Navigating the African Diaspora: The Anthropology of Invisibility

5 Sites of Erasure: Black Prisoners and the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor

CHAPTER 5 Sites of Erasure Black Prisoners and the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor The black man is pure representation for Fanon.The black man is hypervisible yet invisible simultaneously ... —RADHIKA MOHANRAM, BLACK BODY: WOMEN, COLONIALISM AND SPACE If I have so often cited Fanon,it is because more dramatically and decisively than anyone,I believe,he expresses the immense cultural shift from the terrain of nationalist independence to the theoretical domain of liberation. —EDWARD SAID, CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM Dreaming of an Ancient World In this chapter and chapter 6,I present a meditation on the lives and work of two Senegalese scholars, politicians, filmmakers, and former colonial soldiers: the late Léopold Sédar Senghor, former president of Senegal, and the late filmmaker and cultural critic Ousmane Sembene. The work of these two figures encompasses a period in African history beginning in colonialism, passing through an era in which African colonial subjects attempted to“assimilate” into French society through the few educational opportunities offered them, and ending at Independence and the postcolonial present. I take as a point of departure in the following sections an incident that occurred during the Second World War in a transition camp on the outskirts of Dakar, Camp de Thiaroye, variously described as a mutiny or uprising of returning Tirailleurs Sénégalais, soldiers of the French black forces drawn from all over West Africa and among the first 174 SITES OF ERASURE to be repatriated from Europe in 1944. Many of the soldiers had been prisoners of war (POWs) and insisted on their rights guaranteed by the minister of the colonies in a dispute that some suggest is one of the most important labor conflicts of the era. The soldiers’“protest over the failure of the French authorities to provide them with back pay and demobilization premiums” resulted in the most serious confrontation between “alienated” African soldiers and the French state (Echenberg 1991, 101). Still awaiting return to their home villages during the uprising, some thirty-five Africans were killed and others seriously injured when the uprising was crushed by French troops. “Some thirty-four ex-POWs were arrested and tried on charges falling just short of mutiny. All were convicted and sentenced to terms ranging from one to ten years in prison” (101). Another five of the soldiers died in jail before a general amnesty released the Thiaroye victims in June 1947. I argue that these soldiers experienced a kind of transitional status—a state somewhere between colonial subject and postcolonial subject, as their mobilization marked the most dramatic diasporic encounters with peoples outside of the world of their villages and home regions. These encounters of African Americans and others in the field and of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps and Europeans beyond the shores of Africa helped to nourish a new vision of the future. Toward the end of the war, conditions in French West Africa had declined dramatically; the rising urban population, drawn out of the rural areas during the war efforts, forced labor, the extraction of a portion of harvest (farmers were often forced to give over portions of their crops to the colonial government as lack of food and shortages impacted colonial terrirories), and taxation regiments created a seemingly unending cycle of poorly paid jobs and for many meant unemployment. Urban centers offered few public services, a network of roads primarily designed for transporting materials to the empire, and increasingly inadequate attention to issue of sanitation. Although the colonial regime was careful to discourage the formation of labor organizations in the wake of the war, spontaneous disturbances and protests began to erupt in the towns. The uprising of Camp de Thiaroye in 1944 among the infantry regiment awaiting demobilization was one of the first signs of these changes. For a generation of African colonial subjects, Camp de Thiaroye became a kind of clarion call for the end of the colonial relationship; it was clear SITES OF ERASURE 175 that such a disregard for the lives of soldiers that had fought for France was unacceptable. Representations that legitimate the power of stereotype or that enhance an encyclopedic catalog of caricatures of race, ethnicity, gender , class, or even religious practice depend upon the erasure of context and the denial and negation of the existence of the subordinate group. The sites of this erasure in turn constitute sites of potential invention— the place...