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119 african cultural diversity in the Media old Question, New factors The issue of cultural diversity in sub-Saharan africa is an old problem that already concerned colonial administrations and postindependence african elites, the promoters of that common but extremely delicate commodity, democracy, and it still concerns today’s promoters of cosmopolitanism. The colonial administrations (both british and french) found themselves facing the issue of cultural diversity. how were they to bring under colonial law such differing peoples as those located in the same administrative region, who had been lumped together by the chance effects of colonial geographical divisions on a map? how were they to make the law, decipher signs of revolts, and set about recruiting collaborators in populations whose components did not speak the same language or conform to either the same ontological system or the same legal rationality, still less the same founding myths? in other words, how were they to understand that diversity of cultures , then bend it to the new colonial norm? how can obedience originating with the one (the civilizer) encompass diversity? french colonialism came up with one answer to the question of diversity in the face of obedience: diversity must be assimilated—everyone had to deny themselves and become almost french. british colonialism came up with the opposite answer: everyone was to be equal but in servitude: indirect rule. The colonized peoples could keep their social structures, myths, and hierarchies provided they all, from smallest to greatest, served the greatness of the british crown. 120 | Other Essays African elites also faced the diversity problem at the moment when they had to shake off the colonial yoke. having been united in the anticolonial struggle, how were they to manage the postindependence period? in other words, diversity here came up against the issue of the nations’ constitutions. colonization had left states but not nations. how were they to lump together ethnic groups that often had nothing in common and tell them to conjugate the same verbs in the same tenses in order to come up with the nation’s founding narrative? how were they to manage living together? what would be the bond? Some african elites invented political philosophies based, for instance, on the idea of family as the bond; i could cite here former President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania’s african socialism, ujamaa. others came up with an answer to the diversity question by promoting the extremely vague and quite essentialist notion of african authenticity, which immediately makes us think of Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Zaire. diversity is explained here by an unvarying essence that is african-ness. with the disenchantment over independence in africa, economic failure, the crimes of the elites from the independence years, the paralysis of symbolism, which was often accompanied by manifestations of the sacred—tailored to fit the official religions —and finally the states’ loss of dynamism, the 1990s, assisted by the new order in international politics, ushered in a so-called phase of democratization. This was about rethinking citizenship and the relationship to politics, which was unfortunately reduced to the petty proportions of the state. There were international conferences, elites resigned from governments and, having resumed state titles and attributes, finally introduced multiparty systems, which were previously forbidden. This democratization was a response to the notion of diversity. with a multiparty system, ethnic logic would be silenced and a public sphere for discussion opened up. Sadly, the answer to the diversity issue fell far short of expectations. Multiparty systems designed to respond to the diversity question produced only many versions of the same by ignoring the fact that true diversity is less the industrial-scale duplication of the same—same parties , same newspapers unliberated from capitalist logic and the quest for sensation— than the encroachment on the same of the strange, the different, and the unexpected. in the meantime, there appeared the chernobyl cloud—which passed over without worrying about border police—the rwanda genocides, civil war and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. henceforth, with the creation of international penal courts to try those guilty of genocide—since this world is our common habitat, which is proved to us by sea pollution and climate change—the issue of cultural diversity has been included in cosmopolitanism. henceforth nativism and nationalism are much too narrow for thinking about cultural diversity. This cosmopolitical issue with its many aspects has been formulated by ulrich beck and in africa by Kwame appiah.1 but the question of cultural diversity is here...

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