is a demographically Muslim country (over ninety per cent). So it was obvious that we had to teach the tradition of falsafa (the word stems from the arabization of the Greek philosophia) in what was and still is the only department of philosophy in the country. Secondly, the decision was imposed by the historical circumstances represented by the irruption of political Islam into global geopolitics: it was our duty to point out the richness of a tradition of philosophical scepticism, questioning and rationalism, in short of free thought, that was also constitutive of Islamic civilization. For the best way of responding to the murderous fanaticism that is currently spreading death and desolation in the name of Islam, in Muslim societies first and foremost, is to teach the intellectual and spiritual tradition comprised by this religion. The department therefore entrusted me with the task of creating a course on ‘Islamic philosophy’, which I have gradually turned into a specialty of mine, along with my work in history of philosophy and mathematical logic. The texts I have written in this area constitute, on the one hand, an examination of the translatio studiorum in the world of Islam in general; and, on the other hand, a reminder that ‘African philosophy’ is largely a continuation, in West Africa in particular, of this translatio. 73

On philosophy in Islam

Falsafa in general and the philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal in particular My teaching of falsafa led me to study, of course, the older Muslim philosophers, Al-­Kindi, Al-­Farabi, Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Al-­Ghazali, Ibn Bajjah, Ibn Tufayl, Averroes and others. So as not to confine my teaching to the classical period of falsafa alone, I also taught the modern period, marked by the names of Al-­Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh, but dominated above all by the philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal.6 In my texts about this essential thinker of an Islam of modernity and openness, I especially emphasized what the orientalist Louis Massignon called the ‘affinity’ between his ‘reconstruction of religious thought in Islam’ and the philosophy of Henri Bergson. I will parenthetically remark here that examining the thought of Iqbal in its ‘affinity’ with that of Bergson sometimes irritates people. Khurram Ali Shafique, for example, the author of an ‘illustrated biography of Iqbal’,7 argues that if we say that I­qbal – a­ real icon in Pakistan, but also a figure of nationalism in I­ ndia – ­was able to formulate his philosophy in harmony with that of ‘Western’ philosophers, Bergson in particular, this is an unacceptable exaggeration of the role these latter play in the text of the Reconstruction and other works. We can see the concern that is being expressed here: to reject the idea of Bergson’s influence on the author of the Reconstruction, on the pretext that any mention of this genealogy implies that the central concepts of Iqbal’s thought, his conception of an open, emerging cosmology, and his philosophy of time, of the individual, of the human ego, of a dynamic religion, of a creative humanity, of the mystical, owe more to a ‘Western’ conception of the world than to the Islamic intellectual and spiritual tradition which the work of the Indian philosopher-­poet is attempting to revive. To this desire to detach Iqbal’s thought from any influence other than the ‘tradition’, I have a general and a particular answer. The general answer is that the notion that an approach is decolonial if and only if it has nothing to do with anything European is absurd. Decoloniality cannot be confused with what could be called an epistemological nativism. Thus, to take one example, ‘Négritude’ has also been presented as the daughter of the ‘1889 revolution’, as Senghor called the philosophical ‘moment’ that was instigated by Bergson’s publication of Time and Free Will. The particular answer concerns the ‘Islamic’ character of the central concepts of Iqbal’s philosophy. There is no doubt about this: the ideas 74

On philosophy in Islam where his thought overlaps with that of Bergson are perfectly Islamic, while also being Bergsonian. Among these ideas, there is first and foremost the notion of an open, dynamic, ever-­emerging cosmology. So the starting point for a reconstruction of the religious thought of Islam is, for Muhammad Iqbal, the capacity to grasp the implications of the conception of a world continuously making i­tself – t­he same conception that emerges from the Qur’an, for example, when we consider verses such as these, often quoted by Iqbal: ‘[God] adds to creation as He will’ (sura 35, verse 1), and: ‘Every day [God] attends to some task’ (sura 55, verse 29).8 We are poles apart here from the notion of a completed, finite world: a work to be contemplated. Iqbal’s thinking is evolutionary because it espouses this emerging cosmology found in the Qur’an. That is why his thinking encounters the thinking of Bergson, the author of Creative Evolution. It is important to agree with Iqbal when he insists on cosmology as an open world, an unfinished world. This leads to a philosophy of time perceived as creativity as opposed to the idea that it is a process of becoming and corruption. In other words, against the fundamentalism that expresses its resentment against ‘changing times’ that can only corrode and corrupt the perfection that existed ‘at that time’, the time of the origin (and Salafism is the claim to reproduce exactly that original state), the idea of ‘reconstruction’ is based on the notion of time as realization, achievement, innovation, by remaining faithful to the intention of religion. Iqbal and Bergson also coincide when it comes to the idea of a dynamic religion and an open society. We know that in the last book he published during his lifetime, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson drew a contrast between a closed morality and society and an open morality and society.9 He also insists on the role of the true mystic (who may be a woman, of course), namely the person whose ultimate goal is not to abandon themselves to contemplation but to tap into the élan vital so as to renew and revive society. So the mystic, as a creator of values, will keep society forever ­open – a­ lways eager to reform itself and to welcome difference. It is in the same sense that Iqbal contrasted a mystical idea of extinction, of the loss of self by identification with the great All, with a mysticism of the ego, of the continuous movement towards ever more individuation, of a self-­affirmation and self-­realization in the action of transforming the world. I will make three final remarks. The first brings me back to the notion of the ‘affinity’ between Iqbal and Bergson. Iqbal went on the lecture 75

On philosophy in Islam tour that provided the different chapters of his Reconstruction in the years 1928–9. Bergson, meanwhile, published The Two Sources in 1932. Mere chronology indicates that the influence did not go from Bergson to Iqbal. That is why, at bottom, a term as vague as that of ‘affinity’ used by Massignon is the most suitable to characterize the encounter between these two philosophers. It expresses the fact that it is true to say both that Iqbal’s thinking is fully organized around notions that were developed in the intellectual and spiritual tradition of Islam and also that Iqbal found in the Bergsonian philosophy of the individual, of time and of creative evolution a catalyst and a hermeneutical key.10 My second comment concerns Iqbal’s politics. I have said previously that we do not know what position he would have adopted towards the partition of India. Some people think they know that he was actually responsible for this partition, so he is, in the words of the historian Iqbal Singh Sevea, ‘one of the most controversial figures in the modern history of South Asia’;11 Sevea even adds that different groups have appropriated the statements of a man who never thought of himself as a politician: nationalists, Islamists, progressives, socialists, even part of the Ahmadiyya community, as well as the two states of Pakistan and India. Apart from these recuperations, Iqbal constantly refused to fall into the trap of singing the praises of ‘the race and the tribe’, something he denounced: his message was that of a continual humanization of the earth, and this led Léopold Sédar Senghor to see in him a Muslim Teilhard de Chardin. This brings me to my third and final remark. It concerns the need we have today for a politics of our shared humanity against widespread tribalism and ethno-­nationalism (especially in the face of the unprecedented migration crisis that we have experienced since the Second World War). What Bergson and Iqbal remind us is that, if religions can certainly be instrumentalized and serve various forms of identity-­based fanaticism, they also go beyond tribal instinct to combine with philosophical reason and pave the way for the idea of humanity that Jaurès identified with socialism. I read with pleasure in Le Monde of 14 November 2017 that teachers have taken the initiative, at the Georges Brassens school in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris, of giving a course with the simple name humanity. In the singular.

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On philosophy in Islam

Islam: the West African heritage In his work Islams africains: la préférence soufie (African Islams: The Sufi Preference), Amselle re-­examines the concept of ‘Black Islam’, which he sees as a colonial category whose purpose was to differentiate that variety as specifically ‘Negro-­African’, as opposed to Arab Islam. And he indicates that this primitivist colonial construction is still being put to work: this was the case especially after the jihadist offensive in Mali in 2013, where we heard that ‘radical Islamism’, which can give rise to the exclusive interpretations of Salafists and Wahhabis, is the complete opposite of the tradition of a ‘moderate’ and ‘tolerant’ West African Islam. In general, Amselle expresses the greatest scepticism, to say the least, about the idea that there is a West African Islam with a pacifist tradition, one which manifests the pluralistic and tolerant metaphysics of Sufism. The very first words of his Islams africains sweep away this idea: ‘The general idea of this book,’ he announces, ‘is to show that the preference given to Sufi Islam in its African, i.e. “Black,” variant is only the new avatar of primitivism in the age of jihadist terrorism.’12 I would like to say in what sense we can speak of a West African Islam (which, however, in no way contradicts, as we shall s­ ee – ­and I have elsewhere supported this v­ iew – t­he idea that Islam is a unity and that West Africa is plural). West African Islam is for the most part the product of a pacifist tradition (though, as everyone knows, this region has experienced the violence of jihad: I will come back to this) and owes to the prominence of Sufism the tolerant and open character that it usually demonstrates. Thus, to the claim that the Sufi preference is a resumption of the colonial category of Black Islam, my answer is that this does not invalidate its peculiar character. Once we have noted that colonial anthropology has described West African Islam, Sufi in its essential features, as open to pacifism and tolerance, we simply have to ask, ‘How true is this?’ And an answer to this question involves asking these related questions: 1 What is Sufism, and what makes this face of Islam the face of tolerance and pluralism? 2 What have West African writers themselves had to say about all this? (These are the writers whom Ousmane Oumar Kane called ‘non-­Europhone intellectuals’, i.e. African Muslim scholars who wrote in Arabic or used Arabic characters to write in languages such as Pulaar, Hausa, Wolof, Soninke, etc.13) 77

On philosophy in Islam After all, it is impossible to decide, as Amselle does here, on the place and role of Sufism in Islam in general, and in the West African Islam that interests us more particularly, based merely on meta-­epistemological questions, discussing the origin of this or that category and invalidating on principle this or that statement by dismissing it as primitivist or essentialist. We must first examine what Sufism is and what West African writers themselves say about it. This is what it really means to decolonize what has been constructed as an ethnological knowledge about ‘Black Islam’. It is worth noting here, as Amselle quite rightly does, that the image of a colonial ethnology ignorant of Islam and indifferent to what Muslim scholars themselves have written comes up against several counter-­examples: colonial administrators like Delafosse, Africanists but also orientalists, that is, connoisseurs of Islam and Arabic, did in fact pay attention to the tradition of West African Islamic scholarship. Before focusing on West Africa, we need to begin by examining the history of Islam in Africa in general, so as to avoid setting the region apart and enclosing it in some irreducible specificity. Islam in Africa is the story of a first encounter placed under the aegis of human and Abrahamic fraternity. It is also the story of a slow penetration of the continent which subsequently accelerated, from  the edges of the desert to the west and centre, and from the shores of the Indian Ocean into East Africa. It is, finally, a tradition of scholarship and teaching, an intellectual and spiritual history that gave the Muslim religion in Africa, for the most part, a face of pacifism, pluralism and tolerance. Islam started to enter Africa in the very early years of the religion, which, we may estimate, began to be publicly preached by the prophet Muhammad in 610. The history of the beginnings of Islam has established that the first to declare themselves Muslims after the Prophet proclaimed his mission suffered persecution and aggression by the Meccans settled in their ancestral religion, one which rested in particular on an annual pilgrimage to their city by Arabs who came from everywhere to revere the Kaaba and worship the idols with which it was surrounded. The Meccans, especially the more powerful of them, that is to say, the notables from the more powerful tribes, were all the more attached to their traditional religion in that it contributed to the glory and the wealth of their city and of themselves. So they needed to eradicate as quickly as possible the community that had begun to form around the message of Muhammad and proclaiming the one God. While eminent personalities who, like the Prophet himself, came from influential tribes had declared their faith in this message, 78

On philosophy in Islam it was a message that, as was to be expected, mainly attracted the disinherited, for whom it represented the promise of a new world, where justice would replace tribal law: these included slaves, foreign residents and those who were not protected by the small and weak tribes to which they belonged. These people could be subjected to the worst tortures, like those experienced by the most famous of those who were first persecuted for Islam, Bilal, the Abyssinian slave who was freed and would become one of the closest companions of the Prophet. When the situation made it necessary to shelter those who were the most exposed to abuse, the messenger of Islam, so the story goes, asked them to take refuge in the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. This first Muslim emigration, this first Hegira, took place in the year 615 (seven years before the one that made Medina the first Muslim city), marking the first contact of the new religion with the African continent to be recorded in history. It is important to remember today, given the times we live in, when the competition between the two monotheistic faiths in Africa is in some places taking a violent form, that the first meeting of Islam with Africa occurred under the sign of hospitality towards the other, of tolerance and pluralism. Abyssinia was the refuge that the Prophet had envisaged, because he had counted on the fact that a Christian ruler would protect Muslim refugees in the name of humanity and in the name of Abrahamic fraternity marked by belief in one God. It was then in a conquering, warlike form that Islam came to Africa. History pinpoints the year 639, under the caliphate of Omar (634–44), with the conquest of Egypt by Amr ibn al-’As. In 645, the latter founded the citadel city of Fustat (which was to become Cairo in 969), where the first mosque to be built in Africa was erected. It was during the Umayyad dynasty (661–750), based in Damascus, that the process of Islamization in North Africa spread from east to west. Thus, in 666, Uqba ibn Nafi, an Arab general who was the nephew of Amr ibn al-’As, received from the caliph Muawiya the order to move west against the Byzantine forces in Cyrenaica. In 670, the troops commanded by Uqba ibn Nafi founded along the way the city of Kairouan, which became the capital of the province called ­Ifriqiya – ­after its Latin name Africa used under the Roman Empire –, covering the west of present-­day Libya as well as the regions of what today constitutes Tunisia and eastern Algeria. This advance was briefly curbed when in 683 Uqba ibn Nafi was killed by the military leader Kusayla, who had assumed leadership of the Berber resistance to the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb. This conquest was soon resumed and was 79

On philosophy in Islam completed for the most part in North Africa by 711; it then continued in the Iberian Peninsula. During the reign of the Abbasid caliphs (from 751 to 1258, the date of the capture of Baghdad by the Mongols) based in the new capital, Baghdad, the Umayyad branch that, in Andalusia, survived the destruction of this dynasty created the caliphate of Córdoba, while in present-­day Morocco, Idris founded the Idrisid dynasty. His successor, Idris II, built the city of Fez, which would play an important role as an intellectual centre for African Islam in general, north and south of the Sahara. In East Africa, the Islamization of Egypt had started in the seventh century and continued down the Nile Valley to the kingdoms of Nubia. So in general, Islamization in East Africa followed the routes of oceanic trade as on the African coasts of the Indian Ocean there were trading posts that had centuries-­old economic and socio-­cultural links with the Arabian Peninsula and the countries of the Persian Gulf. It was through the Afro-­Arab-­Persian populations settled in these trading posts that Islam was established on the continent as early as the eighth century, with the foundation of new coastal towns called ‘Swahili’, from the name of the commercial lingua franca that was formed by the hybridization between the Bantu languages of the region and Arabic. The word itself comes from the Arabic sahel, meaning ‘coast’; so the word ‘Swahili’ refers not just to the language but also to this coastal culture of a diverse population where different components of the plural world of Islam in the Indian Ocean were represented: Ibadites (also found in North Africa), Zaydis, Ismailis, Twelver Shias, Sunnis, and so on. The coastal nature of African Islam and the fact that Muslim traders, often from the other side of the ocean, massively engaged in the slave trade explain why this religion has long been perceived as foreign by the people living in the interior of the continent. And yet, this oriental ‘Sahel’ gradually moved inland. The process of penetration went through an accelerated phase in the nineteenth century, when the Sultan of Oman, Sayyid Said (1790–1856), decided in 1840 to transfer his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar, becoming the first Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar. Said’s goal was control and development of the slave trade. His ambition of unifying Swahili cities, however, came up against European imperial policies, including those of Germany and Britain. Real progress in Islamization, from the coast to the interior, was the result of the Sufi fraternities: networks of the different mystical orders, such as the Qadiriyya, the Rifa’iyya and the Shadhiliyya, as well as the Alawiyya, proved much more 80

On philosophy in Islam effective than any politico-­military actions in spreading Islam and its appropriation by different populations. Islamization in West Africa south of the Sahara, which, it must be remembered, is still ongoing, has also been characterized by a slow and then more rapid progression from the Sahel to the south (here ‘sahel’ means the ‘coast’ south of the Sahara). As early as the eighth century, Islam began to spread in West Africa along the lines of trans-­Saharan trade that existed long before the birth of the Muslim religion, connecting that region with the Mediterranean. Indeed, the Sahara has never been a barrier between the worlds of North Africa and the sub-­Sahara; it has always been a space of exchanges traversed by goods and persons, free or enslaved. The presence of Islam in the Senegal River Valley was already long established when, at the beginning of the eleventh century, King War Jabi of Takrur, formerly a province of the Ghana Empire, became the first ruler to convert to Islam. Until then, sovereigns more often protected their states and traditional religions against Muslims who lived communally in what amounted to enclaves: so, for example, the kings of Ghana kept at bay, far from the centres of power, Muslim merchants, even if they benefited greatly from trade with them. After his conversion, War Jabi sought to impose on his subjects his new religion and his legislation. At his death, in 1040, Takrur had become largely an Islamic land. In the same way, the great West African empires that succeeded Ghana, namely Mali, founded in the thirteenth century, and Songhay, which dominated the region in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (until its destruction in 1591 by the Moroccan sultan), were led by Muslim rulers, and Islam played a vital role in their development. One of the events that marked the climax of the empire of Mali in the fourteenth century was the pilgrimage to Mecca carried out in 1324 by Emperor Kankan Musa; he was accompanied by an important suite and carrying such a quantity of gold that, when the Malians stayed in Egypt for some time, the price of gold there fell. As for the Songhay Empire, it was ruled by Askia Muhammad (1492–1528), whose name was associated with the desire to exercise power in accordance with Islamic laws, as well as the consideration he showed towards the Muslim scholars of Songhay. In his Islams africains, Amselle describes the power relations that were at stake in the support that Askia Muhammad received from those scholars of the empire, but also from those from North Africa. And he is right on this point, as he is in his description of the role played vis-­à-vis Askia by Al-­Maghili, the lawyer whose repressive 81

On philosophy in Islam policies in the Algerian Touat included the expulsion of the Jews from Tlemcen and the destruction of their synagogue. The historian of West African Islam John Hunwick calls him a Torquemada,14 a comparison repeated by Amselle. He left celebrated ‘responses’ to the Songhay ruler regarding the requirements of an ‘Islamic’ government of his empire. They can be summed up as the injunction to the sovereign to apply the most rigorist reading of the sharia and to fight the ‘pagans’ as well as those whose inclination to accommodation made them no more than ‘lukewarm’ Muslims. Askia, as we know, launched jihads that would be repeated in the nineteenth century in the region. However, we should avoid projecting back onto West African Islam the current obsession with jihad. This is a legitimate obsession for us because of the sound and fury associated with religion in the contemporary world. Nevertheless, it is useful to recall in this respect that the Islamization of West Africa is less due to the action of states and empires than to learned traders. The process did not take place in outbreaks of violence, but followed the trade routes that carried the message of the religion everywhere, and ever more especially to the south. Some ethnic groups, traditionally traders, made a particular name for themselves in the history of this slow expansion of Islam: next to the Dioula, the Jakhanke can rightly be considered the great propagators of the Muslim religion in West Africa. The nineteenth century also witnessed an acceleration in the movement. This period was marked by two armed jihads, the first led in 1804 by Usman dan Fodio (1754–1817) in the region of present-­day Nigeria and Cameroon, and the second waged in the middle of the ­century – f­ rom 1852 to 1 ­ 864 – ­in present-­day Mali by Shaykh El Hadj Omar Tall (1797–1864). In the previous century, Muslim l­eaders had also fought traditional rulers; essentially, they were rebelling against the bloody fall-­out suffered by local populations owing to the role their leaders had played in the slave trade established by the European states.15 So, in 1776, the revolution in Fouta, the region of the Senegal Valley, that replaced the traditional Denianke dynasty by a regime of alma-miyya (imamat) initially took an anti-­slavery line, whose historical importance is worth emphasizing. The acceleration of the process of Islamization was also, paradoxically, a consequence of European colonization. The destruction of traditional kingdoms and the setting up of the infrastructure of a colonial administration helped Islam to spread more quickly, after making only slow progress for several centuries. The main players in this phase were the leaders of Sufi confraternities, who throughout 82

On philosophy in Islam this period demonstrated to the full their capacity to attract the local populations and to oppose the negativity of colonialism with the strength of resistance of a self-­assured Muslim identity. The important question now is this: does the history of the Islamization of Africa in general, and of Sudan in particular, give content and meaning to the concept of a ‘West African Muslim heritage’ comprising a tolerant, peaceful and even pacifist Islam? The two main reasons for answering ‘yes’ are, first, what I said about the significance of the mission of Islamization undertaken by the Jakhanke, and, second, the place and meaning of Sufism in the constitution of this heritage. It is important to highlight, as does Lamin Sanneh, the role played in the Islamization of West Africa by Jakhanke ‘missionaries’. The book he has recently published, Beyond Jihad,16 sheds light on the patient work of West African scholars in spreading the Muslim religion by developing a strong tradition of written scholarship (with respect to Africa, this tautology proves necessary) in Islamic disciplines. If these scholars, these ulema as they are called in Islam, led the mission of Islamization that they had assumed through the peaceful means of education, this was because they had adopted a pacifist philosophy, out of a conviction that religious faith is not based on constraint, according to their interpretation of a Qur’anic verse (sura 2, verse 256: ‘There is no compulsion in religion: true guidance has become distinct from error’). Because it is consent to God, faith cannot be found in the sound and the fury of jihads, which ultimately accomplish little and often transform an initial religious enthusiasm into an appetite for power and domination. Lamin Sanneh’s book explains how this reasoned pacifist conviction gave West African Islam its character: it went hand in hand with a great tolerance towards local pre-­Islamic customs, despite the rigorists of the Maliki school of jurisprudence, which was the one adopted in the region. Sanneh quotes probably the most famous scholar of Timbuktu, Ahmed Baba (1556–1627), declaring that the people of Sudan ‘accepted Islam without being conquered by anybody’.17 Of course, we must take full account of the armed jihads that took place. And we must remember, as does Sanneh, that ulema may have been tempted to subject ‘pagans’ to Islamic law and to fight those who were considered ‘enemies of the faith’ or were considered too accommodating in the face of non-­Islamic ways of doing things, and that they actually transformed themselves into warlords ad majorem Dei gloriam. The fact remains, however, that, viewed over the long 83

On philosophy in Islam duration, the history of Islamization in West Africa was essentially the product of the so-­called ‘Suwarian’ tradition (after Al-­Hadj Salim Suwari, an almost mythical figure whom the Jakhanke claim as an ancestor). This tradition considers that the development of Islam in Sudan needed to rely on a force far more efficient than the violence of jihads. This force is time; and it also involves teaching and study. The history of the teaching of Islamic disciplines and erudition, an essential aspect of West Africa’s intellectual history, has long been ignored. Amselle is one of the writers in France to have criticized an ‘Africanist’ approach that began with de-­historicizing and de-­Islamizing its object; this approach thought it could explain the African ‘worldview’ by assuming that it has always remained identical to itself, since history, especially that of Islamization, changed nothing fundamentally. At present, we are witnessing the rise of what Ousmane Kane proposed to call Timbuktu studies,18 in other words, the history of scholarship in West Africa. Much research produced in situ testifies to the intellectual importance of the city of Timbuktu (even if it is regrettable that it was the jihadist invasion that the city suffered which attracted the world’s attention to its manuscripts) and of many other centres of education in Nigeria, Mauritania, Guinea, Senegal, and so on. As for Sufism and the way it contributes to giving West African Islam its characteristic features, with the Suwarian tradition I have already mentioned, we need to tackle both of the following questions: 1 What makes it possible to say that Sufism favours pluralism, tolerance and therefore pacifism, even though we know that many Sufi leaders fought battles with weapons in hand? 2 If we ‘play the Sufi preference’ today against Salafism, do we not risk endorsing the simplistic colonial category of ‘Black Islam’? Anyone who sets out to give a presentation of Sufism starts quite justifiably by pointing out that it is impossible to give one definition, just as no one is justified in asserting that the way of thinking and living that could be characterized as ‘Sufism’ is the authentic Muslim way of thinking and living. Nevertheless, there is indeed a Sufi perspective in Islam; its particular emphasis lies on the notion that the human being is not a state but a task, that of overcoming separation from God, which is a separation from oneself: it is about (once more) becoming complete and whole. The purpose of the human is the perfect human being, the Homo perfectus, or insān kāmil in Arabic. 84

On philosophy in Islam So at the heart of Sufi anthropology is a verse from the Qur’an, verse 172 of sura 7, where it says that all the souls that were to be born were, in the eternity before time, convened before God, who asked them, ‘Am I not your Lord?’ All of them replied: ‘Yes, we bear witness!’, thereby expressing an acquiescence/consent which constituted their very being and their truth. For a human, to return to this first state of completeness is to regain that state of consent in what Sufi literature calls ‘the day of “am I not?”’ For, when the souls who had said ‘yes’ thereby became bodies and entered this world, they forgot themselves, as it were. And their task is to remember, to recognize this call that remains written in them, the trace of their initial consent, which is love, desire to regain unity, to rediscover their completeness. What I called the Sufi perspective consists in recognizing that, behind the diverse and varied forms of belief in which human beings seek their humanity, there stands one desire, always the same, the desire in which that first consent persists. This cosmic love that leaves nothing outside itself (including negation) is the foundation of the pluralism and tolerance that constitute the Sufi perspective. Thus Ahmed Tijani (1737–1815), the founder of the Sufi brotherhood of the Tijaniyya, probably the most widespread in West Africa, declared that God also loves infidels. Why, then, did a leader of this same Tijaniyya such as El Hadj Omar Tall, who wrote the most penetrating commentary on the teaching of his spiritual master (including the latter’s views on the universal and unconditional love of God), also fight those he then called infidels? El Hadj Omar had to explain at length in a book discussed by the ulema of his time, and even today, why he launched a jihad, in the sense of ‘war’. I shall not examine his justification for this action here, but note that it was necessary in relation to everything that did indeed oppose this war. What mainly needs to be said, in fact, is that if the very philosophy of Sufism is tolerance, the Sufi is not forbidden to fight when necessary. If we come further north, and closer in time to ourselves, we find the example of Emir Abd el-­Kader, the hero of Algerian resistance to French colonialism. His Spiritual Writings express the quintessence of Sufism, which exalts the religion of love that embraces everything.19 But when the French embarked on the conquest of his country, circumstances meant that he needed to accept his responsibility and the duty to fight, according to the principles of the just war: that is, one that is initially defensive, as defined and codified by Islam, like other religions, Christianity in particular. When he then 85

On philosophy in Islam experienced exile in Syria, the only time his duty again commanded that he adopt a combative posture was when he prevented the Druze from massacring the Syrian Christian community.

The ‘Sufi preference’? No doubt one must be wary of simplistically dividing Muslims up between the ‘good’, non-­ violent Sufis and the Salafists/Wahhabis, who are seen as being on the side of ­violence – ­especially since this vision is based on the stereotype that presents sub-­Saharan African Islam as tolerant because it is imbued with syncretism and threatened from the outside by a purist and closed Middle Eastern version. Against the stereotype, it must be said that West African Islam is in no way different from what we can see in other regions of the Muslim world. Sufism exists throughout that world, and the accommodations that it favours with forms of popular beliefs are found in many Muslim societies. Moreover, with regard to Salafism, the philosophy of this interpretation of Islam is in general quietist and is based on the desire to follow with the most absolute fidelity the tradition as it was first established by the first generation of Muslims. So Salafism is quick to denounce everything that seems to constitute an innovation in relation to this tradition. However, the very idea that there is a tradition that can be found in all its initial purity is exclusivist. It separates Orthodox believers from the ­rest – a­ nd this is the complete opposite of pluralism. It is in this respect that Salafist purism can give birth to fanaticism and violence among its extremists. In these circumstances, it makes sense to counter this potentially murderous exclusivism with a ‘Sufi preference’, that is, a perspective that promotes pluralism. The most eloquent expression of pluralism is found in Tierno Bokar Tall Salif (1875–1939), the Malian master of the Tijaniyya made famous by the biography devoted to him by his disciple Amadou Hampâté Bâ.20 Islam is like the water of a river, he taught: it is always the same and always adopts the colour of the landscapes it crosses. West Africa, in its diversity (and in this respect the region includes Morocco and Algeria), gives a particular hue to its Islamic heritage. ‘In its diversity’ means not only that this heritage is plural, but that it is open.

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10 The political instrumentalization of a West African Sufi Islam Jean-Loup Amselle

The question of the Sufi preference must be set within a broader perspective: indeed, West African Sufi Islam, and more generally Sufi Islam, is a construction that forms part of a contemporary context marked by intense Islamophobia, itself partly associated, albeit completely arbitrarily, with recent ‘jihadist’ or ‘terrorist’ attacks, whose field of action now extends worldwide. After all, Éric Zemmour, the well-­known polemicist, recently stated that, in the particularly bloody attack on a mosque in Sinai, Egypt, that resulted in several hundred victims, the ‘Sufis were the most Christian of Muslims’, implying that they were presentable, ‘civilized’ Muslims, as it were.1 Against the crude, bullish assertions of this journalist, recent serious studies have in fact pointed to the existence of ‘Sufi jihadists’ in this same region.2 In short, these categories of ‘Sufi’, ‘Salafist’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘Wahhabi’, ‘reformist’, ‘radicalized Muslim’, and so on, are only as useful as we want them to be; they only work as markers in the context of essentially political situations. In the words of Fabienne Samson, an anthropologist specializing in the Islams of Senegal and the editor of a special issue of the Cahiers d’études africaines on the theme of ‘Islam beyond categories’: ‘While researchers had established a certain number of categories in which to think of the various Islamic groups which they were dealing with (Sufism, reformism, Wahhabism, Salafism, etc.), they are now facing a terminology that no longer corresponds to reality.’ This is all the more true, I will add, as this terminology (as we shall see later on) has never corresponded to any reality. Samson continues: 87

West African Sufi Islam Conscious of the limits of their specifications, and so that they can follow the evolution of transformations in religions, they now speak of the ‘brotherhood spirit’, of ‘neo-­Sufism’, ‘liberal Islam’, ‘cultural Islam’, ‘confusionist’ Islam, etc. ‘Post-­ Islamism’, ‘post-­ re-­ Islamization’ and ‘neo-­ fundamentalism’ are all so many new formulas which tend to display Islamic dynamism throughout the world. But this plasticity of terms does not account for the complexity of the new shapes being assumed by contemporary Islam.3

There is therefore a slipperiness, a fluidity and a flexibility in the categories used to designate the different kinds of Islams practised according to the variety of historical, social and political situations encountered. What we have here are Sufis influenced by ideas of reform or, conversely, ‘reformists’ taking as their founding hero the leader of a confraternity. Some reform groups are so different from each other that one wonders why we should describe them as such. Some of those currently active in political Islam, in every category, are developing in opposite ways, acting in the same spirit as those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while some Salafists nowadays are often very lukewarm in their radicalism. Religious believers confuse the issue, cross over borders and simplistically yoke together entities that are theoretically problematic. In short, reality is always much more complex than one would expect from the established cartography. In addition, the appearance and use of classifications vary with socio-­ historical contexts, and the labels assume different meanings according to the societies in which they express themselves. They evolve over time and are often exploited by one group which seeks to denigrate another. This is particularly the case for the ‘Wahhabites’, a name of colonial origin that the latter often reject, preferring that of ‘people of the Sunna’. The same is true of the question that concerns us here, that of Sufism, which has nothing specifically radical about it as compared to reformism: its name has sometimes been appropriated by certain believers and has even become an element of their identity or their trademark, as is the case for Cheick Soufi Bilal Diallo in Mali. Subdivisions within Islam are therefore similar to ethnic subdivisions within Africa as a whole: the categories used are onomastic emblems whose only value lies in their performative quality. It is social actors who, through the words they utter, create subgroups whose labels are rejected or accepted by those who themselves lay claim to these labels, or find themselves identified by them.

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West African Sufi Islam

West African Sufi Islam and ‘Black Islam’ Another aspect that I would like to discuss is related to the fact that sub-­Saharan Africa has long been seen as a continent marked by the exclusive domination of witchcraft and magic, by a kind of ‘genius of paganism’ that gives Islam in this region of the world a radically different character from the kind that supposedly prevails in both the Maghreb and the Mashriq, leading to its being defined by colonial writers as a ‘Black Islam’, inextricably intertwining polytheism and Islam.4 So we need to rid ourselves of the idea of a specific sub-­Saharan Islam distinct from Maghrebi or Middle Eastern Islam.5 Sub-­Saharan Islam is seen as unusual in that it bears the traces of its underlying pagan, animist or fetishist layer, described as an ‘old Negro-­African substrate’ , but in fact we find similar phenomena in the Maghreb, for example, where the ‘evil eye’ occupies a place very close to that of witchcraft in sub-­Saharan Islam.6 Sub-­Saharan African Islam is therefore supposed to be a quietist or, in a more recent version, ‘moderate’ Islam, hence the notion of a ‘Black Islam’, especially as developed in the French tradition but also to be found in certain British historians and anthropologists who have studied sub-­Saharan Islam or who have worked on partially Islamized populations. As against this idea, there have in fact been violent forms of Islam, such as the jihads conducted at the turn of the sixteenth century by Askia Muhammad, ruler of Songhay, against the Mossi kingdom, probably on the advice of the Sufi al-­Maghili, who was also behind the persecution of the Jews of Touat, as Diagne recognizes. The influence of al-­Maghili, that Torquemada of the Sahara and the Sahel, can also be seen in the nineteenth-­century jihads, such as those of Usman dan Fodio in the north of present-­day Nigeria and of Al-­Hajj Umar in Senegal and Mali, which were partly directed against Muslims deemed to be unbelievers, or even in the Boko Haram jihad movement currently sowing terror in northern Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad. As for the war of conquest and resistance led against the French in the name of Islam by Almamy Samory Touré at the end of the nineteenth century in a region straddling what is today Mali, Guinea and Ivory Coast, it is very similar to the methods used by contemporary Malian jihadists, particularly with regard to the punishments meted out to thieves. In addition, current Salafist and jihadi movements, whether in Mali or Nigeria, refer permanently to the jihads of the past 89

West African Sufi Islam conducted by Sufis, especially those led against colonial enterprises.7 To take one example among many others, the current Massina Liberation Front, led by the preacher Kouffa, claims to embody the caliphate of Massina, a political formation better known by the name of the Fulani Empire of Massina or dina, founded by Seku Amadou in the early nineteenth century. After having fought long against these Muslim hegemonies and having finally succeeded in destroying them, the French conquerors set up an administration run by cantonal chiefs chosen from outside these political formations: that is to say, recruited if possible from among ‘animist’ leaders of indigenous lands or from among the chiefs of Muslim brotherhoods who had come to terms with the colonial administration. This is the ‘race policy’, itself a product of the ‘Berber policy’ carried out in Algeria, which established an absolute dichotomy between the supposedly ‘democratic’ Berbers, resistant to Islamization, and Arabs seen as ‘despotic’ and ‘fanatical’ Muslims.8 This policy and the idea behind it were applied south of the Sahara, in the nineteenth century, by a whole cohort of colonial-­ethnological administrators such as Faidherbe, Gallieni, Binger, Coppolani, Le Chatelier, Ponty, Marty, Delafosse, Monteil, Brevié, Cardaire and Froelich. Some of these colonial administrators, such as Faidherbe, had in fact started their careers in the ‘Arab Bureaux’ and merely transposed to Senegal methods previously used in Algeria.9 Of these colonial-­ethnological administrators, only Vincent Monteil (1913–2005), son of Charles Monteil, is the exception to the rule. He was an Orientalist and Arabist who, having served as a Meharist officer in Morocco and participated in the Second World War, ended his career in the 1960s as Director of the Institut français d’Afrique noire (French Institute of Black Africa) in Dakar, Senegal. Despite the title he gave to his book L’Islam noir (Black Islam), he was the only person to have insisted on the similarity of the Islams north and south of the Sahara, thus avoiding falling into the colonial tropes of his predecessors.10 Once it had ensured its domination over part of West Africa, the French administration always strove to combat the most radical forms of I­slam – s­uch as the Hamallist Sufi movement, which was a dissident Tijani brotherhood, and ­ Wahhabism – ­ and to favour those deemed the most compatible with the colonial presence, such as the Mourides of Senegal, who, having initially opted for the French presence, then actively collaborated with the colonial administration. In Mali, Amadou Hampâté Bâ belonged to a Sufi brotherhood whose leader, Shaykh Hamallah, after rising up against the colonial 90

West African Sufi Islam power, was imprisoned and deported to France, where he died in 1942. This did not prevent Hampâté Bâ from collaborating, in the 1950s, with colonial administrator Marcel Cardaire as he repressed Wahhabism.11 Indeed, he co-­authored with Cardaire a book about Tierno Bokar, himself a disciple of Shaykh Hamallah, whose thought, presented in a pacified and spiritualized, in other words ‘Sufi’, guise, was able to meet the demands of colonial power. And I would like to know what Diagne makes of this.12 I will add that when I first arrived in Bamako, in 1967, to perform my military service as an anthropologist at the Institut des Sciences Humaines, the director of this institute was none other than Hampâté Bâ himself. At the time, the socialist Mali of Modibo Keita was going through a period of political effervescence defined as the ‘Active Revolution’, and I was greatly surprised, one day when I visited him at his home, to see Hampâté Bâ launching into a vibrant eulogy of French colonization, a eulogy doubtless containing an implicit criticism of the socialist regime of that time. And shortly after, Hampâté Bâ, who was being harassed by the Malian government as the official for the ownership of private taxis, left for Ivory Coast, where he was welcomed with open arms by President Félix Houphouët-­Boigny, no doubt more open than his Malian socialist colleague Keita to private initiative. All this to say that ‘Sufism’, as far as this trend can be defined in a purely isolated way, cannot be appreciated outside a political context that gives it meaning. And it is within this framework that I feel I need to analyse the preference currently given to Sufism in West Africa by the various authorities responsible for this part of the continent. The occupation of Timbuktu by the jihadists in 2012 gave rise to a kind of martyrology not just in relation to human beings, even if the application of sharia law and its ­punishments – ­cutting off thieves’ hands, for e­ xample – w ­ as highlighted, but also in relation to mausoleums, mosques and celebrated manuscripts, which thus became, so to speak, the new national fetishes of Mali. The destruction of sanctuaries and written documents gave rise to an intense pathos skilfully exploited by all t­hose – M ­ alians, foreigners, international ­organizations – w ­ ho felt they were the guardians of those ‘Treasures of Islam in Africa’, as the title of a recent exhibition on African Islams put it, for the obvious purpose of emphasizing the open, tolerant and peaceful role of Sufism in the face of a Salafist, Wahhabi, Islam, the vector of jihadism and terrorism.13 Now, we must bear in mind, without excusing in any way the abuses committed by these jihadists, that while these mausoleums of saints were destroyed, it is also because they symbolized the veneration of ancestors of certain 91

West African Sufi Islam patrician families; their demolition therefore also had a symbolic and social meaning, that of putting an end to the domination that a certain elite exercised and still exercises on this city. Moreover, ever since UNESCO took over their restoration, the population has lost interest and is no longer helping to rebuild them.14 More broadly, it would be appropriate to condemn, for the same reason as these abuses, albeit retrospectively, the campaigns of destruction of fetishes (boli) and other objects of ‘animist’ worship, such as that pursued in the 1980s by the Sufi Shaykh Modibo Kane of Dilly in the Bambara villages of Bélédougou in Mali.15 How can we protest against the amputations of thieves’ hands if we do not compare and contrast this practice with the paedophilia that certain marabouts (mori) exercise against their Qur’anic students (garibou)? This is a clear example of ‘double standards’, which implies yet again that we need to relativize the contrast between a Sufi Islam that is lauded to the skies and a radical Islam that is pilloried. It is in this context marked by the various insurrections that are currently affecting Mali that we need to assess the deployment of the different kinds of Islams to be found there. At first glance, not only the properly religious domain but also the political field (since religious leaders have been active in this sector for ten years) are the site of a clash between an Islam labelled Sufi and an Islam defined as Wahhabi. These two camps are represented by two emblematic characters: on the one hand, Chérif Ousmane Madani Haïdara, head of the Ançar Dine brotherhood, and, on the other hand, Mahmoud Dicko, President of the High Islamic Council of Mali, a man who is usually considered as Wahhabi. Officially, they are poles apart: while the first is revered as a saint, exercising a charismatic power over many thousands of faithful both in Mali and abroad, the other is seen as a fierce enemy of the cult of the saints, of everything that stands between the faithful and Allah, and more generally of everything that can be considered as innovation (bidaa) – for example, the celebration of Maouloud (the Prophet’s birthday) –, mixture (shirk) and what comes from the ‘age of ignorance’, the age preceding the arrival of Islam (jahiliyya). Yet while Chérif Ousmane Madani Haïdara and his Ançar Dine brotherhood actually display certain traits regarded as ‘reformist’, such as the obligation to swear an oath directly to Allah (ba’ya), Mahmoud Dicko, supposedly intolerant towards all innovations in dogma and towards polytheistic survivals, is actually very open to these practices. This is how in a nationalist political perspective, aimed at getting the majority of Malians to back him, he calls for the 92

West African Sufi Islam Muslim reappropriation of all pagan practices, such as female genital mutilation, early marriages and ‘joking relationships’, which are an old type of pact binding together certain clans and permitting in particular the transgression of rules governing the relationship between junior members of different clans. Similarly, unlike the jihadists who have occupied the north-­east of Mali, Dicko is hostile to the interpretation of sharia law stipulating that thieves’ hands be cut off and a supporter of what might be called, in another context, ‘reasonable accommodations’ with polytheism. Indeed, when anyone refers to the allegedly peaceful character of Sufis in his presence, he simply smiles. The international press and foreign powers that have intervened in Mali criticize Dicko harshly because, even if he is a quietist Wahhabi, he is viewed as a dangerous element owing to the links he maintains with the jihadists and the inflammatory statements he made after the attack in 2014 on the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, an attack which he saw as a divine punishment intended to chastise homo­sexuals. It is certain that his homophobia, his defence of female genital mutilation and early marriage do not favour his popularity with the international organizations, NGOs and feminist associations that defend such human rights in the region. It is appropriate, however, in my opinion to consider these postures and declarations for what they are, namely markers intended to establish specific positions inside the arena of Malian politics, especially as opposed to an elite that is ‘secular’ or viewed as such. Conversely, Chérif Ousmane Madani Haïdara is the darling of the Western powers, who see him as the best antidote to the spread of Salafism, Wahhabism and jihadism. Benefiting from all the attentions of power, he is received in great pomp at the French Embassy.16 Haïdara and his associates all gathered in the ‘Group of Religious Leaders’, a rival organization to the High Islamic Council of Mali chaired by Mahmoud Dicko, were instrumental in setting up the branch of the training course for ‘deradicalized’ imams at the Institute Mohammed VI of Rabat in Morocco, which also includes, among the members of its superior council, Mahmoud Zuber, former director of the Ahmed Baba Centre in Timbuktu. Indeed, in much of West Africa, with the exception of Senegal, where for decades powerful brotherhoods like the Mourides or the Tijanes have held sway, the local Sufi form of Islam is no longer deemed sufficiently powerful to resist the thrust of radical Islam, whether quietist or violent. That is why the powers which exercise their tutelage over this part of Africa, France and Morocco in particular, with the latter country itself relying on Sufism to counter the 93

West African Sufi Islam Islamists, have decided to curb the rise of these forms of Islam by putting in place training courses for a Maliki Islam of the ‘golden mean’. They hope that these ­imams – ­men or women – will, once they have returned to their country, provide an effective bulwark to the expansion of radical Islam. Sufi Islam in West Africa, an Islam seen as peaceful and tolerant, and in this respect the heir of the colonial category of ‘Black Islam’, was once ‘sold’ as such in Morocco, for example by ‘sub-­Saharan’ African singers such as the Senegalese Youssou N’Dour. By a strange reversal, it now appears as needing to be regenerated and to benefit from the support of countries to which it was formerly exported. In general, if the sub-­Saharan part of West Africa has been able in the past to form a kind of brand of Sufism, especially because of the social, religious and political weight represented by the different brotherhoods in Senegal, it seems that the fate of this trend of Islam is now largely being played out outside the continent of Africa as a whole, as Éric Geoffroy, a specialist in Sufism and a Sufi himself, puts it.17 And this is true because Sufism has become a widely globalized cultural ‘product’, although it is still partly promoted by West Africans from the ‘diaspora’, notably academics in the United States. This globalized Sufism has in fact been adopted for decades by a few converts like Michel Chodkiewicz, mentioned by Diagne, and Éric Geoffroy, to whom we have just referred; it is also represented by scholars specialized in Islamic philosophy, such as Christian Jambet, a disciple of Henry Corbin, and by promoters of Sufism, if not Sufis themselves, such as Abdelwahab Meddeb, Malek Chebel and Abdennour Bidar. Bidar has recently joined the Council of Wise Men of the Laity, constituted by the French Minister of National Education, doubtless to counter radical Islam. Perhaps we should add to this list the name of Michel Foucault, close to Henry Corbin, who was initially an admirer of the ‘political spirituality’ of the 1978 Iranian Revolution, before moving away from it when it turned out that Khomeini was using this spirituality to prop up his power.18 It is in this context that we must situate the globalized Sufism that is showing new aspects, such as the reference to ecology, organic food, antispeciesism and the connection with the universe.19 This reinterpreted Sufism fully suits a New Age spirituality whose different components can be endlessly mixed and appropriated in many different ways, on all continents. As such, African Sufism north or south of the Sahara cannot be conceived as the resurgence of an age-­old tradition carrying with it all its animistic, fetishist or pagan ingredients, as so-­called ‘traditional’ African systems of thought are 94

West African Sufi Islam habitually called.20 In Africa and elsewhere, it is only as a contemporary intellectual configuration that Sufism can be made and used against this other contemporary configuration cobbled together and labelled ‘radical Islam’ in all its varieties (Wahhabism, Salafism). So what we have here is not in any way a confrontation between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ within Islam or ‘African’ Islams, but rather a clash between two modernities constructed on an ad hoc basis, modernities that are not specifically ‘African’, but quite simply, so to speak, ‘global’.

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11 West African Sufism revisited Souleymane Bachir Diagne

When Jean-­Loup Amselle and I talk about Sufism in West Africa, we follow two lines that I will describe as parallel, because in fact our words do not meet at a single point that could then betoken agreement or disagreement. For example, when Amselle says that Sufism ‘cannot be appreciated outside a political context that gives it meaning’ or that the thinking of Tierno Bokar, the master of Amadou Hampâté Bâ, was ‘pacified and spiritualized’ in a way which could satisfy the demands of the relevant colonial administration, Sufism is ultimately being presented as an ‘invention’ of colonialism in the sense that Edward Said analysed the Orient as an invention of the West, or that Valentin Mudimbe spoke of an ‘invention of Africa’. It is surely undeniable that Marcel Cardaire conducted his examination of Islam in West Africa with the focus and interest bearing on the question of the ‘governmentality’ of Muslims under colonial administration. (Even before Foucault, Nietzsche had said that ­interest – p ­ olitical i­nterest – l­ies at the heart of knowledge.) But have we understood everything about Tierno Bokar and Amadou Hampâté Bâ when we have observed that their ‘Sufi Islam’ was to the taste of Théodore Monod or Marcel Cardaire? I think that rather than obsessing over the agenda of the colonial administration and its desiderata concerning ‘good Islam’, we need to pay attention to how West African Shaykhs fit into a tradition that stretches back for over a millennium, as well as to the texts and to the teachings they produce. Does anyone believe that Tierno Bokar taught why we can say that God loves ‘the infidel’ too, or that Hampâté Bâ reported this story in the biography he devoted to his master, while thinking what the colonial administrator or researcher would say? 96

West African Sufism revisited I myself start out from two premises: firstly, Sufism, far from having come into being with colonization, is, on the contrary, the name of an intellectual tradition (a metaphysics) and a spiritual tradition (a way) that exists in writings (treatises, poems, remarks and ‘biographies’ reported for the purpose of edification, etc.) and which is as old as the Muslim religion itself; secondly, masters such as Tierno Bokar and others rethink this tradition in accordance with the conditions of their time. I will not say that the colonist is the least of their worries (since the colonist, himself, worries about them); but ultimately, when they talk about Islam and Sufism, he is not the person they are addressing: they speak to those who are the beneficiaries of their teaching, the direct descendants of the line from which they spring. No doubt Tierno Bokar’s remark about God’s universal love, including for the ‘infidel’, can reassure the colonist or even make him happy, but we need to realize that he is here talking up, for the sake of his disciples, an idea that he finds in the founding book of the Tijaniyya brotherhood to which he belongs, the Jawāhir al-Ma’ni (Pearls of Meanings). Similarly, the figure of the colonist is not in the mind of the founder of the Mouride brotherhood, Amadou Bamba, when he writes for Muslims the long didactic poem where he presents the age-­ old spiritual tradition he is reviving, the Masālik al-Jinān (Itineraries of Paradise). The category of ‘invention’ is most certainly an essential tool for the analysis and deconstruction of epistemological colonialism. But we must avoid concluding from this that, when the colonized speaks, it is the colonizer who, without his knowledge, or perhaps with his consent, is speaking within him; and that when he speaks it is to address the settler. That’s why, in the examination of Sufism in West Africa, we must start out from what the Sufis themselves write and ­teach – ­for this, yet again, is in dialogue with a tradition that has nothing to do with colonialism. We can even hypothesize that it is the metaphysics of Sufism that dictates to them their attitude to the colonial situation and, in general, their responses (variable, as has been said) to the mistrust, even the hostility, of an administration obsessed by the possibility of jihad. Sufism constantly reinvents itself as life itself moves on. And Amselle is right to point out, so as to question them, the ever-­increasing number of names such as ‘neo-­ Sufism’, ‘neo-­ confraternity’ movements, and so on. It is also true that, these days, the member of a brotherhood will happily call himself a ‘Sufi’, whereas only a short time ago he would simply have referred to the brotherhood to which 97

West African Sufism revisited he belonged, presenting himself as a qadir or tijānī, for example. That this way of designating oneself as a ‘Sufi’ expresses a willingness to distinguish one’s way of living and practising Islam from the one associated with the intolerance and the excommunicative fanaticism that attacked the Sufi mosque in Sinai is indeed a new fact, one which owes a great deal to the circumstances we live in today. This does not mean, in my view, that Sufism has become a form of New Age spirituality where people read Rūmī’s poetry while meditatively strumming a guitar. Tradition, that is, what is worthy of being transmitted, continues to live by being continually reinvigorated. Sufi, as the adage puts it, is ‘the son of the moment’, of the time one lives in. Finally, I will mention the importance for the history of philosophy in Africa of the intellectual and spiritual significance of the Islamization of certain regions of the continent. Indeed, the discussion of the existence or non-­existence of African philosophy, which has led to the spilling of a great deal of ink, has mainly been conducted in a sometimes wilful ignorance of the intellectual consequences of this Islamization. The Timbuktu studies I mentioned earlier remind us that philosophical texts have been read, commented upon, studied, taught and written in many centres of learning such as Timbuktu and Djenné, Mali, Coki, Senegal, Tichitt, Mauritania, and so on. This literature remains to be rediscovered, published and translated, since manuscripts, those of Timbuktu and elsewhere, need to cease being mere topics of conversation; they should be printed and put into circulation. This literature teaches us to see the history of philosophy in Africa as part of the history of philosophy in the Islamic world in general. For the intellectual history of West Africa can be understood only in relation to that of the whole Muslim world, with the Sahara no longer being considered as a separation between a sub-­Saharan African world and a world of the north open to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In this sense, the question of philosophy in Africa is linked to the question of what Africa itself is. It is on this question, now newly topical at a time when the pan-­Africanist ideal has been revived, that I would like to conclude our conversation and our ‘quest for Africa’ (an Africa that, for my part, I write in the ­singular – ­we shall see why).

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12 Thinking/creating Africa Souleymane Bachir Diagne

I wrote that the question ‘What is Africa?’ was, for the discussion of the notion of ‘African philosophy’, at least as important as the question ‘What is philosophy?’1 This discussion indeed changes everything if we remember that the Sahara does not constitute a separation between two worlds, the ‘Arab-­Berber’ world north of the desert and the ‘Black’ world in the south, but an area of commerce that people, goods and ideas have always crossed. So African philosophy will also be an aspect of Islamic philosophy in general, as it was taught in intellectual centres such as Timbuktu, where classical logic (essentially Aristotelian) was taught and commented on, for example through the study of the manual used in all schools in West Africa, The Ornamented Ladder into the Science of Logic by the scholar Kabīlāt Al-­Akhdariyah (1512–75). More generally, beyond the questioning of the division between supra- and sub-­Saharan worlds, can we accept ‘a concept of Africa’?2 For a long time, colonial discourse (in the writings of Western anthropologists, but also in African writers) spoke of ‘Africa’ or ‘the African’, postulating an Africanity everywhere and always self-­ identical. Such a remark is often countered by noting that ‘Africa is not a country’; and sometimes it is necessary to repeat this, insistently, in particular when faced with journalists who are not interested in accuracy when it comes to the ‘Black Continent’ and the misfortunes that are natural to it, and who talk without more precision of the Ebola epidemic in ‘Africa’, thereby obliging the parents of African pupils enrolled in American schools to explain that Kenya is not Liberia. There is an equally big risk of passing from thoughtless generalizations on ‘Africa’ to a ‘semi-­astute’ posture, as I would call it, 99

Thinking/creating Africa borrowing the expression from Blaise Pascal. For the latter, the truly ‘astute’ (‘habile’) person is one who, while fully understanding, for example, that power derives its prestige and its efficiency solely from its appearance, still consents to bow down before it while still holding it in no great esteem, keeping what Pascal calls a ‘mental reservation’ or ‘a thought at the back of his mind’ (‘une pensée de derrière’). On the other hand, the semi-­astute, in the same situation, will waste time and energy in useless questions and unnecessary revolts, as if any power could exist that did not owe anything to its appearance, an ‘authentic’ power which would maintain itself by coming forth naked. Likewise, here, the semi-­astute will forbid himself from speaking of Africa: because Africa is not a country, he will come to the conclusion that there is no Africa and that it is better to speak of Africas in the plural, if we are to name the realities of the continent. We reach a situation where, in order not to fall back into the error of essentialism, we juxtapose ad absurdum singularities that we must be careful not to subsume under the concept of Africa or African. There is no science of the singular, we need to remember. To flush out and denounce essentialism the minute that something is said to be African, for example African art, may lead to the prohibition of any statement that is not in the singular. On this view, there is only the art of a particular terroir, which is insistently said to be radically different from that of the terroir next ­door . . . ­Africa is then no more than a conglomerate of hamlets. This leads to the paradox that it is the only continent that should always be written in the plural as a reaction against essentialism and colonial lack of differentiation. That anticolonial discourse has often been itself a dangerously simplistic ­response – ­that is, an essentialism that is merely the reverse side of a colonial essentialism that it actually m ­ aintains – i­ s something that critical thinking endeavours to demonstrate. But we must be careful of unleashing an unbridled deconstruction which would see everywhere nothing but an all-­powerful, insidious and ventriloquist colonial logic that always dictates the responses made to it. To take one example on which I have worked: when Senghor examines the meaning of African art, is he being essentialist in the sense that he does not know that Senufo masks are not the ujamaa of Mozambique or the terracottas of Djenne? The answer to this question is that the poet is not giving himself an essence of an African art that pre-­exists all the productions that form part of it: he is constructing it. In other terms, he is proceeding to what phenomenology calls an eidetic reduction, a reduction to e­ ssence – ­and we must take care to distinguish this from essentialization. 100

Thinking/creating Africa When Senghor, who is mainly a thinker of African art, uses this expression, what he has in mind is the way in which the diversity of artistic creations on the continent makes it possible to carry out a reduction to the non-­mimetic essence of ‘Negro sculpture’, thus allowing us to think it, to give meaning to this non-­realist parti pris, for the purpose of what he calls the ‘sub-­reality’ beyond appearance. Far from ignoring variety, he adopts an approach in which variations meld together, which means he can ask the right questions that then arise: what is the reason for this art of disproportion, and for those geometric shapes that converge rhythmically to bring out the ‘compelling force’ by which they are linked ? We must, of course, discuss the answers, refute them, ask other questions, and so o ­ n – ­in other words evaluate the validity of the approach, and not airily dismiss it while uttering the magic word ‘essentialism!’ It is necessary, epistemologically, to give ourselves a ‘concept of Africa’, but generally speaking the main sense of this is both philosophical and political. If we must say ‘Africa’ in the singular, this is not out of ignorance of the constitutive plurality of the continent or of the ethics of pluralism (to which I will return) which this de facto plurality necessitates. If we need to say ‘Africa’ in the singular, this is because the point is to name an idea, a project, a telos. It is to evoke the horizon onto which the younger generations of the Africa of today are projecting their dream of tomorrow. Of what is the word ‘Africa’ the name? The name was first forged outside and applied to the continent by a power of naming that did not belong to it but that the Romans had given themselves. They are the ones who said ‘Africa’, before Europe broadened the denotation of the word to the entire continent. It is worth recalling, however, that the origin of the name is internal to the continent: the word Afer (approximately), which referred to a tribe or a territory or a divinity (or all three), became the name, Africa, of a whole province centred on Carthage. This province and the name eventually included the lands south of the Mediterranean and west of Egypt that the Arabs baptized Ifriqiyya. It then became customary to apply the name ‘Africa’ to the entire continent when European circumnavigations revealed its shape and contours ever more fully. Incidentally, I note with Léonora Miano that there is some irony in seeing the inhabitants of the Maghreb talking about ‘Africa’ as if they themselves lived on another continent. She writes that ‘the name under which our land is known has a Berber and thus continental origin. It does not matter that most of the Maghrebins living on the continent reserve to sub-Saharans the name of Africans.’3 101

Thinking/creating Africa But you have to wonder what an African consciousness means, as well as Africa as a project, if, on the one hand, the African totality was constituted by an external act of naming and if, on the other hand, that totality has itself been dismembered by colonialism and the scramble for Africa in which the continent was shared out. The answer to this question is precisely that Africa as a plural, open and dynamic reality is a movement of re-membering. I use this concept in allusion to the expression used by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o when he speaks of ‘remembering Africa’ – both putting together (re-­ membering) what has been divided and recalling a past state of affairs. This dual meaning is found in the works of those who have associated the concept of ‘Africa’ with the movement of remembering: Edward Wilmot Blyden, Marcus Garvey, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Pixley Ka Isaka Seme, Kwame Nkrumah, Shaykh Anta Diop, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Patrice Lumumba, Gamal Abdel Nasser and others. It is no coincidence that the double movement of commemoration and totalization was first born in ‘the New World’, within the populations that transatlantic slavery had torn away from the continent. Because slavery meant the erasure of particular memories, it favoured the emergence of a global African imagination. It is this imaginary that then truly created ‘Africa’, sometimes in synecdoches such as the words ‘Guinea’ or ‘Ethiopia’.4 A first construction of ‘Africa’ thus occurred in the diaspora in the ranks of intellectuals and activists who thought it as a totality and made of it the name of the origin and the ultimate home. This then led to the formulating of the project, both cultural and political, which took the name ‘pan-­Africanism’. Africa, which had been the object of an external naming, became the ongoing creation of the pan-­African project. First defined as ‘return’ in the vision of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), the project became with W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) a whole philosophy and a project of emancipation and cultural renaissance. At the first Pan-­African Congress of 1919, the Senegal deputy Blaise Diagne pledged his support, but it was especially the Fifth Congress, the Manchester Congress of 1945, which marked a turning point: Africans on the continent took over the project. Pan-­Africanism then became the self-­creation of an Africa that would also be socialist. Kwame Nkrumah was the African leader who identified historically with the socialist development of one Africa that would be free and independent only on condition that it was unified. Continentalized, pan-­Africanism no longer aimed solely at unity between Black Africans and descendants of Africans in the diaspora, 102

Thinking/creating Africa but the unity of all Africans, north and south of the Sahara. In 1963, in Addis Ababa, Nkrumah declared before his peers in the Organization of African Unity: ‘We are not here today as Ghanaians, Guineans, Egyptians, Algerians, Moroccans, Malians, Liberians, Congolese, or Nigerians, but as Africans.’ Whenever he expressed his ­desire – ­his will, we should say –, an essentially political will to create Africa, the Ghanaian leader was happy to refer to the potential example of the federal structure of the United States of America. If he felt that there was an ‘African personality’ that must become the subject of its own destiny, he insisted especially on the urgent task of conquering the ‘political realm’ of unity: the rest would be given in addition. In contrast to the federalist impatience of Nkrumah, the pan-­ Africanism of Senghor first manifested itself as opposition to what he called the ‘balkanization of Africa’ during the process of decolonization that would grant independence to the French colonies territory by territory, thereby dismantling the major Federations, that of French West Africa (AOF: 1895–1958) and that of French Equatorial Africa (AEF: 1910–58), which had been put in place by the colonial power for the purpose of administrative rationalization. After he was obliged to resign himself to noting the centrifugal force of the micro-­nationalisms of different territories, of ‘territorialism’ (a term he and his political colleague and friend Mamadou Dia coined to label separatism and the forces of balkanization), Senghor advocated, with the ultimate goal of ‘creating Africa’, a process of integration by regional blocs. This process of moving towards African unity was known as the ‘concentric circles’ approach. However, the construction of regional blocs should not lead us to lose sight of the philosophical project of creating Africa from Cairo to Cape Town. Achille Mbembe often repeats, with reason, that Africans should not add the internal borders of states to the barriers that today stand in the way of their mobility outside the continent. They should not, in other words, continue to nourish territorialism. Federalist impatience found one of its most strident spokesmen in the person of Muammar Gaddafi, the former Libyan leader. It still has its supporters. Personally, I think that the patient construction of regional blocs based on the pan-­African project that will create Africa is the right way to go. The African Union is currently setting itself the task of achieving the integration of five main regions: North Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa. But all this is an open, ever-­changing reality; Morocco pointed this out by asking recently to also join West Africa. And, added to the five ­regions – a­ nother reminder that Africa is an open reality that will 103

Thinking/creating Africa not allow itself to be locked up within the ­continent – ­is the diaspora. This symbolic region, which the future will need to turn into a reality, is also a reminder that Africa is not only in Africa and that it was in the diaspora that the idea of Africa was born. In addition to the old African diasporas, the result of slavery, there are new diasporas, as Africa is a land of emigration and will remain so for some time, until the seeds of change that are currently giving us reason to think that the continent is truly in the ascendant will bring to fruition the promises they bear. I would like at this point to say, in parenthesis, a few words about the very different reality of the African academic diaspora that has become important in North America in particular. First, there is a great deal of talk about the ‘brain drain’ from Africa to American universities: it is seen as a new wound inflicted on the continent. And second, here, in this co-­authored book, Amselle attaches a great deal of importance to the fact that Indian, South American and African intellectuals are to be found in the American universities from where postcolonial thinking is supposed to lead to what he calls the décrochage (the ‘unhooking’ or ‘taking down’) of the West. We first need to remember one thing: the mobility that leads many African academics to American universities is the same mobility that leads many academics from around the world, Europe, India and China, to these same universities. My colleague at Columbia, Pierre Force, published in the École normale supérieure magazine L’Archicube the very interesting results of a study on graduates of the ENS in the United States. What this reveals is that, first of all, many of them chose America in general, and its universities in particular. There is currently considerable alarm in France, but also in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany, about the ‘brain drain’. The attraction of working conditions in the United States for academics from all countries is universal, and there is no reason for it not to have an effect on Africans as on others. So we should stop considering the African academics who teach at UCLA, Tulane, New York University or Harvard as an anomaly. They are no more an anomaly than the French who are to be found particularly frequently in American university French departments and find, like everyone else, working conditions there better than those they would find in France. The second thing to be said is about how we should react if the ‘brain drain’ is also a ‘brain gain’ for Africa. An important aspect of the pan-­African project will be its ability to organize the mobility of African academics and researchers within the continent, and also 104

Thinking/creating Africa between training institutions in Africa and the American or European universities to which their careers have led them. Finally, I come back to the concept of remembering. I repeat that it is an affirmation and valorization of the plurality of Africa and not a project of homogenization. Unity comes about within pluralism (as the American motto puts it: E pluribus unum) and not in spite of it or against it. Enthusiasm for unity has led some people to desire a language that will promote the unification of the continent. Such a project is impractical, and one wonders what purpose it would serve. Believing in a necessary isomorphism between political totality, language and culture in the singular is at best a form of Jacobinism which flies in the face of the pan-­African ideal of remembering. For this, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o says, will come about in the plural of African languages, innumerable as they are, and innumerable as they must remain.

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13 On the non-­existence of ­Africa . . . ­and of Europe Jean-Loup Amselle

Continents are like languages: they exist only because we speak about them, because we speak them. When it comes to Africa, there is no need to look at the etymology of this term, which has meaning only thanks to the meaning or meanings we assign to it. As Souleymane Bachir Diagne has reminded us, Africa did indeed emerge as a continent only after being circumnavigated by the Portuguese, and therefore, like all other continents, is only a belated invention, essentially the product of an external gaze. Africa does not exist in itself: it is a receptacle that has been subject to different projections and interests that vary with all the statements that have seized upon it, depending on conflicting interests, varying according to the times and political situations. As I said in Branchements, Africa is a floating signifier, a performative, which belongs to all those who lay claim to it, whether they live on the African continent, in Europe, the Americas or Asia.1 Africa was first split between a ‘White’ North Africa and a ‘Black’ sub-­Saharan Africa by colonial conquerors; it was further divided into several hundred languages corresponding to as many ethnic groups appearing on the different maps that represent this continent. This parcelling out of the continent by conquerors and colonial administrators, who were later joined by ethnologists, was nevertheless accompanied by the constant concern to find some deep unity within Africa. Maurice Delafosse (1870–1926) is a particularly interesting representative of this twofold impulse. Trained as an Orientalist and Arabist, he was inclined to see ‘Black’ Africa and its great empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhay) as the mirror image of the Arab Caliphates of the Near East and therefore to postulate a unity of the ‘Negro 106

On the non-­existence of A ­ frica . . . ­and of Europe soul’, itself an ancestor of ‘Négritude’.2 On the other hand, his time at the Museum of Natural History led him to label the different ethnic groups in West Africa, and he therefore helped to shape the multiple identities that are currently expressing themselves. Having the dual status of researcher and colonial administrator, Delafosse was thus placed at the confluence of contradictory demands that paradoxically led him to extol the timelessness of an authentic Africa, even though his action reinforced the French presence on this continent. This ambiguity in Delafosse’s life and work fits into a tradition that we can describe as ‘indigenist’, a tradition that springs both from conquering officers such as Faidherbe and from pan-­Africanist nationalists like Blyden. This tradition represents an important part of the French colonial endeavour that it would be wrong to reduce to the sole desire to conduct what was known as France’s ‘mission civilisatrice’ (‘civilizing mission’). It is perpetuated in the works of supporters of ‘Négritude’ such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, and even Frantz Fanon: these writers draw on colonial ethnology, that of Delafosse but also that of Leo Frobenius, the necessary reference point for those seeking to regenerate African cultures.3 Africa is therefore a colonial ‘invention’, as Valentin Mudimbe calls ­it – ­an external ‘invention’, but neither more nor less than other continents such as Europe, Asia, Oceania or the Americas, which are all historically dated creations that saw the light of day only after the disappearance of the old conception of the ‘four parts of the world’.4 If Africa was ‘invented’ as a circumscribed, delimited, closed, ‘discrete’ space, the same logically goes for its ethnic and cultural unity. But what happened in epistemological terms with conquest and colonization, namely the delimitation of the space of Africa and the postulate of its cultural unity, has also naturally been taken further with the nationalist and pan-­Africanist demand that developed over the nineteenth century among thinkers and political actors such as Edward Wilmot Blyden, Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, who were all Caribbean or African-­American, and therefore members of the African ‘diaspora’, a term that Diagne is happy to use.5

African diaspora/Black Atlantic Now the notion of diaspora, with its racialist connotations, is not without its own problems. Indeed, if there is one notion that has, in recent years, invaded the fields of both ideas and the media, it is that of diaspora. Countless books and journals are devoted to this topic, 107

On the non-­existence of A ­ frica . . . ­and of Europe and it is now difficult to find a text on politics, migration, the arts, identity, or even economics, which does not resort to the use of this concept. Etymologically, the term ‘diaspora’, which comes from Ancient Greek, designates, in a metaphor borrowed from botany, the dissemination of spores. Applied initially to the dispersion of a people (the Jews) across space, it now refers, by extension, to the result of the dispersion, that is, all the members of a ‘community’ living in several countries, such as the Burkinabé migrants who live in Ivory Coast and are named ‘Diaspos’.6 The prevailing idea, in the ubiquitous use of this concept, is that of permanent links and of solidarity between members of the same people who, despite the vicissitudes of history, have been able to maintain racial, cultural and religious stability. Paradoxically, we cannot help but observe that despite its adoption into the vocabulary of the social sciences, this concept maintains a close semantic relationship with the notion of ‘ethnic group’ (‘ethnie’) which was introduced into the French language in 1896 by the social-­Darwinist Georges Vacher de Lapouge. In Les Sélections sociales, Vacher de Lapouge defines belonging to an ‘ethnic group’ as the feeling experienced by different segments of the same people separated by history, a feeling that pushes these different segments to search for a lost unity.7 It then becomes easier to understand how the notion of diaspora, intimately linked to that of ‘people’, ethnic group or race, and to the permanence of these entities throughout history, works as a burning political issue for both those who support such concepts and those who reject them, as we observed on the occasion of the controversy over the publication of Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People.8 If there is no ‘people’ perpetuating itself unvaryingly over time, there can be no ‘diaspora’ either, since this latter notion is only the ‘dispersed’ variant of the former. The concept of ‘diaspora’, used about Jews or about African-­Americans, therefore assumes the racial stability of the members of the dispersed people and excludes a priori the phenomena of conversion and union between Jewish men and non-­Jewish women (in the case of the Jews)9 or intermarriage, or with people from other groups who arrived later on American soil (in the case of African slaves or their descendants). In addition, the notion of diaspora, as currently conceived, presupposes the related idea of a ‘centre’ of dispersion, that is, a country or continent of origin to which the individual is related even if they no longer feel any connection with the country from which their parents come and consider that they belong exclusively to the country where they were 108

On the non-­existence of A ­ frica . . . ­and of Europe born. Such is the case of those French people who have the dismal labels of ‘second-­generation’, ‘offspring of immigration’ (‘issus de l’immigration’) and ‘offspring of diversity’ (‘issus de la diversité’) stuck on them. If we accept the idea of the permanence of a Jewish, Black or other diaspora throughout history, we thereby suppose that the scattered members of these diasporas are destined at one time or another to ‘return’ to their ‘homeland’, and that is the meaning of such slogans as ‘going up’ (aliyah) for Israeli Zionists, or of ‘Back to Africa’ for pan-­Africanists such as Edward Wilmot Blyden and Marcus Garvey.10 The notion of diaspora, which, as I said above, has strong racialist connotations, refers, on the other hand, to an origin, which is perfectly captured by the notion of ‘Afro-­ descendants’ applied in particular to the supposed existence of ‘Black music’, which itself developed as part of a ‘Black Atlantic’, a space of cultural circulation straddling Africa, Europe and the Americas.11 Indeed, thanks to the ‘one drop’ rule, which until recently governed interracial relations in the United States, it was sufficient that the individual had one drop of ‘Black blood’ to be included in this c­ ategory – q ­ uite regardless of the colour of their skin, and insofar as some chromatic scale or other had any meaning in this context. This ‘one drop’ rule has been reappropriated by some ‘African-­Americans’ on the basis of the reversal of the stigma, which, thanks to the use of DNA tests, has allowed them to prove their ancestry and therefore to bring lawsuits requesting reparations from the successors of the slave-­trading companies that in the past deported their ancestors to American soil. But, beyond the use of these tests for economic-­judicial purposes, certain African-­American intellectuals, such as Henry Louis Gates, have justified the use of DNA tests for the purpose of official recognition of race while at the same time criticizing elsewhere the idea of a ‘Black diaspora’.12 In this case, as in others, those who criticize the notions of ‘Black diaspora’, ‘Black music’ and even ‘Black Atlantic’ can be rejected out of hand by those who counter that the use of these notions, as long as they are claimed by a collective of individuals, of any kind, is of the order of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls ‘strategic essentialism’: that is, it aims solely to foster, in the artistic field, the ‘empowerment’ of the discriminated-­against group by reversing their stigma. This was the goal of filmmaker Wim Wenders when, while making his film Buena Vista Social Club (1999), he envisaged ‘sending back’ Cuban musicians to Africa so that they could re-­forge the link with their ‘Mother Earth’. Even if Wenders finally gave up trying to re-­establish their links with the supposedly ‘original’ continent of Cuban music, 109

On the non-­existence of A ­ frica . . . ­and of Europe this aim would be taken up later by his colleague Martin Scorsese. In the movie Feel Like Going Home (2004), Scorsese does indeed put African-­American musicians such as bluesman Corey Harris and Taj Mahal side by side with African musicians Ali Farka Touré and Salif Keita, with the idea of repairing the broken threads between the African Atlantis and the ‘Black’ music of the United States. The declarations of Marc Benaïche, curator of the exhibition ‘Great Black Music’ held in Paris in 2014, are in the same spirit as the Scorsese film: From working songs in the cotton fields to the cry of free jazz, from the blues of the Mississippi to its Malian source, via Guy Konkèt for gwo ka and Danyèl Waro for maloya, there has been a perpetual two-­way traffic between Africa, America, the Caribbean and the French overseas territories, let alone Europe with its artistic trends and its many festivals. This gives rise to cross-­fertilization and on-­ going creativity.13

The fact that Martin Scorsese is a ‘White’, as are Marc Benaïche and Emmanuel Parent, the scientific adviser for the ‘Great Black Music’ exhibition, is in any case not a major obstacle to the realization of such artistic actions, as the problem would be identical if this type of project was carried out by ‘non-­White’ people.14 A more serious objection comes from the musicologist Philip Tagg, who shows, in a devastating article about the United States, that the expression ‘Black music’ has no more sense than the expression ‘European music’, with which it is generally contrasted, and the different distinctive features of this so-­called ‘Black’ m ­ usic – ­blue notes, call-­and-­response techniques, syncope and i­mprovisation – c­ an be found in many other types of music.15 Another objection was formulated by African musicians who ‘performed’ in Scorsese’s film, such as Ali Farka Touré, who went on to protest at the claim that Malian music, his own music, was the source of American blues.16 We cannot help thinking, when faced with works of art or artistic events dedicated to ‘Black music’ or to any other item called ‘Black’ (‘Black thought’, for example) and straddling the ‘Black’ Atlantic, that what we have here are merely enterprises that follow a strict economic logic, in which the ‘Black’ referent only serves as a marker for a coveted market niche.

African diaspora and the sixth region of Africa It is within the framework of the Organization of African Unity, and of its successor the African Union, that we need to situate the 110

On the non-­existence of A ­ frica . . . ­and of Europe semantic field of the notion of the African diaspora and the sixth region of Africa. It is defined by the Commission of the African Union as follows: The African diaspora is made up of people of African origin living outside the African continent, who wish to contribute to its development and to the construction of the African Union, regardless of their citizenship and their nationality. Considered as the ‘sixth region’ of Africa, the African diaspora is made up of about 112.65 million people in Latin America, 39.16 million people in North America, 13.56 million in the Caribbean and 3.51 million in Europe, according to the official figures of the African Union for 2010.17

This definition, and the idea behind it, thus leads to postulating, in a problematic way, a racial, ethnic and cultural continuity between segments of the population and individuals whose supposed or actual ancestors left the African continent at different times, which means that it is really impossible to confuse them. What is there in common, after all, between those who are called and call themselves ‘African-­ Americans’ and the Africans of all origins who have recently migrated to the United States or other countries to stay temporarily or to settle there for good? True, those who are called or who call themselves ‘African-­ Americans’ have the right to lay claim to that appellation, but the fact remains that their forebears have not remained ‘pure’ Africans since their arrival on American soil as slaves and they all have non-­Africans among their ancestors. Therefore, wanting to confuse such diverse elements within the same stock of population seems to me to be wrong-­ headed and not to account for the specific situation of contemporary African emigrants and their ambiguous relations with African-­ Americans, a situation which the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie admirably depicts in her novel Americanah.18 When all is said and done, it seems to me that the pan-­Africanist national claim, apart from its colonial origins, has the effect, like all nationalist claims, of concealing the internal social divisions within each country of the continent. Of course, it is easy to see why the ‘Fathers of independence’, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Modibo Keita and Kwame Nkrumah, should have desired to escape the trap of the ‘balkanization’ of Africa that had been promoted by the former colonizers, and that they tried to set up federations of African states such as the Federation of Mali, comprising the current Mali and Senegal, or the Union of African States, including Ghana, Guinea and Mali. But in this case, the nationalist options, even if they were 111

On the non-­existence of A ­ frica . . . ­and of Europe ‘­pan-­African’, served only to mask the internal contradictions specific to each country. In addition, these organizations that brought together most of the countries of one and the same continent, such as the African Union, as well as larger organizations operating on a global scale, such as the United Nations, have long shown their impotence, particularly with regard to the resolution of civil wars or armed insurrections. Such examples as the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia and Mali, among others, are eloquent proof of this. Rather than intoning the ritual demand for pan-­Africanism, it seems to me more useful to hasten to the rescue of the opponents of particularly autocratic and corrupt regimes; and I would like to point out here the particularly brave struggle of one Cameroonian writer who teaches in the United States, Patrice Nganang, who found himself in the jails of the president of his country, Paul Biya, before being finally expelled.19

Thinking/creating Africa ‘Thinking/creating Africa’, as conceived by Diagne, ‘thinking and writing Africa today’, as in the title of the volume edited by Alain Mabanckou,20 or ‘writing the Africa-­World’, as suggested by the book of that title edited by Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr21 – all these have the disadvantage, in my view, of essentializing not just Africa, but all continents. This personification of Africa seems to me, in fact, to lead straight to an intellectual drift applied to the continents, a shift in racialist and cultural tectonic plates that is unfortunately reminiscent in some respects of the fatal conception of the ‘clash of civilizations’ described a few years ago by Samuel Huntington, and which still exercises its seductive power on people’s minds. It is to be feared that the highlighting of such slogans, even if it proceeds from the legitimate wish to regenerate this continent and ensure an ‘African Renaissance’, leads willy-­nilly, if not to the idea that there are African thinkers, which no one doubts, at least to the idea that everything is worth taking up provided that it comes from the African continent. I cannot help but think, for example, that the way the French media reported on the two editions of the ‘Ateliers de la pensée’22 (‘Workshops in Thinking’) somehow reflects a certain paternalism that could be described as postcolonial and that is found ad nauseam in these media. The fascination now exerted by Africa on the West is accompanied by a certain repulsion and may ultimately be no more than a hidden form of racism.23 112

On the non-­existence of A ­ frica . . . ­and of Europe And that brings us back to the fundamental purpose of this book of dialogues with Diagne: we need ‘Ateliers de la pensée’, of course, but must we assume implicitly that these be workshops in African thought? If so, would that not lead just as legitimately to the symmetrical and inverse question of the need for workshops in European thought? However, precisely, a desire for symmetry should not lead to what it was so difficult to deconstruct (namely the idea of a European thought or a Western philosophy stemming directly from the ‘Greek miracle’) having, through an unfortunate reversal of the stigma, perverse effects on the thinkers of Africa. Diagne has always insisted on the idea that there was no African philosophy but a philosophy in Africa, that is, an activity of philosophers considering themselves as ‘Africans’, practising in Africa or outside Africa, and using all the concepts available to them, whether African or otherwise, since everything should be grist to their mill. That is, briefly summarized, the lesson that I would like to retain from our exchanges.

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14 On Africa and pan-­Africanism Souleymane Bachir Diagne

I will make one first remark, which also goes for many of the points raised by Jean-­Loup Amselle. When he denounces the idea of ‘Black thinking’ or the idea that Africanity is an immutable, ahistorical (etc.) essence, that comment should not be seen as addressed to me or ‘responding’ to me in any way. Essentialist statements, against which the anti-­essentialist argument has been set out at length, have nothing to do with my positions or my work. We agree on the following: there can be no ‘Black thought’ any more than there is ‘White thought’ – this much is obvious to me, and so everything that Amselle says of this must be addressed to another interlocutor than myself. I have no intention of playing the role of the Afrocentrist, the main addressee of the universalist profession of faith. The universal is just as much my concern, but we are ‘concerned’ about it in different ways. Personally, I see it as the opposite of all ‘centrisms’, in the decentring of translation. So I come back to my reasons for saying ‘Africa’. In the singular. That all great collective entities are to some extent ‘invented’ is also obvious. Portugal is not the Netherlands, and Greece is not Germany: that is clear. Moreover, the Greek crisis is proof of this; it led to people envisaging taking Greece out of Europe, and one of its manifestations was the wave of anger among ordinary people in Greece against a Germany that was called every name under the sun and accused, under the guise of a demand for economic and financial orthodoxy, of a genuine cultural contempt for the countries of southern Europe. The differences in Europe are thus deep, as they are in other parts of the world. Nevertheless, a European project exists that is not constructed as a mere market, but mobilizes a history and speaks of shared values. Thus, Greece’s exit from Europe 114

On Africa and pan-­Africanism would of course have had an economic meaning, and it was envisaged for a while, but it would also have been a symbolic disaster, a fact that did not escape anyone: taking Greece out of a Europe that has constructed its very concept in reference to it would have meant destroying the idea of Europe. This is not the case, for example, with the United Kingdom. That is why Amselle is quite mistaken about my remarks and all my work in general when he exclaims ‘essentialism!’ because I express a desire for Africa. I completely endorse Alain Ricard, who has said more clearly than anyone that it is an epistemological mistake to give oneself ‘Africa’ without taking the time to construct the reasons to think of it as a totality. So he denounces ‘stretching out any observation and turning it into a general ­idea – ­a virus that leads to people talking about Africa as a whole the minute they have stayed for a while in a single point of the continent’.1 No region of the world has been treated with so much casualness, or made the object of so many unfounded generalizations, as the African continent, as I have already said. But this should not lead to the knee-­jerk reaction of making it the only continent of which we must now always speak in the plural, whatever the subject. Nobody says ‘Europes’ because, when we refer to Europe, we first think of the continuous construction of this continent. The same applies to Africa. What does it mean to say that Africa desires Africa? That Africans are engaged in the realization of the pan-­ African idea, with full awareness of the history of this idea and the difference between pan-­ Africanism yesterday, with all the emancipatory force it represented, and the pan-­Africanism of today, keyed in to what the new advances in independence mean. To desire Africa means to wish to create unity in pluralism. This, as I have said, is the meaning of re-­membering. First, we need to abolish the internal borders of the continent in a certain p ­ eriod – ­ours – when ethno-­nationalisms abroad are working to control and limit the mobility of certain populations, including African populations, of course, and are scared of the notion, which they consider the ultimate catastrophe, that natives will be ‘replaced’ by migrants. They dislike the idea that the Earth is a single country in which, as Pope Francis tirelessly repeats, nobody should be an exile. To offer an African space without frontiers to the initiatives and the creativity of citizens who are no longer Moroccan, Malian, Rwandan, and so on, but African is not to ignore the fact that Morocco is not Rwanda; it is to desire an African future. The future of the African project is not given, but it will be what, together, we make of it. It is in this respect that Africa is not and will not be the invention of anyone 115

On Africa and pan-­Africanism other than Africans themselves. And this future unity has started to emerge. It is worth noting that the ongoing construction of the African Union (AU) shows a real break with much of what the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had represented. The latter, in fact, was described (and denounced) by progressive organizations on the continent as a ‘trade union of heads of state’ all protecting each other, to the extent that they all turned a blind eye to dictatorships and human rights violations committed by their neighbours. Today we see the AU giving its mandate to the West African regional organization (ECOWAS) to exercise the military pressure that led to the departure of the ubiquitous Yaya Jammeh of Gambia. What is gradually being established is setting the continent on the path to a unity that will also be based on democratic values. Amselle seems to be sceptical in principle about everything that looks like the march of Africa towards its unity. Fine. But we cannot reduce the pan-­African project to an ‘incantatory evocation’, or consider it as a distraction from the struggle against the imprisonment of an intellectual in Cameroon. Why does the AU talk about its diaspora, and what sense does this have? I will first say that Amselle is quite right in his analyses of the word ‘diaspora’ and his discussion of its etymology. The fact remains, however, that what gives concepts their meaning is first and foremost their use. We will use this word ‘diaspora’, as everyone now understands it, quite naturally forgetting the origins of the word, to speak of African diasporas. I will observe, then, that in the article in the document produced by the AU concerning these diasporas, quoted by Amselle, reference is made to people of African origin who ‘wish [my emphasis] to contribute [. . .] to the construction’ of African unity. So it’s a desire for Africa that is still at stake, not of the evocation of an essence. What the AU is saying is that it is natural for Afro-­descendants to feel a connection to the continent that takes the form of a desire for Africa in the sense that I have indicated. Indeed, it is in their interest to do so: it is clear that the fate of the continent, its development, will count for a great deal in the fight against racism throughout the world. That does not mean that all Afro-­descendants are not fully citizens of the countries in which they live, or even that some of them consider that they have no particular connection to the continent. Why, after ‘Negroes’ and then ‘Blacks’, did Afro-­descendants in the United States decide to call themselves African-­Americans, if not to express this bond, which is a desire, which does not presume anything and freely constructs its own meaning? 116

On Africa and pan-­Africanism Let’s go back to the sea serpent of essentialism. Are we being essentialist when we say ‘Black music’? Or when we consider the way Cuban salsa was also a music (re)created in Africa because its rhythms echoed on both sides of the Atlantic? In fact, Youssou N’Dour, for example, began his career as a salsero singer before ‘branching out’ – to take up an important concept in Amselle’s ­work – ­into the rhythms of Wolof mbalax and others. Touré Kunda, meanwhile, has with suppleness and talent forged an encounter between the bougarabou of Casamance and the reggae rhythms of Jamaica. Amiri Baraka, when he had not yet adopted this name and was still known as LeRoi Jones, wrote a beautiful book on American Black music, Blues People,2 in which he carefully examined how, among all the elements from Africa with the Atlantic slave trade, only the musical rhythms survived systematic destruction, intangible as they are, and were preserved in the Black churches. That we can talk about ‘Black’ or African music in the New World is not a matter of essence but of a history which invites us to study the music of the ‘Blues peoples’, with the many ‘branchings’ they have experienced, and to learn about their reality from musicologists who have studied the question. On the ‘Ateliers de la pensée’ (‘Workshops in Thinking’) established in 2016 by Felwine Sarr and Achille Mbembe, we agree: those who set up these workshops are the first to say that, while it is important that intellectuals, artists, writers, who have in common what I have called a desire for Africa should meet to reflect together and share their points of view on African issues, it is obvious that African issues are planetary issues and planetary issues are African issues. To give an example: the meeting of these workshops held in Dakar at the beginning of November 2017 focused on the ‘politics of the living’, a vital planetary question. On this question, the participants share the thought that Africa must mark its presence, and reflection must start out from Africa, for Africa and the world.

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15 Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s ‘desire for Africa’ Jean-Loup Amselle

Souleymane Bachir Diagne has just described a ‘desire for Africa’ he says is felt by a number of African intellectuals, including those who led or participated in the two ‘Ateliers de la pensée’ (‘Workshops in Thinking’) held in 2016 and 2017 in Dakar, Senegal. By advancing this notion of a desire for Africa, he is attempting to respond to my remarks about the need to conjugate Africa in the plural and to question the relevance of the notion of pan-­Africanism. But this notion of a desire for Africa must, in my opinion, be questioned in turn because it reproduces what I have continued to point out in our exchanges, namely a certain essentialism. The desire for Africa, as conceived by Diagne, recalls the ‘need for Africa’ of Éric Fottorino, Christophe Guillemin and Erik Orsenna;1 it evinces a deep intuition an African may have about his or her culture, a kind of intimate conviction or private opinion which does not relate to the individual as such but to the collective. Through the desire for Africa, Diagne seems to me to want to highlight its profound nature as a collective self, with the person standing in for the whole, pars pro toto. This intimate conviction of representing a culture has the effect of delimiting a space, and thus enclosing ‘African culture’ within an enclosed space, and in doing so excluding willy-nilly those who do not belong to it. In my view, and although Diagne is totally foreign to the wish to ostracize, what we have here is Édouard Glissant’s idea about the ‘opacity’ of some cultures vis-­à-vis an outside observer. No one enters here if he is not African, one might say, paraphrasing Plato. As an African philosopher, Diagne seems to be saying to us, I am perfectly justified in defending the idea of an African singularity and I am therefore justified in not sharing it with foreigners. 118

Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s ‘desire for Africa’ What he is describing is therefore an ‘emotion’ that is, if not ‘Negro’ (Senghor), at least properly African, with an ineffable Africanity that can never be felt by anyone who is not African. How many times have I heard in the mouths of my interlocutors from Mali the judgement that I will never understand a thing about the ‘secrets of Africa’? This desire to ward off the other, the external gaze, is one of the constants of post- and decolonial thought. The split between the (Western) subject and the (native) object is exactly what is supposed to be a characteristic of Western epistemological domination, and it is as such that this split and its translation in the field of anthropology are being questioned. Know yourself without going through the other thus becomes, in another sense, the motto par excellence of decolonial thinking. The disadvantage of this position, besides the fact that it debars the knowledge produced by African nationals who are socially external to the environments they study, is that one wonders where this desire for Africa comes from and how it can form the basis for any knowledge on a given culture or society if the individuals who state it have not made any investigation into their own society, and if it is just their immersion, their education, in and through their culture which act as knowledge about their own culture. In short, can we, as Auguste Comte put it in regard to introspection, walk down the street and see ourselves in the window? And that’s why I do not see in this desire for Africa, as proposed by Diagne, anything more than a form of cultural introspection, with all the uncertainties that this posture involves.

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16 Were human rights born in Africa? Jean-Loup Amselle

Let us specify at once that in this case, as in others, the question of whether human rights emerged in Africa is perhaps more interesting than any possible answer.1 We will focus here on the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ and/or the ‘Charter of the Mandé’, which is supposed to have been set out in 1222, before the Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and even roughly contemporary with Magna Carta (1215). Since Africa was the cradle of humanity, it makes sense from the Afrocentrist perspective that human rights should also have been born on this continent, more precisely in West Africa, in the Sudano-­Sahelian region. The drama that depicts the emergence of human rights on African soil is a play with several acts.

Act One In chronological order, it all starts with Maurice Delafosse, colonial administrator, ethnographer and orientalist, and his magnum opus from 1912, Haut-Sénégal-Niger (Upper Senegal-Niger), in which he paints an impressive ethno-­historical fresco of the ‘civilizations’ of this part of Africa, in particular of the great ‘Sudanese’ empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhay) that followed one another in this whole area from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries.2 The identity of Delafosse’s informants is unknown, since he was working at second hand based on surveys that colonial administrators (circle commanders) carried out at the request of the governor-­general of French West Africa at the time, François-­Joseph Clozel. From the point of view that interests us here, it is clear from this survey that Soundiata Keita, by defeating 120

Were human rights born in Africa? Soumaoro Kanté, the emperor of Sosso, at the Battle of Kirina in ­1235 – a­ date that was actually invented by Delafosse –, became the sovereign founder of the Mali Empire.3 But after relating this major event, nowhere does Delafosse mention the Kurukan Fuga meeting at which Soundiata Keita allegedly enacted the celebrated charter.

Act Two It is not until 1960, with the publication of Guinean historian Djibril Tamsir Niane’s Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue (Sundiata or the Mandingo Epic), the translation of an epic collected from the griot (jeli) Mamadou Kouyate from Jeliba Koro in Guinea, that this event is mentioned in a book written in French.4 The book, which does not contain any literal transcription in Malinke, contains a chapter entitled ‘Kouroukan Fuga ou le partage du monde’ (‘Kouroukan Fuga or the Sharing of the World’), in which is narrated the meeting that Sundiata organizes following his victory over Soumaoro and which brings together the dominant clans of the empire as well as the newly subjected peoples.5 It sets out the prohibitions (jo) and the joking relationships (senankuya) governing relations between the different clans of the Mandé family. But in the final chapter of the book, ‘Le Manding éternel’, Mamadou Kouyaté and Djibril Tamsir Niane do not just describe the political organization that Sundiata sets up at this meeting: they actually describe it as a ‘Constitution’, though we do not really know to what Malinké term this French word corresponds. (‘Go to Kaba, you will see the clearing of Kouroukan Fuga, site of the great assembly which gave a “constitution” to the empire of Sundiata.’6)

Act Three: Souleymane Kanté and N’Ko In 1949, Souleymane Kanté (1922–87), a Guinean marabout, invented an alphabet that was a mixture of Arabic and Latin alphabets, which he used in his translation of the Qur’an into Malinké; he also wrote many books using this system of writing.7 Among these works should be mentioned a kind of ‘book of legal customs and traditions’, probably inspired by colonial codification or its indirect echoes in Delafosse’s Haut-Sénégal-Niger, which enumerates the hundred and thirty ‘rules’ or ‘laws’ (ton)8 enacted by Sundiata at Kurukan Fuga and which Kanté, here closely following Delafosse’s chronology, ­situates in 1236, one year after the supposed date of the Battle of Kirina.9 121

Were human rights born in Africa? The first laws concern the old customs (landa)10 as collected by the elders, customs which these elders are supposed to have abolished in order to adopt new ones. The second laws result from Sundiata’s stay in Marka country, during which the future sovereign is said to have appreciated certain Muslim customs of that country, especially the seven-­day week. The third laws follow on from the abandonment of the laws in force under the domination of Soumaoro, the ruler of the empire defeated by Sundiata. These ‘laws’, ‘rules’ or ‘customs’ relate to several domains: mat­erial goods, how to obtain them and transmit them; marriage and the issue of dowry; inheritance; the status of slaves; the organization of work within the family and age classes; rights to land; the prohibition of human sacrifice; the protection of foreigners; succession to the chieftaincy; the settlement of conflicts and killings; oaths and ordeals; the calendar; social statuses (tontigi, tontan) and the ‘joking relationships’ pertaining to them, and so on. All these ‘rules’ or ‘laws’ result from the fixing and the standardizing, on a legal basis, of practices which have been ‘performed’ in different ways over time, within what I will call, for want of a better word, the ‘Mandé cultural space’. It is therefore a sort of oral codex largely ‘invented’ by Souleymane Kanté, since he himself confesses that the griots are unable to utter it; and it probably proceeds from observations or historical investigations on his own culture carried out by this Muslim scholar as he questioned the holders of the ‘tradition’ (elders, griots, etc.). This oral codex is therefore subject to a double treatment: on the one hand, it is the subject of a transcription and a written transformation that has the effect of creating a ‘list’, as often with this type of operation; on the other hand, it is thrust back into a distant past, to 1236, although this date, as we have seen, is totally invented. The written fixing of this oral codex and its transformation into a ‘false archaism’ place its author, as well as Mamadou Kouyaté and Djibril Tamsir Niane, the aforementioned co-­authors of the Epic of Sundiata, in a position that could be described as ‘Afrocentrist’.11 The point is actually to state, through this operation, that the ‘laws’ and the ‘Constitution’ of Kurukan Fuga preceded by four centuries the English Bill of Rights, and by five centuries the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in the French Revolution. But, fundamentally, the question is less whether these oral rules are or are not comparable to a ‘Constitution’ – precisely because they are ­oral – ­than to determine their purpose. The fact that the precolonial 122

Were human rights born in Africa? Mandé world had its rules, norms and values cannot be doubted, even if these rules, norms and values would themselves have been extremely variable according to the time and place (and even if this too is a problem). The difficulty lies in the fact that it is impossible to compare a set of rules, or even a ‘code’ or a ‘charter’ like that of Kurukan Fuga, with the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Indeed, if it were necessary to establish at all costs a comparison, and assuming that this meeting actually took place in the thirteenth century, it is with the Code of Hammurabi, for example, that this should be done rather than with a ‘Constitution’ of whatever kind, since the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ is meant essentially to govern relations between groups and social statuses. Both things are in fact closely interconnected since, precisely, it is an extremely hierarchical society (warriors, ‘caste members’, slaves) in which the maintenance of the social and political order is paramount. In the story of the establishment of the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’, and generally in the Epic of Sundiata, we should doubtless see the desire to promote a vast project of social and political reorganization, coming much later and centred on the cessation of the ‘war of all against all’, that is, in the Mandé and West African context in general, segmentary wars between provinces and chiefdoms (kafo) that were opposed (fadenkele). Hence the importance, in what is narrated by both Mamadou Kouyaté and Souleymane Kanté, of the forging of pacts between rival ‘houses’, those celebrated senankuya that were ‘cooled’, ‘depoliticized’ and subsequently transformed into ‘joking relationships’ and ‘cathartic alliances’ by colonial ethnologists (Radcliffe-­Brown, Griaule).12 These, indeed, are social and political contracts meant to ensure peace and order, so as to control rival aristocracies, somewhat in the same way, mutatis mutandis, that Philip the Fair, in the thirteenth century, moved to centralize the French monarchy by limiting the power of his vassals. In the Epic of Sundiata, and in the assembly of Kurukan Fuga that comprises its climax, we thus need to see the staging, from the point of view of the dominant aristocracies and the contemporary political elites that succeeded them, of the establishment or re-­establishment of an imperial power that succeeded that of Soumaoro Kanté, the emperor of Sosso.13 It is in this respect that the idea of Mamadou Kouyaté and Souleymane Kanté to compare the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ to the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen does not make much sense. Not because Africa or Africans are unable to elaborate a ‘Constitution’, but because this 123

Were human rights born in Africa? charter does not in the slightest represent an uprising against an absolute monarchy analogous to the Glorious Revolution in England in the seventeenth c­ entury – a­ revolution which resulted in the advent of a parliamentary ­monarchy – ­or a relative preoccupation with the rights of the individual, whatever these rights may be. Once again, this charter relates exclusively to the formation of pacts or alliances between groups, ‘social contracts’ if you like, but social contracts which have absolutely nothing to do with those of the political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), which aim to ensure, by drawing on the achievements of the Magna Carta, the gains made by Habeas Corpus. By means of a fictional schema contrasting a ‘state of nature’ with a ‘social contract’, they also ensure the shift from the status of subject to that of citizen with certain rights.

Act Four: the Kankan meeting (1998) In any case, this anachronism, common to all fundamentalisms, whether they be of a religious or cultural nature, has been put to use within the framework of the rise of policies of decentralization, as well as policies encouraging multiculturalism, ethnic diversity and pan-­Africanism in Sudano-­Sahelian West African countries or across the continent as a whole. With the support of international organizations, donors and NGOs, the values of hospitality (terenga, jatigiya), humanism (maaya) and power of proximity (ka mara la segi so) are thus reaffirmed in Senegal and Mali as guarantors of good governance, while in all countries of the zone ‘joking relationships’ and palaver are promoted as factors in conflict resolution and peace-­building between different ethnic groups.14 Sudano-­Sahelian West Africa as a land of concord was thus ‘sold’ on the market of international aid as the perfect counter-­example of a Central Africa (Rwanda) or a coastal Africa (Ivory Coast) torn apart by tribal conflicts and genocides, until the jihadi offensives of 2012–13 wrecked this Edenic vision of Mali. It is in this context that, in 1998, in Kankan in Guinea, a workshop was established on the initiative of the Agence pour la francophonie (Agency for Francophone Countries) and the Centre d’études linguistiques et historiques par tradition orale (Centre for Linguistic and Historical Studies in the Oral Tradition, CELHTO). At this workshop, several Sudano-­ Sahelian West African countries were represented. This workshop or seminar officially aimed to promote a better understanding between ‘traditionalists’ (as griots and other 124

Were human rights born in Africa? maintainers of the oral tradition are called), researchers and experts in communication in order to focus on the urgent task of collecting and safeguarding the African oral heritage. At this workshop, griots were invited to deliver in turn their respective versions of the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’. The judge Siriman Kouyaté, a Guinean magistrate who himself came from a family of prestigious griots, assumed responsibility, in the purest colonial tradition, for ‘synthesizing’ it in the form of a ‘constitutional text’ consisting of forty-­four articles. In fact, this meeting of 1998 and the ‘rediscovery’ of the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ which constituted its main event led to the marginalizing of the version of Souleymane Kanté, the Guinean marabout who invented the N’Ko alphabet. His text on Kurukan Fuga, itself inspired by the colonial books of legal customs and traditions, left its mark on the version of the charter as it appears in the written document resulting from this workshop.15 Indeed, only the version delivered at this seminar is authorized, although it is actually only a ‘synthesis’ of the different versions given by the griots and loftily ignores that of Souleymane Kanté.16 Conversely, in the foreground are the two contributions of the Malian researcher Youssouf Tata Cissé: the ‘Testament of Sundiata’, narrated by his privileged informant, the griot Wa Kamissoko, as well as the ‘Hunters’ Oath’, an oral text apparently earlier (1222) than the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ (1236), which contains articles regarded as relating to ‘human rights’, in particular those demanding the abolition of slavery.17 In reality, while drawing inspiration from the colonial chronology of Delafosse, Youssouf Tata Cissé synthesized the story collected in 1965, in Tégué Koro, in Mandé, from the hunter Fadjimba Kanté, and the narrative of the griot Wa Kamissoko, who praises Sundiata for having proclaimed the abolition of slavery on the day of his enthronement as Emperor of Mali in Dakadjalan, in 1222. Thus, by tracing the genealogy of the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ to the ‘Hunters’ Oath’, it becomes possible to do ‘even better’ than Souleymane Kanté, who, for his part, had merely claimed that this Charter was prior to the Bill of Rights of 1689. From now on, human rights, in their African version, are presented as roughly contemporaneous with the English Magna Carta (1215).18 Now, it is well worth clarifying that if the Magna Carta establishes, almost for the first time, the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot, it is difficult to find anything equivalent in the Mandinka tradition prior to the texts of Souleymane Kanté, those of the Kankan workshop or the ‘Hunters’ Oath’ as published by Youssouf Tata 125

Were human rights born in Africa? Cissé. In fact, it is questionable whether this projecting back in time of the individual’s right of resistance to royal power, as it is found throughout the entire English political tradition, from the Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights via Habeas Corpus, proceeds from a ‘democratic’ or ‘egalitarian’ vision of traditional Malinké hunters’ associations (donso ton). This, at all events, is the vision that was based on Cissé’s investigations, themselves enriched by the subsequent theoretical elaborations of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux.19 So it is quite possible that, in his work on the ‘Hunters’ Oath’, Cissé, who was close to Meillassoux, adopted his vision as it provided him with a ‘traditional’ legitimization of the democratic processes at work in the West, as well as in Africa since the 1990s. At the end of this meeting, the ‘rediscovery’ of the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ resulted in the discovery of a number of highly contemporary principles or preoccupations such as human rights, gender equality, the environment, cultural diversity, African unity, and so ­on – ­principles which thus appear, in the aforementioned words of Lévi-­Strauss, as so many ‘false archaisms’.

The aftermath of the Kankan meeting: ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ or ‘Charter of the Mandé’? This ‘invention of tradition’ continued at the next meeting in Bamako in 2004, in Mali, which brought together a number of interested parties, including some who had already been present at the Kankan meeting. At this meeting, the Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop, while taking pains to distance himself from the Afrocentric ideas of Shaykh Anta Diop which had played a major role in the process that led to the promotion of the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’, nonetheless mocked those who had seen this charter as an ‘a posteriori construction of intellectuals prepared to commit any imposture in order to find valid reference points for their own history’.20 Like Diop, and without going as far as to speak of imposture, one cannot help thinking that this charter and its a­ ppendices – t­he ‘Hunters’ Oath’ and the ‘Charter of the Mandé’ – are, indeed, a construction intended to play a part in the process of heritagization. In fact, at the next meeting, again held in Bamako, in 2007, on the initiative of the Malian Ministry of Culture, the career of this charter continued when the aforementioned Malian researcher Youssouf Tata Cissé launched the ‘Hunters’ Oath’ under the brand name ‘Charter of the Mandé’.21 This latest avatar of the ‘tradition’ eventually won out 126

Were human rights born in Africa? in the international competition between ‘cultures of the world’, since it was this version that was chosen, in Abu Dhabi, in 2009, to appear on the indicative list of Intangible Cultural Heritage as established by UNESCO. How can we fail to view this decision as the product of a rivalry between the two main countries that were stakeholders in these charters, namely Guinea and Mali? This rivalry was mainly displayed in the spelling used, since the assembly organized by Sundiata can be spelled in two ways: the Malian way (Kurukan Fuga) or N’Ko-­ Guinean way (Kudukan Fuga), as it appears in the place where the famous meeting is said to have occurred.22 This ‘rivalry of traditions’, to use the expression chosen by the veteran of Malian researcher Bakary Kamian (1928–2016), should nevertheless not lead us to forget what he called the ‘complementarity’ of this ‘undeniable achievement of the national heritage’ that went beyond the limits marked by the borders of today’s Mali. This same seminar at which Kamian s­poke – t­he ‘National Seminar for the Authentication of the Charter of Kurukan Fuga’, held in Kangaba, Mali, in ­2010 – ­witnessed an ‘Afrocentric’inflected reaffirmation of the need to reject all ‘negationism’, that is to say, any questioning of the ‘reality’ of the charter, because of its adoption as part of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage and of the ensuing need for the Malian authorities to have a consensual version available.23 The next touch was added as a result of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Mali’s independence in Kurukanfuga, on 1 October 2010. At this ceremony, the Malian president of the time, Amadou Toumani Touré, in the presence of a large Guinean delegation, laid the foundation stone of a vast monument to be built in the famous ‘clearing’, which had the effect of sealing in cement and engraving in marble the different laws of this ‘unwritten constitution’.24 This completed the process of firming up Malinké identity, a process that started several decades ago and again manifested itself in 2017, when the Malian president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita sought to include the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ in the draft revision of the Constitution. Although this draft revision of the Constitution was finally abandoned in the face of vigorous opposition from the people, the fact remains that this desire to find a Mandé basis for the institutional framework of Mali is a clear expression of the north–south divide which now affects the country. It is definitely within this context that the vogue for the ‘Charter of the Mandé/Hunters’ Oath’ needs to be seen. Certain researchers, such as Jan Jansen, attribute this to the Malians’ desire for ‘autochthony’, 127

Were human rights born in Africa? as well as to their willingness to follow an egalitarian political model quite distinct from that which prevails in the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’.25 Against this idea, however, it seems to me difficult to generalize this desire for Mandé autochthony to the entire Malian population, if only because the Fulani, the Songhays and the Tuaregs are excluded from it. In addition, the current mobilization of hunters in Mali hardly fits this democratic vision. Indeed, it plays a part in the context of ‘communitarian’ confrontation between Dogon and Bambaras hunters organized by the authorities in the framework of militias and Fulani, which is far from giving these brotherhoods of hunters the egalitarian character that is habitually attributed to them.26 In this way, a kind of coalition of Bambaras and Dogons (of Mandé origin according to some people) comes into being around the Malian state; it provides a hegemonic front focused on the repression of the Fulani, considered as not forming part of the nation as a whole.27 Finally, it should be added that the discussion on the charters of Kurukan Fuga and Mandé, far from having remained restricted to West Africa, has also found its way into French political debate. The occasion for this was Ségolène Royal’s polemical response, in Dakar in 2009, to Nicolas Sarkozy’s infamous speech stating that ‘African man was not sufficiently integrated into history’. In her riposte, Royal, who had stood as a candidate for the French presidency, made mention of the ‘Charter of the Mandé’ to show that ‘African man was perfectly well integrated into history’. We must put an end to this misconception that democracy and fundamental rights rose in only one cradle, the West. In a recent lecture by Stéphane Hessel on the history of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which he co-­ authored, he gave the floor to Souleymane Bachir Diagne. The latter noted that ‘in the thirteenth-­ century Charter of the Mandé, this “Hunters’ Oath”, which was also addressed to the whole world, we find a definition of the rights of the human person that is still valid’.28

What lesson are we to draw from this? While it is legitimate from a philosophical point of view to seek to find in the ‘tradition’ elements that could support contemporary concerns, rather as Latin Americans draw on Native American values such as buen vivir and Pachamama, from the perspective of the researcher in the social sciences, on the other hand, and regardless of the place occupied by Africa in the Western imagination,29 the question arises whether it is possible to project current philosophical and political conceptions onto an ‘oral’ text which was uttered in a context of which we know nothing. 128

Were human rights born in Africa? And we are all the more justified in asking ourselves this question as Claude Meillassoux himself, the anthropologist who is probably behind this democratic vision of the hunters’ societies, has pointed out some of the erroneous projections back in time which the famous griot Wa Kamissoko, the ‘inventor’ of the ‘Charter of the Mandé’, had indulged when he set certain historical facts in the tenth century when they probably occurred in the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries.30 In the same way, we can legitimately question whether the abolition of slavery which the hunter Fadjimba Kanté claims was promulgated by Sundiata, the founder of the empire of Mali, if we are to believe Wa Kamissoko, corresponded to the situation prevailing in this region at the end of the nineteenth century, at the time of the French conquest, when whole villages were raided and their populations sold as slaves and deported massively to the north, as far as the oases of the Sahara and the Maghreb. Was not the abolition of the slave trade, one of the justifications for the conquest of this region of Sudano-­Sahelian West Africa by the French army, to some extent reflected in the stories later collected from this hunter and this griot? Many examples of this phenomenon, which can be described as a feedback from the written onto the oral domains, are indeed attested by anthropologists in connection with Africa and other parts of the world.31 But, beyond that, should we not give up trying at all costs to find ‘African’ equivalents for the great principles of the ‘European’ philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or similar equivalents for human rights, in a sort of ‘mimetic rivalry’, a source of frustration and misunderstanding? And besides, in what way do the human rights that are supposedly detectable in the ‘Hunters’ Oath’ (apart from the one dealing with the abolition of slavery, still practised in Mauritania and Libya) correspond to the requirements of international organizations concerning the abolition of female genital mutilation, early marriages or an end to the repressive treatment of homosexuals? The recent African democratic revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have mostly failed, but they were carried out in the name of freedom of expression and democracy, without this posing any particular problems to those who took part in them. The latter did not feel, in fact, the need to turn to the Qur’an, the caliphates or Berber ‘democratic’ traditions, for example, in a quest for political models justifying their action. The process of Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan democratization seized on human rights and turned them against the West, setting an example of what needed to be done and 129

Were human rights born in Africa? showing what the West still needed to do. This process did not ask human rights to show their passport; it simply expressed its thirst for freedom and dignity; and nobody would dare to reproach it, in doing so, for betraying some kind of African authenticity, even that of the north of the continent.

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17 On the charters of the Mandé Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Jean-­Loup Amselle discusses the ‘Charter of the Mandé’, which is another text, transcribed from its oral status in a quite different operation. Here, a group of researchers, drawing on the memory of West African griots, reconstituted the principles that had been publicly stated as necessary for the process of founding the plural empire that Mandé had become. In the collective work La Charte de Kurukan Fuga: aux sources d’une pensée politique en Afrique (The Charter of Kurukan Fuga: The Sources of Political Thought in Africa),1 the researchers engaged in the project explain how they collected many versions from the griots (the guardians of what we now call, unabashed by the oxymoron involved, oral texts), proceeded to the necessary cross-­referencing and reconstitutions, and thereby produced a document in which were set out the principles and prohibitions that were to form the basis of a harmonious coexistence of various clans, linguistic groups, castes, and so on, within the empire, the recognized rights of certain social categories, women, children, and so forth. All of these statements taken together make up what can be called the ‘Constitution’ (or charter) of the Mandé, that is to say, if we look at the etymology of the word ‘constitution’, that which makes the empire ‘hold together’. I sense that Amselle is questioning the whole project not by examining and discussing its approach, but by claiming that, right from the outset, it has the crippling defect of being the manifestation of a desire which he baptizes ‘Afrocentrist’, a desire to emulate the West by producing a document that can be compared to the Magna Carta. It is well worth reading the introduction to this book by Djibril Tamsir Niane, and especially the foreword by the late Mangoné Niang, the anthropologist and prime mover, in his capacity as ­director 131

On the charters of the Mandé of CELHTO, established in Niamey, which sets out the planned reconstitution of the ‘charter’ of the Mandé. Niang, who was as competent as anyone, as honest and demanding as anyone, when it came to the protocols and procedures to be implemented when working in the field of oral transmission, first explains the kind of approach and cross-­checks that made it possible to update the Kurukan Fuga document. Then, in connection with what makes it interesting over and above its historical value, here is what he writes: ‘If Africans of that period sought to manage litigation by negotiation, why can’t we?’2 This is what drives the Senegalese anthropologist: the meaning today, for West Africa, of the political philosophy that expresses itself in this document, and not the aim of addressing an interlocutor whom one would seek to emulate and whose approval would simultaneously be sought, namely ‘the West’. The aim is the translation, into the language of modern democracies, of this document that witnesses to a desire to build a form of ‘living together’ on the basis of the plural. Much more interesting in reality than a comparativism that does not make much sense is the fact that the state of Mali today, for itself, for the meaning it gives both to its history and to its future, has enshrined in its Constitution, with reference to the ‘Charter of the Mandé’, its desire to draw inspiration from the political philosophy that is expressed in it.

Addendum on the ‘Charter of the Mandé’ and the ‘Hunters’ Oath’ The first thing that has to be said about the ‘Charter of the Mandé’ is that it corresponds to two different ‘oral documents’. There is the ‘charter’ properly speaking, which is the reconstitution, through the study of the oral traditions concerning the empire of Mali, and after cross-­checking, of the principles upon which this empire was founded. It is, literally, the Constitution (in the sense of founding principles) of historical Mali. The mode of presentation of these principles and the way they are arranged as a succession of articles give the transcribed document the form of a charter. There is also the ‘Hunters’ Oath’, now published in Bambara, French, and English (it is in this version that it constitutes one of the texts studied at Columbia University in a course called ‘African Civilizations’), and in which the fraternity of the Mandé hunters made a commitment to protect West African societies in the name of and in keeping with a certain number of principles that are enumerated in it. 132

On the charters of the Mandé As I have said, there were some who questioned the validity of the two documents, the charter in particular, which is to be expected when it comes to oral archives entrusted to human memory. The answer to these questions is to be found in the explanations given by researchers about the methods of reconstitution on which they relied. I have already referred to this in connection with the work published by CELHTO on the charter. We need to be quite clear: on this subject more than any of the others that we have discussed in this book of conversations, my opposition to what Amselle says is total and radical. Not because I do not think we need to discuss the methods of reconstituting the Mandé charter, but because, if we are to believe Amselle, we are dealing not with a discussion, but with a posture of conspiracy. And this posture does not care about counter-­arguments, it merely says: mimetic rivalry with the Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the whole intention behind the ‘invention’ of this Mandé charter. It was an invention that benefited from the support of Meillassoux’s ‘subsequent theoretical elaborations’ (note that the theory comes from Meillassoux, just as the chronological framework had come from Delafosse, while it falls to Youssouf Tata Cissé and anthropologists from CELHTO to conduct ‘surveys’) and the complicity(?) of UNESCO. How should one respond to this? I won’t even try: there is no point in protesting in the name of all those who are accused of imposture and putting myself in the position of an apologist. So I just need to repeat what Boubacar Boris Diop (quoted by Amselle) wrote when he mocked those who view the charter as no more than a conspiracy of intellectuals. On the other hand, there is the question of the origin of human rights, an interesting topic for discussion. On this subject, my position is as follows: it is only from the point of view of ‘centrisms’, whether they are Euro-, Afro- or otherwise, that the question of the origin of human rights makes sense. If we pose the question in terms of origin, we end up going back into the mists of time. It is not wrong to speak of the ‘religious origins of human rights’. We could (why not?) argue that the idea that rights are attached to the human, and related to human dignity, appears in Cain’s remorse for committing the first murder, that of his brother Abel, especially when he laments the fact, as it is said in the Qur’an, that he did not even bury him, while the ravens do show respect for their dead fellow bird. In his important work on the history of human rights,3 Samuel Moyn suggests that we do not pursue this undecidable question of 133

On the charters of the Mandé their origin only to realize that they assumed their current importance in political discourse and international relations only in the early 1970s, when, after the discrediting of the great causes bearing the promise of a bright future, ‘human rightism’, as it is called, became ‘the last political utopia’. Human rights activists speak the language of ethics that ignores borders and sovereignty once it is a matter of fighting on behalf of the human; thus they have also committed themselves to humanitarian action without borders. The Ebola epidemic that affected certain West African countries (and not ‘Africa’, as many newspapers reported) showed the value of ‘médecins sans frontières’ (‘doctors without borders’). Their commitment and their courage in the service of the human, everywhere, are to be saluted. Since we are talking about Africa, rather than focusing on useless and absurd questions of priority, it is better to consider the current status, at this time of ‘human rightism’ and the ‘without frontiers’ movement, of human rights on the African continent and the role that can be played by the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ in their development. I will first remark that African doctors will have more trouble than their European counterparts in placing their generosity and their ethical sense at the service of the causes that call for urgent action because ‘without frontiers’ is not a viable option for those who find it difficult to get the right visas, and have problems crossing borders. One needs a European or an American passport to claim that boundaries can be ignored when an emergency so dictates and that only human beings and the rights attached to them matter. One must already enjoy the human right to move easily across the whole earth. That today’s world controls and limits the mobility of ‘brown people’ is also a question of human rights. But I must come back specifically to Kurukan Fuga, and repeat that the only question that seems important to me is the way it is used here and now. That Africa now has an African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights that citizens and groups of citizens can brandish in opposition to states is a significant advance on a continent that, as late as the 1980s, was said to have been ‘neglected by human rights’. However, we know that this charter is, in some of its articles, still marked by those who wanted to believe that African philosophy in this matter tends to emphasize the rights of the group and the duties of the individual vis-­à-vis the group. The ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ provides us with an eloquent counter-­example to this call for an ‘African philosophy’ of the group that ignores the way the individual is a bearer of rights, in opposition to the group if necessary. Every time I mentioned in my writings the 134

On the charters of the Mandé ‘Hunters’ Oath’ more especially, this was never to become embroiled in an idle discussion of the origins of human rights, but to recall that the principles listed therein relate to the rights of the individual, which West Africa was not, as such, unfamiliar with. In general, teaching the history of the ‘Charter of the Mandé’ as part of a course on the history of the empire of Mali will involve telling young Africans that the question of getting diverse populations to live together, by stating principles that combine rights with duties, arises today as it arose yesterday. And that the response provided by the ‘Charter of the Mandé’ thus has lessons for our own time. All peoples write their history in the present tense, and it’s in their present that they read the texts of their past, a reading which reinvents them. It’s no different for Mali today, or for West African countries, of which the ancient Mandé constitutes the cultural matrix.

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18 On various contemporary questions Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle

White privilege, Whiteness, anti-White racism SBD – It must first be recalled that the concept of White privilege is not new and comes from the United States. Let’s go back to a text that we know well and that we’ve already mentioned in our conversation: ‘Black Orpheus’, Sartre’s famous preface to Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in French). The very first lines say that the imperial West has lived on a history that consisted of the privilege of seeing without being seen.1 We cannot imagine a better definition of what is currently called White privilege. What does Sartre tell us? He tells us that after taking a look at the rest of the world and applying its own anthropological approach to other cultures, the West believed that it had itself achieved such self-­transparency that it was justified in knowing others better than they knew themselves. That is the simple summary of what could be called White privilege, the privilege of seeing without being seen, of considering oneself to be the norm while the others are different or particular, and that one represents a certain form of norm and universality. Once we came back to these definitions, we tackled, in the course of our conversation, my way of questioning what, under the pretext of denouncing White privilege, becomes a sort of confinement within one’s own experience. And I gave the example of Open Casket, the famous painting by Dana Schutz that stirred controversy: this American artist was criticized for speaking of Black suffering. I am totally against this. Obviously, we cannot, under the pretext of denouncing White privilege, lock each person in his or her pure 136

On various contemporary questions experience. Basically, it’s as if I were to say, ‘As soon as I declare that I speak as a Muslim African, I’m saying to everyone “shut up, you can’t say anything about me because you’re not yourself Muslim Africans”.’ I strongly reject this posture. That’s what I have to say about White privilege. It is undeniable that the West has posed as a connoisseur of the rest of the world: I look at you and I explain you, I explain to you who you are; it’s an imperialists’ form of cultural privilege. On the social level, this has had specific consequences. Let’s imagine that you and I are currently students in Paris. When we start looking for accommodation, you’ll find it easier than I do. It’s a form of White privilege that’s quite commonplace, and we have to say that it reproduces a kind of ambient structural racism. JLA – I largely subscribe to that view, if not totally. Because there is indeed a White privilege which consists in claiming for the West and for Western science a kind of overarching neutrality over other cultures that is completely illegitimate. I also agree with what you just said; for my part, I would call it ‘the racial prohibition of representation’, that is, what you mention about that artist who represented Black suffering but who, because she is White, is felt not to have the legitimacy to do so. I took up this idea in connection with Exhibit B, a show that also aimed to represent Black suffering, but as Brett Bailey is a White South African, he was denied the right to represent Black suffering. On this level, we agree, even if, in the course of our exchanges, where we have sometimes been pulling our punches, some divergences have been expressed a little abruptly. I think there is another problem, that of Whiteness. This is basically the rebuke addressed to those who are designated as Whites: that they ignore, precisely, the fact that they are White and therefore enjoy certain privileges because they are White. This notion of Whiteness has the disadvantage, in my view, of coming with an essentialist connotation, because it attaches or binds a skin colour to a certain race, blithely overlooking the fact that Whiteness is not a pigmentary or phenotypic phenomenon, but a social phenomenon. I think there is a social construction of colour and that Blacks, Africans, West Indians and Americans can also be called Whites. This is what the term ‘Bounty’ in English ­means – ­people who are Black on the outside, but White on the inside, like the confectionery that’s made of chocolate on the outside and coconut on the inside. To address the issue of White privilege insofar as it is related to the concept of Whiteness, 137

On various contemporary questions it would be advantageous to remove all raciological, phenotypic and pigmentary connotations and consider it as a social phenomenon, a notion that may be appropriated positively or negatively by certain social groups. SBD – I’ll first make a general remark. You spoke of our debate as a debate where we pulled our punches. Paradoxically, I didn’t have this impression. In fact, it seems to me that you personally need to set yourself up against someone Afrocentrist, particularist and essentialist. You urge me to don that livery. You like to have this man of straw you can attack. But I’m not an Afrocentrist; I’m for the universal and I’m not particularist. We will find it difficult to disagree. I wrote at the conclusion of the article ‘Négritude’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: ‘[O]ne does not have to be black to be a “nègre.”’2 Negro is a constructed social category, a response to an ­oppression – s­ o there is no need to attach a skin colour to it. Césaire said that Quebecers who were fighting to assert the presence of their language in the English-­speaking ocean of North America were, from this point of view, Negroes. In the same way, Senghor made Rimbaud, Claudel and Bergson Negroes. This de-­pigmentation of apparently racialist categories can actually be found even among authors who would be considered the most racialist and most essentialist, such as the writers of ‘Négritude’; besides, if I leave those authors to one side, it is intensely present in my own work. The idea that we can attach stigmas to an appearance, to a phenotype, comes so close to racism that these words repel me. I have trouble saying ‘Whiteness’, ‘anti-­White’, talking about people as ‘Whites’ and ‘Blacks’. It’s true that it’s a social phenomenon and that we should try to see what lies behind the use of these terms. The idea that is debated here is that Whiteness, the fact of being White, gives one a kind of advantage in a society, even though people claim this is not the case. We spoke just now of the difficulties of finding accommodation. This debate must be taken in the context of several considerations, one of which, in the United States, is the famous question of affirmative action, also known as positive discrimination. Those who attack such a notion say that a discrimination is a ­discrimination – a­ n affirmative action is a way of targeting skin colours and this goes against a requirement of equality on both ethical and legal levels. Those who reply that there is a legitimacy both moral and legal in ‘active action’ are implementing the concept of Whiteness, saying that being White gives you advantages that either you do not realize, or you claim not to exist. If we consider 138

On various contemporary questions the concept of Whiteness at work in the political, social and cultural configuration that I have just described, we can see more clearly how things stand here. Having explained where this notion came from, I’m one hundred per cent in agreement with you that it’s not a question of pigmentation, but a social phenomenon. We are always someone’s White person or someone’s Black person, if we see these as contrasted. For example, in the United States, something very amusing cropped ­up – ­well, it would have been amusing if it didn’t fit rather precisely into this somewhat nauseating context of the characterization and fragmentation of humans according to phenotypes. People wondered at one point whether Arabs were to be considered as Whites. It was almost decided on a heads-­or-­tails basis: finally, yes, they were White. In an American society at that time dominated by segregation, it radically changed the lives of Arab immigrants, depending on whether they entered the category of ‘Whites’ or not. It was touch and go whether they were so categorized. This is of course a matter of social construction, an eminently political phenomenon which must be treated that ­way – ­we need to ask ourselves what a society does with its ‘visible minorities’, as the French put it, how these minorities are treated in regard to phenotype, and here, unfortunately, these concepts of ‘Whiteness’ or ‘Blackness’– such ugly words in French (‘blanchité’ and ‘noireté’) – are obviously at work. We need to hope for a society where these terms no longer have relevance. JLA – Despite the Afrocentrism that you reproach me for ascribing to you, we get on well with each other, we have always done so, and we will continue to do so in the future. On this notion of Afrocentrism, I think that in your perception of the charters of the Mandé, and in particular the ‘Hunters’ Oath’, there is still an Afrocentrist connotation that you may not fully realize, but in any case it’s present among those who promoted this ‘Charter of the Mandé’, and in particular in the form of the ‘Hunters’ Oath’, because this oath, as promoted by Youssouf Tata Cissé, was supposed to have appeared in Africa around the time of the issuing of the Magna Carta. You have not taken over the whole of Cissé’s argument, but you haven’t distanced yourself from it or denied it either; so your approach does, in spite of everything, it seems to me, form part of an Afrocentric trend. Indeed, with the question of the possibility of finding accommodation, something which is less easy for Blacks than for ­Whites – ­generally s­ peaking – ­we come to the heart of the problem. I think the possibility of finding accommodation is not the same for Blacks 139

On various contemporary questions depending on the social category they belong to. I think, for example, that it will be easier for someone like you to find accommodation than for a migrant who has just arrived from sub-­Saharan Africa. There are no Blacks in general, but categories or social classes among Blacks and among all those whose membership is defined according to phenotypic or pigmentary criteria. This brings us back to an important issue that aroused rather lively controversy in connection with Houria Bouteldja’s Whites, Jews, and Us.3 While I have many reservations about this ­book – ­I disagree with a good number of the author’s arguments –, I still think she has put her finger on something, and this allows me to go back to what you said about how Arabs were classified in the United States on the racial and chromatic scale. You said Arabs were almost not classified as Whites. In her book, Houria Bouteldja ­shows – a­ nd here I subscribe to this i­dea – t­hat Jews are not Whites. Jews are not Whites, even if they consider themselves as such, because, being the victims of anti-­ Semitism, they can be included among other social categories who are also the victims of racism, such as Arabs and Blacks. This also allows me to make a reservation about what you said about visible minorities. I think the visible minority concept is confusing; it’s not productive, because Jews, who are victims of ­racism – ­anti-­Semitism is for me a form of racism –, are not visible in the public space. And yet they are victims of racism. Why? Because we can be visible in many ways, not just phenotypical or pigmentary ways, but also because our name is Mohammed if we’re an Arab or Levy if we’re a Jew. It’s also a way of questioning this notion of the visible minority. SBD – On visible minorities, I totally agree with you. By the way, it’s worth r­emembering – I­ always come back to my dear classical ­authors – ­that Sartre conducted an analysis of the Jewish question which in many ways is parallel to his analysis of the Black question in ‘Black Orpheus’. He talks about how a society constitutes minorities as minorities. The model of this constitution, its mechanism, is always the gaze. One is Jewish under the gaze of the anti-­Semite, in the same way that one is Black under the gaze of the racist. So, in this respect, I fully agree with what you say. And, in parenthesis, I was speaking of how Arabs have become White, but, conversely, for a very long time the Irish were Black in the eyes of a kind of British racism, or English racism, rather. We agree on social construction and minority politics. I come back to the term ‘Afrocentrism’, a kind of lump concept, one that slips and slides and has no precise outlines. If I invite the 140

On various contemporary questions readers of our conversation to read my work closely and accurately, and my thoughts on the ‘Hunters’ Oath’, how does the problem appear? It appears on two levels. First, the epistemological reflection: is the oral tradition (in this case African) a source of history? Youssouf Tata Cissé and all those who worked on the ‘Charter of the Mandé’ or the ‘Hunters’ Oath’, as well as on the Kurukan Fuga, rely on the tradition that says that in the thirteenth century, Sundiata Keita, a historical as well as legendary emperor of Mali, enacted this oath and also a number of rules on which the plurilingual and multicultural empire he was building was to be constituted. There is an epistemological question that habitually comes up and that needs to be treated scientifically: to what extent is a reconstruction based on the oral tradition valid? This question must be asked. The second thing is that my remarks on the ‘Hunters’ Oath’ entered the philosophical debate on the collective and the individual: Africans are considered to have a collectivist philosophy where rights, the concept of human rights, attach to groups and not to individuals. This is because in Africa, in African thought, we believe, the individual does not count, the individual only has duties towards a group, which alone has any rights. In a position that I consider as individualist and universalist, I support the idea that rights are individual, because I can see that, when we define rights as collective, this may entail crushing individual difference, crushing the possibility of dissent. Since you say that ­Africans – ­although I don’t know what the term ‘Africans’ means, since Africa is extremely ­diverse – ­are, in essence (here’s the essentialism), collective in their way of thinking, just one example will be enough to demolish your argument. This counter-­example is Article 1 in the ‘Hunters’ Oath’, which insists on the value of the said individual. Other articles express the value of the rights attached to the individual. So that’s why I talk about the ‘Charter of the Mandé’. You think that, having talked about the Mandé charter, I am entering into the Afrocentric discourse that consists of saying, ‘We had the declaration of human rights before the rest of the world.’ But I’m not really bothered about the question of p ­ riority – w ­ hat I have written is that these rights are individual rights; what I needed for the argument was a counter-­example presenting articles of individual rights. If they had dated back to the eighteenth or the nineteenth century, it would have been exactly the same for me. I wanted to show that the facile statement made by over-­hasty ethnologists and anthropologists that Africa had a collectivist way of thinking was wrong, and that the evidence needed to be gathered on the ground. 141

On various contemporary questions Afrocentrists are first and foremost Egyptophiles. They spend their time talking about Black Egypt, and do so in terms of priority. They are obsessed with the symmetrical construction that corresponds to the construction of the West, and their whole discourse is mimetic: they reply to the West: ‘You have Greece, we have Egypt; you have human rights, we have the “Charter of the Mandé”.’ Personally, I’ve moved beyond this confrontation, I’m not obsessed with the West, and, besides, I don’t think that you’re any more Western than me. What would it mean to consider you as a Westerner, and me as an African as against a Westerner? This kind of mirror speech which constitutes Afrocentrism and, indeed, all ­centrisms – ­we can’t denounce Eurocentrism without denouncing A ­ frocentrism – i­s something I reject. I reject all centrisms, and my conception of the universal of translation is precisely a decentring machine. Let’s look at the points on which we are not in agreement. You have the feeling that if one provincializes Europe and views it as a cultural area like the others, then we fall into fragmentation, we fall into the fact that the world will be ­constituted – a­ s Levinas says, and on that level you’re saying the same as h ­ im – ­as a saraband of sealed cultures separated from each other. Why must Europe be anything other than a province like all the other provinces in the world? Why must it be in the centre? This is a point on which we do not agree. JLA – The concept of Article 1 of the ‘Hunters’ Oath’ bothers me, because it involves a ‘juridicization’ of this oath, it’s as if it were Article 1 of the constitution of African individualism. I don’t agree. We are faced with a kind of legal codification of an oral text and we don’t really know the conditions in which it was collected or what it meant in the context of its discovery, and this is where the work of the anthropologist is markedly different from that of the philosopher. But on the question of individualism, I completely agree with you: the individual has always existed in Africa, including in the precolonial era. A certain number of kingdoms were founded by individuals on the margins of the society they came from. I therefore subscribe to the concept of the individual and the existence of the individual in Africa, including in the precolonial era, and not just currently in cities, in situations of modernity. I think that the individual has always existed and that the imputation of collectivity remains a thoroughly racist imputation about Africa: ‘These people have no individuality, just as they have no history’ – it sounds just like what Sarkozy said in Dakar. If different ­areas – ­Africa, Europe, Oceania, Asia, Latin ­America – ­are culturalized, then that means you and I disagree. Not that I align 142

On various contemporary questions myself with L ­ evinas – I­ don’t agree with him at all: indeed, rather than looking for the differences between cultures and languages, I think it is initially necessary to focus on the similarities between different cultures. And I think we can find, for example, similarities between precolonial theories of power in Africa and theories of power as they existed in Europe, and especially in France, in the Ancien Régime. In this regard, I take the example of the classic opposition between the indigenous masters of the land and the conquerors, the people in power who have a foreign origin. This is an idea, principle or structure that we find in the theory of the ‘war of the two races’, as it was set out by Boulainvilliers in France in the seventeenth century, and as it was taken over by Michel Foucault in Society Must be Defended,4 where we find this opposition between the Gauls or the Gallo-­Romans, the ancestors of the Third Estate, and then the Franks from Germania, the ancestors of the nobility. We find exactly the same theory in precolonial Africa in connection with a multitude of kingdoms. What interests me is finding precisely what English-­ language writers call the ‘commonalities’ between different areas that we call ‘cultural’ areas, though this is ultimately just intellectual laziness, without seeking resemblances. Here, for me, lies the interest of universalism and the universalist vision that I defend. SBD – That there is something in common, we agree; what you say about the structures of power, I say in my analysis of oral literature. Let’s take folktales: nothing brings humans closer or is more able to show what is common to them than f­olktales – ­we find everywhere the same structures, the same motifs. So, on what is common, we agree completely.

Intersectionality and universalism SBD – Intersectionality is a word that comes from this side of the Atlantic. As I understand it, this concept expresses something very specific. If we consider the world as a juxtaposition of identities, which is not my view of it, we can identify several identities that are oppressed in the same way. That is, one can be oppressed both as a woman and as a Black, for example. In actual fact, if one is a victim of oppression, if society as it exists is misogynist (human societies are indeed misogynist societies), and if we consider that racism exists in the world, one can be a victim of racism and misogyny and find oneself at the intersection of these two oppressions. That’s how I 143

On various contemporary questions would define the term, that’s how I understand it; now it has a purely descriptive aspect. JLA – I tend to agree with this descriptive definition that you give. Intersectionality, for me, is the idea that different discriminations of race and gender, in particular, reinforce class exploitation: for example, even if they have equal qualifications, women and homosexuals are paid less than heterosexual men, Black women are paid less than White women, children are paid less than adults, disabled people are paid less than those who are not disabled, prisoners are paid less than people at liberty, and so on. Not to mention a reality that appeared in France recently: migrants are more affected by AIDS than other members of society. There is a way of adding handicaps to one another to cumulative effect; and this raises the question of the universality of the conditions of existence, of living conditions. This leads to the assertion that society is composed only of minorities, and it also leads us to an extreme fragmentation of society and, in my view, we have the question of the aggregation of all these struggles, the struggles of these women, these Blacks, these homosexuals, these prisoners, and so on. In the intersectional perspective, in intersectionality, it seems to me that oppression comes before exploitation, so the criticism I would address to this concept, to this problem, is that we can’t add race or gender to class. I think these are things that can’t be added, that can’t form a sum total; on the contrary, we must privilege what I would call an approach in terms of ‘class-­based’ relations of race and the appropriation and social use that can be made of notions like those of postcoloniality, for example. SBD – I would now like to express more systematically something I mentioned in connection with an expression in Hannah Arendt, who says, ‘When one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a ­ e – ­and here I concur with Barbara Jew.’5 The word ‘as’ seems to m Cassin’s a­nalysis – ­a very meaningful expression. That brings me back to a point in the previous conversation: you are perfectly right to say that class is important. Speaking of the difficulty in accessing accommodation, I said that, if I was a student in France right now, I would have more trouble getting accommodation than a classmate with a typical French name such as Christophe Dubois. On the other hand, today, when I need to rent an apartment for a month or two of research in France and I do it over the Internet, saying that I’m working as a professor in the United States, I have no problem. The 144

On various contemporary questions most racist proprietor knows a bit about political economy, knows that I’m solvent, and will prefer to rent to me rather than someone else because I can pay the two months up front. These phenomena of class exist and we must not reduce ourselves to being nothing but members of a m ­ inority – i­n other words, we mustn’t just highlight one parameter. It’s important to understand that if one is oppressed, a victim of discrimination insofar as one is this or that, it is as this or that that one responds. In other words, if a Black kid goes around the streets with his hoodie u ­ p – a­ s is the ­fashion –, before they know which neighbourhood he comes from, if it’s the wealthier neighbourhoods or the ghettos, it’s a safe bet that the police will view him with suspicion. In the same way, if I arrive at the border police ­control – ­as often ­happens – a­ nd show my Senegalese passport, it is looked at with much greater scepticism than if I had an American passport, which I haven’t yet got round to obtaining, unlike the rest of my family, who, on my advice, own American passports, since in any case they are also American by culture. When the policeman asks me who I am and what I’m doing here, and he realizes that I’m a professor at Columbia, everything goes fine. But this is a moment when I have the experience of being reduced to the identity of someone who comes from a country, Senegal, associated in the minds of many frontier police officers with the status of migrants, before I’m slotted into the category of a professor, an intellectual, and thus someone unlikely to quit his job just to trudge round the streets of Paris. How are we to think about struggles ‘as’ this or that and class-­ based struggles? We can’t just s­ay – a­ nd this was the meaning of Aimé Césaire’s opposition to the universalism represented by French ­communism – t­ hat a universal class, the proletariat, will bring emancipation and that, as a result of dissemination, this emancipation will also mean the emancipation of all minorities, equality between men and women, and so on. This is not the case. We are in a critical situation where you have to imagine a kind of convergence of struggles towards a common horizon of emancipation, to advance freedoms on all levels, or even freedom as such, if we want to use this word in the singular. And so we should not ignore the fact that a group such as ‘Black Lives Matter’, for example, addressed a specific problem, which was that at a given moment (and this is, unfortunately, a structural matter) the police felt that policing the city meant policing it against people who looked like the young Trayvon Martin, who was killed by a neighbourhood watch coordinator, a self-­proclaimed guardian of middle-­class values and security. The justification of a 145

On various contemporary questions group like this one is a response to a situation experienced as a young Black. We must not stop at this simple juxtaposition and imagine that these struggles will add up. You have to aim for a universal horizon and articulate a discourse that can express how emancipation is emancipation from global capitalism, from an organization of society which itself generates inequalities of many kinds (economic inequality, inequality resulting from one’s origins, etc.). JLA – I agree with the last part of your remarks. However, I want to pick up something you said at the beginning, in particular about Hannah Arendt, that you are reappropriating so as to challenge the idea of ‘as’. SBD – That’s a word I don’t understand. Why, if I quote Sartre, am I not reappropriating him, while if I quote Arendt, I’m reappropriating her? Why this word ‘reappropriate’? JLA – I wanted to challenge the idea (no matter whether it came from Hannah Arendt or from you) of the ‘as’. I don’t think one can say ‘as a Black’, ‘as an Arab’, ‘as a Jew’, and so on; and the example you chose, one that concerns you personally, namely that when you cross a border with your Senegalese passport this isn’t the same as if you cross the same border with your American passport, doesn’t convince me. Because, to speak like Bourdieu, in your habitus, in your whole way of being, of behaving, of comporting yourself, and also because of your mastery of the French language, you can’t be viewed as similar to a sub-­Saharan migrant who comes from Senegal and speaks poor French, who doesn’t comport himself in the same way as you, who doesn’t have the same habitus. There is no ‘as’ – as a Black, as a Jew, as an Arab. In my view, there’s no such thing. This enables me to reintroduce the phenomenon of social class through phenotypic or pigmentary differences. SBD – Two counter-­examples: Animata Sow Fall, an internationally acclaimed writer, had trouble on the border with her Senegalese passport. As for the young Trayvon Martin who was killed by that vigilante: it was discovered after his death that his parents didn’t come from the ghetto, and anyway his social class wasn’t visible; on the other hand, unfortunately, what was visible was that he was a young Black man. I wish you were right and that we lived in a world where the ‘as’ didn’t exist, but I feel that you’re being far too optimistic. 146

On various contemporary questions JLA – What I meant, to take another counter-­example, if you like, is that the veiled women from the Gulf countries who walk down the Champs-­Élysées aren’t treated the same way as the veiled women who walk round the suburbs of the big French cities.

Cultural appropriation SBD – Appropriation, it seems to me, is a universal phenomenon. We appropriate things because we are human beings, and I believe this is one of the features of our human condition. And it is good that it should be so. Using this expression, you explained to me that the issue was the reproach addressed to Westerners for seizing on the cultures of non-­ Westerners, and in particular, in the case that concerns us, African cultures. I’d like to talk about this aspect of things from two points of view. Just now, I mentioned Europe’s self-­proclaimed anthropological vocation, as it were. Europe did indeed have the feeling that it was its task to go off and study other cultures and explain them to themselves to get them to understand themselves better than they had already had. In saying that, I didn’t want to give the impression I was attacking ethnology or anthropology. Anthropology admittedly was part of the baggage brought by colonization, but by nature it is a science that carried within itself a postcolonial and decolonizing potential, since the anthropological approach to understanding other cultures was the gateway to a positive appropriation of cultures. I pointed out that it is true that the world is becoming Europeanized, but it’s also becoming Indianized and Africanized, and that’s a good thing. That’s one way to think of appropriation, in my view. Now, to take a concrete example, there is a very specific form of appropriation that you and I ought to say something about. Recently I reread Michel Leiris’s book Phantom Africa,6 and especially the hallucinatory pages where he describes the violence both symbolic and physical of the teams of ethnologists, who are, after all, teams of scientists. They seize on objects of art, worship and culture and pretend to pay for them by forcing people to accept a penny or two in exchange for objects which are for them all the more priceless as they are religious. President Macron recently said that we needed to study modes of restitution. This is really important, as the point is to ensure justice for those societies that have experienced this violent appropriation of decisive elements of their culture. I’m also happy that this mission has been entrusted to intellectuals who are both 147

On various contemporary questions responsible and thoughtful, including my friend Felwine Sarr, and who will investigate what restitution entails. JLA – I would like to take two examples of critiques of the West’s cultural appropriation of African cultures. Kader Attia, a Franco-­ Algerian artist who is known worldwide, is the author of a ‘Dogon mask’ covered with pieces of broken mirror, a mask that reflects back to the West a diffracted vision of Africa. Attia rebukes Picasso for appropriating Negro art without trying to get in touch with the African artists who had produced these masks. He criticizes, indeed lambasts, this primitivist operation, which renders those artists invisible. Similarly, he slates the 2009 exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris dedicated to the work of Picasso for not mentioning the influence of Negro art on his work; it only mentioned Western art, and presented Picasso as an exclusive heir to its history. Attia is seeking to make ‘reparation’, as he calls it, for this injustice, and that’s what he is endeavouring to do in his Parisian studio, called La Colonie. We can take other examples such as that of Amahiguéré Dolo, a Malian artist, who criticizes Miquel Barceló, a world-­renowned Catalan artist, for appropriating the technique of the Dogon pottery that Dolo had taught him. At the same time, Western, European dancers are reproached for performing African dances, for playing the djembe and making use of African percussion instruments; Elvis Presley was rebuked for appropriating the Black music of the United States. But, conversely, the point I’m getting to is this: Africans appropriated ownership of Dutch ‘wax’ that has now become an African fabric and is being reappropriated in turn by Western stylists who use it, for example, to make shoes. Who owns what? Who owns the cultural items once they have been re-­semanticized? In my opinion, this notion of cultural appropriation presupposes the existence of intangible cultures, such as Black music, and assumes there is a radical distinction between Africa and the West. Moreover, there are also (and here the point is to de-­ racialize the notion of cultural appropriation) examples of ‘Black’ intra-­racial cultural appropriation. I refer here to the controversy about Beyoncé and Jay-­Z, who have been accused of appropriating the poster of an old, limited-­release Senegalese film, Touki Bouki, directed by Djibril Diop Mambety; in this 1973 film, we see a motorcyclist with his companion sitting behind him, his bike decorated with zebu horns. This is an image that has been taken up by Beyoncé and Jay-­Z. So cultural appropriation is also for me a phenomenon of economic domination, 148

On various contemporary questions and this phenomenon needs to be analysed as one of the circulation of items between different social classes, and not only between different cultural areas. Rather than cultural appropriation, starting out from what you said about anthropology, I would talk in terms of the inequality of the conditions of access to culture(s). For example, as far as Mali is ­concerned – ­it’s the African country that I know the b ­ est – w ­ hat strikes me is that anthropology there is largely the work of foreign researchers who, in fact, are not necessarily ‘White’; there may be Japanese people involved, for example. And when they are talking about anthropologists there, about foreign researchers (the ‘toubabs’), they say they are ‘dans les conditions’ (‘in [the right] conditions’). They have more funding and better means of publication, so they can seize on their culture and spread it more widely than Malian nationals would be able to. I will end with another example. In 2017, I acted as a consultant for the exhibition ‘Trésors de l’islam en Afrique de Tombouctou à Zanzibar’ (‘Treasures of Islam in Africa from Timbuktu to Zanzibar’). On the cover of the catalogue of this exhibition there is a picture of the Djenné mosque, but what’s striking is that there is not a single Malian among the contributors. This is what was pointed out to me in Bamako. SBD – Basically, as we have said, we quite agree. A word about Kader Attia, who is a friend of mine; I know La Colonie and its work very well. Moreover, my book Open to Reason is illustrated with a work by Kader Attia, who kindly allowed me to use it. He’s an artist of repair in a general way, he has organized exhibitions about the repairing of the gueueles cassées, the facially disfigured soldiers of the First World War, and the concept of repair is, in his work, very broad. I don’t think his point is to denounce the fact that Picasso appropriated Black art, but rather to say that this fact should be more recognized. I believe this is the nuance that must be added. In this respect, one has only to look at Picasso’s own remarks that I quote in my book on Senghor.7 I refer to the interview that Picasso had with André Malraux, in which he recounts his visit to the Musée de la Place du Trocadéro in Paris (this was essentially the ancestor of two later anthropological museums, the Musée de l’Homme to begin with, and today’s Musée du Quai Branly). Picasso explains that his visit left him with a very deep impression. And in particular he tells Malraux: ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day.’ Now, if we look at Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, this was the first time in Picasso’s approach that African masks appeared, since 149

On various contemporary questions the faces of these young ladies are African masks. So, if it’s simply a matter of saying that Picasso appropriated Negro art in a good way, we need only quote Picasso himself. Senghor was not mistaken about this. He organized an exhibition in Senegal where Picasso’s works were shown alongside works of traditional African art, thereby bringing into dialogue the forms that were clearly in conversation from the moment they were brought together. However, what Kader Attia is criticizing in the case you quote is the way that the prior works are rendered invisible, as happened with Elvis Presley. What we can criticize Presley for, or rather those who have reconstructed the history of the kind of music he distinguished himself in, is that he is seen as a pioneer, while, in fact, everything he drew on to feed into his own work was a music played by Black musicians; he put this music into the public space and above all into the commercial space while presenting himself as a great innovator. Today, contemporary American histories of music are putting things right. The only way of responding to the way prior art is rendered invisible is to trace the history of different arts in modern times, in the twentieth and early twenty-­first century, so as to give more room to those who inspired them. But here again, we need to think about the notion of appropriation. It would be wrong simply to say that Picasso was influenced by Negro art. The word ‘influenced’ doesn’t mean anything. It is known that during this period of gestation, which led in 1906 to the radical break represented by the Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso was looking for something. In other words, these African masks, which he himself collected, would never have so much as caught his eye if he had not been already looking for something. So there was an encounter between his own formal research and the supply of forms represented by these African art objects. There is something a little negative in the term ‘appropriation’, as if we were stealing something, and I don’t think that’s the case for Picasso. These examples that we have mentioned are a good illustration of the fact that the world is becoming Europeanized, is becoming Africanized too, and Indianized, and Sinicized; this world is criss-­ crossed by cultural and intellectual flows and artistic transformations, and this is a good thing. So I completely subscribe to your vision of not wanting cultures to be narrowly and geometrically defined as separate insularities. The examples we have just quoted show us that this is not the case. I particularly appreciate the example of the ‘wax’ you mentioned. It was Dutch and then became African, but it is so closely associated with Africans that, as no one traditionally wears 150

On various contemporary questions wax outfits in Europe, we feel that a wax shirt, for example, is an African outfit; and now it’s coming back to Europe as the fabric for shoes. This circulation is really emblematic of what’s going on in our world, and, again, this is a good thing.

Non-diversity and communitarianism JLA – Non-­diversity is a novelty in Europe. In France, in particular, it involves the idea that people need to get together in ­groups – ­women, Blacks, Arabs, gays, etc. – so as better to defend their group interests. It is therefore a question of organizing non-­diverse, non-­White meetings, as they have been launched by Afro-­feminists of the Mwasi Nyansapo movement, for example. The problem is to know what a ‘White’ or a ‘Black’ person actually is; are Jews ‘White’ in the eyes of those who are not Jews (the ‘goys’)? Let me refer you back to what I said just now about Houria Bouteldja. Non-­diversity is dramatized in France politically, especially by the right and the far right who lambast these non-­diverse meetings, while in actual ­practice – ­for example, the non-­diverse meetings that took place at the University of Paris-­8 and that in principle only included ­Blacks – ­it was possible to observe that, in these meetings, Whites were accepted. Likewise, when the movement ‘Nuit debout’8 demonstrated on the Place de la République, in 2016, men were accepted at feminist meetings provided they remained silent and did not try to take the floor. But in any case, this idea of a non-­diverse meeting is difficult to defend, in my opinion, because it is also promoted by associations on the far right, of the type ‘Riposte laïque’,9 whose aperitifs with ‘sausage and red wine’ are designed to keep Muslims out. Non-­diversity is criticized by the republican left, by the right and the far right, who see it as a phenomenon of ‘communitarianism’ or of ‘separatism’. One example would be the ‘Manifeste des 100 personnalités’ (‘Manifesto of 100 leading figures’) in Le Figaro in March 2018. This Manifesto against ‘Islamic separatism’ was an attack on the Sud Éducation 93 trade union, which organizes non-­diverse meetings and which protests against ‘state racism’. Faced with this critique of non-­diversity, the postcolonials and the decolonials retaliate by pointing to what they call male, White ‘communitarianism’ in business companies and in the political world. But I think that in this case we need to distinguish between the demand to be among one’s peers as implemented by Afro-­feminists, in the c­ ontext of the non-­diverse meetings organized by Mwasi Nyansapo, or the 151

On various contemporary questions similar demand when voiced by ‘Riposte laïque’, and the de facto sense of being among one’s peers that can be observed in business companies or in the French National Assembly, as in other instances where there is clearly a majority of White males, for example. SBD – This is a phenomenon that we see a lot in the United States too, where meetings are restricted to groups of one’s peers. It’s a very difficult question, since, depending on the examples you choose, you’ll go one way or the other. I’ll take an example and try to give a general idea on the basis of it. It’s a personal example: I was invited, a few years ago, under the auspices of UNESCO, and with my friend Barbara Cassin in the chair, to the constituent meeting of a network of women philosophers. Nobody saw any problem. There were very few of us men there, it was mainly women philosophers. Much later, a guest participant told me what had occurred to her when she had seen that I was invited and that I was going to speak: she wondered what kind of meeting for women it was, designed to set up a network for women philosophers, when you still needed to bring along a man to talk to them, to those women. Then, she tells me, she was convinced by my remarks, which focused on the fact that my two sisters are both, like me, philosophers. JLA – It’s interesting what you just said about women philosophers, because, after all, there have been women philosophers for some time in the history of philosophy… If we can say, for example, that there’s a truly feminine and feminist side to Simone de B ­ eauvoir – i­t was as a woman that she wrote The Second Sex –, is there, in your view, a feminine and feminist aspect to Hannah Arendt? How can we distinguish her from a male Heideggerian philosopher? SBD – I don’t think we can. To give you an example, there’s Suzanne Bachelard, who was one of my professors: I don’t see what in her work indicates the fact that she’s a woman. In the same way, the work that I did on Boolean a­ lgebra – m ­ y first two books are on Boolean a­ lgebra – ­has nothing to do with the fact that I’m an African. When I write a book about philosophy, on philosophical issues in Africa, these contributions have the same universality, I hope, as anything written by anyone called, for example, Jean-­Loup Amselle. But the fact that my position itself consists in writing and thinking from Africa is evident in this. That is the kind of diversity of approach that is desired. In my opinion, we must not sacrifice anything of the universal scope of what we have to say, or at least our demand for universal152

On various contemporary questions ity. If you write in philosophy, you have to write ‘from one wall of the Mandé to another’ – an expression used by Mandé hunters to mean ‘universally’ – and not just to a small group. That’s why, after putting a fly in the ointment by referring to the story about women philosophers, which for me was fully justified, I would say that if I had to make a general statement about these non-­diverse meetings, I fear for the requirement of universality on which I particularly insist, and I would not wish thinking to be confined within an experience that will be considered incommunicable.

State racism or racism in the state? JLA – The idea of ‘state racism’ in France is defended by decolonials, since we no longer say postcolonials, who consider that the state as a whole, the French state in this case, is a racist apparatus, philo-­Semitic and Islamophobic. The French state is deemed to practise a ‘Jewish preference’ and a corresponding racism towards Blacks, Arabs and Muslims. Witness the support for Israel, the racial profiling by facial features that are seen as akin to the South African ‘passes’ of the time of apartheid, which enabled the authorities to closely control the entry of Blacks from the townships into exclusively ‘White’ areas. I think this decolonial vision is outrageous. It seems to me that the French state is not structurally racist, as the Nazi state or the South African apartheid state was. I find that this notion of apartheid applied to France is wrongly used by all tendencies in the political spectrum, be it former prime minister Manuel Valls or decolonials, because, to my knowledge, there is no legislation dividing up the ‘hexagon’ of French territory between the different ‘racial’ fractions of the population, even if de facto groupings can be observed. For example, there are more Blacks and Arabs in Seine-­Saint-­Denis than in the wealthy sixteenth arrondissement, that’s just a fact. I think there is racism in the French state, as there are pockets of anti-­Arab or anti-­Black racism, especially in the police, but there are also pockets of anti-­Semitism in the French state. We cannot reduce the functioning of the French state to a fundamentally philo-­Semitic posture; there are also sectors that are anti-­Semitic. So that’s why I prefer the notion of ‘racism in the state’ to that of ‘state racism’. SBD – From my point of view, first of all, I’ll say that I agree with you about the state. A state enacts laws and sets rules. State racism is when the state itself enacts racist laws and racist rules. Apartheid was 153

On various contemporary questions state racism, Vichy was a racist state, or an anti-­Semitic state, if you want to be more precise, and racist too; apart from this, it’s absurd, it seems to me, to say that a state is racist, I completely agree with you. But overstatement is the thing most commonly practised in the world. I remember that, at high school, when I was a kid, older pupils told us that Senghor was a Nazi; it’s insane, it’s the kind of overstatement that’s so exaggerated that it becomes meaningless. On the other hand, the foreign policy of a state goes one way or another; we’ve seen variations. The foreign policy of France under Jacques Chirac, in particular its policy towards Israel or Palestine, was not the same as under the Socialists, for example. It’s rather pointless to replace a thoughtful and accurate analysis of differences in foreign policy and the reasons behind them by throwing around words such as ‘philo-­Semitic’ or ‘anti-­Semitic’. In contrast, a rule like the one enacted at a given moment by that mayor from the South of France who wanted to ban the burkini: now that was a racist measure. He took a rule and behaved as if this rule flowed quite naturally from the laws of the French Republic, from secularism in this case. But people very quickly pointed out that it was not a question of legislating on this matter, since if one starts to scrutinize the way people dress even on the beaches, where will it all end? That’s the kind of slippage that can occur: people get to make rules left, right and centre where they shouldn’t. JLA – In American campuses, the tensions around questions of racism, of difference, seem, relatively speaking, to have calmed down: that is, inside the campuses, in other words in places where one learns in principle to argue rationally. But in France, things are about twenty years behind, and one can see that these postcolonial, decolonial questions are emerging only now, coming out mostly from places where people endeavour to think, namely the university. It is interesting to think about this time lag and how these questions have been appropriated by different groups, classes and levels. SBD – The time lag is indeed something we’re experiencing. A number of things discussed in American campuses arrive in France belatedly, often several years later. For example, the two major books I know that have expressed a reaction to postcolonial studies, your own L’Occident décroché and Jean-­ François Bayart’s Les Études postcoloniales, published in the same period, appeared at a time when, basically, the big question, the big controversy surrounding postcolonial studies in the United States, had largely quietened down. 154

On various contemporary questions Nevertheless, despite this discrepancy, the questions remain. The time lag is a first aspect of this. It is also always important to think about another aspect of the different degrees of acuity with which similar questions arise on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in France. If we take the so-­called ‘populations that were the offspring of immigration’, their sociology is not the same in the United States and in France, and this is a phenomenon that must always be taken into account. If I look, for example, at the Muslim populations in the United States, they have a level of education and wealth that is above the US average, which is not the case in France. So, in the United States these populations are richer and more educated than the US average, unlike the French situation. I do not know how to measure that, but I feel that it is also a matter of the difference in the acuity, the intensity of the questions which are asked related to this phenomenon of postcoloniality or decoloniality. Decoloniality, if I may say a word about it, is the idea that we need to decolonize epistemologies, decolonize knowledge, it is an expression that seems to win support. Who would disagree with the idea of decolonizing knowledge? But when we start to wonder what this means in concrete terms, we stray into extremely dangerous territory. When, in London, young students from SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) say that we must remove from the curriculum such and such authors because they represent coloniality in all its horror, when people start to say ‘we’re removing certain authors’, it’s as if we were saying ‘we’re going to burn books’, and that does not augur well. That’s where we are now, with this idea that we must both develop and promote the epistemologies of the South, or the Souths, but this can involve us in having to think about questions of epistemological autochthony or epistemological nativism that have little meaning. You were talking about my ancestors, namely Leibniz and a certain number of philosophers, and I answered that, yes, those are my ancestors. I don’t have to seek paternities in my way of thinking that would only be people who have thought about Africa. When it comes to theory, all is grist to my mill. JLA – To return to this question of the relationship between postcoloniality and decoloniality, between the postcolonial posture and the decolonial posture, I think it is necessary to emphasize a difference. Postcolonialism can be characterized in a uniform way: it relates the history of the West essentially with slavery, with the slave trade and 155

On various contemporary questions colonization. In my view, the decolonial perspective is a little different, because it pushes the history of the West backwards in t­ ime – a­ s seen by Latin American liberation theology and the philosophy of liberation, I’m thinking in particular of Enrique Dussel –, tracing the history of the West back to 1492, that is, to the discovery of America, and the expulsion of the Muslims and Jews from Spain. The history of accumulation, of Western capitalism, is seen as beginning in 1492. For the decolonials, there is a radical opposition, a rejection of an interpretation of the totality of human history, and in particular of Hegelianism, dialectics and Marxism, and the emphasis instead on what Dussel, for example, calls ‘analectics’, which he distinguishes from ‘dialectics’, that is, the idea that there are thoughts that are radically different from Western thought. So what you were saying about nativism, or what one might call indigenism too, is quite relevant; it’s a way of reintroducing a radical difference between us and them, replacing an apprehension of history in terms of social, political and economic (etc.) phenomena with identity. In plain and simple terms, this is where I see the difference between postcolonialism and the decolonial posture. SBD – I have recently discussed the tolerance and solidarity which should bring together Jews and Blacks, and here I have in mind the seminal studies of Michael Walzer. In Sartre’s Nausea, the only moment when Roquentin feels almost tranquil, when he stops feeling full of nausea, is when he listens to that blues song ‘Some of These Days’. He then explains in the text that this blues song seems to him charged with meaning, because it’s a song written by a Jewish musician and sung by a Black woman. Here we find a kind of shared suffering in a society of discrimination, and also a shared hope in the joint creation of a work of art which is a form of novelistic manifestation of this solidarity evoked by Walzer. The idea isn’t to argue that there is some kind of solidarity between Blacks and Jews insofar as they are Blacks and Jews, but to fight for more emancipation. The fight against oppression has real meaning only if it is moving towards a common horizon which, quite naturally, will allow the convergence of these different struggles. We forget, for example, that in the United States there was, as for the Blacks, discrimination against the Jews. I know a professor of ­physics – a­ t the time I was teaching at N ­ orthwestern – f­ rom Chicago who had been turned down by Northwestern because the university had already filled its quota of Jews. I then learned that the universities were in fact forbidden to Jews, or in any case that there was a limited 156

On various contemporary questions quota. These are the kinds of oppression we need to remember. This brings us back to the old saying: ‘If these people start to say, “I’m coming for the Jews,” know that tomorrow they’ll be coming back for you.’ This solidarity is effective because the principle of oppression is the same. Nobody has the right to say, ‘it’s X who is oppressed and not me’; oppression is one and the same, and therefore the struggle must be one and the same. JLA – In the same sense, I’d like to point out that, currently, in France, there is a tendency to distinguish racism from anti-­Semitism, and I think this is a really harmful distinction. For me, anti-­Semitism is a form of racism in the same way as Islamophobia or anti-­Black racism. There is no need to distinguish, to set a place aside for, anti-­ Semitism; it must be classed as one of the multiple forms, the multiple avatars of racism. There are no Jews as such and Blacks as such: there are Jews and there are Blacks, and it’s not the same thing but varies with time, country, society, and so on. We know that there have been very shifting relationships, relationships of exclusion and inclusion, alliances, conflicts, including in the United States, between some Blacks and some Jews, for example in New York, in Harlem. I would like to return to my personal experience. If I have become interested in Africa, this is because, as a French petty-­ bourgeois Jewish intellectual, and not as a Jew in general, I experienced a certain community of suffering when I was young with regard to those who were called American Blacks (we did not speak at the time of African-­Americans), especially Black Muslims and Malcolm X; as an effect of this, I was led to take an interest in ‘Négritude’ and in Africa. The discomfort I felt, the situation of awkwardness I experienced in the French society of the 1960s, led me to sense this community of suffering with Black Americans, especially through jazz. SBD – It’s a real experience worth highlighting. We are not used to considering the ethnicity or religion or origins of intellectuals, while the role played in African studies in the United States by Jewish anthropologists who had emigrated from Germany is considerable. We can mention Melville Herskovits, who founded the biggest Africanist library in the world at Northwestern, or the role played by anthropologists such as Franz Boas and his disciples here at Columbia University; and today, if we consider the sociology of the African Studies Association, it’s obvious that this sociology is still present. It’s an expression, as it were, in the academic and intellectual world of a 157

On various contemporary questions real solidarity among those who know what it means to be oppressed or at risk of suffering insofar as they are who they ­are – ­which is a terrible violence. You are reduced to an essence and this is a first violence, before that which will be inflicted on you when you are mistreated or denied something or other. This solidarity is real, it is forged by oppression and must also be forged by the response to oppression.

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Notes

Foreword   1 Jean-­Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Paris: PUF, 1999).  2 Jean-­Marc Moura and Jean Bessière (eds), Littératures postcoloniales et représentations de l’ailleurs: Afrique, Caraïbes, Canada. Conférence de littérature comparée de l’Université de la Sorbonne (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000).   3 See Neil Lazarus (ed.), Penser le postcolonial: une introduction critique (Paris: Amsterdam, 2006), Marie-­ Claude Smouth (ed.), La Situation postcoloniale: les postcolonial studies dans le débat français (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des Sciences politiques, 2007) and Collectif Write Back (ed.), Postcolonial studies: modes d’emploi (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2013).   4 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003).  5 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, New Accents, 2002).  6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds (London: Routledge, 2006; first published in 1987).   7 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004; first published in 1990).   8 Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire (eds), La fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).   9 Jean-­Loup Amselle, L’Occident décroché: enquête sur les postcolonialismes (Paris: Stock, 2008). 10 Jean-­François Bayart, Les Études postcoloniales: un carnaval académique (Paris: Karthala, 2010). 11 Nicolas Bancel et al. (eds), Ruptures postcoloniales: les nouveaux visages de la société française (Paris: La Découverte, 2010).

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Notes to pp. x–xvi 12 See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, translated by Chike Jeffers (London: Seagull Books, 2011), p. 15. 13 ‘It is but natural that, in the study of the history of culture, our own civilization should become the standard, that the achievements of other times and other races should be measured by our own achievements. In no case is it more difficult to lay aside the Kulturbrille’ (‘The History of Anthropology’, in The Shaping of American Anthropology [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], p. 28). ‘Proud of his wonderful achievements, civilized man looks down upon the humbler members of mankind. He has conquered the forces of nature and compelled them to serve him. [. . .] What wonder if civilized man considers himself a being of higher order as compared to primitive man; if it is claimed that the white race represents a higher type than all others. When we analyse this assumption, it will soon be found that [. . .] the achievement and the aptitude for an achievement have been confounded’ (‘Human Faculty as Determined by Race’, in The Shaping of American Anthropology, pp. 221–2). 14 Santiago Castro-­Gómez, ‘Le chapitre manquant d’Empire: la réorganisation postmoderne de la colonisation dans le capitalisme postfordiste’, Multitudes, no. 26, Autumn 2006, http://www.multitudes.net/Le-­ Chapitre-­manquant-­d-Empire-­La/. 15 Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 149. 16 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Boole, 1815–1864: l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Paris: Belin, 1989). 17 George Boole, Les Lois de la pensée, translated by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Paris: Vrin, 1992). 18 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Islam et société ouverte: la fidélité et le mouvement dans la philosophie de Mohammed Iqbal (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001). 19 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 20 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, translated by Chike Jeffers (London: Seagull Books, 2011). 21 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2016). 22 Daniel Arasse, Histoires de peinture (Paris: Gallimard, Folio Essais, 2006). 23 Diagne, African Art as Philosophy, pp. 11, 13 and 54. 24 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Bergson postcolonial: l’élan vital dans la pensée de Léopold Sédar Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011). (An English edition, Postcolonial Bergson, translated by Lindsay Turner [New York: Fordham University Press, 2019], was in production as the current volume was going to press. [Translator’s note.])

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Notes to pp. xviii–5 25 Diagne, African Art as Philosophy, pp. 194–5. 26 Jean-­Loup Amselle (ed.), Les Migrations africaines: réseaux et processus migratoires (Paris: Maspero, 1976). 27 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Les Négociants de la savane: histoire et organisation sociale des Kooroko, Mali (Paris: Anthropos, 1977). 28 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Psychotropiques: la fièvre de l’ayahuasca en forêt amazonienne (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013). 29 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Islams africains: la préférence soufie (Lormont: Le bord de l’eau, 2017). 30 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Branchements: anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures, 3rd edn (Paris: Flammarion, 2015). 31 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 32 Jean-­Loup Amselle, L’Ethnicisation de la France (Paris: Lignes, 2011). 33 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Les Nouveaux Rouges–Bruns: le racisme qui vient (Paris: Lignes, 2014). 34 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Branchements: anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). 35 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, translated by Claudia Royal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 36 In addition to L’Occident décroché (2008), see also the third part of Jean-­ Loup Amselle’s last book, Islams africains (2017), devoted to Diagne, or listen to the podcast of the debate in Lille in November 2014 and broadcast on France Culture in ‘Les Chemins de la connaissance’ (‘The Paths of Knowledge’), as part of a series of broadcasts and conferences on ‘African Thinkers’ (‘Penseurs d’Afrique (2/5): L’Afrique a-­ t-elle inventé les droits de l’homme’, https://www.franceculture.fr/ emissions/les-­nouveaux-­chemins-­de-­la-­connaissance/penseurs-­d-afrique-­ 25-­l-afrique-­t-elle-­invente-­les.

Introduction   1 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003).   2 Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).   3 Conseil pour le développement de la recherche en sciences sociales en Afrique (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa).   4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).  5 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Pour une Afrique libre (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2017), p. 84.

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Notes to pp. 7–9 Chapter 1  Universalism in questions   1 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Vers un multiculturalisme français: l’empire de la coutume (Paris: Flammarion, 2010; first published in 1996).   2 Jean-­Loup Amselle, ‘L’excision et l’homosexualité: enjeux politiques au Mali’, Les Temps modernes, no. 698, April–June 2018, pp. 3–19.  3 Mehdi Ba, ‘Homosexualité: à Dakar, Obama tente le panier mais se fait contrer’, Jeune Afrique, 28 June 2013, http://www.jeuneafrique. com/169948/politique/homosexualit-­dakar-­obama-­tente-­le-­panier-­mais-­ se-­fait-­contrer/.  4 Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Françoise Vergès, ‘Féminismes décoloniaux, justice sociale, anti-­ impérialisme’, in Zahra Ali and Sonia Dayan-­ Herzbrun (eds), Pluriversalisme décolonial, Tumultes, 48 (Paris: Kimé, 2017), p. 159.  5 Frédéric Lagrange, lecture on ‘Homoérotisme et homosexualités dans les sociétés arabes, des âges prémodernes à l’ère contemporaine’ (‘Homoeroticism and Homosexuality in Arab Societies, from Pre-­ modern Ages to the Contemporary Era’), IISMM, EHESS, 6 June 2017. For a critique of Massad’s ideas, see also ‘Gay Imperialism: Postcolonial Particularity’, https://thecharnelhouse.org/2016/05/15/gay-­imperialism-­ universality-­particularity-­and-­capitalist-­civilization/.   6 Jules Ferry, ‘Les fondements de la politique coloniale (28 juillet 1885)’, http://www2.assemblee-­n ationale.fr/decouvrir-­l -assemblee/histoire/ grands-­moments-­d-eloquence/jules-­ferry-­28-­juillet-­1885.   7 This ambiguity is particularly apparent with regard to the State of Israel, which can be seen as both an exemplary democracy and a racist state. See Zeev Sternhell, ‘En Isräel pousse un racisme proche du nazisme à ses débuts’, Le Monde, 18 February 2018, https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/ article/2018/02/18/zeev-­sternhell-­en-­israel-­pousse-­un-­racisme-­proche-­du-­ nazisme-­a-ses-­debuts_​5258673_​3232.html.   8 Ali and Dayan-­Herzbrun (eds), Pluriversalisme décolonial.   9 Jean-­Loup Amselle, L’Occident décroché: enquête sur les postcolonialismes (Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2011; first published in 2008), chap. 6, ‘La voix des “sans-­voix”’. 10 Vivek Chibber, ‘L’universalisme, une arme pour la gauche’, Le Monde diplomatique, May 2014, https://www.monde-­diplomatique.fr/2014/05/ CHIBBER/50380; Vivek Chibber, ‘Postcolonialism vs Marxism’, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=​ r1tvVTfeikg; see also Vasant Kaiwar, L’Orient postcolonial: sur la ‘provincialisation’ de l’Europe et la théorie postcoloniale (Paris: Syllepse, Mille marxismes, 2013). 11 Nivedita Majumdar, ‘Silencing the Subaltern’, Catalyst Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 2017, https://catalyst-­journal.com/vol1/no1/silencing-­the-­ subaltern. 12 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton &​Co. Inc., 2006); The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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Notes to pp. 9–13 13 An ethnic group in south Ghana. 14 Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), chap. 7, pp. 137–47. 15 See chap. 7 below, pp. 60–6. 16 Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, ‘Rapport de Maurice Merleau-­Ponty pour la création d’une chaire d’Anthropologie sociale’ (1958), La Lettre du Collège de France, special issue no. 2, 2008, https://journals.openedition. org/lettre-­cdf/229. 17 Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald A. Landes, new edn (London: Routledge, 2012). See also Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, edited by Rodney Needham; translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer and Rodney Needham, revised edn (London: Social Science Paperbacks in association with Eyre &​Spottiswoode, 1970). 18 Merleau-­Ponty, ‘Rapport de Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’, para. 13. 19 Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind, new edn (London: Weidenfeld &​ Nicolson, 1974). 20 Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Signs, translated by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 21 ‘Emotion is Negro, as reason is Hellenic.’ In Diagne’s view, these are two forms of thought found in all cultures. Personally, I sense the influence of Gobineau h ­ ere – t­hough, from my point of view, this is by no means to denigrate Senghor’s thought. See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘Penser de langue à langue’, in Alain Mabanckou (ed.), Penser et écrire l’Afrique aujourd’hui (Paris: Le Seuil, 2017), p. 74. 22 ‘If a philosophy of the future exists, it will have to be born outside of Europe, or as a consequence of the encounters […] between Europe and non-­Europe,’ quoted in Jeremy R. Carrette (ed.), Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 113. 23 Merleau-­Ponty, ‘Everywhere and Nowhere’, in Signs, p.  139. See also Anthony Mangeon (ed.), Anthropolitiques: Jean-Loup Amselle, une pensée sans concessions (Paris: Karthala, 2015), p. 8, note 1. 24 See Amselle, L’Occident décroché on the connections between primitivism and postcolonialism. 25 I am drawing here on the analysis of Levinas’s work in Jean-­ Marc Narbonne, Levinas et l’héritage grec (Paris: Vrin and Presses de l’Université Laval, 2004), pp. 90, 111, 112, 116 (quotation from pp. 111–12). 26 Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, translated by Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 60 (translation modified). 27 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ‘Monadology’, in Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and other Essays, translated by Danile Garber and Roger Ariew (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991). On Diagne’s thought as a kind of theology, see Anthony Mangeon, La Pensée noire et l’Occident (Cabris: Sulliver, 2010), p. 141. 28 On the ‘opacity’ of cultures, as Édouard Glissant puts it, see his Le Discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). On Barbara Cassin’s views on ‘untranslatability’, see Entretien avec Barbara Cassin réalisé par

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Notes to pp. 13–16 Colette Briffard, http://www.revue-­texto.net/Dialogues/Cassin_​inter view.html; see also Barbara Cassin (ed.), Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, translated by Steven Rendall et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014) and her Éloge de la traduction: compliquer l’universel (Paris: Fayard, 2016). François Jullien puts forward in his many different books the view (close to that of Merleau-­Ponty) that European culture can be observed ‘from’ the standpoint of Chinese culture. 29 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 30 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Perspectivism and Multinaturalism in Indigenous America’, in Alexandre Surrallés and Pedro García Hierro (eds), The Land Within: Indigenous Territory and Perception of the Environment (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 2005). 31 Laure Noualhat, ‘Attac: Pachamama mia!’, Libération, 23 August 2010, https://www.liberation.fr/terre/2010/08/23/attac-­p achamama-­m ia_​ 673655; Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing Postcolonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Modernity’, http://dialogoglobal.com/texts/grosfoguel/Gros foguel-­Decolonizing-­Pol-­Econ-­and-­Postcolonial.pdf. See also the article by Maëlle Mariette, ‘À la recherche de la Pachamama’, Le Monde diplomatique, March 2018, https://www.monde-­ diplomatique.fr/2018/03/ MARIETTE/58464. 32 Jean-­Loup Amselle and Elikia M’Bokolo (eds), Au coeur de l’ethnie: ethnies, tribalisme et État en Afrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1999). 33 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, translated by Claudia Royal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 34 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Branchements: anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures, 3rd edn (Paris: Flammarion, 2015). 35 See the interesting debate that I had with Diagne at the ‘Cité Philo’ (Lille, November 2014) and which was rebroadcast as part of the ‘Chemins de la connaissance’ (‘Paths of Knowledge’) series: the topic was whether Africa invented human rights (‘Penseurs d’Afrique [2/5]: L’Afrique a-­ t-elle inventé les droits de l’homme’, https://www.franceculture.fr/ emissions/les-­nouveaux-­chemins-­de-­la-­connaissance/penseurs-­d-afrique-­ 25-­l-afrique-­t-elle-­invente-­les). 36 As well as my Mestizo Logics and Branchements, see my Rétrovolutions: essais sur les primitivismes contemporains (Paris: Stock, 2010). 37 See Dominique Franche, Généalogie du génocide rwandais (Paris: Tribord, 2004). 38 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandre Fontana; translated by David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003). 39 ‘By reconnecting with the deep meaning of Marx’s doctrine, one should be able to recover not only the meaning of capital as a social relationship, but also as a magical relationship, the one that appears in Marx in

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Notes to pp. 16–22 connection with “commodity fetishism”. Considering the commodity as a fetish represents a truly revolutionary approach as it gives this representation the truly anthropological dimension of witchcraft, itself seen as a belief system. Seeing the commodity as a fetish involves considering the commodity as an idol, a kind of Golden Calf to which we sacrifice’ (Jean-­ Loup Amselle, L’Anthropologue et le Politique [Paris: Lignes, 2012], pp. 104–5). 40 See Luis Martínez Andrade, ‘Le capitalisme comme religion: la théologie de la libération au tournant décolonial’, in Ali and Dayan-­Herzbrun (eds), Pluriversalisme décolonial, pp. 92–3. 41 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 42 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘Du mouvement vers l’universel’, de(s)générations, no. 22: ‘Penser avec l’Afrique’, 2015, pp. 25–6. 43 Diagne, ‘Du mouvement vers l’universel’. 44 Jean-­Loup Amselle, ‘De la déconstruction de l’ethnie au branchement des cultures’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 185, 2010, pp. 96–113. 45 Indigènes de la République (Indigenous of the Republic) is the name of an anti-­imperialist and anti-­racist French political party. (Translator’s note.)

Chapter 2  On the universal and universalism   1 Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (London: The New Press, 2006), p. 71.   2 See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Boole, 1815–1864: l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Paris: Belin, 1989); and George Boole, Les Lois de la pensée, translated by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Paris: Vrin, 1992).  3 The science fiction author Stanisław Lem writes that ‘mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented’ (His Master’s Voice, translated by Michael Kandel [London: Secker &​ Warburg, 1968], p. 13).   4 Barbara Cassin, Éloge de la traduction: compliquer l’universel (Paris: Fayard, 2016).   5 As against this universalism, resting as it does on negation, the American anthropologist Edward Sapir notes the ‘outstanding fact’ that every language is characterized by ‘its formal completeness’ (‘The Grammarian and His Language’, in Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, edited by David G. Mandelbaum [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949], p. 153).   6 Kwasi Wiredu, ‘The Concept of Truth in the Akan Language’, in Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). I develop this point in Souleymane Bachir Diagne, The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2016).

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Notes to pp. 22–6   7 The Bandung Conference, held in the Indonesian city of that name in 1955, brought together twenty-­ nine countries from Asia and Africa to denounce colonialism. The turbulent process of independence had already begun and was to continue. We can, as I do here, see the advent of a postcolonial world as dating from this historic conference.   8 In his 1933 Vienna Conference on ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man’, in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, translated by Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper &​Row, 1965), p. 157.   9 Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, translated by Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 10 Levinas, Humanism of the Other, p. 60. 11 This is exactly what he writes: ‘I often say, although it’s a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks. All the rest can be translated, all the ­rest – ­all the e­ xotic – i­s dance’ (quoted in John E. Drabinski, Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013], p.  5). Note the interpolated clause, often used in these cases where xenophobic remarks are being made, when a person firstly emphasizes that he or she knows perfectly well they are going against the ‘politically correct’ (it’s ‘dangerous’, says the philosopher); note also the resumption of the idea that outside the verticality of the Bible and the Greeks there lies the horizontality of translation. 12 In Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), Levinas calls these masses ‘underdeveloped’ (p. 160). This lies at the heart of the criticisms frequently addressed to him. 13 Perhaps I may again mention my The Ink of the Scholars. It should be noted that the construction of the history of philosophy as the peculiarity of a European humanity is recent, and for the most part Hegelian. Roger Bacon thought that, in the translatio studiorum, Arabic had played a more important role than Latin, and Descartes saw no reason to deny that algebra, the true matrix of his philosophy, was a ‘foreign’ science. 14 Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty, ‘From Mauss to Claude Lévi-­ Strauss’, in Signs, translated by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 119–20. 15 See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘L’universel latéral comme traduction’, in Philippe Büttgen, Michèle Gendreau-­Massaloux and Xavier North (eds), Les Pluriels de Barbara Cassin ou le Partage des équivoques (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2014). 16 See Pascale Casanova, La langue mondial: traduction et domination (Paris: Le Seuil, 2015). 17 See Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). 18 See Youssouf Tata Cissé and Jean-­Louis Sagot-­Duvaroux, La Charte du Mandé et autres traditions du Mali (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003). 19 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘Individual, Community, and Human Rights: A Lesson from Kwasi Wiredu’s Philosophy of Personhood’, Transition:

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Notes to pp. 27–31 An International Review, no. 101, 2009, pp. 8–15; see also my article ‘Philosophie africaine et Charte africaine des droits de l’homme et des peuples’, Critique, nos 771–2: ‘Philosopher en Afrique’, 2011, pp. 664–72; and my The Ink of the Scholars. 20 See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘Faire la terre totale’, in Jérôme Bindé (ed.), Signons la paix avec la terre: quel avenir pour la planète et pour l’espèce humaine? (Paris: UNESCO/Albin Michel, 2007). See also my Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), especially chapter 5, where I discuss the ecological responsibility of human beings as understood by the hero of the philosophical novel by Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzān. I examine this question in more detail in ‘Faire humanité ensemble et ensemble habiter la terre’, a paper I gave in Abidjan, at an international philosophy conference organized by the FISP (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie), the proceedings of which were published, edited by Tanella Boni, in Présence africaine, no. 193, 2016, pp. 11–19. 21 Léopold Sédar Senghor (ed.), Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache d’expression française (Paris: PUF, 1948). 22 In an interview published in Libération (5 June 2015), he declares: ‘I am a Eurocentrist, I absolutely do not believe in this idea that traditions, local cultures and partial identities can put up any resistance to global capitalism’ (https://next.liberation.fr/culture/2015/06/05/slavoj-­zizek-­ je-­reste-­communiste-­car-­tout-­le-­monde-­peut-­etre-­socialiste-­meme-­bill-­ gates_​1323864). There is an interesting discussion of this Eurocentrism in Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think? (London: Zed Books, 2015). 23 Pap Ndiaye shows how relevant Césaire’s comments are in the face of a ‘universalist’ discourse on emancipation in an opinion piece in Le Monde (25 June 2017) titled ‘Jamais l’antiracisme n’a semblé aussi balkanisé’ (‘Never Has Antiracism Appeared So Balkanized’). His views gain in interest when contrasted with those of Didier Leschi on the same page, ‘La portée réactionnaire du discours de la race écrase le combat social’ (‘The Reactionary Scope of the Discourse on Race Crushes Social Struggle’). 24 Simone Weil, ‘Blood is Flowing in Tunisia’, in Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other, edited and translated by J. P. Little (Lanham, MD: Rowman &​Littlefield, 2003), p. 43. 25 See the biography by Elisabeth Young-­Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 109 (original emphasis).

Chapter 3  Race, culture, identity  1 Georges Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire (Paris: PUF, 1955).

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Notes to pp. 32–43   2 Jean-­Loup Amselle, L’Ethnicisation de la France (Paris: Lignes, 2011), p. 88.  3 For the connection between the ideas of Frobenius and Césaire, see Romuald Fonkoua, Aimé Césaire (Paris: Perrin, 2010).  4 Leo Frobenius, Histoire de la civilisation africaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1936). For an excellent critique of the notion of ‘Négritude’, see Alain Foix, Noir: de Toussaint Louverture à Barack Obama (Paris: Galaade, 2009). See also Wole Soyinka’s famous aphorism on the essentialism underlying this notion: ‘A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.’ (Quoted in Janheinz Jahn, A History of Neo-African Literature, translated by Oliver Coburn and Ursula Lehrburger [London: Faber, 1968], pp. 265–6.)   5 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).  6 On this notion, see my Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, translated by Claudia Royal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).   7 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, translated by Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1995).  8 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 44.  9 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 51. 10 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 53. Marcel Griaule is definitely the target here, even if he is not explicitly named. 11 Aimé Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’, translated by Chike Jeffers, in Social Text, 103, vol. 28, no. 2, Summer 2010, pp. 149–50. 12 See Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, Manifeste pour les ‘produits’ de haute nécessité (Paris: Galaade, Institut du Tout-­monde, 2009). 13 See Jean-­Loup Amselle, Branchements: anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures, 3rd edn (Paris: Flammarion, 2015), chap. 3, ‘Servitude et grandeur de l’afrocentrisme’. 14 Houria Bouteldja, Les Blancs, les juifs et nous (Paris: La Fabrique, 2016); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon &​Schuster, 1996).

Chapter 4  Africanity, Afrocentrism, representation   1 Jean-­Paul Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, translated by John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 6, no. 1, Autumn 1964–Winter 1965, p. 13.   2 It is in this sense that Emmanuel Levinas, apparently alluding to Marx, writes in Humanism of the Other of ‘the decried Western civilization that knew how to understand particular cultures that never understood anything about themselves’ (Humanism of the Other, translated by Nidra Poller [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003], p. 37).

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Notes to pp. 45–50 Chapter 5  The racial ban on representation   1 See also the critical attitude of the South African photographer David Goldblatt, following the decision of the University of Cape Town to cover up certain works of art exhibited on its premises on the ground that they were created by Whites or people of mixed race. This decision led him to drop his plan to entrust his archives to the University of Cape Town, giving them instead to Yale University: ‘“I Will Not Compromise About My Work”: David Goldblatt on Artistic Freedom, Censorship, and Moving His Archive Out of South Africa’, Art News, 23 June 2017, http://www.artnews.com/2017/06/23/i-­will-­not-­compromise-­about-­my-­ work-­david-­goldblatt-­on-­artistic-­freedom-­censorship-­and-­moving-­his-­ archive-­out-­of-­south-­africa/.   2 Humanités Classiques-­Africaines, press conference of the ‘Collectif contre Exhibit B’, 8 December 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=​ NkYhEqpbR1k.  3 John Mullen, who led the ‘Collective against Exhibit B’, did not see the show; see Christophe Kantcheff, ‘Les censeurs d’Exhibit B’, Politis, 20 November 2014, https://www.politis.fr/articles/2014/11/les-­censeurs-­ dexhibit-­b-29059/.   4 See Claude Ribbe (@ClaudeRibbe): Twitter, https://twitter.com/clauder ibbe. See also the remarks made by Bams in the broadcast ‘Ce soir ou jamais’, 28 November 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=​i9yGP PARHWg.   5 Kehinde Andrews, ‘Exhibit B, the Human Zoo, is a Grotesque ­Parody – ­Boycott It’, Guardian, 12 September 2014, https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2014/sep/12/exhibit-­b-human-­zoo-­boycott-­exhibi tion-­racial-­abuse.   6 On this point, and this point alone, I agree with Houria Bouteldja, Les Blancs, les juifs et nous (Paris: La Fabrique, 2016).   7 Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).   8 ‘Une militante antiracist blanche se faisait passer pour une noire’, Le Monde,  13 June 2015, https://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2015/ 06/13/etats-­unis-­une-­militante-­antiraciste-­blanche-­se-­faisait-passer-­pour-­ une-­noire_​4653376_​3222.html.   9 Philip Roth, The Human Stain (London: Vintage, 2000).

Chapter 6  On cultural and linguistic specificities  1 Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).   2 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘Pour un universel vraiment universel’, in Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr (eds), Écrire l’Afrique-Monde (Paris/ Dakar: Philippe Rey/Jimsaan, 2017), p. 78.

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Notes to pp. 51–4   3 Claude Hagège, On the Death and Life of Languages, translated by Jody Gladding (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).  4 Jean-­ Loup Amselle, ‘Ethnies et espaces: pour une anthropologie topologique’, in Jean-­Loup Amselle and Elikia M’Bokolo (eds), Au cœur de l’ethnie: ethnies, tribalisme et État en Afrique (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).   5 Claude Hagège, ‘Imposer sa langue, c’est imposer sa pensée’, L’Express, 28 March 2012, https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/claude-­ hagege-­ imposer-­sa-­langue-­c-est-­imposer-­sa-­pensee_​1098440.html.   6 Michael Silverstein, ‘Contemporary Transformations of Local Linguistic Communities’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 27, 1998, pp. 401–26.   7 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Branchements: anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures, 3rd edn (Paris: Flammarion, 2015; first published 2001).   8 Cécile Canut, Une langue sans qualité (Limoges: Lambert-­Lucas, 2007); Le Spectre identitaire au Mali (Limoges: Lambert-­Lucas, 2008); ‘De l’ethnie comme de la langue?’, in Anthony Mangeon (ed.), Anthropolitiques: Jean-Loup Amselle, une pensée sans concessions (Paris: Karthala, 2015); Caroline Panis, ‘Processus de géographisation linguistique et identifications multiples au Burkina Faso’, Langage et société, no. 159, 2017, pp. 117–38.  9 Ousmane Oumar Kane, Intellectuels non europhones (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2003). For N’Ko, see Amselle, Branchements. 10 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Heinemann Educational, 1986). 11 Jean-­Loup Amselle, L’Anthropologue et le Politique (Paris: Lignes, 2012), p. 97. 12 Simon Gikandi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 13 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: In Praise of a Friend’, in Oliver Lovesey (ed.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2012). 14 Boubacar Boris Diop, ‘Qui a peur du wolof?’, Le Monde diplomatique, March 2017, https://www.monde-­ diplomatique.fr/2017/03/ DIOP/57237. The collection is called Céytu (after the village where Shaykh Anta Diop was born and where he now rests) and the works published in it include Wolof translations of works by Aimé Césaire, J. M. G. Le Clézio and Mariama Bâ. 15 See Racine Assane Demba, ‘Au nom de père par l’­âiné – e­xtraits de “Cheikj Anta Diop l’homme et l’œuvre”’, LivRacine, 7 February 2015, http://www.livracine.overblog.com/2015/02/au-­nom-­du-­pere-­par-­l-aine-­ extraits-­de-­cheikh-­anta-­diop-­l-homme-­et-­l-oeuvre.html. 16 See http://www.ias.columbia.edu/academic-­program/african-­language-­ program. 17 But it must be recognized that this policy has its positive sides. I owe my knowledge of the Bambara language of Mali to a course that the American linguist Charles Bird gave to the Peace Corps in Bamako, which I was allowed to attend.

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Notes to pp. 54–9 18 Magali Lagrange, ‘S. Bachir Diagne (philosophe): “Des langues africaines, d’écriture et modernisées”’, Invité Afrique (RFI), 5 February 2017, http://www.rfi.fr/emission/20170205-­souleymane-­bachir-­diagne-­ professeur-­universite-­columbia-­langues-­africaines. 19 Sylvain Gouguenheim, Aristote au mont Saint-Michel (Paris: Le Seuil, 2008); Philippe Büttgen, Alain de Libera, Marwan Rashed and Irène Rosier-­Catach (eds), Les Grecs, les Arabes et nous: enquête sur l’islamophobie savante (Paris: Fayard, 2009). 20 Ousmane Oumar Kane, Non-Europhone Intellectuals, translated by Victoria Bawtree (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2012; first published in 2003). 21 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Islams africains: la préférence soufie (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2017). 22 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘Penser de langue à langue’, in Alain Mabanckou (ed.), Penser et écrire l’Afrique aujourd’hui (Paris: Le Seuil, 2017). 23 Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971). 24 Ani Rusi, ‘Le rapport entre catégories de pensée et catégories linguistiques chez Aristote, d’après Émile Benveniste’, 16 May 2010, https:// conformationdeterritoires.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/le-­rapport-­entre-­ categories-­de-­pensee-­et-­categories-­linguistiques-­chez-­aristote-­d’apres-­ emile-­benveniste/. 25 Diagne, ‘Penser de langue à langue’. 26 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2016), and Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 27 I am here drawing mainly on El Hadji Abdou Aziz Faty, Processus d’homogénéisation linguistique et instrumentalisation discursive au Sénégal: le cas des Halpulaar, PhD thesis, University of Paris-­Descartes, 2011, and his ‘La “haalpularisation” ou la mise en discours de la culture et de la langue pulaar au Sénégal’, Cahiers d’études africaines, no. 217, 2015, pp. 67–84. 28 Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal, ‘Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation’, in Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2000). See also Judith T. Irvine, ‘Subjected Words: African Linguistics and the Colonial Encounter’, Language &​Communication, vol. 28, no. 4, October 2008, pp. 323–34. 29 Stéphanie Pouessel, Les Identités amazighes au Maroc (Paris: Non Lieu, 2010). 30 Paulin Hountondji (ed.), Les Savoirs endogènes: pistes pour une recherche (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1994). 31 Cécile Canut, ‘À la frontière des langues: figures de la démarcation’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 2001, nos 163–4, pp. 443–64. 32 Denia Chebli, ‘L’échec de l’intervention française au Mali’, Libération,

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Notes to pp. 64–73 27 June 2017, http://www.liberation.fr/debats/2017/06/27/au-­mali-­si-­tu-­ poses-­une-­mine-­les-­islamistes-­te-­donnent-­150-­euros_​1579931.

Chapter 7  On African languages and translation   1 Chike Jeffers (ed.), Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013).

Chapter 8  An optimism of translation   1 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, translated by Claudia Royal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).   2 Pascal Engel, ‘Le Mythe de l’intraduisible’, En attendant Nadeau, 18 July 2017, https://www.en-­attendant-­nadeau.fr/2017/07/18/mythe-­intra duisible-­cassin.  3 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2016).  4 Jean-­ Loup Amselle and Emmanuel Sibeud (eds), Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie: l’itinéraire d’un africaniste (1870– 1926) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998).   5 Souleymane Bachir Diagne , ‘Senghor et la question qui se pose toujours’, interview with Nadia Yala Kisukidi, ThéoRèmes, no. 4, 2013, https:// theoremes.revues.org/430.   6 Diagne , ‘Senghor et la question qui se pose toujours’.   7 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘Traduire le Coran’, in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Après Babel: traduire (Arles: Actes Sud, 2016).

Chapter 9  On philosophy in Islam and on the question of a ‘West African Islam’   1 See Jean-­Loup Amselle, Islams africains: la préférence soufie (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2017).   2 Pakistani readers of the texts I have written about him have sometimes criticized me for not systematically calling him ‘Pakistani’, but he died in 1938 before the separate independences of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; and above all, no one can say what position he would have adopted towards partition.   3 Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Lahore: n.p., 1977).   4 Alain de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), p. 104.   5 Perhaps I may at this point refer to my article ‘Pour une histoire post­ coloniale de la philosophie’, Cités, no. 72, 2017, pp. 81–93.

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Notes to pp. 74–86   6 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Islam et société ouverte: la fidélité et le mouvement dans la philosophie de Mohammed Iqbal (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001).   7 Khurram Ali Shafique, Iqbal: An Illustrated Biography, 2nd edn (Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 2007).  8 The Qur’an, translated by A. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). All Qur’an quotations below are from this translation.   9 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (London: Macmillan, 1935; first published in 1932). 10 See my ‘Achieving Humanity: Convergence between Henri Bergson and Muhammad Iqbal’, in Chad Hillier and Basit Bilal Koshul (eds), Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 11 Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 27. 12 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Islams africains: la préférence soufie (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2017), p. 1.  13 Ousmane Oumar Kane, Non-Europhone Intellectuals, translated by Victoria Bawtree (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2012; first published in 2003). 14 John O. Hunwick (ed. and trans), Sharī’a in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghīlī to the Questions of Askia al-Hājj Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 15 These wars waged by marabouts on ‘pagan’ traditional aristocracies are studied by Boubacar Barry, one of the representatives of what has been called the ‘Dakar School’ in history. See Boubacar Barry, Le Royaume du Waalo: le Sénégal avant la conquête (Paris: Maspero, 1972). 16 Lamin O. Sanneh, Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition in West African Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 17 Sanneh, Beyond Jihad, p. 53. 18 See Ousmane Oumar Kane, Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). See also Samil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (eds), The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: HSRC Press in association with CODESRIA, 2008). 19 Michel Chodkiewicz, The Spiritual Writings of Amir ‘Abd al-Kader, translated by James Chrestensen et al. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995). 20 Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar, le sage de Bandiagara (Paris: Le Seuil, ‘Points Sagesses’, 2014).

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Notes to pp. 87–91 Chapter 10  The political instrumentalization of a West African Sufi Islam   1 Éric Zemmour, ‘Les soufis sont les plus chrétiens des musulmans’, RTL, 28 November 2017, https://www.rtl.fr/actu/international/eric-­zemmour-­ les-­soufis-­sont-­les-­plus-­chretiens-­des-­musulmans-­7791171494.   2 Ismaïl Alexandrini, ‘Généalogie du djihadisme au Sinaï’, Orient XXI, 23 September 2014, https://orientxxi.info/magazine/genealogie-­ du-­ djihadisme-­au-­sinai,0687.  3 Fabienne Samson, ‘Les classifications en islam’, Cahiers d’études ­africaines, nos 206–207: ‘L’islam au-­ delà des catégories’, 2012, pp. 329–49.   4 Marc Augé, Génie du paganisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).   5 On the genealogy of the construction of a ‘Black Islam’, see Jean-­Louis Triaud, ‘L’islam au sud du Sahara. Une saison orientaliste en Afrique occidentale. Constitution d’un champ scientifique, héritages et transmissions’, Cahiers d’études africaines, nos 198–200, 2010, pp. 907–50.  6 Edmond Doutté, Magie et religion dans l’Afrique du Nord (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1994; first published in 1909).   7 Abdulbasit Kassim and Jacob Zenn, ‘Justifying War: The Salafi-­Jihadi Appropriation of Sufi Jihad in the Sahel-­Sahara’, Hudson Institute, 1 March 2017, https://www.hudson.org/research/13480-­justifying-­war-­ the-­salafi-­jihadi-­appropriation-­of-­sufi-­jihad-­in-­the-­sahel-­sahara.   8 See Jean-­Loup Amselle, Vers un multiculturalisme français: l’empire de la coutume (Paris: Flammarion, 2010; first published in 1996), chap. 3, ‘Le multiculturalisme français en Algérie’.   9 On Faidherbe, see Amselle, Vers un multiculturalisme français, chap. 4, ‘Faidherbe, un raciologue républicain’. 10 On this point, see Jean-­Loup Amselle, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, translated by Claudia Royal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), chap.  7, ‘White Paganism’, and Vincent Monteil, L’Islam noir (Paris: Le Seuil, 1964). 11 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Les Négociants de la savane: histoire et organisation sociale des Kooroko, Mali (Paris: Anthropos, 1977), p. 257. 12 Amadou Hampâté Bâ, A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar, edited by Roger Gaetani (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2008); originally published as Amadou Hampâté Bâ and Marcel Cardaire, Tierno Bokar: le sage de Bandiagara (Paris: Présence africaine, 1957). On all these aspects, see the crucial work by Louis Brenner, Controlling Knowledge: Religion, Power and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 87, 102–5, 160–1, and the article by Jean-­Louis Triaud, who emphasizes the role of mediator and transmitter played by Théodore Monod in the transformation of the character of Tierno Bokar: ‘La construction d’une hagiographie à la croisée de l’oral et de l’écrit: Tierno Bokar, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Théodore Monod’, in Gaetano Ciarcia and Éric Jolly

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Notes to pp. 91–9 (eds), Métamorphoses de l’oralité entre écrit et image (Paris: Karthala, 2015). 13 ‘Trésors de l’islam en Afrique: de Tombouctou à Djibouti’, Paris, Institut du monde arabe, March–July 2017. I myself collaborated on the catalogue of this exhibition, but the contribution on Wahhabism that I proposed was turned down. 14 The tombs of the saints themselves were not destroyed by the jihadists, only the low walls surrounding them. Personal communication from Hadizatou Traoré, a Malian researcher. 15 Benjamin F. Soares, ‘A Contemporary Malian Shaykh: Al-­Hajj Shaykh Sidy Modibo Kane Diallo, the Religious Leader of Dilly’, https://open access.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/9328/ASC_​1293978_​002. pdf; sequence=​1. 16 President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita paved the track leading to Haïdara’s native village and he recently offered the latter a plot of 150 hectares to gather his faithful for the Maouloud festival. See ‘Fin de suspense: contre l’avis d’Ansardine, Chérif Ousmane Madani Haïdara les 150 ha d’IBK’, Mali Jet, 15 December 2017, http://malijet.com/a_​la_​une_​ du_​mali/200560-­end-­of-­suspense-­against-­the-­noticed’ansardine%2C-­ Sharif-­ousmane-­madani.html. 17 ‘Paradoxically, I believe that it is rather in Europe that the emergence of ideas in Islam will be played out.’ See Célian Macé, ‘Les soufis représentent un islam de paix et d’ouverture diamétralement opposé à celui des jihadistes’, Libération, 19 May 2016, http://www.liberation.fr/ planete/2016/05/19/les-­soufis-­representent-­un-­islam-­de-­paix-­et-­d-ouver ture-­diametralement-­oppose-­a-celui-­des-­jihadistes_​1453724. 18 See the major interview with Christian Jambet, En attendant Nadeau, 11 October 2016, https://www.en-­ attendant-­ nadeau.fr/2016/10/11/ entretien-­christian-­jambet/. See also Jean-­Loup Amselle, ‘Michel Foucault et la spiritualisation de la philosophie’, in Daniel Zamora (ed.), Critiquer Foucault: les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale (Brussels: Éditions Aden, 2014). 19 https://reporterre.net/Le-­soufisme-­une-­voie-­musulmane-­vers-­l-ecologie. 20 Inspired by Augé’s Génie du paganisme, Mamadou Diouf praised the African paganism viewed, in the way Latin American decolonial writers view such trends, as an alternative to and competitor with European thought: ‘L’universalisme (européen) à l’épreuve des histoires indigènes’, in Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr (eds), Écrire l’Afrique-Monde (Paris and Dakar: Philippe Rey and Jimsaan, 2017).

Chapter 12  Thinking/creating Africa  1 Perhaps I may here refer to my introduction in Souleymane Bachir Diagne, The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2016), pp. 5–6.  2 Un concept d’Afrique (A Concept of Africa) is the title of a PhD thesis

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Notes to pp. 101–9 by Salim Abdelmadjid, who turns the question ‘What is Africa?’ into a philosophical question that he pursues in the articles he has written on this theme.   3 Léonora Miano, ‘De quoi l’Afrique est-­il le nom?’, in Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr (eds), Écrire l’Afrique-Monde (Paris and Dakar: Philippe Rey and Jimsaan, 2017), p. 102.   4 So one example that is given is that of slaves believing that their death would be their release and return to ‘Guinea’: Susan J. Matt writes that the slave Jin Cole had always kept alive the hope that on her death, or maybe before, she would be returned to Guinea (Homesickness: An American History [New York: Oxford University Press, 2011], p. 25). As for Ethiopia, ever since Greco-­Roman antiquity, its name has often been synonymous with Africa in general. In W. E. B. Du Bois, we find this meaning.

Chapter 13  On the non-­existence of ­Africa . . . ­and of Europe   1 Jean-­Loup Amselle, Branchements: anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures (Paris: Flammarion, 2015; first published in 2001).  2 Jean-­ Loup Amselle and Emmanuel Sibeud (eds), Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie: l’itinéraire d’un africaniste (1870– 1926) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998).   3 Jean-­Loup Amselle, L’Ethnicisation de la France (Paris: Lignes, 2011), chap. 4, ‘Négritude, créolisation, créolité’.   4 Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Serge Gruzinski, Les Quatre Parties du monde: histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: La Martinière, 2004).  5 Amselle, Branchements. On pan-­Africanism, see Amzat Boukari-­Yabara, Africa Unite! Une histoire du panafricanisme (Paris: La Découverte, 2014).   6 See the French Wikipédia article on ‘Diaspora’.  7 Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Les Sélections sociales (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1896).   8 Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, translated by Yael Lotan (London: Verso, 2009).   9 For Jews, of course, Jewishness is transmitted down the maternal line. 10 It can be observed, moreover, that the concept of ‘diaspora’ comes with negative aspects too: applied to African students staying in Europe, it has the effect of showing them that they are staying there only for a time and should ‘return’ to their home countries as soon as their studies are completed. 11 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 12 Claudine Raynaud, ‘Confrontations: Jean-­ Loup Amselle et les intellectuels afro-­américains’, in Anthony Mangeon (ed.), Anthropolitiques:

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Notes to pp. 110–17 Jean-Loup Amselle, une pensée sans concessions (Paris: Karthala, 2015), p. 92. 13 C. Gara, ‘La grande musique noire, brasier de résistance’, L’Humanité, 7–9 March 2014, https://www.humanite.fr/la-­grande-­musique-­noire-­ brasier-­de-­resistance-­0. 14 ‘Emmanuel Parent: “L’approche raciale de la musique a été portée par les Noirs eux-­ mêmes”’, interview by Édouard Launet and Sophian Fanen, Libération, 28 February 2014, https://next.liberation.fr/musique/ 2014/02/28/l-­approche-­raciale-­de-­la-­musique-­a-ete-­portee-­par-­les-­noirs-­ eux-­memes_​983634. 15 Philip Tagg, ‘Lettre ouverte sur les musiques “noires”, “afro-­américaines” et “européennes”’, Volume!, vol. 6, nos 1–2, 2009, pp. 135–61. In his article on the exhibition ‘Great Black Music’, conversely, Edouard Launet sees these so-­called ‘distinctive’ marks as proof of the existence of an authentic ‘Black music’ (‘Aux racines des “musiques noires”’, Libération, 17 March 2014, https://next.liberation.fr/musique/2014/03/17/aux-­ ra cines-­des-­musiques-­noires_​987781). 16 Personal communication from the ethnomusicologists Steven Feld, Francesco Giannattasio and Giovanni Guiriati (Venice, Fondation Cini, 30 January 2014). 17 ‘La diaspora africaine, la “6ème region d’Afrique”’, CEEC-­COMOROS. com, 18 September 2014, http://afriqueinside.com/la-­diaspora-­sixieme-­ region-­dafrique18092014/. 18 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (London: Fourth Estate, 2013). 19 Patrice Nganang was deported to the United States on 27 December 2017. 20 Alain Mabanckou (ed.), Penser et écrire l’Afrique aujourd’hui (Paris: Seuil, 2017). 21 Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr (eds), Écrire l’Afrique-monde (Dakar: Philippe Rey/Jimsaan, 2017). 22 See below, chap. 14, pp. 114–17. 23 See Jean-­ Loup Amselle, ‘L’Afrique: un parc à thèmes’, Les Temps modernes, nos 620–1: ‘Afriques du monde’, April–November 2002, pp. 46–60.

Chapter 14  On Africa and pan-­Africanism   1 Alain Ricard, ‘De l’africanisme aux études africaines, textes et humanités’, in Afrique et Histoire, vol. 2 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2004), p. 171.   2 LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow &​Co., 1963).

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Notes to pp. 118–22 Chapter 15  Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s ‘desire for Africa’   1 Éric Fottorino, Christophe Guillemin and Erik Orsenna, Besoin d’Afrique (Paris: Fayard, 1992).

Chapter 16  Were human rights born in Africa?   1 I would like to thank the anthropologist Anne Doquet, of the Institute of Research for Development, for assistance in drafting this chapter.   2 Maurice Delafosse, Haut-Sénégal-Niger (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1912), 3 vols. On the life and work of Maurice Delafosse, see Jean-­Loup Amselle and Emmanuel Sibeud (eds), Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie: l’itinéraire d’un africaniste (1870–1926) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998).  3 Delafosse, Haut-Sénégal-Niger, vol. 2, p.  169. On the invention of this date by Delafosse, see Jean-­Louis Triaud, ‘Haut-­Sénégal-­Niger, un modèle positiviste? De la coutume à l’histoire: Maurice Delafosse et l’invention de l’histoire africaine’, in Amselle and Sibeud (eds), Maurice Delafosse, p. 218.   4 Djibril Tamsir Niane, Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue (Paris: Présence africaine, 1960). I say ‘written in French’ as the date of composition and publication of Souleymane Kanté’s Kurukan Fuga Gbara are not known (see below).  5 Niane, Soundjata, pp. 136–43.  6 Niane, Soundjata, p. 152. It should be noted that in the epic of Sunjara, collected in Kela (Mali) by Jan Jansen, there is never any mention of the assembly of Kurukan Fuga: Jan Jansen, Esger Duintjer and Boubacar Tamboura (eds), L’Épopée de Sunjara d’après Lansine Diabate de Kela (Leiden: CNWS, 1995). Nor does it appear in Youssouf Tata Cissé and Wa Kamissoko, Soundjata la gloire du Mali, vol. 2 (Paris: Karthala, 2009).   7 See Jean-­Loup Amselle, Branchements: anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures, 3rd edn (Paris: Flammarion, 2015; first published in 2001).  8 Ton: ‘rule, law, regulation, government, association that follows a regulation, something that cannot be contravened, obligation, duty, assigned aim’. See Maurice Delafosse, La Langue mandingue et ses dialectes (malinké, bambara, dioula), vol. 2, Dictionnaire Mandingue–Français (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1955), p. 759.   9 Souleymane Kanté, Kurukanfuga Gbara, translated by Emmanuel Nii Odoi and Djibrila Doumbouya, edited by David C. Conrad (Kissidougou: Guinée, 1994), typescript. 10 Lada and landa, ‘customs, customary law’, from the Arabic ladat; see Delafosse, La langue mandingue, vol. 2, p. 452. 11 The most well-­known representative of ‘Afrocentricism’ is Shaykh Anta Diop; see his Antériorité des civilisations nègres: mythe ou vérité historique? (Paris: Présence africaine, 1967).

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Notes to pp. 123–6 12 Alfred R. Radcliffe-­Brown, ‘On Joking Relationships’, Africa, vol. 13, no. 3, July 1940, pp. 195–210; Marcel Griaule, ‘L’alliance cathartique’, Africa, vol. 18, no. 4, October 1948, pp. 242–8. 13 This is true both in the context of administrative decentralization in Mali and in the ‘African Renaissance’ dear to Abdoulaye Wade, President of Senegal. 14 On all these points, see Claude Fay, Yaouaga Félix Koné and Catherine Quiminal (eds), Décentralisation et pouvoirs en Afrique: en contrepoint, modèles territoriaux français (Paris: IRD, 2006). See also the special issue of the Cahiers d’études africaines on ‘Parentés, plaisanteries et politique’, no. 184, 2006, edited by Cécile Canut and Étienne Smith, and the inaugural lecture of Djibril Tamsir Niane, ‘La Charte de Kurakan Fuga: aux sources d’une pensée politique en Afrique’, Université Gaston Berger de Saint-­Louis, Senegal, 2009. On the figure of ‘palaver’, see Jean-­Loup Amselle, L’Anthropologue et le Politique (Paris: Lignes, 2012), chap. 1, ‘Le vote et la palabre’. 15 CELHTO, La Charte de Kurukan Fuga: aux sources d’une pensée politique en Afrique (Paris: L’Harmatan, 2008). 16 His ‘Variations sur les lois de Kurukan Fuga’ are presented in a somewhat condescending way, in the appendix, as the work of a ‘poet and traditionist scholar’: CELHTO, La Charte de Kurukan Fuga, pp. 153–5. 17 CELHTO, La Charte de Kurukan Fuga, pp. 22–23. The ‘Hunters’ Oath’ collected by Youssouf Tata Cissé in 1965 is attached in an appendix to La Charte de Kurukan Fuga, pp.  145–9, and can also be found in La Charte du Mandé et autres traditions du Mali, translated by Youssouf Tata Cissé and Jean-­Louis Sagot-­Duvauroux, calligraphy by Aboubakar Fofana (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003). 18 Hamidou Dia, ‘La Charte du Mandé: une nouvelle Magna Carta pour l’Union africaine’, in CELHTO, La Charte de Kurukan Fuga, pp. 141–3; Iba Der Thiam, ibid., p.  140; Raphaël N’Diaye, ibid., pp.  109–10; ‘Kaman Bolon’, ibid., p. 159. 19 Youssouf Tata Cissé, ‘Notes sur les sociétés de chasseurs malinké’, Journal de la Société des Africanistes, no. 34, 1964, pp.  175–226. See also Claude Meillassoux, ‘Recherche d’un niveau de détermination dans la société cynégétique’, in Terrains et theories (Paris: Anthropos, 1977), pp. 119–40, in which article is mentioned. In much of his work, especially in Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris: Maspero, 1975), and also in his Anthropologie de l’esclavage (Paris: PUF, 1986), the great anthropologist Claude Meillassoux (1925–2005) constantly sought to confirm the analyses of Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), using the materials of modern ethnology. He adopted an evolutionist perspective to discern the famous ‘stages’ identified by the founders of Marxism. He compared the ‘hunter-­ gatherer communities’ and the ‘associations of Malinké hunters’ (donso ton) with ‘primitive communism’, and identified the warrior-­captives (tonjon) of the Kingdom of Segu with a ‘military democracy’, and so on. We find the same idea in Jan Jansen, ‘À la recherche d’autochtonie:

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Notes to pp. 126–8 pourquoi les Maliens acceptent la Charte du Manding et la Charte de Kouroukanfouga’, Mande Studies, vol. 18, 2016, pp. 57–73. 20 CELHTO, La Charte de Kurukan Fuga, pp. 89, 93. 21 Hawa Semega, ‘Charte du Mandé, Kurukanfuga, une rencontre internationale se tient à Bamako’, Soir de Bamako, 1 June 2007. 22 In his inaugural lecture already cited in this chapter (see n. 14), Djibril Tamsir Niane criticized the ‘Hunters’ Oath’ promoted by Cissé and described the rediscovery of the ‘Charter of Kurukan Fuga’ as part of the ‘African Renaissance’ that was close to the heart of the Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade. 23 Final Report of the National Seminar on Authentication of the Charter of Kurukan Fuka 1236, Kangaba, 27–8 February 2010. 24 M. Keita and H. Kouyate, ‘Cinquantenaire: Journée de Kurukanfuga, au cœur de la grande histoire’, L’Essor, 1 October 2010, http://malijet. com/a_​la_​une_​du_​mali/27880-­cinquantenaire_​journee_​de_​kurukanfuga .html. 25 Jansen, ‘À la recherche d’autochtonie’. In another context, that of the Somali shepherds of Djibouti, Somalia and Ethiopia, see Ali Moussa Iye, Le Verdict de l’Arbre. Le Xeer Issa: essai sur une démocratie endogène africaine (Achères: Éditions Dagan, 2014), which is doubtless inspired by the classic work of the British anthropologist Ioan M. Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy: A Study of Pastoralism and Politics among the Northern Somali of the Horn of Africa (London: James Currey, 1999; first published in 1961). As in many other cases, ‘colonial’ anthropology seems to have provided material for an Afrocentric way of thinking. Thanks to Simon Imbert-­Vier, a historian from the Institut des Mondes africains (Aix-­en-­Provence), for providing me with this reference. 26 ‘Mali: Conflit communautaire entre peulhs et dogons au centre du pays: les jeunes de l’association Tabital Pulaaku dissent halte à l’amalgame!’, Maliactu.net, 16 March 2018, http://maliactu.net/mali-­ conflit-­ commu nautaire-­entre-­peulhs-­et-­dogons-­au-­centre-­du-­pays-­les-­jeunes-­de-­lassoci ­ation-­tabital-­pulaaku-­disent-­halte-­a-lamalgame/. 27 Personal communication by the anthropologist Julien Gavelle and presentation by the anthropologist Boukary Sangaré in our seminar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, ‘Le Sahel à l’envers’ (9 March 2018). 28 Saïd Mahrane, ‘Ségolène, une Grande Royale au gouvernement’, Le Point, 19 August 2014, https://www.lepoint.fr/afrique/segolene-­une-­ grande-­royale-­au-­gouvernement-­19-­08-­2014-­1857398_​3826.php#​xtmc​ =​segolene-­royal&​xtnp=​1&​xtcr=​1. According to Libération (9 April 2009), Ségolène Royal’s speech in Dakar was written by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Jean-­ François Bayart and Elikia M’Bokolo. See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘Philosophie africaine et Charte africaine des droits de l’homme et des peuples’, Critique, nos 771–2: ‘Philosopher en Afrique’, 2011, pp. 664–72. 29 See Joseph Tonda, L’Impérialisme post-colonial: critique de la société des éblouissements (Paris: Karthala, 2015).

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Notes to pp. 129–51 30 This was the ‘war of the sons of the dream’ that was waged at the end of the eighteenth century in Wasolon; see Claude Meillassoux’s remarks in Youssouf Tata Cissé and Kamissoko Wa, Soundjata, la gloire du Mali, vol. 2 (Paris: Karthala/Arsan, 2009), pp. 255–6, and Jean-­Loup Amselle, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, translated by Claudia Royal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 31 The ‘Hunters’ Oath’ appears in the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes.

Chapter 17  On the charters of the Mandé  1 CELHTO, La Charte de Kurukan Fuga: aux sources d’une pensée politique en Afrique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008).   2 Mangoné Niang, ‘Avant-­propos’, in CELHTO, La Charte de Kurukan Fuga, p. 5.   3 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Chapter 18  On various contemporary questions  1 Jean-­ Paul Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, translated by John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 6, no. 1, Autumn 1964–Winter 1965, pp. 13–52 (p. 13).  2 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ‘Négritude’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 24 May 2010; substantive revision 23 May 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/negritude/.  3 Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, translated by Rachel Valinsky (New York: Semiotext(e), 2017).   4 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandre Fontana; translated by David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003).   5 Elisabeth Young-­Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p.  109 (original emphasis).  6 Michel Leiris, Phantom Africa, translated by Brent Hayes Edwards (London: Seagull Books, 2017).   7 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, translated by Chike Jeffers (London: Seagull Books, 2011).   8 This was a protest movement in France that started in March 2016, and was broadly similar to the Occupy movement in the United States. (Translator’s note.)   9 A far-­right avowedly secularist movement hostile to Islam. (Translator’s note.)

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Bibliography

Works by Souleymane Bachir Diagne Books Boole, 1815–1864: l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Paris: Belin, 1989). Logique pour philosophes (Dakar: NEAS, 1991). George Boole, Les Lois de la pensée, translated by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Paris: Vrin, 1992). Reconstruire le sens: textes et enjeux de prospectives africaines (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2001). (Edited with Samil Jeppie) The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: HSRC Press in association with CODESRIA, 2008). African Art  as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, translated by Chike Jeffers (London: Seagull Books, 2011). Bergson postcolonial: l’élan vital dans la pensée de Léopold Sédar Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011). Forthcoming in English as: Postcolonial Bergson, translated by Lindsay Turner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2011). Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2016). (With Philippe Capelle-­Dumont) Philosopher en islam et en christianisme (Paris: Le Cerf, 2016).

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Bibliography Articles cited ‘Faire la terre totale’, in Jérôme Bindé (ed.), Signons la paix avec la terre: quel avenir pour la planète et pour l’espèce humaine (Paris: UNESCO/Albin Michel, 2007). ‘Individual, Community, and Human Rights: A Lesson from Kwasi Wiredu’s Philosophy of Personhood’, Transition, an International Review, no. 101, 2009, pp. 8–15. ‘Négritude’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 24 May 2010; substantive revision 23 May 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/negritude/. ‘Philosophie africaine et Charte africaine des droits de l’homme et des peuples’, Critique, nos 771–2: ‘Philosopher en Afrique’, 2011, pp. 664–72. ‘L’universel latéral comme traduction’, in Philippe Büttgen, Michèle Gendreau-­Massaloux and Xavier North (eds), Les Pluriels de Barbara Cassin ou le Partage des équivoques (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2014). ‘Achieving Humanity: Convergence between Henri Bergson and Muhammad Iqbal’, in Chad Hillier and Basit Bilal Koshul (eds), Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). ‘Du mouvement vers l’universel’, de(s)générations, no. 22: ‘Penser avec l’Afrique’, 2015, pp. 19ff. ‘Faire humanité ensemble et ensemble habiter la terre’, in ‘Les politiques de la dignité’, Présence africaine, no. 193, 2016, pp. 11–19. ‘Traduire le Coran’, in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Après Babel: traduire (Arles: Actes Sud, 2016). ‘Penser de langue à langue’, in Alain Mabanckou (ed.), Pensée et écrire l’Afrique aujourd’hui (Paris: Le Seuil, 2017). ‘Pour une histoire postcoloniale de la philosophie’, Cités, no. 72, 2017, pp. 81–93. ‘Pour un universel vraiment universel’, in Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr (eds), Écrire l’Afrique-Monde (Paris/Dakar: Philippe Rey/Jimsaan, 2017).

Works by Jean-­Loup Amselle Books (As editor) Les Migrations africaines: réseaux et processus migratoires (Paris: F. Maspero, 1976). Les Négociants de la savane: histoire et organisation sociale des Kooroko, Mali (Paris: Anthropos, 1977). Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, translated by Claudia Royal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). (Edited with Emmanuel Sibeud) Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie: l’itinéraire d’un africaniste (1870–1926) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998).

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