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The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge
V.Y. Mudimbe
(First published 1988)
Yet the promotion of African literature and languages was basically a dubious enterprise. It kept pace with the philosophy of applied anthropology and questionable policies in education programs. Nevertheless, it seems legitimate to consider this literature in African languages as an expression of African condition; thus it is a voice of anthropology if one accepts the etymological root meaning of the word: Anthropou-logos, a speaking about humans. This literature heavily relies on African experiences and milieux and can present another "view", different from that of the colonisers and Western anthropologists. Consequently, it takes on a power which could ultimately be used against foreign ideologies. Two other facts confer a particular weight on this period; the collaboration, in both America and Europe, between black African and black Americans; and, in France, the glorification of African models in both art and literature. Of those involved, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Derain, Guillaume, Matisse, Picasso, and Vlaminck are the best known. Both movements contributed to the emergence of a black African consciousness.
This consciousness firmly relies upon an anthropological perspective but does not always seem to follow the mainstream of anthropologists’ conclusions. Within the postprimitivist era, for example, Paul Hazoumé wrote Dogiucimi (1938), an ethnological novel about the court of Abomey. In 1938, Jomo Kenyatta published Facing Mount Kenya, which is both a study of Kikuyu ways and style of life and a discreet political manifesto. During those years a very popular kind of anthropology developed. More and more Africans published traditional tales and legends. Later on, the influence of Griaule’s and Dieterlen’s works and the impact of cultural anthropology led African intellectuals to distinguish "good" and "bad" works about Africa, according to their conception of the value of their own civilisation. The most extreme example of this ideological process is Cheikh Anta Diop’s work on the cultural experiences of Africa.
In the 1950s it was clear that independence movements, in the opposition to colonialism, also tended to reject the essentials of anthropological perspectives. African intellectuals began to question the methodological reductionism of the discipline. Later, Africa’s scholars preferred to speak about African history, regarding Western colonialism and its ideology as a parenthesis in the black African experience.
The changes that began circa 1950 were not the doing of Africa scholars. The were the consequence of the rise of African nationalism in the form of political movements. Nationalist movements by their very existence challenged both implicitly and explicitly, the two basic premises of the previous work of Africa scholars. First, nationalist movements asserted that the primary arena of social and political action, in terms of legitimacy and hence of study, was and ought to be the colonial state/putative nation and not the "tribe"…Secondly, nationalist movements asserted that the relationship between Europeans and Africans had not been one of "culture contact" at all, but rather one of a "colonial situation". Culture contact could be good or bad and…the anthropologists had devoted themselves politically to trying to make sure it was good rather than bad. (Wallerstein, 1983:157)
An analysis of some of the most representative works of this last period indicates a bizarre climate. Some classical methodologies of social philosophy and anthropology continued to sustain scholarly works, such as Dike’s book on trade and politics in the Niger delta (1956), Idowu’s study on God in Yoruba belief (1962), W.E. Abraham’s hypothesis of a family resemblance which allowed him to use Akan culture as a methodological paradigm (1966), Ogot’s history of the Southern Luo (1967), F.A. Arinze’s account of Ibo religion (1970), Okot P’Bitek’s presentation of Luo religion (1971), J.M. Agossou’s study on relationships between God and man among peoples of South Dahomey (1972), and Deng’s book on the Dinka (1972).
But within this apparently classical orientation, a new ideological dimension appears. For example, E.B. Idowu, in his subsequent book on African religion, questions the validity of Western scholars’ works, since most of them cannot understand African languages and conduct their studies "by proxy through research assistants scattered all over the field or by library work". J.B. Danquah’s attempt (1944) to link Akan religious categories to those of the Middle East is similar to L. Olumide’s objective in his study of Yoruba religion (1948), in which he claims to demonstrate the Egyptian origin of Yoruba tradition. This assertion is similar to the theme of Cheikh Anta Diop;s works on the religious, linguistic, and cultural unity of Africa. In fact, no one will disagree that a nationalistic trend is present. More and more African scholars seem to rely on the hypothesis of African unity. The title of Abraham’s book – The Mind of Africa (1966) – is a program. Here one can also situate Mulago’s enterprise (1973), which, after the major works of P. Colle, G. Hulstaert, Van Caeneghem, and others, draws a new frame from Parrinder’s approach and asserts the homogeneity of a Bantu religious vision of the world, "that some call Untu, negritude, Africanity, three terms used one for the other".
It is easy to point out the paradox faced by these African scholars: on the one hand, for the sake of their own pride and identity they deny exoticism and its assumptions; on the other, they are sincerely ready for the practice of a positive social science, and so for a conscious alliance with science in the frame of its epistemological field. It is from this exact point that we can observe and understand the contradictions of pan-Africanist ideology in social science. Idowu’s postulations or Mulago’s Africanity, as a "common factor" of African cultures and religious beliefs, are just hypotheses, in the same way as Abraham’s family resemblance is an assertion and not a scientific demonstration. Mbiti’s theory of the cultural unity of the continent as a foundation for the coherence of African religions and philosophy is supported by nothing except his own subjectivity.
This paradox may account for some tedious discussions that, in Africa, repeat "alternations of European social thought". From this statement, however, it cannot be inferred that Africans must endeavour to create from their otherness a radically new social science. It would be insanity to reproach Western tradition for its Oriental heritage. For example, no one would question Heidegger’s right to philosophise within the categories of ancient Greek language. It is his right to exploit any part of this heritage. What I mean is this: the Western tradition of science, as well as the trauma of slave trade and colonisation, are part of Africa’s present-day heritage. K. Nkrumah rightly pointed out , in his Consciencism, that Africans have to take these legacies along with Muslim contributions and their own past and experience.
Moreover, one might also conceive the intellectual signs of otherness not as a project for the foundation of a new science, but rather as a mode of re-examining the journeys of human knowledge in a world of competing propositions and choices. Concretely, from the background of the colonial politics of conversion, this mode seems imperative and one would agree with R. Horton:
The kind of comparative conceptual analysis that the "philosopher" of traditional thought could offer would do much to help the contemporary intellectual in his struggle to think through the relationship between his two super-compartments (that is, tradition and modernity). It would be supremely relevant to such questions as: Should there be a global stand in favour of traditional though patterns and against modern patterns? Or should there be a global commitment to the running-down of the traditional in order to make way for the modern? Or again, should traditional thought-patterns be encouraged to co-exist with modern? And if so, in what manner? Or yet again, is traditional thought a many-stranded thing, whose various strands must be disentangled and their appropriate relations to modernity considered one by one?
Beyond as well as in the exposition of comparative studies, the logic of the mode would institutionalise a re-evaluation of preceding norms, voices, and consensus. As a test of the fruitfulness of the new formulas and answers, one would look both at the durability of the founding arguments and at processes purifying controversial assumption in the field. I have read three rewarding and ambitious contributions: O. Nduka’s brief essay on the implications of African traditional systems of thought, which is based on a "critique of principles of causation and quality of the understanding of mechanical and organic processes" (1974); Gyekye’s note on the philosophical relevance of Akan proverbs and the paradigm of the African proverb as situational (1975); and Nkombe’s impressive work on paremiologic symbols (1979). using the logic of classes in order to describe metaphors and metonyms in Tetela proverbs, Nkombe succeeds in two ways: first, he makes an original contribution by demonstrating that it is possible to reformulate the logic of classes in terms of the logic of propositions; second, through this highly abstract exercise, he analyses the originality of an African culture in its dual dimension – internal plenitude and aspiration towards universality. A final example taken from a quite different source is Horton’s schema of common and contrasting features existing between African traditional thought and Western science. At the end of his demonstration, he writes: "Though I largely disagree with the way in which the ‘Negritude’ theorists have characterised the differences between traditional African and modern Western thought, when it gets to this point I see clearly what they are after" (1981).
To sum up my position more theoretically, I would say that there is a mutation which took place in the 1920s and which explains both the possibility and pertinence of an African discourse on otherness. This mutation signifies a new foundation for organising a plurality of historical memories within the frame of the same episteme. Thus fundamentally, it does not seem to matter whether Herskovits’s propositions on African cultures, Vansina’s methodological proposal on oral history, or Davidson’s contributions to African history and Balandier’s to African sociology created or determined the emergence of a new spirit against a reigning tradition. It does not mean either that, before the 1930s, no one thought of questioning the grids through which the Same displayed its kingship. E. Blyden’s thought, which I shall look at carefully below, is, for instance, an annunciating sign of the rupture. On the other hand, the very fact that in the 1930s and 1940s a Collingwood could concern himself with the theme of re-enacting the glory of the Same by focusing on the documentary virtues of historical thought and its means does not invalidate my thesis. On the contrary, it rather shows the intellectual audacity of Herskovits or of Vansina, and its specificity as a question about both philosophical and historical imagination. The articulation of the mutation was already visible in the 1920s, and one of its most apparent signs is the fragmentation of the notion of civilisation. In the first quarter of this century, critical thinkers like Blyden and Frobenius seemed to be simply transferring doxological modalities from their own rationalisations of African experiences, the first hypothesising a black personality culture on the basis of the most controversial racist recommendations, the second anxious to grant African social formations the practicality of a classification of its culturally distinct features. However, it seems clear that Blyden and Frobenius, however unknowingly, participated in a larger epistemological shift. In the 1920s, this shift would, among other things, reveal its presence through the appearance of ideologies of existence, subjectivity, otherness, and interest in "oral philosophies" and histories. Picasso and Cendrars’s celebration of primitive imagination and works, and Schmidt’s description of the universal extension of an Urmonotheismus were predicated upon this epistemological shift, which makes them comprehensible.
The specific question of African culture is probably the best conceivable illustration of this epistemological mutation. Within the framework of the early twentieth-century epistemology, all discourses on alterity could only, as Foucault suggested, be commentaries or exegeses on excluded areas: primitive experience, pathological societies, or non-normal functionality, subsumed by the Same defined and understood in terms of a biological model from which determining terms – function, conflict signification – emerge as classifiers with the power of measuring the social, individual, or psychological distance vis-à-vis the model. Anthropology, as well as missionary studies of primitive philosophies, are then concerned with the study of the distance from the Same to the Other. A reversal of categories is more obvious in Schmidt’s enterprise than in Malinowski’s postulation. The former, by the extension of diffusionist gradients and thus the universalisation of properties of the Same, was, despite his preconceptions, marking the very possibility of a grid which, using new criteria – rule, norm, and system – could eventually account for the universality and the particularity of each cultural organisation according to its own rationality and historical strategies. And we have seen that the outcome of this problem in the 1950s depends on a new manner of speaking about theodicies and cosmogonies, which in their differences grant a regional coherence and at the same time witness to properties of human mind and its universal potentialities. On the other hand, the so-called relativist principles of Malinowski seem to be just sophisticated postulates which, concretely, in the particularity of social formations as radically autonomous bodies with respect to their functional organisation, negated cross-cultural influences, or at any rate the validity of any comparative schema. More important, Malinowski enclosed the alterity of social formations in their own strictly limited otherness and thus very clearly underlined the regional virtues of such paradigms as function, conflict, and signification. Thus it is no wonder that Malinowski’s best creation was applied anthropology, a technique for supposedly avoiding aberrant mixtures of the Same and the Other. The monstrosity is represented by a mixture "symptomatic and symbolic of culture change: the skokian, the famous concoction brewed, retailed, and consumed in the notorious slum yards of native South African locations…Anything which quickly increased the alcoholic content was added; calcium carbide, methylated spirits, tobacco, molasses and sugar, blue stone, are only a few examples". Independently from the significance of this violent symbol – how can anyone, even an African, survive after drinking such a poison? – if we carefully look at the paradigms which produce Malinowski’s method and which, essentially, are the same that guided applied anthropology, we can state that there is no epistemological rupture between Levy-Bruhl’s comments on prelogism and Malinowski’s functionalism. All of them, as well as Durkheim (one of the guiding stars of functionalism) work at describing the reversed image of the Same through the models that impose the notions of function, conflict, and signification. the real change, that is, a reversal of grids, came later.
Yet we have to note a major difference between Levy-Bruhl and Malinowski. The French philosopher is strictly concerned with the notion of deviation (écart) and, through an exegesis of merits of the Same’s function and signification, he challenges the identity of human nature through time and space. As everyone knows, Levy-Bruhl was haunted by Tylor’s theory about animism and Comte’s Loi des trois etats. He used "primitives" as an opportunity for distinguishing both the logical and the historical distance that separates the homogeneous experience of the Same from the heterogeneity and prelogical character of the Other. Malinowksi, in contrast, was more imaginative, despite the fact that he believed, as Levy-Bruhl did, that humans can be mere object of science. He substituted the concept of an organic function of a social system for the determinism of the passage from prelogic to logical knowledge. In doing so, Malinowski was promoting a radical possibility, that of using and referring to such conceptual tools as autonomous rule, social norm, and the epistemology and singularity of regional cultural systems.
It becomes clearer that the voices which, from the 1920s to the 1950s spoke against the historicity of the Same and its scientism to indeed repudiate anthropological policies and researches that are "anti-historical" insofar as African communities are concerned. Particularly, they oppose the political processes of acculturation. In order to escape these ideological limits, some of the participants prudently or boldly chose to claim that everything in human experience was simultaneously both culture and history. They were just inferring lessons of an epistemological mutation from the margins of Malinowski’s outlook. In effect, this rupture has led from an indecent curiosity about the mysteriousness of the Other to P. Veyne’s statement (to which Herskovits, Levi-Strauss, Vansina, Ajayi, or Cheikh Anta Diop could have subscribed): "the Romans existed in a manner just as exotic and just as ordinary as the Tibetans or the Nambikwara, for example, neither more nor less; so that it becomes impossible to continue to consider them as a sort of value-standard".
