2023-11-11 21:10:07
In his new essay entitled “Africa in World Time”, the Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf, professor at Columbia University in New York, takes a critical look at the role played by African history since independence, as he points out in the newspaper Le Monde on November 11, 2023.
According to Diouf, as research centers developed in Africa in the 1950s-1960s, “African history asserted itself as a revalorization of a past depreciated by the imperial West, but also as a decentring in relation to him”. She notably relied on “libraries other than her own, such as the Islamic library and that resulting from the hybrid historical reality that the British sociologist Paul Gilroy called “the Black Atlantic””. This concept aimed, in the words of Mamadou Diouf, “the resettlement of Africa to a pioneering place in world time”.
These historical works were part of a broader tradition aimed at “rereading the past of black peoples in order to claim the present [leur] dignity”, quotes Diouf. He adds that for Africans, “regain control over the writings of their history, [c’était] demand cultural, creative, historiographical parity, and demand a narrative of the universal finally decoupled from Western imperialism.”
In his work, Mamadou Diouf reviews the main African historical trends such as those of Dakar, Ibadan and Dar es Salaam. He also discusses key figures in the discipline such as the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop. He also analyzes the major debates, notably on the place of colonization and the slave trade or on the importance of orality.
In conclusion, Diouf believes that African history now seeks less to tell the story of Africa than that of “humanity in Africa”. Inscribing the continent “in the time of the world” would, according to him, “replace fragments of cultural communities in a new tapestry of human civilization”.
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