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