Amadou Hampate Ba et l'africanisme (review)

Amadou Hampâté Bâ et l'africanisme, by Kusum Aggarwal. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999. 266 pp. ISBN 2-7384-7467-5 paper.

Kusum Aggarwal's study represents an important contribution to the history of African studies and discussions of the work of Amadou Hampaté Bâ. Its subject matter is especially topical, given the renewed attention to the role of the African scholar in the discipline of African studies in recent time. Aggarwal's specific area of interest here is the development of Africa as a subject of study among French scholars and within the context of the institutions of French colonialism in Africa. On the one hand it follows the footsteps of works dealing with the study of non-Western societies pioneered by authors like Edward Said. On the other, it differs from some similarly inclined studies relating to francophone Africa in its adoption of a rigorously diachronic perspective and its focus on the significance of a singular concern within the development of the field in the French-speaking world.

The concern in question relates to the invocation of real and implied transcriptions of African oral texts in African studies, which become in Aggarwal's opinion increasingly associated with essentializing discourses on African culture that mask the real power relations involved in the production of supposedly emblematic samples of African tradition. Accordingly, she traces the growing significance of the discourse on orality for representations of African culture carried out by several French authors during the colonial era, and continued into the present by figures as varied as Léopold Senghor and Mohamadou Kane. Aggarwal further contrasts the relative invisibility of Africans recruited by French anthropologists to assist with transcriptions during the colonial period with the increasing prominence of the African informant as symbol of the group best epitomized by Marcel Griaule's work on Dogon religion. It is in this connection that she highlights Hampaté Bâ's commitment to destabilizing the power relations embodied in many transcriptions by foregrounding the practical work of transcription and the real contribution of the African scholar/informant to the production of the discourse on African orality.

Although she ends with a disavowal of postcolonial theory, and its dehistoricizing tendencies, her work is an example of postcolonialism done right, of how to properly situate African cultural politics in relation to the outworkings of colonialism in a particular time and place. As demonstrated here, orality in Hampâté Bâ's work often signals a consciously undertaken response to the institutionalization of African studies in French colonial institutions.

Readers will no doubt quibble with some of the opinions buried in Aggarwal's study: the claim that Apartheid South Africa made no tangible contribution to a scientific study of African societies (38), or the claim that African studies is no longer dominated by Western institutions (244). The omission of references to African scholars of orality like Isidore Okpewho and recently Ato Quayson in a study that deals precisely with the place of the African scholar in African studies as presently constituted is regrettable. Nonetheless, this remains a significant work, and an invitation to further reflection on the legacy of Hampaté Bâ, on orality in Africa, and the place of the African scholar in African studies.

Moradewun Adejunmobi

Moradewun Adejunmobi teaches in the Department of African-American and African Studies at The University of California-Davis.

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