Is Africa the Continent of Dreamers Par Excellence?
Abstract
The accusation that Africans live in dreams conceals the founding dreams through which the West imagined, conquered and possessed the world.
Philosophy, representation and history · Full reading edition
The African reduced to a dreamer
A long Western tradition portrays Africans as people who exchange the substance of the real world for the rags of dreams, magic and a vanished past. This accusation assumes that imagination is empty and that knowledge comes only from perception.
The African becomes a perfect sleeper without common sense, an image connected to the dehumanising claims found in Montesquieu and other writers of European modernity.
The dream of the awakened master
The supposedly awakened Western subject is not free from dreams. Since 1492, Europe has imagined itself as master and possessor of nature, sole representative of the world and privileged observer of things themselves.
Stuart Hall shows that the West is not simply a geographical place but a historical representation constructed against barbarians, Orientals, Africans and Indigenous Americans.
Myths, exploration and conquest
From Plato’s Atlantis and classical visions of a golden age to the treasures described by Marco Polo, European exploration was guided by powerful dreams. Columbus did not cross the Atlantic as a tourist; his expeditions pursued imagined wealth.
The same dream animated colonial expansion. Tunisia, Congo, Madagascar and other African territories were conquered before and after the Berlin Conference, while Jules Ferry justified empire as the duty of supposedly superior races.
When the dream of possession contracts
The colonial dream founded Spanish, French, British, Dutch and later American imperial power, at the cost of massacres and dispossession. Today that dream appears to contract into a defensive Westernism fearful of competitors once treated as illegitimate.
The figures of the Islamist, Russian, Turk or Chinese often express anxiety before former outsiders and before the possible exhaustion of a civilisation that imagined its own destiny as coextensive with the universe.
Equal experiences of the world
Both African and Western experiences are incomplete. They should therefore be placed horizontally as different experiences of one world, rather than vertically as degrees of certainty. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that being is the meeting ground of situations.
Dreams and illusions belong to the world and possess relative truths. Africa has the right to imagine a different project. Difference is not necessarily opposition: it is also the basis of freedom, creation and cooperation among peoples.
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