from Research in African Literatures Volume 35, Number 1

Excerpt from:

Rethinking Francophone Culture: Africa and the Caribbean between History and Theory

Kamal Salhi

University of Leeds, UK

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ABSTRACT

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, large areas of the world were controlled by the French colonial power. As a select few from the indigenous peoples in these areas were educated in colonial schools, it was inevitable that French thought and theory then developing there would influence them in disharmony. They would explore, reinvent, and sometimes apply it to seek the liberation of their people from colonial rule. This article is intended to analyze critical issues relating to Africa and the Caribbean as they rebound in the expression of their writing, and the discourses that have constructed models for interpretative approaches to theoretical frameworks for these writings. It seeks to highlight and rethink the most compelling, shared features of francophone postcolonial cultures and examines what these cultures have in common, and the ways our interests as researchers, citizens, and people with a general influence reflect a shared concern for the complex, postcolonial cultural diversity inherent in the francophone canon.

Thoughtful, fruitful human experience forms the basis for thinking and written expression in any literature. The traditional cultures of francophone Africa have rarely appeared worthy of respect. So great was the degradation inflicted by colonial rule that many Africans have come to join in the denigration of their own historical achievements. There was a belief that Africans were so primitive that they practically represented a raw material that the "civilizing" powers could mold at will as they pursued their "civilizing" project. The challenge to such thinking has been an important element in the African renaissance of recent decades, and its success has made it possible for Africans to valorize the modes of social thought, action, and belief unique to the continent. The notion that Africa was completely savage and chaotic before the arrival of the French and, by extension, the other European powers, is little heard nowadays, though it still lies like a shadow in the background. Recent scholarship has done much to destroy the myths of "primitive Africa." Where scholars have applied themselves to factual research, they have found evidence of complex social and technological development among a wide range of peoples in almost every part of the continent.

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