In Search of Africa(s). Souleymane Bachir Diagne
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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 people – 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 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 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 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