Table Of Content

Past Imperfect Time and African Decolonization, 1945–1960 Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 74 Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool Editorial Board TOM CONLEY JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A. HIGGINS Harvard University University of Melbourne Dartmouth College MIREILLE ROSELLO DEREK SCHILLING University of Amsterdam Johns Hopkins University This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture. Recent titles in the series: 61 Joshua Armstrong, Maps and 68 Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, Lydie Territories: Global Positioning in the Moudileno, Postcolonial Realms of Contemporary French Novel Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France 63 Lucas Hollister, Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in 69 Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan, Contemporary French Fiction What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th and 21st-century French 64 Naïma Hachad, Revisionary Narratives: Literature and Thought Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts 70 Erin Twohig, Contesting the Classroom: Reimagining Education in Moroccan 65 Emma Wilson, The Reclining Nude: and Algerian Literatures Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin 71 Keith Reader, The Marais: The Story of a Quartier 66 Margaret Atack, Alison S. Fell, Diana Holmes, Imogen Long, Making Waves: 72 Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy, French Feminisms and their Legacies Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, 1975–2015 Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond 67 Ruth Cruickshank, Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Re-thinking with Case 73 Lia Brozgal, Absent the Archive: Studies from Post-war French Fiction Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961 PIERRE-PHILIPPE FRAITURE Past Imperfect Time and African Decolonization, 1945–1960 Past Imperfect LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2021 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2021 Pierre-Philippe Fraiture The right of Pierre-Philippe Fraiture to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-80034-840-0 (cased) ISBN 978-1-80034-546-1 (epdf) Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Contents Contents Acknowledgements vii Prelude: ‘L’Âme nègre doit sortir des musées’ 1 Introduction 19 Aims and Objectives of Past Imperfect 19 Breakdown of Book 23 Chapter I: ‘Pasts and Futures’ 33 The Imperialization of Time 36 Salvaging the Relics 50 Africa’s ‘Present Past’ 57 Chapter II: ‘Things’ 93 African Art and Its Commodification 99 ‘Forces’ and ‘Life’ 104 Africa’s Difference 115 ‘Lost Arts’ … 123 … And Reprised Arts 130 From Les Statues meurent aussi to It for Others 137 Chapter III: ‘Words’ 145 African Babble 148 Cheikh Anta Diop’s Glottopolitical Project 173 vi Past Imperfect Chapter IV: ‘Customs’ 201 Colonial Ruination 210 Cutting the Past: On Clitoridectomy 223 African Prophets and Reprises 238 Conclusion: ‘Decolonization: A Work in Progress’ 261 Bibliography 275 Index 307 Acknowledgements Acknowledgements I would like to dedicate this book to Alison and our two daughters, Manon and Ella. Time flies: oui, ces fameuses mouches temporelles! And to thank the following people for answering my queries or inviting me in the past few years to present, discuss, or write about some of the material included in this book: Dorthe Aagesen, Ana Lucia Araujo, Yolanda Aixelà Cabré, Jean Copans, John Drabinski, Grant Farred, Axel Fleisch, Marie-Aude Fouéré, Charlotte Gran, Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard, Maëline Le Lay, the late Alain Ricard, Ana Lúcia Sá, Rhiannon Stevens, and Jennifer Yee; the two anonymous readers for their useful comments on the manuscript; my colleagues on the European Research Council Project ‘African Philosophy and Genre’: Michelle Clarke, Chantal Gishoma, Albert Kasanda, Benedetta Lanfranchi, and Alena Rettová; Anders Sune Bergh for allowing me to reproduce his photograph of Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s Krigeren for the front cover of this book. My editor, Chloé Johnson, for her patience and responsiveness. The production editor, Siân Jenkins. My gratitude goes as well to Kate Courage from the Warwick University Library; and to the librarians of the Vere Harmsworth Library at Oxford: Johanna O’Connor, Jane Rawson, Martin Sutcliffe, and Judy Warden. I would also like to thank the University of Warwick and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures for their continuous support and for granting me a study leave which allowed me to bring this project to a close. This book was completed in July 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the climate of racial insurrection generated by George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. As it deals with the decolonization of the humanities in francophone Africa, Past Imperfect is also about viii Past Imperfect issues that have hitherto not been resolved and whose roots are to be located in our colonial past. I have been fortunate enough to be able to discuss the ongoing legacies of this present past with my current PhD students, Matthew Allen, Sky Herington, Rebecca Infield, and Orane Onyekpe-Touzet; and with several cohorts of Warwick undergraduate students on modules such as ‘Colonial Memory’, ‘Slavery and After’, and ‘Postcolonial Literatures in French’. It would be impossible to name them all, but I am grateful to them for their insights and enthusiasm. Finally, a special thought for Julia and Ken Franklin – for everything, and much more: we have been missing you. Prelude ‘L’Âme nègre doit sortir des musées’1 Prelude The words ‘rupture’, ‘end’, but also ‘beginning’ best capture how the post-Second World War era was experienced in France and its colonies. The creation of the United Nations, an organization which set out to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’, promote ‘faith in fundamental human rights’, and ‘practise tolerance’, cast serious doubt over the future of the colonial project.2 Behind its generous principles, however, the Charter of the UN continued to maintain a clear distinction between its fully accredited members and the ‘peoples’ – the word ‘colony’ was avoided in this document – having ‘not yet attained a full measure of self-government’.3 UN members responsible for administering ‘non-self-governing’ and ‘trust’ territories were enjoined ‘to ensure, with due respect for the culture of the peoples concerned, their political, economic, social, and educational advancement, their just treatment, and their protection against abuses’.4 What is interesting in this process is that the various imperial powerhouses – whether in Paris, London, or Brussels – whilst under the explicit obligation to implement measures to ‘develop self-government’, were still expected to decide whether or not the ‘peoples’ for whom they were responsible had attained the necessary ‘advancement stages’ to shape and determine their own political futures.5 In other words, the political initiative firmly 1 The adjective nègre, although very pejorative now, was used until the immediate post-war era to describe that which was regarded as being authentically African or black. 2 ‘Preamble’ of the ‘Charter of the United Nations’: https://www.un.org/en/ sections/un-charter/preamble/index.html [accessed 3 April 2019]. 3 ‘Charter of the United Nations’, Chapter XI (article 73): https://www.un.org/ en/sections/un-charter/chapter-xi/index.html [accessed 3 April 2019]. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 2 Past Imperfect remained with the administering powers; and even though the latter were accountable to the UN General Assembly,6 the terms under which they operated in overseas territories had not substantially changed since the creation of the League of Nations after the First World War.7 If they pledged to act as the facilitators of self-determination, they often failed to listen – or they simply paid lip service – to the political demands of ‘dependent’ peoples. This increasingly insistent focus on self-determination nevertheless transformed the meaning of, and scope for, anti-colonialism. Hitherto, opposition to colonialism had remained a peripheral phenomenon that never gained enough momentum to destabilize colonial adminis- trations. Although the interwar period was marked by violent responses to French colonialism, not only in France,8 but also in the colonies (the examples of Dahomey and Indochina come to mind), critics such as René Maran and Kojo Touvalou were militating for the improvement of the colonial regime rather than for its disman- tlement.9 French intellectuals like André Gide and André Malraux operated on analogous premises. Their brand of early anti-colonialism, and their desire to speak on behalf of exploited locals, remained overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Gide’s Voyage au Congo did not depart from the evolutionist principles that had fed physical anthropology for three generations;10 in La Voie royale,11 Malraux, who had previously fought for the rights of Indochinese people – notably by creating, in 1925, the short-lived Saigon-based newspaper L’Indochine enchaînée12 – makes a shocking case for colonial ‘domination and loot’.13 6 Evan Luard, A History of the United Nations: The Age of Decolonization, 1955–1965, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 176. 7 See Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 87–95. 8 Pap Ndiaye, ‘Présence africaine avant “Présence Africaine”. La subjectivation politique noire en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, Gradhiva, 10 (2009), special issue ‘Présence Africaine. Les conditions noires: une généalogie des discours’, pp. 64–79. 9 Ibid., p. 69. 10 André Gide, Voyage au Congo. Carnets de route (Paris: Gallimard, 1927). 11 André Malraux, La Voie royale (Paris: Grasset, 1930). 12 See Raoul Marc Jennar, Comment Malraux est devenu Malraux: de l’indifférence politique à l’engagement (Perpignan: CapBear Éditions, 2015). 13 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994 [1993]), p. 251.