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«Similar to the blacks' witch-doctor, to the chieftain of the savages' tribe» Balzac, Louis Lambert Just like Michel Foucault who, in The Will to Knowledge, would oppose the ever-present
Considering the West-Africa relationship as something sublime in the sense meant by Burke and Kant (that is to say - using an oxymoron - in the sense of the pleasant anguish we feel however we speak of it) does not seem far-fetched. Such image of Africa's “sublime“, or such subliminal image of Africa, clearly shows the controversial place this continent holds in our subconscious, i.e., the image of a degenerate entity which is also a source of regeneration.
Sponsors of all sorts (international organisations, major powers, non-governmental organisations), as well as the media, regard Africa as the continent of poverty par excellence; this is so true, that, from this perspective, Africa is synonymous with poverty. The image of Africa conveyed by the media turns on the theme of emaciated bodies which reports on the various famines keep showing ad nauseam. This happens because the focus placed on poverty and disease is one of the basic factors of the “charity business” that resorts to a repeated mobilisation of large European and North American groups, arousing their sense of guilt. This essential and primary poverty resulting from economic margilisation (less than 2% of world trade, an overall debt of 334 billion dollars) is associated with a range of other factors that make Africa a continent totally apart. As a result, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, Africanist political commentators pointed to the issue of corruption which, after the notions of “neo-patrimonialism” and a “full stomach” policy, is regarded as an essential feature of the African continent. Embracing this theory, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank link the granting of international aid to good governance requirement – which they call “conditionality”. These are the requirements apparently needed to govern the common good (res publica) of the Western state establishments. However, these latter in turn find themselves caught in a trap – much to the satisfaction of African governments – when, given the same circumstances, such phenomena also occur in Western countries. In other words, phenomena ideally to be understood through an investigation mainly based on the notions of legitimate use of power and abuse of the same power (hence, a cross-cultural outlook on ways to secure and re-allocate resources), were solely put down to the distinguishing features of a geographical and cultural entity. Most important of all, by culturalising corruption1 , this approach failed to take into account the universality which virtually links corruption of African States with that of the French State (“Frenchafrica”), especially through the varied and notorious Elf cases2 . To go from corruption to tribalism and genocide is only small step onward, given that, according to the same politologists, corruption seems to be linked to, or even caused by, tribalism. Unable to create civil societies distinctly separated from the state system, Africans are considered as doomed to political structures that rely on patronage-based systems of resource collection and re-allocation. On this assumption, the oil or mining revenue, and particularly the diamond trade that has produced the famed “gemocracies”, or the revenue that derives from seizing international aid funds, remain confined within family, tribal or ethnic networks – which ultimately trigger the ethnic conflicts ravaging the region. It is common knowledge that the spread of all this discourse on ethnicism has strongly contributed to the development of the notion of a tribal Africa, just as is the case with India, seen as the continent of castes, or the Arab/Moslem world, seen as a culture medium for fundamentalism. Such self-serving vision of Africa does not take into account the diverse nature of conflicts and civil wars that are simply labelled as “ethnic conflicts” (is mono-ethnic Somalia a theatre of a tribal war? Do the same-language-speaking Tutsi and Hutu peoples in Rwanda and Burundi belong to different ethnic groups?). Also, it has the drawback of taking in no account the basically ethnic nature of the European State (see the “limpieza de sangre” upheld by the Inquisition); this is true to such an extent, that one can legitimately wonder whether the tribal characters attributed to Africa are in fact Europe's projections onto exotic societies – projections having the purpose to confirm, whether by means of cleansing or elimination, its own identity. On the other hand, such projection of Europe, that dates back to the time of colonisation, certainly had repercussions, in that it helped form and consolidate that continent's ethnic groups. As a result, when European colonisers left, these new tribal entities started taking control of Africa's state establishments. Such colonial tribalism, as a system of political management of areas under the European influence, turned out to be a sort of delayed-action bomb whose impact is still being felt in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Rwanda, and the two Congos. The alleged problem of African societies' tribalism is closely linked to that of genocide. The
Last but not least, we cannot fail to mention all that concerns genocide as a classification or a variable (and, as such, global) signifier – a question that surfaced (or rather, surfaced again) during the recent conference on racism arranged by the United Nations in Durban, South Africa. On that occasion, the African delegations demanded once again that the Atlantic slave trade be considered as a crime against humankind and satisfaction be obtained at last. That claim, voiced for the first time by Nigerian billionaire politician Moshood Aiola who was later on joined by Afro-Americans, is a new way to throw the issue back to where it came from by trying to prove that the real genocide is not the one everyone thinks – that of the Jews – but rather the one involving the forcible deportation of Africans to the New World – a genocide which had on the other hand been mainly perpetrated by Jewish traders3 . The question of AIDS and its spread – ever present when talking of Africa – is another reference to genocide. A particularly strong symbol of the African continent's apparent state of neglect, the AIDS epidemics – a global disease – is the subject of European and African cross-representations. While Europeans maintain that AIDS, or at least some of its manifestations, originated in Africa and was transmitted to humans from monkeys, the African argument is symmetrically opposite. Africans maintain AIDS to be a disease the whites contracted through zoophilia practices and then transmitted to the Africans4 . Whether this account is true or false (it could be based on real practices seen among Africans during the colonial or post-colonial period), it cannot escape a comparison with the contents of South-African President M’Beki's5 recent speech. By denying HIV retrovirus to be the AIDS transmission agent and ascribing this disease to underdevelopment, poverty and, ultimately, to the European colonialism, he threw again the issue back to where it came from, and turned this interpretation into an important African identity label in the current globalisation phase.
This repulsive charm of Africa, the libidinous and viral way in which we think of it, is just the other side of a representation of Europe – and of the West in general – seen as a detached, anaemic, bodiless continent. According to this vision, the origin of which can be traced in the colonial administrators’ line of thought (Faidherbe’s in particular), Europe has hypertrophied intellectual functions and underdeveloped physiological functions – the loss of its body was the price paid for securing the supremacy of cool reason. These representations have generated a line of thought that permeates the economic, political, social, cultural and religious domains. To begin with, in the area of economics, rigorous economic rationality and market utilitarianism are contrasted with the inventiveness of the African informal sector – a whole economy based on the ideas of “muddling through” and recycling (a theme also recurring in the area of Arts), that provides our ossified economy with a “counter-example” in terms of values. Interestingly, this current of thought is part of an anti-utilitarian approach of social sciences. Such approach gives priority to the principles of reciprocity in terms of gift/reciprocation that for instance exist in our “local systems of exchange” and, more in general, enhances job-creating small-sized enterprises to the detriment of deterritorialized multinational corporations. Once again, by making a virtue of necessity, the Africans, good “poor savages” of the economy, set an example for their degenerate Northern colleagues. Once again, the strength of Africa's civil society may outperform the bureaucratised and dehumanised Western economy6. In policy as well, human qualities are again attributed to the African informal sector. As it happens with economy, Western and Japanese political relations that are strictly governed by contracts and are under the constraint of “public space” could derive a fresh strength from decisional processes in African villages where agreement is secured only after all members' opinions are taken into account, which means favouring consensus rather than a clear-cut opposition between “losers” and “winners”. As a pattern of balance within small communities in which their members' status enjoys full respect, the realm of consensus or verbal exchange would be a helpful complement to processes constrained by red tape and contracts governing the behaviour of decision-makers in developed countries. We can easily move from the economic and political sphere to the social one and note that across the grain of these representations, a principle of solidarity attributed to Africa and the Africans is always perceptible – a principle which is nothing but a rehash of the old opposition between sociology and anthropology (community/society, holism/individualism), hence between “Us” and the “Others” which also provided a plot for the movie Little Senegal where “warm-heartedness” in relations between Africans clashes with “coldness” in relations between Westernised Afro-Americans. Africa's economy and policy are as collective and “solid” as the conscience in Durkheim's theory because, in the European representation, the African mind is always dominated by magic and the sacred. In this respect, in Louis Lambert Balzac depicted himself as a witch doctor-writer in referring to Africa (see the quotation at the beginning of this study) possibly because at the time, Christian religion already appeared devoid of the sacred. Therefore, a century later, Pierre Gaudibert, former Director of the Museum of African Art in Grenoble, practically confirmed such desertion with his words: “We have lost the sacred when we put Christ in a Museum”7 . In the first half of the 20th century, arts and literature – from Picasso to Jean-Hubert Martin, curator of Magiciens de la terre and Partage d’exotismes, through Bataille and Artaud – are characterised by the recurring theme of the defection of the sacred, body and blood – a theme that can be subsumed in the notion of primitivism and still plays a vital role in the process of regeneration of French thinking. The fact that French-Cameroonese mestizo writer Henri Lopès’s slogan that francophone literature is a blend of “the language of the Marquise de Sevigne and a black man’s balls” has become the slogan of Gallimard’s “Black Continents” series edited by Jean-Noël Schifano means that we believe that French literature is languishing, drying up, is too highbrow, and therefore no longer able to produce new Malraux, Camus and Sartre’s. Michel Le Bris, a fervent promoter of travel literature of the Twenties and Thirties, and organizer of the “Etonnants Voyageurs” Festival in Bamako, Mali, drew the same conclusion when, last year, he stated that “The regeneration of French literature will come from the suburbs and the fringes of society”8 . The role of Africa therefore seems to be that of injecting the necessary fresh blood in the veins of our exhausted champions of Arts and Literature – as shown by the inglorious behaviour of our venerable academicians who, a few years ago, excitedly stammered out justifications for the much disputed award of a prize by their institution to African writer Calixthe Belala. Isn’t this the same vein – in both senses of the word – which we find in Stéphane Zagdanski’s recent novel, Noire est la Beauté9 , which suggests an “exploration of (twice as black) women's sexual and pictorial universe”, and rejoices in the unique charm of African women’s sexuality using tones which the once colonial administrators would not reject? Not to worry, though – the African virus is not a typical trait of Western male chauvinism; our women artists are on a par with it when they invite us to plunge into a deep Africanity. Mathilde Monnier, Director of the Montpellier Choreographic Centre, did leave for Africa in
On her part, renowned film-director Claire Denis (Chocolat, Bon Travail) who also spent her childhood in Africa, in her latest film, Trouble Every Day, where she addresses the theme of cannibalism, also deals with the repression of drives by European males compared with the primitive power of their black counterparts11 . In front of an emasculated and deodorised Europe stands a pleasantly nauseating Africa inhabited by leopard-men who are body and soul eaters and vividly resemble Les Hommes-Tigres whom Jean Giroudoux already presented in 1926, on the wake of the accounts given by colonial administrators. Such vision of a Jurassic and feline Africa (according to the meaning of Jacques Tourneur’s La Féline), namely the vision of the animal nestling inside us, of the cry of the jungle coming from bellowing wild beasts, surely marks the climax of the positive fantasies projected into that continent, but also shows the deep ambivalence normally governing the psychological and economic investments concerning that geographical entity. If the gore-trash-crash art with an African connotation only interests a limited Euro-American elite – an elite who likes to visit FIAC and see Orlan’s African “Self-Hybridations”: digital collages of African photos and the artist’s self-portraits, works alternating with his surgical performances –, the notion of Africa in a marketing-related sense on the other hand interests a wider range of customers, i.e., those flowing into ethnic shops in Paris or African exhibitions at the Galeries Lafayette. In this sense, Africa’s globalisation is not an attraction for tribal art which expresses itself through trendy primitive Arts and the construction of the Musée du Quai Branly, but is rather a recycling of African kitsch as it shows itself – particularly through the promotion of photographers from Mali such as Seydou Keita or Malick Sidibé, rescued from oblivion thanks to the wonders worked by skilled Museum Curators, or the launch of “etno-chic” fashion collections which bring together confused elements of our imagination of Africa12 , or the transubstantiation into artists of prophets and naïf artists, such as Frédéric Bruly-Bouabré, whose works make a fine show of themselves in the art-gallery run by collector and stylist Agnès B’s. Actually, African primitiveness is no longer to be traced in ancient local artefacts alone; it is increasingly becoming a matter of reviving techniques or outdated European items whose regeneration is possible through their passage through the prism of African newness (“African” plastic kettles made in China, model cars made with old tomato sauce cans, etc). Therefore, at this stage of globalisation, Africa’s primitiveness does no longer mean pushing Africa back into an oblivious past of prehistoric barbarism; rather, it means driving Africans back into the Western past, as if their works, not us, were to give evidence of the world we have lost. That way, Africans appear to be our close ancestors, sorts of well-disposed Uncle Ben’s doing some house-sitting while the house owners are busy elsewhere in activities better in tune with our high-tech times.
The same happens in the sphere of arts, where an orthodox aesthetics dating back to the Seventies and Eighties is still prevailing among the Africans. Such aesthetics is mainly based on commemorations of genocides, AIDS, famines, national liberation struggles or struggles against dictatorships, the rape of Africa or the repression of emigration and, even though much to the annoyance of Western eulogists of traditional Art, it makes use of modern media (videos, staging); confirms African artists' devotion to the victimisation syndrome, and shows their inability to adopt a morbid aesthetics which would amplify the continent's real or alleged primitiveness. An expression of real contemporary Art could for instance be the display of pictures of scarified and maimed bodies in Sierra Leone (if reference to Africa is to be maintained) – pictures which would prove that responsibility for present-day violence has been symbolically assumed –, yet contemporary African artists' works still focus on a series of "politically correct" issues having a bitter flavour, thus showing to be still under the influence of the aesthetics of domination. Unable to spouse the primitiveness of present-day Art, which means transplanting, consolidating or making it their own and giving it the genuine seal of Africanity in these days of belated modernity, African artists keep recycling the image of Africa the West had in the good old days of national liberation wars. Another possible reason for the priority given to these themes – by doing so, these artists prove easily dazzled by Western mirrors and not yet autonomous – is their will to meet the alleged expectations of their clients, and play, more or less consciously, with their public's guilty feelings. As a result, African Art, however modern, is nothing but what it has always been, i.e., an annex, a tropical dependency of Western Art. Such dependence will only end when African Art stops being exhibited the way it is now; when, drawing inspiration from global Art, African artists will be displaying their works as artists rather than as Africans. It is a fact that, for the time being, few African artists have these requirements. Ousmane Sow is perhaps the only one who, by “clicking” and capturing Leni Riefensthal's Nubas into her works, is able to elude the mirror effects involved in the allegations of Africanism; she is matched by American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe whose perfectly scandalous Greek-Black plasticity amazingly shows the general flow of meanings throughout the hermeneutic galaxy of "African" Art. By “africanising” its own unconscious drives, the West has provided Africa with a mirror in which Africans are forced to be reflected. In that sense, Africa is a proper representation of Europe's self-development – a sheer fantasy of archaic primitiveness, a symbol of our globalised post-modernity14 . Paradoxically, we could say that Africa is lagging further behind compared to how its image lags behind in the Western conscience. However, surely it is not by hiding behind its Third-Worldist sense of guilt that the West will be able to catch up. Rather, by consciously riding the idea of Europe's primitiveness and adapting it to its own requirements, i.e., by turning it to its own advantage through a sort of cathartic process, will the West be able to form a mature conscience.
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Jean-Loup Amselle was born at Marseille
in France, in 1942. Currently he is Directeur d'études at the EHESS
(Centre d'études africaines) and editor of Cahiers d’études
africaines. He was also in charge of the doctoral program of Anthropology
at the EHESS Amselle J.-L. (ed.) with E. M'Bokolo, Au coeur de l'ethnie, Paris, La découverte, 1985 (new edition, 1999, forthcoming translation in Italian and Russian). —, Logiques métisses, Anthropologie de l'identité en Afrique et ailleurs, Paris, Payot, 1990 (new edition, 1999; Italian, Greek and English translations: Mestizo Logics, Anthropology of Identity in Africa and elsewhere, Stanford University Press, 1998).—, Vers un multiculturalisme français, L'empire de la coutume, Paris, Aubier, 1996 (translation in English, Cornell University Press, 2002). —, Branchements, Anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures, Flammarion, 2001 (Italian translation, English translation forthcoming). The images in this article refer to the works of Ousmane Sow, an important contemporary African artist. Ousmane Sow was
born in Dakar in 1935. Up to the time of his first exhibition, which was
organized by the French Cultural Center in Dakar in 1987, nothing was
known of his work, apart from an except from an animated film, which portrayed
small sculptures. In 1984, inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's photographs
of the Noubas of Southern Sudan, he began to work on the wrestlers of
this ethnic group and produced his first series of sculptures,"The
Nouba". In 1988, he created "The Masai", in 1991 "The
Zulus", and in 1993 "The Peulh". Ousmane Sow has always
sculpted without a model. He creates his own medium. In a form of subtle
alchemy, he allows a number of ingredients to macerate over the years.
For him this medium is a work in itself, giving him almost as much pleasure
as creating the sculpture itself. He applies this material into a framework
of metal, straw and jute, allowing Nature and the medium their own freedom
thus opening of the door to the unforeseen. This approach is inherently
artistic, but also African. |
