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131 books between african Memory and anticipation The book sows; whether one likes it or not, the book always spreads seeds. The capital letter “L,” one element of the symbol for Larousse dictionaries and encyclopedias in france (L is also the first letter of the word “book” in romance languages), is there for a good reason: it “scatters in every direction.” L (either for “livre” or for “Larousse,” but let’s choose “livre”!) strews to the winds: would the L therefore be “drunk” [ivre]? if so, it would seem that this drunkenness of the book were being censored by all these proclamations concerning the “end of the book” being circulated these days by promoters of immediacy in the audio-visual industry, who promise readers of the early twentyfirst century that they will have access to immediate visual, auditory, and iconographic knowledge. The temporal dimension of the detour is replaced by a temporality that is defined through instantaneity. in their drunkenness, books deliver two paradoxical experiences to humanity. They only sow unity among people of the past, the present, and the future in order to better divide them when it comes to the use people make of their contents. That is because the rule [the common form] brings together, but usage and interpretation divide. books offer knowledge—informative value—only to take it away from the majority: one only “enters” a book when initiated in the codes that cover the rules of spelling and grammar, the latter being the detectives in the police force of spoken and written expression. once introduced into african cultures said to be oral, books opened them up to the other cultures of the world—by reading the histories of other peoples, africans opened up and integrated world history. but this opening immediately produced a 132 | Other Essays closing. because, just as books appeared in africa, africans only entered into world history to be locked into the category of the “Noble Savage.” To truly affirm their alterity , africans would have had to be the other of written civilization. The production and circumscription of books in african colonies—fostered by islam long before european colonization—was contemporaneous with the acts of archiving, cataloguing, and classification by which geographers, linguists and ethnologists created a figure of the african as “the other.”1 Giving everything while taking back, opening while closing, books construct codes of reading, displace intentions and understandings, and obstinately sow doubts or expectations in an african history whose triumph over the instrumentbook is no small achievement. although they are instruments of knowledge, books cannot be reduced to a simple Organon because they are processes of fruition, sowing, and promise. books are the seeds sown in africa and they can bear both the fruits of knowledge (of oneself, of others, and of institutions) and the fruits of barbarism. The recording, publication, and dissemination of the ideological books of political dictatorships and religious fundamentalisms are eloquent in this sense. books are therefore a rich soil of possibilities that, within each individual historic site, can promote the best, while being capable of the worst. but is “africa” a fertile site? one can only study the adventure of books, productive activity, and the product-book as a process. how do the symbolic products (books) in circulation in africa speak, contradict, translate, betray, or cover up the contradictions woven between the places of production and the products? This seems to be the general question posed by the existence and enduring presence of books in africa. evaluating the space of the book (the place), as well as the actors involved in it, suggests that all analysis of the book’s situation in a particular history should consider it not simply as a product but also as a process. books as products are in turn productive. as an active link in a process, often in spite of itself, the book has produced a whole imaginary in africa. have books not been taken as something sacred there? have they not been associated directly with scientific knowledge—as if all books were part of knowledge—as they are for the beti of cameroon, whose word for “book” is the same as that for “knowledge ” (kalara)?2 Process, product, producer: the book is also a symptom. The content of books, the frequency and quality of publications, the legal terms of literary and artistic property, the diligence, harshness, or laxity of censorship all put into perspective the manner in which a society plays around with its moments of...

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