In Search of Africa(s). Souleymane Bachir Diagne
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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 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 state – Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand, for example – or 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 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 contributions. 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.
Notes
1 1. Jean-Loup Amselle, Vers un multiculturalisme français: l’empire de la coutume (Paris: Flammarion, 2010; first published in 1996).
2 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 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 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 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 Premodern 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 6.