[by Vincent Tournier]
While the “Decolonial Month[1] » is celebrating in Grenoble, the Château des ducs de Bretagne is organizing the second edition of its exhibition “Decolonial Expression(s)”. Alas, the two guests from Africa gave a very different speech than what was expected, revealing in passing a difficulty that decolonial activists have clearly not considered: could it be that decolonial thought is itself the heir to colonial thought?
The accusation is now well-rehearsed: our mentality as Europeans, and more particularly as French people, is conditioned by a colonial history. which does not pass, as was once said about Vichy. Far from belonging to a bygone past, colonization continues to inhabit and determine us. It has shaped our minds and our mental frameworks. It makes us see the world through a binary gaze: the colonists and the colonized, the Whites and the “racialized.”
This “white thought” permeates everything: institutions, laws, thought, language, cultural expressions, and even science. Our entire universe is marked by this matrix inherited from the past, like software that we cannot get rid of. Once a colonizer, always a colonizer. Whites are eternal colonists, and the worst part is that they are unaware of it; they form a caste that is unaware of its privileges because their titles of nobility are based on a habitus conditioned by the past. Hence systemic racism: You may have the best laws and the best intentions in the world, but you will always be colonists in blood.. Like father, like son. Decolonialism has, without seeming to, brought back into fashion the collective and hereditary responsibility of peoples.
From the enlightened avant-garde to the awakened avant-garde
A question comes to mind, however: if our mental frameworks are so conditioned by history, by what grace were decolonial activists able to escape the common pot? By what mystery did they manage to escape the curse of colonialism, they who ultimately have the same characteristics as their compatriots who remained stuck in the colonialist gangue?
The problem is not new. It has been posed in the same terms to revolutionary militants: if each person's ideas are determined by class position, in the name of what do certain minds manage to tear themselves away from their social condition and become aware of their situation?
Such a powerful contradiction could have become embarrassing if it had not been resolved by a magic trick inspired by the Platonic myth of the cave: by a miracle, a particularly lucid minority has managed to free itself from its class determinism. These lucky chosen ones have managed to leave the mental universe of the ordinary citizen and know how to see the world as it isThey have become the enlightened vanguard of the proletariat, which allows them to work towards raising the consciousness of the masses.
The same miracle is happening today with decolonialist activists. A minority of awakened people have been able to escape from colonial ideology and take the lead in the post-colonial struggle. Like their predecessors who fought for the emancipation of the proletariat, from which they claim affiliation.[2], these newly awakened people intend to raise awareness of the hidden dominations that structure the social world – or rather: racial, because race has taken over from social class – with the aim of bringing about a world freed from white domination.
The objective of decolonialism then joins that of communism: in the same way that it was once necessary to deconstruct the bourgeois imagination, it is now a question of "deconstructing the colonial imagination", to use the formula of the Decolonial Month.[3], or even “decolonize one’s thoughts, one’s outlook, one’s imagination,” as indicated by the Nantes History Museum[4]In short, we must emerge from the false colonial consciousness, just as we once had to emerge from the false class consciousness.
"If there had been no seller, there would have been no buyer"
Could it be, however, that the decolonial enlightened are mistaken about themselves? Could it be that their thinking is more imbued with colonial ideology than they imagine?
This is the question that comes to mind when discovering the interventions of the two guests of the Nantes exhibition “Decolonial Expression(s)”[5].
Although this event was placed under the sign of the most ordinary decolonialism, the two guests made remarks that were at the very least explosive. The Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumé thus declared:
« My role as an African artist is to tell my people: “we Africans must also assume our responsibility in slavery! If there had been no seller, there would have been no buyer. Like Westerners, Africans have also benefited from this traffic! And it is important to talk about what is happening today, to talk about these children who are ‘placed’ in other families, who do the cleaning, the dishes, who are not sent to school… We must look at ourselves first before looking at others..” »
For his part, Ivorian historian Gildas Bi Kakou explains that he became interested in the slave trade because he discovered that some of his ancestors had been slave owners. He indicates that his research focuses on the war operations "nolo" (kidnapping of an isolated individual) and "mvrakila" (raids) carried out in the Congo to provide slaves to slave traders. He also studies the slave kingdom of Ashanti (1701-1874) which demanded the delivery of 2 slaves each year. From his research, he draws a scathing conclusion in the decolonial milieu:
« African responsibility for slavery is still taboo. Whether you are a descendant of parents reduced to servitude or of people who owned slaves, it is still very complicated and shameful to talk about it. ».
It is understandable why this historian, whose research was rewarded in France with the prize of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery in 2019, does not arouse much enthusiasm from Ivorian universities: clearly, his conclusions risk confusing the demands for reparations that African states are trying to promote.
But above all, listening to these two personalities, a question comes to mind: what place does decolonialism give to this type of analysis? At what point does it allow this critical speech to be expressed?
Colonialism that ignores itself?
As a result, two problems are incidentally brought to light. The first is that decolonialism is a discourse closed in on itself, impervious to any dissonant information, which is not really a surprise; the second is that the decolonialist imagination only conceives of history from the Western point of view, attributing an active role only to Western peoples. The West certainly has all the faults on earth because it is the one that sows the evils of humanity (domination, exploitation, violence, barbarity), preventing other peoples from expressing themselves, and plundering their resources and their genius for its own profit. But it is also the only authentic actor in history,
Could it then be that decolonialism, by its refusal to integrate into its reasoning the slightest responsibility of Africans themselves, is in turn impregnated by colonialist ideology? Doesn't decolonialism ultimately have the characteristic, by freezing Africa in the role of an eternal and passive victim, of taking up the same condescending and paternalistic vision that justified colonization?
A phrase comes to mind here: that of Nicolas Sarkozy on " african man [who] did not enter history ", pronounced in Dakar in 2007. At the time, the former president had attracted virulent criticism, particularly from the left. However, it is disturbing to note that, all things considered, this sentence suits today's decolonial activists quite well, they who see the peoples of Africa only as idealized and terribly fragile entities, incapable of being autonomous actors in history, especially when it comes to expressing the negative impulses of humanity.
Colonial yourself
Far from breaking with colonialist thinking, decolonialism thus presents itself as one of its offspring or, rather, as one of the variants of the same cultural matrix: the one that aspires to do good for humanity, to emancipate peoples on the basis of universal rights, with all the limits and contradictions that such a program supposes. As a result, decolonialism proves itself right: in spite of itself, it is itself proof that colonial ideology permeates all our mentalities. And in doing so, it reveals its failure: one does not easily escape the colonial imagination.
The paradox remains not insignificant: on the one hand, decolonialism intends to break with the colonialist imaginary; and on the other, it is precisely from this imaginary that it draws the bulk of its argument. This is the same difficulty that we observe among the supporters of the opening of (European) borders from which decolonialists generally come: on the one hand, they idealize individuals who come from Africa, but on the other hand, they unconsciously wish to save them from the barbarity that reigns at home. Hence their mobilizations to help migrants cross borders or prevent expulsions to their countries of origin.
In doing so, a schizophrenic reading has been formed that dissociates individuals and their society, as if the former had nothing to do with the collective reality to which they belong. Yet the contradiction is obvious. It can only be resolved by considering that all responsibility for the world's misfortunes lies with the West, which is yet another way of deciphering history from a single center.
Deconstruct what?
The announcement of the Grenoble Decolonial Month was accompanied by a nice little slip of the tongue. We read on an association website: " through an artistic gesture and an intellectual word, we will attempt to deconstruct the post-colonial imagination« [6].
Talking about the imaginary here post-colonial is amazing. Usually, leaflets and posters evoke the imagination c, which makes sense. Deconstructing the colonial imaginary means destroying the colonial legacy that is supposed to still be present in our minds; on the other hand, deconstructing the imaginary post-colonial is less clear since this expression designates the period which follows colonization, and therefore deals with the imagination which was constituted after colonization, of which decolonialism is precisely a part.
This gentle slip of the tongue would not be worth dwelling on if it did not reveal an obvious limitation of decolonialism: the absence of a critical look at the very nature of the decolonial movement. If deconstruction is a method of accessing authentic knowledge, why would it not be applied to the imaginary? post-colonial, therefore to decolonialism itself, a pure product of the post-colonial world?
It goes without saying that decolonial activists are not willing to undertake such work. The Decolonial Month program makes little secret of its weak appeal for contradictory debate, as one of its activists readily acknowledges: " What interests me is to have information, to understand, not to know if we should deconstruct or not, but how. Otherwise, we end up in a debate on CNews! »[7].
Where things are more complicated is that the decolonial movement is not only an activist movement; it has also developed strongly in universities and research centers where it is regularly gaining ground. However, if the absence of debates among activists is not surprising, it is different for academics, from whom we expect a minimum of perspective and reflexivity.
This could be a great project for the CNRS: why not launch a research program on the decolonialist imaginary with the aim of understanding its nature and its driving forces, as well as the groups and networks that support it? The stakes are high since this ideology seems to be taking over from communism as a project of emancipation, without it being yet very clear what type of society this ideology intends to establish.
