in this day and age ...

Nicolas Sarkozy - France’s newly elected and rather right-wing President - already garnered little favor amongst Africans. As Jacques Chirac’s Minister of the Interior, he took a pretty virulent stance against immigration (particularly of Arabs and Africans). He also invited a little resentment for his role in sparking the riots in Paris’s minority-dominated suburbs in 2005 and for his general - if alleged - affiliation with the racist extreme-right. And yet on his late July tour through sub-Saharan Africa, thousands lent him an open ear. Some might have been surprised by his nominations of two African-French officials to government, but I think many were drawn by some sort of curiosity as to whether or not - as the authoritative face of France - he was ready to publicly recognize the multiracial character of French society.

It seems, however, Sarkozy poured a little salt on the wound. Speaking to the youth of Senegal as well as its intellectual elite at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop, he committed what the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe calls an act of “violation by language.”

We’ve all experienced that moment of insult, when our favorite politicians drop the bomb, say something that so offends our intellect and sense of justice and reason (after seven years, we should be used to it). I think that’s a little how Sarkozy’s audience felt when he suggested Africans were a people continuously on the periphery, without history, and prisoner of their own spirit who could survive and navigate the future only by assimilating to certain European aspects of civilization. I encourage you to skim through Mbembe’s response in the “Le Messager” (which I'm kind of paraphrasing in the remainder of this): http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=affiche_article&no=6816. If your up to it Sarkozy's speech in French: http://cdfafrique.afrikblog.com/archives/2007/07/31/5774862.html. (Senegalese Boubacar Boris Diop also wrote a response I have not yet read).

Mbembe claims that the intellectual framework underlying France’s policy towards Africa dates back to a late 19th century, obsolete philosophy and discourse. This was the era of the colonial ethnographers, those pseudo-scientists who conceived of Africans as sharing a “primitive” or worse, “pre-logical mentality.” This was the era of Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, of Leo Frobenius's “African vitalism,” of societies “deeply plunged into the night of childhood.” (Senegalese poet-president Senghor was criticized for glamorizing this image in his work). This was the era of colonial exhibitions, human zoos, and primitive art that Picasso so adored. That can’t possibly carry over to our own era. We should not even have writers like Mbembe spending another minute of their time on these issues. I think the need to retire this “Other” business to the history books is well overdue. And yet here comes the President of France with a whopper that was plucked almost word for word from Hegel‘s passages on Africa. (Hegel died in 1831).

What stings the most, to Mbembe, is the way Sarkozy and other French elites continually characterize the African Man in opposition to the Modern Man. In some twisted effort to legitimize the crime of colonization (of which Sarkozy is not the first Frenchman to be guilty), to recast it as something more benevolent in the lens of history, there arises this need create a fixed characterization of the colonized as something "oppositional," or "less than..." And this happens in spite of generation after generation of scholars across the globe who claim that identity is (#1) invented and (#2) constantly changing. ("Fixed identity is the source of cultural death," as he says.)

But Mbembe, in few words, reveals the true failure of Sarkozy’s speech, the weakness of his ideology. To Mbembe, the future of Africans in the former French colonies does NOT depend on France. (Despite the millions in aid, much of which mysteriously fails to trickle down). “After half a century of formal decolonization,” he writes, “the younger generations have learn that there is little to expect from France…” And finally, overall, in conclusion, a la fin, “France simply lacks the moral credit that would allow it to speak with certitude and authority.”