Africa in the World

My remarks stem from my training, research activities, administration of research activities (organization and management of research networks), and publication of books and journals. I have been involved in these activities in different institutions since I defended my PhD. Various locations and intellectual environments, both professional and personal, have played a critical role in shaping both my theory and practice as an African historian / an Africanist / a student of Africa / an African.

I

I was trained in France in the classical tradition of historiography, in a moment when history in France was dominated by a new approach histoire des mentalités, animated by a new generation of Annales historians. They were busy reengaging critically the double legacy of Marxism and economic history. The image of an intellectual move from the cellar (cave) to the attic (grenier) is quite expressive to describe the new “historiographical operations” (M. de Certeau) they advocated and practiced.

Among the Africanist scholars, only one participated directly and actively in the debates initiated by the Annales School: Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. She published many articles in the Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. Her engagement with the Annales was aimed at demonstrating that African material could be processed using the most sophisticated historiographical methodology when the more pointed African debates—historical and anthropological—were fed by the controversies about ethno-history, the uses and abuses of oral traditions, and the opposition between imperial/colonial historians such as Henri Brunschwig (French Colonialism, 1871–1914: Myths and Realities [1966]; Noirs et Blancs dans l ‘Afrique noire française ou comment le colonisé devient colonisateur [1870–1914] [1982]), and oral-tradition–based historians who were in search of a proper African archives, such as Yves Person (Samori, Une révolution Dyula [Dakar: Mémoires de L’Institut Fundamental d’Afrique Noire 80, 3 vols., 1968Samori, Une révolution Dyula [Dakar: Mémoires de L’Institut Fundamental d’Afrique Noire 80, 3 vols., 1970Samori, Une révolution Dyula [Dakar: Mémoires de L’Institut Fundamental d’Afrique Noire 80, 3 vols., 1975]). Sometimes parallel, other times intersecting with the African history debates, the opposition between Marxist anthropologists (Maurice Godelier, Claude Meillassoux, Emmanuel Terray) and more traditional ethnographers (Pierre Clastres, La société contre l’Etat, Recherches d’anthropologie politique [1974], Robert Jaulin, La mort Sara: l’ordre de la vie ou la pensée de la mort au Tchad [1967]) was mounting.

II

I joined the Department of History at Université Cheikh Anta Diop (then Université de Dakar) in the 1980s. Social sciences and the humanities were dominated by two historians, Cheikh Anta Diop (Nations nègres et cultures [1955]; The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa [1959/1962]); Abdoulaye Ly (La Compagnie du Sénégal [1958]), and an Egyptian economist, Samir Amin (Les effets structurels de l’intégration internationale des économies précapitalistes: Une étude théorique du mécanisme qui a engendré les économies dites sous-développées [1957]; Le monde des affaires sénégalais [1959]; L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale [1970]; Le développement inégal: Essai sur les formations sociales du capitalisme périphérique [1973]). Amin was a faculty member at the Université de Dakar Law and Economics School; Diop and Ly were research scholars at L’Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noire.

Diop was a nationalist historian, who argued that African peoples shared cultural unity and continuity across the continent. He strongly asserted that archaeological, historical, and anthropological evidence supported his main thesis—that ancient Egypt was a black African civilization. Ly was more of a Marxist than a nationalist. As an historian, he was interested in studying connections and the making of the Atlantic economy in order to track the causes of the colonial and neocolonial domination and exploitation of Africa.

The Department of History was divided between these three scholars, who shared a strong commitment to intellectual autonomy but diverged on the mission and writing of history and social sciences. Amin’s concept of delinking (economically from the world market) illustrates quite well the quest to dismantle the “colonial library” (V. Y. Mudimbe), reject colonial knowledge, and promote an African...