Conférence en anglais donnée au centre Africana Studies de l’université d’Arizona en 2012.
Emmelene Landon helped for the translation.
See also http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/marie-darrieussecq/le-discours-de-dakar-une-_b_1387360.html et le site de France culture
Every Tuesday morning I have a chronicle on the French national radio
station France Culture. Just last week the guest of the day was Henri Guaino,
President Sarkozy’s special adviser. In 2007, soon after Sarkozy was
elected, Henri Guaino wrote a speech addressed to young Africans that
was delivered by Sarkozy in a university in Dakar, Senegal. This very
controversial speech – that is also greatly admired by certain people
– is known as the “Dakar speech”.
Henri Guaino considered my quoting his own sentences in the electoral
context as “dishonest, improper and disgraceful”: he was there the radio on
Nicolas Sarkozy’s speaking time as a candidate. Our live argument on
the radio and his edginess about what he felt was impertinence on my
behalf created a small scandal. It seemed to me to be quite the
opposite, and I thought it was most appropriate and legitimate, now
that the government’s track record has to be made, to remind the
person who had advised the President of the Republic for five years
about his own words.
The same president, Nicolas Sarkozy, delivered a magnificent speech on
slavery in May 2011. These two speeches, as contradictory as they may
be, are accessible on the Elysée’s website, for those who would like
to read them.
Before going any further, here's the chronicle I gave on the radio and that
annoyed the President’s adviser so much:
The Dakar speech begins by criticizing the ravages of colonization and
slavery, which takes up ten percent of the entire text, to remind us
that colonization also brought “bridges, roads, hospitals, free
clinics, schools and fertility to barren lands,” and to conclude by
stating that “For better and for worse, colonization has transformed
the African man and the European man.”
Already, I think it’s quite questionable to place on an equal base the better
and the worst of colonization. If colonization were a marriage, it
would be a forced one. Henri Guaino, in the beginning of his speech,
quotes a poem by Aimé Césaire. So let’s go back to Césaire, to one of
his own speeches: his Discourse on Colonialism, in 1950.Césaire was
already mentioning the “disloyalty,“ as he put it, of the colonialist
clichés, that would “legitimize a posteriori by the obvious material
progress” the systematic sacking of colonial enterprise. As for Henri
Guaino, he continued by stating that “All colonists were not thieves,
all colonists were not exploiters.” As if the fact that some
individuals were not bastards exempted colonialism from being a
general plundering; another classic legitimization that Césaire had
identified in his times.
The remaining ninety percent of the Dakar speech contains two
principal ideas: praise for the African man close to childhood and
nature, and friendly encouragement for him to come out of his
immobility. I quote Henri Guaino, Président Sarkozy's special adviser :
“I came to tell you that modern man who feels the need to
be reconciled with nature has much to learn from African man who has
been living in symbiosis with nature for thousands of years.” (…)
“Africa’s drama is that African man hasn’t come into History enough.
The African peasant, who has been living with the seasons for
thousands of years and whose ideal for life is to be in harmony with
nature, only knows the eternal cycle of time in rhythm to the endless
repetition of the same gestures and the same words. In this world
where everything is always repeating itself, there is no place for
human adventure or for the idea of progress. In this universe where
nature rules over everything, Man escapes from the anguish of History
that torments modern Man, and Man remains immobile in the midst of an
unchanging order in which everything seems to have been inscribed
beforehand. Never could Man throw himself into the future. Never could
he have the idea of stepping out of the repetition to invent his own
destiny. The problem with Africa – and allow a friend of Africa to say
so – is there.” End of quotation.
Césaire of course has a totally different explanation for “Africa's
drama”: “the greatest historical drama of Africa,” he wrote, “is less
its being too late to establish contact with the rest of the world,
rather than the way this contact was made: Europe "propagated" itself at a time
when Europe fell into the hands of bankers and the most unscrupulous
industrial tycoons; our bad luck was meeting this Europe along our
way, and Europe is accountable for the highest heap of corpses before
the human community.”
Césaire speaks of the historic moment from his point of view in 1950;
whereas the Dakar speech is inspired by the bicentennial theses of
Hegel in Reason in History (on the African Man close to childhood,
magic and nature, inaccessible to reasoning and to the movement of
History). An imagery that ends up, for better, in traditional clichés
and, for worse, with Gobineau’s idea that “History only exists in
white nations.”
I ended my chronicle by a last quote from the presidential speech
delivered before the students and teachers in the Dakar university:
“Africa reminds all the peoples of the earth that we have shared the
same childhood. Africa has aroused the simple joys, ephemeral
happiness and the need (…) to believe rather than to understand, the
need to feel rather than to reason, and to be in harmony rather than
to conquer.”
This long speech tries to be awkwardly generous, but it is totally
discredited by the stupefying resurgence of clichés we would have
thought were long bygone. A French-Senegalese professor in Oxford, Hélène Neveu,
told me she had translated certain passages in
English from the speech and asked her students to date them. Their
answer was “in the middle of the nineteenth century,” in any case they
didn’t think the “author was posterior to Cecil Rhodes” (Cecil Rhodes
founded the Cape colony in the late nineteenth century, as well as
Rhodesia, named after him).
France, according to Henri Guaino’s vision, is turned towards itself
and a vision of Africa that ignores modernity. Who, in France, reads
Wole Soyinka (Nobel prize winner in 1986) or his contemporary Chinua
Achebe, to mention only them? Why is there this Francophone obstinacy
to remain withdrawn in our own narrow vision of the world, when
Nigeria, South Africa and all the black diaspora take an active part
in the invention of globality? Henri Guaino refers to Senghor and to
Césaire, but it is a selective recourse: it is the pantheonized
Césaire and not the Césaire of virulent speeches; it is the Senghor
who read Teilhard de Chardin, the Senghor of “Negritude”, who wanted
African man to participate in the civilization of the Universal
through his “sensitivity,” “cosmic rhythm” and “intuitive Reason” as
opposed to “logical Reason.” This “anti-racist racism”” (according to
Sartre’s expression) and this essentialization of African Man have
been greatly criticized by the Africans themselves, starting with
Soyinka.
The English colonizers never tried to “assimilate” their colonized as
the French did (their violence was in radical separation). Which is why
the francophone poets Senghor and Césaire had to affirm to the French people that they were indeed black. This heritage determines the typically French
embarrassment today about the apprehension and the designation of
those who are perceived as others. Embarrassment that leads to
expressions such as “people of Muslim appearance”, said by Nicolas Sarkozy on
French radio last week, but also to François Hollande’s proposition to take the
word “race” out of the French constitution; a complex proposition that, while
trying to avoid discrimination, would also risk nourishing the
confusion in French discourse on so called “diversity.”
To crown it all, this Dakar speech in July 2007 was delivered at the Cheik
Anta Diop University; who is precisely the researcher who inaugurated
historiology from the African point of view. It is incredible to have
to remind top-level politicians that African History does actually
exist, written differently, with many African and European authors to
resurrect and unfurl it. We should really be asking ourselves why a
certain Europe needs to believe that Africa has no History.*
“ Contempt springing from so much ignorance,” wrote Mamadou Diouf,
“the most wretched clichés of colonial ethnology,” wrote Boubacar
Boris Diop, both Senegalese, “an obsolete intellectual heritage,
almost a century old,” wrote the Cameroonian Achille Mbembe… As very
alive authors who reacted immediately to the Dakar speech, and who do
not need a European to come and explain Africa to them, and who cannot
be suspected of reducing their vision to a victimized reading. Many of
them denounced this President of the French Republic who had come to
African soil to urge the young to “decide” on democracy, without
saying a word about France-Africa, about the scandals, about the
collision of political and petrochemical interests, and about the French
supporting the "Satraps" in a “system of reciprocal corruption”
(Mbembe). And what about the sentence uttered by Sarkozy in this speech : “I haven’t come here to speak to you about repentance,” : shouldn’t that be for the ex colonized to decide?
*On these subjects, one can read the works of Catherine Coquery
Vidrovitch, a historian on Africa, in her Petite histoire de l'Afrique
published by La Découverte (2010) ;
L'Afrique répond à Sarkozy, collective edition assembled by Philippe
Rey and another collective under the direction of Jean-Pierre Chrétien
: l'Afrique ou le déni d'histoire, published by Karthala.