Africa in the Blogosphere
By Mialy Andriamananjara in GlobalVoicesOnline.org
 Sarkozy Get’s His Comeuppance from the African
Intelligentsia
Francophone Africa was awaiting anxiously the newly elected French President’s arrival. Nicolas Sarkozy’s reputation certainly preceded him in Africa. He was minister of the interior under Jacques Chirac and was responsible for quenching the revolts of disaffected youths (ones he referred to as “racaille” (scum)).
Today, Africa is still reeling from the speech Sarkozy made at the University of Dakar, named after Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese historian and anthropologist whose theories “put emphasis on the human race’s origins and on the study of pre-colonial African culture and its connectedness to the rest of the world”. Cheik Anta Diop is also one of Africa’s most prominent historians.
GV Author Lova Rakotomalala already wrote a post on the Open Letter authored by Malagasy writer Jean-Luc Raharimanana and published in French daily newspaper Liberation. But other influential francophone African intellectuals are making themselves heard through blogs, among them Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe, whose specialty is post-colonial Africa, and who is now a research professor in history and politics at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and acclaimed Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop. Alain Mabanckou’s blog reproduces Achille Mbembe’s reactions and one can read Boubacar Boris Diop’s at Kangni Alem’s.
Boubacar Boris Diop bitterly wonders whether Sarkozy’s speech could have been made elsewhere than francophone Africa.
“A foreign president, looking down on us from his 1.64 m high, judging inhabitants of an entire continent, demanding that they finally get away from nature, enter human history and invent themselves a destiny”
“Sarkozy is not so naive to believe that his country’s voice will be heard as far as Johannesburg, Mombasa or Maputo. If intellectuals of this part of the continent have, for once, paid attention to the speech of a French President, it is because it has been previously summarized for them. For several days, they have been discovering with astonishment the realities of Françafrique”
Achille Mbembe lashes out at Nicolas Sarkozy and other contemporary French politicians for using an outdated approach:
“The intellectual framework supporting African policy (that) literally dates from the end of the XIXth century.”
This feeling is echoed by Boubacar Boris Diop:
“This lack of humility, from a man apparently still in shock for having so easily reached his presidential goals, has led him to make in front of an especially apprised audience a speech full of all the unfortunate clichés of XIXth century colonial ethnology.”
“The African man” of our “ethno-philosopher” president is mostly recognizable to what he does not possess, what he is not, or what he has never succeeded to achieve (a dialectic of loss and failure), or to his opposition to “modern man” (“white man”) - opposition which would result from his irrational attachment to the kingdom of childhood, the world of darkness, simple pleasures and a golden age which never existed.” |
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For Mbembe, the speech shows France’s willful ignorance of Africa: rejecting the blame of slave trade on Africans themselves, and then asking Africans to make the difference between the good and the bad colonizers.
“The new French leaders pretend to understand realities which they dread and fantasize about (race), but which in fact they are ignorant about.”
Boubacar Boris Diop, whose last novel was on the Rwandan genocide, is particularly incensed about the attempt at downplaying the importance of the Rwandan genocide.
“France’s role in the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda is so proven that one sometimes feels in some authorities of the Hexagon a temptation to confess”
“To get out of trouble, one tries to the idea that Rwanda was, if one thinks of it, but another African genocide and one should not make a big deal out of it”
Both men recognize that atonement and public regrets were not in Sarkozy’s line of view.
Boubacar Boris Diop:
“One would not expect public regrets from Nicolas Sarkozy for his country’s participation - which is out of doubt- in the Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda”
But according to Achille Mbembe:
“Nicolas Sarkozy felt he had to invite his audience to distinguish between “good” and “bad” colonizers. Would he allow a German to use the same standard to his country?”
Among the comments, one R.G. asks:
“The German Willy Brand knelt down in Warsaw, in the name of the German people, in repentance of Nazi crimes. Which Prime Minister of Great Britain will kneel down one day in Lagos, Freetown, New Delhi, .etc… in the name of the English people, in repentance of colonization’s crimes?”
Boubacar Boris Diop renders a harsh verdict, but also thanks Nicolas Sarkozy:
“He will soon realize: Africans and Negroes of the diaspora will never forgive him. Good old doublespeak would have better served his country’s interests. It would have avoided oratory effects so gauche that they were a bit pathetic. At the end one almost wants to thank Nicolas Sarkozy for having brought us, in spite of himself, good news: in Françafrique, since May 16th 2007, the King is a dunce.”
Achille Mbembe puts Africa’s fate firmly in the hands of Africans and dismisses France.
“Today, among Francophone Africans whose servility towards France is particularly marked and who are seduced by the sirens of nativism and victimization, many know pertinently that the continent’s fate, or its future, does not depend on France. After half a century of formal decolonization, young generations have learned that from France, like from other world powers, one should not expect much. Africans will save themselves or they will perish.”
“For now, France is simply missing the moral credit which would allow it to speak about Africa with certitude and authority”
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