Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa

1. Introduction: Engineering History and Engineering Literature

Introduction 1 State involvement in the production and dissemination of ideology has been investigated with specific reference to the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, China, and Latin America, but it has been ignored in the francophone sub-Saharan African context.1 Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa attempts to redress this imbalance by exploring a complex African reality and consideration of culture and politics . This book offers scholars and students of African literature, comparative literature, and francophone studies a framework with which to think about the political and ideological consequences of structuring literary works according to the political persuasions of state apparatuses. For political scientists and historians, the book explores those processes that culminated in independence and delineates the complex path of post-independence politics , the transition to democratic rule, and the civil conflict of the late 1990s. In its attempt to engage a broad range of readers across disciplinary boundaries , this book suggests how this approach might in turn stand to impact and influence the future of interdisciplinarity, while also contributing to thinking on nationalism and postcoloniality. In order to obtain a more accurate view of the formation of modern African nation-states and to better understand the complex and complicated mechanisms associated with the process of engineering history and engineering literature, I draw upon a broad range of anthropological, historical, and sociological information. This information offers access to the specificity of the Congolese context, articulates the uniqueness of the Marxist-Leninist era, and locates writings according to the political context in which they were produced. INTRODUCTION Engineering History and Engineering Literature When an old person dies in Africa, it is the same thing as a library burning. —AHMADOU HAMPATÉ BA The time will come when Africa will write its own history. —PATRICE LUMUMBA 1 Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa 2 The construction of cultural and national identities has often been inseparable from the discourse of nationalism in the African context. In an attempt to move beyond Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, I have adopted what could perhaps be described as a more proactive term, namely the engineering of the nation.2 While my usage of this term shares many of the qualities Anderson attributes to the notion of “imagining,” it is also indebted to Stalin’s concept of “the engineers of the human soul,” which was used to describe state-sponsored writers, and Noam Chomsky’s invocation of “consent” as something that can be “manufactured” through propagandist structures.3 In its incorporation of revolutionary and reconstructive practices, the term engineering then has the possibility of situating those voices attempting to exercise control over the various mechanisms of power, while recognizing that this pluralism emerges from often antagonistic coexistence , that its polyvocality inherently functions, negotiates, and competes at different levels, and that various identities are not freely or independently formed but rather mechanically clash in a constitutive framework. Furthermore , this book suggests that Anderson’s emphasis on the widespread nature of print culture that allows for the imagination of the nation may not provide an adequate framework with which to explore the complexity of the postcolony. In the case of the Congo, the nation has been engineered topdown by ideologues and state-sponsored official literature, which has in turn been challenged by orality and non-official and diasporic literature. The fundamental question that emerges concerns the mechanisms through which power is acquired, maintained, and manipulated in colonial and postcolonial spaces. The object of this book is to locate those agents— colonial, national, transnational—responsible for the cultural, political, and social processes explored in the area of investigation. For example, colonial expansionism during the post–Berlin Conference era (1884–85 onward) witnessed the collaborative practices of assimilationist and missionary tendencies for the purpose of deploying the mission civilisatrice, while négritude, Pan-Africanism, Socialism, and Marxism-Leninism, among other theoretical models, generated particular conditions for the elaboration of post-independence decolonizing objectives. Since the 1980s, numerous political and social transitions have occurred in African states, and this change has been somewhat paradigmatic in terms of the innovative measures it has brought to African conceptions of democracy. The African context offers a unique opportunity for the exploration of the disorientation that has accompanied political transition, and it is taken up in later chapters of this book. Attempts Introduction 3 to remedy problems...