From Visuality to Postcolonial African Politics: A Conversation wtih Saidou Mohamed N'Daou

In February 2003, Saidou Mohamed N'Daou and I met several times at his home in Chicago to discuss his visual renderings of Marshall Sahlins's historical anthropology. N'Daou is currently associate professor of history at Chicago State University. He began his formal education in 1958, the year of Guinea's independence from French colonial control. He attended the University of Conakry during the postindependence intellectual excitement fostered by President Sekou Toure and continued his education in Bulgaria and the Soviet Union during the 1970s. As a Fulbright scholar in the late 1980s, N'Daou studied with Marshall Sahlins and became interested in historical anthropology.¹ N'Daou subsequently produced visual images elaborating Sahlin's theoretical models of structure, event, and individual agency.

Before the interviews, I spoke with Sahlins about N'Daou's drawings. One issue that came up in our conversation was how the difference between words and images allows for different representations of culture and history, or structure and event. In relation to written accounts, Sahlins stated:

The problem of writing is how to bring the ethnographic and the narrative together. I attempt to give full explication of the event, and then unpack the narrative from the deepest ethnographic level to the most proximate. But one doesn't want the ethnography to be so obtrusive and monographic that you lose sight of the history. It is always important to go back to what you are trying to explain historically. One cannot reduce the narrative to ethnography, but should attempt to show the basis of cultural values [within particular events], though they are not simply deterministic. How they are put together is quite contingent.

N'Daou's drawings provide ways to think through the poetics of the visual and written forms of social theory. In our interviews, we discussed the implications of visuality for history and memory in relation to the particularities of postcolonial Guinea.

Jesse Weaver Shipley: Professor N'Daou, how do you see the relationship between visual representation and a historical anthropology that is most typically portrayed through written text?

Saidou Mohamed N'Daou: Frankly, I think through images. Writing a text for me is like drawing with words. When I read a text I see the images behind the text, then I represent these images through visual symbols. If I read Sahlins's text, I can see the actors and their interactions. That is the image I keep. I remember the text through these images I have visualized. The more I invest myself into those images, the more I learn and become through repetition. This reflects the way I teach as well. I emphasize that through texts that students read they are internalizing holistic images. This repetition transforms the images into force, into power.

JWS: In what way is that power?

SMN'D: If I say power it is not the kind of power that people talk of in terms of political and social authority. The more you immerse yourself into images, the more you give them life. If you invest your energy into the image, the image becomes a force alive in you. That is the image you express through language, through all social interactions. You can represent images through whatever you want, words or even natural phenomena. In Africa, oftentimes instead of using words or written texts people use natural phenomena and visual images of them as the basis of philosophical inquiry and social commentary; they often have more symbolic power than words. Proverbs, dances, divination, painting, and sculpture often involve this kind of symbolism. You can find a kind of tree that is very flexible, very resilient to symbolize these ideas and characteristics. In this way, if you want to describe a personality through this kind of symbolism, you use the name of the tree that is resilient to talk about the personality...