Having Been So Often Deceived by the White Man, Africans Should Accept the Risks of Experiencing the World Directly

The present is rooted in what precedes it

It would be inappropriate to reproach Africans for having an imaginative conception of their past, because the present always refers to something beyond itself—distant, yet immediately behind it (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Gallimard, Paris, 1964, p. 246).

The transcendence of the present enables human beings to tell their stories. No one can do so without relying on something already stated, on a history that began before them and is already there, rather than on an absolute beginning such as the dawn of humanity imagined by German Romantic philosophy, which helped to contaminate Africa’s image in Western thought (Herder, Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, trans. Edgar Quinet, Strasbourg, 1834).

Seizing memory at a moment of danger

Every person speaks with words that preceded them, after what others have said, even when reshaping language according to personal taste or a particular view of the world. The past had to exist for an individual to connect the present to it.

As Walter Benjamin observed, articulating the past historically does not mean recognising it ‘as it originally was’; it means taking possession of a memory or presence when it flashes up at a moment of danger. Africa must therefore summon its past experience at the moment when it is threatened with disappearing forever from memory. But what does ‘experience’ mean?

Experience as an opening onto the world

Experience is not a mere accumulation of memories of events. It is not the repetition of an unchanging content preserved through time, nor does an experienced person possess a gift of ubiquity allowing movement between past and present.

For Merleau-Ponty, experience is the ontic activity at the origin of every truth: an opening onto the world beneath scientific constructions and idealisations, through which we reactivate, criticise, correct and refound the fundamental meanings handed down by history that govern our understanding of being and our access to our own being. Although it grounds being and truth, it is not immediate: like an archaeologist’s object, it must be reconquered beneath the sediment of later knowledge.

The right to direct knowledge

Far from refusing contact with the outside world, Africans are simply demanding the freedom to undertake this archaeology and reach the truth buried beneath layers of foreign knowledge by following their own paths—even when others condescendingly claim that those paths lead nowhere.

We must hear Cheikh Anta Diop’s exhortation to young Africans: ‘There is only one salvation: direct knowledge. Train yourselves, arm yourselves with science to the teeth and wrest back your cultural heritage… there is no other way.’

Returning home without withdrawing from the world

This exhortation is not exclusionary. It calls for thought that becomes worldly and returns home to take root without asking permission from any external culture, convinced that more past does not mechanically mean less future.

There is not enough African past in the continent’s school curricula, and the supposedly excessive quantity of memories attributed to Africa cannot occupy all the space needed to imagine its future. Experience shows that prioritising knowledge of the past does not automatically destroy visions of the future. The true cause is the growing individualism hidden within theories Africans are asked to apply. Globalisation’s prioritisation of this individualism erodes the mobilising power of the masses and weakens belief in progress.

Reference

Walter Benjamin is cited here through Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual.