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  • Moogo: l’émergence d’un espace étatique oust-africain au XVIe siécle by Michel Izard
  • Mark Breusers
Michel Izard, Moogo: l’émergence d’un espace étatique oust-africain au XVIe siécle. Paris: Karthala, (pb €29.00 – 2 84586 449 3). 2003, 394pp.

In his elaborate introduction, Michel Izard expresses his scepticism as to the possibility of ever recovering the history of societies that have an oral tradition. He notes, for instance, that with the death of an African elder it is not so much a library that burns; rather, it is the disappearance a few more fragments of a book that will never be written. He certainly does not want to imply that the writing of history based on oral tradition is futile. His many works on the Mossi kingdoms provide ample proof to the contrary, and demonstrate how anthropology and history may combine to enhance our understanding of past political and social processes in such societies.

What Izard is most concerned with is the premature closure of historical writing. This was already so when, with his 1970 publication, he first shook the foundations of scholarly study of the Mossi kingdoms – kingdoms that for several centuries preceding French colonial rule constituted remarkably stable political entities dominating a large region in present-day Burkina Faso. The quasi-canonized views of colonial scholars such as Louis Tauxier and Maurice Delafosse were dismantled by Izard’s dismissal of any direct link between the ‘Mossi’ who sacked Timbuktu in 1337 and the Mossi who founded the kingdoms in the Volta Basin. Izard proposed an alternative chronology, which brought the kingdoms’ history some three to four centuries closer to the present, starting no earlier than the fifteenth century.

Today, Izard recognizes the danger of his own vision becoming all too easily accepted as the new orthodoxy and therefore critically revisits his earlier work. The introductory chapter sets the scene by dealing with methodological intricacies and pitfalls related to the study of oral tradition and by presenting the kingdoms, their populations and their social and political system. The remainder of the book is essentially structured around different moments of political revolution, and this in a diachronic but regressive way, starting with the transformation of the royal court into an instrument of centralized administration in the eighteenth century, and ending with the invention of the Mossi concept of power, the naam, in the fifteenth century.

Izard stresses that Mossi state formation was first of all an intellectual project. Power had to be thought before it could be exercised, and state formation resulted first from successive intellectual mutations that acquired only progressively the means for their implementation. By thus shifting the focus of historical analysis from the origins of the people who took power to the origins of the concept of power and to the successive institutional translations of that concept, Izard offers a fresh and insightful analysis of the major creative ruptures in Mossi history. He sketches a lively image of that crucial initial time constituted by the apparition of a first man, a first chief, in a given place at a given moment, without which no historical development is ever thought. Bringing together and critically reviewing oral traditions, tarikhs and the writings of colonial administrators and anthropologists, he meticulously traces the emergence of a new concept of power to a moment in the fifteenth century and a place in the north-east of present-day Ghana, and then convincingly argues that not one, but several first men carrying along this concept entered the stage. First, the Mamprusi and Dagomba kingdoms were founded in northern Ghana, and one generation later, not one but several Mossi chiefs initiated the carving out of kingdoms not only from the south-east, but also – and this constitutes a radical new element in the interpretation of the Mossi kingdoms’ origins – from the north-west of present-day Burkina Faso. [End Page 280]

Izard thus definitely distances himself from the (until recently) widely accepted understanding of the kingdoms’ history in terms of a linear process, that began with the apparition of a single ‘stranger’-ancestor whose patrilineal descendants progressively constructed the Mossi polities by subjugating autochthonous populations. His suggestion...

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