"Pedagogical Use of the General History of Africa"

– 2 – “Pedagogical Use of the General History of Africa” Project Elaboration of the common pedagogical content for use in African schools *** First meeting of the drafting teams *** Workshop on the revision of concepts, paradigms and categorization used in Social Sciences and applied to Africa *** Harare, Zimbabwe, 5 – 6 September 2011 *** Concept paper by Mr Martial Ze Belinga, consultant General issue The decolonization of the concepts, paradigms and categorizations used in the social and human sciences, particularly in history, is regarded as an epistemological necessity throughout the scientific and intellectual communities in the former colonies (and beyond) and as yet another component of the cultural and political emancipation of peoples who, not without difficulty, have thrown off the yoke of European colonization. In post-colonial studies, researchers in Latin America1 and Africa2 now select topics on the structural, protean remnants of colonial relations in the post-colonial era – a sort of “coloniality”3 that perpetuates age-old images and epistemological racism, in sum, disparaging non-Western cultural output. This inextinguishably burning issues somewhat informs the endogenous African approach taken in writing the General History of Africa (GHA). The outstanding preface to Volume I signed by Mr Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, Director- General of UNESCO, sounded the keynote of this groundswell. The GHA was designed against a backdrop of political decolonization (1964) as an academic onslaught on biased wor ld vie ws of Africa as a mere object on the sidelines of the history of humanity. Owing to biased views on the weakness of African sources, reputed to lack written signs, the primacy of outside sources which were the only ones deemed to be genuinely credible in an ethnographic historiographical setting, was firmly established. All of the continent’s social forms, practices and historical developments, vie wed at the time from the “W estern provincialism” standpoint, were initially measured against the yardstick of European history only. As a result of the centuries-long slave trade and colonization of the African hinterland, stereotypes and prejudices became entrenched and a functional image of the negro in slave societies took shape. The writing of African history did not withstand wholesale biases, errors and distortions wrought as much by the historical need to justify hegemonic policies as by the dated omnipotence of an imperialist and condescending Europe holding sway over the whole world. The General History of Africa, an act of self-assertion entailing rigorous exhumation of an African past, the patient collection of oral, written and archaeological sources, the use of African concepts, ethnonyms, toponyms and anthroponyms, and an interdisciplinary approach, amounts to proactive and positive decolonization of Africa-related imagery. As it has contributed to the goal of a form of emancipation, a break with historiography, it is indisputably a best practice, giving primacy to the complex dynamics of indigenous actors, making Africa their own subject. The relativization of external categories, be they temporal or spatial in respect of Africa viewed and extended to include the diasporas and peoples of African descent, and the careful but groundbreaking promotion of African terms are both indicative of the decolonizing mission that is to be accomplished by the General History of Africa. Yet while the General History was being drafted, major events continued to run counter to the context described by Mr M’Bow. Great changes were at work in the world such as population changes, technological developments, the emergence of new industrial nations, the juxtaposition of international regionalization (the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), powerful liberal globalization f lows , the end of the 1 See, for instance, Rodolfo Stavenhagen’s Sept thèses erronées sur l’Amérique latine ou Comment décoloniser les sciences humaines. Paris, Editions Anthropos, 1971, first edition, 208 pages. 2 In 2007, Codestria launched an initiative rewarding the best essays on the subject “Decolonizing the social sciences in Africa: an incomplete programme”. Another approach, taken by the historian Achille Mbembe in his key work De la postcolonie (Karthala, 2000), addresses the issue of the link between colonial violence and the postcolonial “potentate”. 3 Several South American authors have used the term coloniality to describe global relations of domination, qualified as “structural” by the French philosopher Alain Renaut (Un humanisme de la diversité, Flammarion, 2009), established after colonization and surviving formal independence in such areas as ethno-racial hierarchies, economic system, gender, religion and knowledge. Cold War and the disestablishment of political apartheid, all combined with, at best, the disastrous stagnation of the African continent generally. In regard to images and knowledge, the apparent decline of essentialist ideologies observed in the third-worldism years has been imploded by non-convergent ideological schools of thought. The likely and complicated causes of the “liberated” resurgence of new forms of essentialism, racism, rejection and indifference to intolerance include the waning of cultural relativism, nationalist rearmament in major but decreasingly influential Western countries (fears of decline, immigration, isolationism and an unpalatable colonial past), cyclical economic and financial crises, mass unemployment, anticolonial, Islamist and ultraliberal forms of fundamentalism and the rise of Asia. The statement made in 2007 by the winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, Dr Watson, to the effect that the black race was inferior, betokens the scale of the resurgence of racializing ideologies,4 with African history and culture being sidelined once more. Moreover, Africa can only be envisioned as portrayed in the media – beset by the never-ending problems of the day. The dominant images by which it is entrenched in the collective mind are inseparable from the still prevalent colonial view and from the asymmetry of power, and they surface again whenever the situation changes. In-depth consideration of the educational component of GHA’s decolonizing mission is all the more justified because it has been found that essentialist, incomplete, partial and variously biased content does not die out automatically. The mission was also designed to redress other distortions endogenous to Africa and originating in elitist views, rivalry among peoples, religious discourse (Islam, Christianity) and other factors, all of which are potential distorting prisms. It is only fair to state that many Western researchers are resolutely taking radical approaches to the decolonization of images.5 If the decolonizing mission is to make headway, decisions must be taken on the inherent characteristics of pupil’s receptiveness to educational content. Owing to young African’s inclusion in information flows globalized by the Internet, their hunger for history and their thirst for dignity, this generation’s sensitivity to the unequal values placed on cultures and histories has been exacerbated. A common core of African knowledge, accessible to as many people as possible, is now required, more than ever before, as a matter of urgency – an urgency increasingly conveyed to the diasporas of African descent worldwide in search of preferably non-slave roots in the continent. If the GHA is to be used successfully in education, an array of undefined terms, polysemy (words, concepts used in markedly different ways) and unfairly underestimated semantic and conceptual ambiguities must be phased out. The most ordinary concepts such as tradition, modernity, development, authenticity, identity, democracy and pre-colonial period do not necessarily raise the most problems. In proposing a conceptual framework for the revision of knowledge of Africa, under the approach envisaged here, the parameters of epistemic coloniality – namely the remnants of colonialism in contemporary knowledge – will be reconfigured and exit strategies other than the mere inventory and avoidance of terms could be envisaged. Consideration should then be given to the thematic 4 As illustrated by Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, 1994; Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 1997; the rise of the extreme right vote in Europe; the preliminary Bénisti report (2004) on delinquency in France which, claiming that risks inhered in bilingualism, incriminated African culture by using the expression “speaking the country’s patois” and the denunciation of the racism of elites in Europe by Doudou Diène, then United Nations Special Rapporteur Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Libération.fr, 22 November 2007. 5 See for instance Jack Goody, The Theft of History, Cambridge University Press, 2006. The author shows how European ethnocentrism claimed for itself the invention of institutions (democracy, market capitalism, and so on) which were at least in their infancy elsewhere (Asia and Africa). outlines of interactive reflection (workshop), putting into practice one or more realistic approaches to the decolonization of knowledge. 1. Epistemic coloniality: a conceptual framework “Coloniality” of knowledge, a neologism used by specialist researchers in Latin America,6 denotes the wide variety of colonial relations that subsisted through adjustments in the post-colonial era

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