Non-Europhone Intellectuals

1. Introduction

1 Introduction A debate is taking place about post-colonial literature and society in Africa in which writing in English about writing in English or French is pursued without any acknowledgement that a whole world of debate has been going on vigorously and at length in African languages (Graham Furniss, Poetry, Prose and Popular Culture in Hausa, p. ix). For many important cultural purposes, most African intellectuals south of the Saharaarewhatwecancall‘europhone’ (KwameAppiah, InmyFather’sHouse,p. 4). In the early 1990s, two books deeply influenced the intellectual debate on the production of knowledge on Africa, on Africanism and Pan-Africanism (Mudimbe 1988 and Appiah 1992), so much so that their authors received, in 1989 and 1993 respectively, the Melville Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association of North America, which is awarded annually to the best book on Africa written in English. Both authors come from a Christian background, had attended top Western universities (Louvain and Cambridge), teach in two prestigious US universities (Stanford and Princeton) and represented the two dominant intellectual traditions of post-colonial Africa (Anglophone and Francophone). While Appiah’s book was based on an in-depth analysis of a limited body of work, mainly Pan-Africanist authors, that of Mudimbe made use of an impressive range of books. What was more striking as a common denominator between the two authors (which they share with African intellectuals trained in the Western languages) was their very Eurocentric approach to the production of knowledge in Africa and on Africa. Mudimbe argues that the writings that have contributed to the invention and the idea of Africa were, for the most part, produced by Europeans during the colonial period: they formed what he called the colonial library.1 Non-Europhone Intellectuals 2 As for Appiah, he stated that most of the writings produced in sub-Saharan Africa were in Portuguese, French and English and that consequently most of the intellectuals of sub-Saharan Africa were Europhones (Appiah 1992:4). He added that, historically, the intellectuals of the Third World (including sub-Saharan Africa) were the product of the encounter with the West (Appiah 1992:68). The ‘colonial library’ can be traced to the formation of modernity and the Western identity which dates back to the end of the medieval period. In medieval Europe, Latin was the scholarly language par excellence and Christianity the main identity reference. Thanks to the growth of the printing industry and the enormous production of books in vernacular languages (German, English, Polish, Spanish), the European communities gradually acquired a national identity that supplanted the religious one (Anderson, passim). As they acquired these new identities, which were an important dimension of Western modernity, they also constructed the identity of ‘savages’: people who were not Western (Hall 1996). The accounts of travellers and the testimonies of explorers and missionaries, as well as writings by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, contributed to the idea that there was a relationship of radical otherness between the West and the Rest. In the case of Africa, Mudimbe (1994, passim) tried to question the very idea of the continent that the social sciences2 had developed. To illustrate the controversial nature of the term ‘Africa’ which originally designated a Roman province of Northern Africa, Mudimbe analyzed works of art and Greek texts about the black people, as well as accounts by European travellers, missionaries and explorers. He stated that the writings constituted the nucleus of a ‘library’ that has created extremely simplistic, if not racist, representations of a mosaic of peoples and places in Africa, whose culture, ecology, modes of social organization and political economy differ so greatly that one wonders whether, apart from its geographical location, the term Africa makes any sense at all.3 During the colonial period, this embryo of a library was reinforced by anthropologists and other colonial writers whose aim was to help create governable subjects (Mudimbe 1994:xii). Later, the library was enriched by the writings of Africanists (non-African researchers working on Africa). This expanded library shaped, according to Mudimbe, an epistemological territory inhabited by concepts and worldviews inherited from the West. Even during the post-colonial period, neither the Africanists nor the Africans who were preaching the authenticity of Africa, and still less the Afrocentrists, were able to break out of the extremely schematic and simplistic representation of Africa that the Western epistemological order had invented (Mudimbe 1988:x; 1994:xv). According to Mudimbe, ‘the European interpreters, like the African analysts, used categories and conceptual systems that...