Table Of ContentPast Imperfect
Time and African Decolonization,
1945–1960
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 74
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
Series Editor
CHARLES FORSDICK
University of Liverpool
Editorial Board
TOM CONLEY JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A. HIGGINS
Harvard University University of Melbourne Dartmouth College
MIREILLE ROSELLO DEREK SCHILLING
University of Amsterdam Johns Hopkins University
This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contem-
porary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical
practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural
and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All
manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression
are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes
in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary
culture.
Recent titles in the series:
61 Joshua Armstrong, Maps and 68 Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, Lydie
Territories: Global Positioning in the Moudileno, Postcolonial Realms of
Contemporary French Novel Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern
France
63 Lucas Hollister, Beyond Return:
Genre and Cultural Politics in 69 Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan,
Contemporary French Fiction What Forms Can Do: The Work of
Form in 20th and 21st-century French
64 Naïma Hachad, Revisionary Narratives:
Literature and Thought
Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical
and Testimonial Acts 70 Erin Twohig, Contesting the Classroom:
Reimagining Education in Moroccan
65 Emma Wilson, The Reclining Nude:
and Algerian Literatures
Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and
Nan Goldin 71 Keith Reader, The Marais: The Story
of a Quartier
66 Margaret Atack, Alison S. Fell, Diana
Holmes, Imogen Long, Making Waves: 72 Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy,
French Feminisms and their Legacies Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism,
1975–2015 Transnationalism and Culture in the
Maghreb and Beyond
67 Ruth Cruickshank, Leftovers: Eating,
Drinking and Re-thinking with Case 73 Lia Brozgal, Absent the Archive:
Studies from Post-war French Fiction Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris,
17 October 1961
PIERRE-PHILIPPE FRAITURE
Past Imperfect
Time and African Decolonization,
1945–1960
Past Imperfect
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2021 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2021 Pierre-Philippe Fraiture
The right of Pierre-Philippe Fraiture to be identified as the author of this
book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 978-1-80034-840-0 (cased)
ISBN 978-1-80034-546-1 (epdf)
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Prelude: ‘L’Âme nègre doit sortir des musées’ 1
Introduction 19
Aims and Objectives of Past Imperfect 19
Breakdown of Book 23
Chapter I: ‘Pasts and Futures’ 33
The Imperialization of Time 36
Salvaging the Relics 50
Africa’s ‘Present Past’ 57
Chapter II: ‘Things’ 93
African Art and Its Commodification 99
‘Forces’ and ‘Life’ 104
Africa’s Difference 115
‘Lost Arts’ … 123
… And Reprised Arts 130
From Les Statues meurent aussi to It for Others 137
Chapter III: ‘Words’ 145
African Babble 148
Cheikh Anta Diop’s Glottopolitical Project 173
vi Past Imperfect
Chapter IV: ‘Customs’ 201
Colonial Ruination 210
Cutting the Past: On Clitoridectomy 223
African Prophets and Reprises 238
Conclusion: ‘Decolonization: A Work in Progress’ 261
Bibliography 275
Index 307
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
I would like to dedicate this book to Alison and our two daughters,
Manon and Ella. Time flies: oui, ces fameuses mouches temporelles!
And to thank the following people for answering my queries or
inviting me in the past few years to present, discuss, or write about
some of the material included in this book: Dorthe Aagesen, Ana
Lucia Araujo, Yolanda Aixelà Cabré, Jean Copans, John Drabinski,
Grant Farred, Axel Fleisch, Marie-Aude Fouéré, Charlotte Gran, Cecilie
Høgsbro Østergaard, Maëline Le Lay, the late Alain Ricard, Ana
Lúcia Sá, Rhiannon Stevens, and Jennifer Yee; the two anonymous
readers for their useful comments on the manuscript; my colleagues
on the European Research Council Project ‘African Philosophy and
Genre’: Michelle Clarke, Chantal Gishoma, Albert Kasanda, Benedetta
Lanfranchi, and Alena Rettová; Anders Sune Bergh for allowing me to
reproduce his photograph of Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s Krigeren for the
front cover of this book.
My editor, Chloé Johnson, for her patience and responsiveness. The
production editor, Siân Jenkins.
My gratitude goes as well to Kate Courage from the Warwick
University Library; and to the librarians of the Vere Harmsworth
Library at Oxford: Johanna O’Connor, Jane Rawson, Martin Sutcliffe,
and Judy Warden.
I would also like to thank the University of Warwick and the School
of Modern Languages and Cultures for their continuous support and
for granting me a study leave which allowed me to bring this project to
a close.
This book was completed in July 2020 during the COVID-19
pandemic and in the climate of racial insurrection generated by George
Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. As it deals with the decolonization
of the humanities in francophone Africa, Past Imperfect is also about
viii Past Imperfect
issues that have hitherto not been resolved and whose roots are to be
located in our colonial past. I have been fortunate enough to be able to
discuss the ongoing legacies of this present past with my current PhD
students, Matthew Allen, Sky Herington, Rebecca Infield, and Orane
Onyekpe-Touzet; and with several cohorts of Warwick undergraduate
students on modules such as ‘Colonial Memory’, ‘Slavery and After’,
and ‘Postcolonial Literatures in French’. It would be impossible to name
them all, but I am grateful to them for their insights and enthusiasm.
Finally, a special thought for Julia and Ken Franklin – for everything,
and much more: we have been missing you.
Prelude
‘L’Âme nègre doit sortir des musées’1
Prelude
The words ‘rupture’, ‘end’, but also ‘beginning’ best capture how the
post-Second World War era was experienced in France and its colonies.
The creation of the United Nations, an organization which set out to
‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’, promote ‘faith
in fundamental human rights’, and ‘practise tolerance’, cast serious
doubt over the future of the colonial project.2 Behind its generous
principles, however, the Charter of the UN continued to maintain a clear
distinction between its fully accredited members and the ‘peoples’ – the
word ‘colony’ was avoided in this document – having ‘not yet attained a
full measure of self-government’.3 UN members responsible for adminis-
tering ‘non-self-governing’ and ‘trust’ territories were enjoined ‘to
ensure, with due respect for the culture of the peoples concerned, their
political, economic, social, and educational advancement, their just
treatment, and their protection against abuses’.4 What is interesting
in this process is that the various imperial powerhouses – whether in
Paris, London, or Brussels – whilst under the explicit obligation to
implement measures to ‘develop self-government’, were still expected
to decide whether or not the ‘peoples’ for whom they were responsible
had attained the necessary ‘advancement stages’ to shape and determine
their own political futures.5 In other words, the political initiative firmly
1 The adjective nègre, although very pejorative now, was used until the
immediate post-war era to describe that which was regarded as being authentically
African or black.
2 ‘Preamble’ of the ‘Charter of the United Nations’: https://www.un.org/en/
sections/un-charter/preamble/index.html [accessed 3 April 2019].
3 ‘Charter of the United Nations’, Chapter XI (article 73): https://www.un.org/
en/sections/un-charter/chapter-xi/index.html [accessed 3 April 2019].
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
2 Past Imperfect
remained with the administering powers; and even though the latter
were accountable to the UN General Assembly,6 the terms under which
they operated in overseas territories had not substantially changed since
the creation of the League of Nations after the First World War.7 If they
pledged to act as the facilitators of self-determination, they often failed
to listen – or they simply paid lip service – to the political demands of
‘dependent’ peoples.
This increasingly insistent focus on self-determination nevertheless
transformed the meaning of, and scope for, anti-colonialism. Hitherto,
opposition to colonialism had remained a peripheral phenomenon
that never gained enough momentum to destabilize colonial adminis-
trations. Although the interwar period was marked by violent
responses to French colonialism, not only in France,8 but also in the
colonies (the examples of Dahomey and Indochina come to mind),
critics such as René Maran and Kojo Touvalou were militating for
the improvement of the colonial regime rather than for its disman-
tlement.9 French intellectuals like André Gide and André Malraux
operated on analogous premises. Their brand of early anti-colonialism,
and their desire to speak on behalf of exploited locals, remained
overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Gide’s Voyage au Congo did not depart
from the evolutionist principles that had fed physical anthropology for
three generations;10 in La Voie royale,11 Malraux, who had previously
fought for the rights of Indochinese people – notably by creating, in
1925, the short-lived Saigon-based newspaper L’Indochine enchaînée12
– makes a shocking case for colonial ‘domination and loot’.13
6 Evan Luard, A History of the United Nations: The Age of Decolonization,
1955–1965, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 176.
7 See Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future
of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 87–95.
8 Pap Ndiaye, ‘Présence africaine avant “Présence Africaine”. La subjectivation
politique noire en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, Gradhiva, 10 (2009), special
issue ‘Présence Africaine. Les conditions noires: une généalogie des discours’,
pp. 64–79.
9 Ibid., p. 69.
10 André Gide, Voyage au Congo. Carnets de route (Paris: Gallimard, 1927).
11 André Malraux, La Voie royale (Paris: Grasset, 1930).
12 See Raoul Marc Jennar, Comment Malraux est devenu Malraux: de
l’indifférence politique à l’engagement (Perpignan: CapBear Éditions, 2015).
13 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994 [1993]),
p. 251.
