by Rob Spillman
The State or the citizen? We would say that, as President, Senghor the poet was de facto the first citizen of his country; but perhaps we would have enough shame to recognize a sophism in this response, because the place of writing, as we saw, even if that writing was black, would always be anchored firmly in the pocket of the State. A verse reveals a vision of the world as much as a grammar, and that of Senghor shows us a symbiotic relationship between the writer and his State. And so the geographies of lost civilizations align themselves appropriately (read: La Civilisation Nègre); and dot our field of vision with their infinite repetitions—“Kingdoms” of “Ancestral Africa” (read: Kingdom of Sine)—and the heroes of a mythical Africa multiply, among which the personage of “Prince” (read: Chaka) illuminates our tragedy, as if he had not committed genocide, this dear Chaka, exonerated by his singular blackness; and now add the face of power, of force: the energy is expressed by the “warrior” and the “athlete,” and the “griot” (read: “Djali”) provides the more enigmatic face. Wrote Senghor: “I say it clearly: I am Djali.”12 The gesture of his celebratory poetry is regal: it does not know self-doubt; it is not attacked by this line which ceaselessly gnaws at the heart of our spirit and makes the stinking garbage cans of our lives crumble before us. On the contrary, we see the Senghorian poem elaborating upon a philosophical tradition that, via ethnophilosophy, like that of Alexis Kagame, searches for the “philosophical Bantu,” but leaves us with no guard against the genocides which torpedo our countries; we see the emergence of a historiography which, in the words of Hampaté Bâ (“when an old man dies, a library burns”), has clearly chosen its camp (that is, between that of the citizen and that of the State), and, in turning towards the Africa of the elders on a continent which is again selling its youth, we see the unfolding of an Africa that, through “Djali,” has chosen to rewrite the continent’s history to satisfy the “virile” powerful, this in an Africa that belongs to our mothers, wives, and sisters as well; we see a vision of writing which allows no place for the thousand gangrenes that gnaw the continent’s very heart—today in the form of AIDS, which ravages its young people, and condemns its future to malaria. Standing before the expanse of a continent that he wants blackened, faced with the sporadic multiplying of cadavers, and the raging of the virus, the uncontrollable soaring of famine, and the culture of genocidal impunity, “Djali” says “Greatness” and, of necessity, invents it to the satisfaction of his king. The evasion of our history’s paradox is a refusal to see an Africa which is obstinately killing itself; and this suicide lies as much a condemnation of the majorities of the population (women, young people, the poor . . .) to powerlessness as it lies in the plunging of the continent’s intelligentsia into the “ancestral past,” when the real stakes of the continent—its young people, we say it daily—is its future. The patron of “Djali” is the king, the “Prince”; now his power feeds on violence. “Universities today, particularly in Africa, have become the modern patrons for the artist,”13 Ngūgī wa Thiong’o reminds us. Why, more than the Senghorian doxa, is it the citizen-place of writing that emerges from these words, that nudges our intelligence? Perhaps, because, in the meantime, we learned to see the path to our safety in our empowerment—empowerment which yields all knowledge—and thus, to situate the promise of our recovered dignity less in celebration than in skepticism.
The choice of skepticism over celebration is already a politics of writing. The most rectilinear Senghorian verse, in its choice of celebration and of “Djali” as the symbol of poet, is also itself political. We mean political in the sense of articulating the foundational language of a community. For Senghor, the mortar of community is fundamentally friendship. Few poets have cultivated friendship to the extent Senghor did, his relationship with Césaire being one of the most mythic. Senghor’s poem is thus often epistolary, addressed to a friend; who, though, would have us read the letters of his actual exchanges with all these people? What editor would have the good fortune to publish the Correspondances complètes of Senghor? We are still waiting with his poems in our hands, poems that are little islands expressing form as much as idea, idea that is a labyrinth of human relationships. The central trait of this subterranean friendship in his poem, even judged only by its effect, is the intel-ligentmarriage between private and public. Some names leap to mind here—among them Pompidou, De Gaulle, and Eboué in particular—and convey a certain orientation, a manner of organizing the political, and express in their way a fidelity to a tradition, at the same time as they reveal a Senghor who was Gaullist from the very beginning, even in those times when Senegal, and the AOF (French West Africa), was not. It would take too many words to sum up a political adventure lasting close to forty years, with all its contradictions, its resumptions, its erasures, its successes, its promises and elegies, among which the Senegalese democracy, the oldest of the continent, is certainly the most celebrated. Indeed, one would need too many words to capture a friendship that was formed as much on the benches of Lycée Louis-le-Grand and in the prison camps of Germany, as in the corridors of the French National Assembly, before revealing itself in the total subjugation of a country, Senegal, to French interests. For us, meanwhile, understood from the red earth of Bamileké country—which, in 1940, added its sons to the forty thousand men which a resisting France received from the AEF (American Expeditionary Force) in order to constitute the army it needed to free itself from under the German boot, and which harvested the flowers of rage between 1956 and 1970—understood from this rebellious land that in 1958 aligned itself with the tradition of Sékou Touré’s “No,” deciding, logically, to go “into the bush” under the leadership of Um Nyobé, Ernest Ouandie, Félix Moumié, the vengeful shadow of Gaullism covers Senghorian friendships with a mantle of blood. Considering the war of liberation that then shook Cameroon, the voices of which are already rising, fortunately, to tell of the genocide and to accuse France14 directly, the existence of the “amitié francafricaine” (what France called the “Union Française,” the “Francophonie” as Senghor would soon have it, or “Françafrique” as François-Xavier termed it) is truly remarkable.
One would ask oneself at times why French-speaking Africans have this relationship of “fraternelle amitié” with their former colonizer, a relationship which indeed surprises observers, France being, with its fourteen thousand soldiers stationed in Africa—of which twelve hundred are in Senegal—the Western country which has by far the largest number of military bases on the continent today, and which, long after the time of the French Colonial Army, still refuses to “decolonize itself,”15 as Mbembe says. Always, Senghor will be at the center of this surprise, less as an enigma than as the epitome of a way of doing politics; the legacy of a poet of the “amitié francafricaine.” Perhaps it is necessary, in the tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois, of whom Senghor was a fervent reader, and who in his famous The Souls of Black Folk asks, “Would America be America without her Negro people”; perhaps it is necessary to begin to ask ourselves what France would be without Africa; and especially what France would be without its African front, and thus, without the “amitié africaine” of these straw men, Francophonie having become today the ultimate bastion of tyranny in Africa. Certainly Senghor can do nothing about the way of doing politics, although he himself began the tradition. Let us look for a moment on the faces of infamy: Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea with his twenty-seven years; Paul Biya, President of Cameroon, who last November could count twenty-four years in power and promised his country twenty years more; President of the Republic of Congo, Sassou Nguesso, is now in his twenty-fourth year in power; Ben Ali of Tunisia, who counts twenty-one years; Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso with nineteen years; but also the President of Chad, Idriss Déby, who with sixteen years in power has just won in elections which he did not even need to rig, it being a given that he also ran the campaign against himself. Let us stop at sixteen years, because it is the limit of a generation, African young people making up more than half of its populatio
n, the very ones that French soldiers killed in front of the Hôtel Ivoire in Abidjan on November 9, 2004. But we must add to this shameful list the names of those budding potentates, the sons who captured power upon the death of their father: Kabila Jr. of the RDC, then Faure Gnassingbé, who proved last year that a Constitution is not worth the paper it is written upon, and took the presidential seat, which his father had occupied for thirty-nine years, at gunpoint. How to express further the hideous face of “l’amitié francafricaine,” if not by adding that, in supporting Habyarimana—President of Rwanda before 1994, “ami de la France” in power for twenty-one years—Paris would find itself implicated in a genocide?
Beyond Senghor: The Lesson of the Falls of Metche
Oh, it was not the first time. For us, Rwanda was a metaphor that articulated the limits of the politics of our time: a revelation of the teleology of violence that turned our path into a volcano of blood. I remember, during a reading tour in March 2005 in Bamileké country, on the road to Bafoussam in western Cameroon, meeting a procession of men and women going towards the Falls of Metche. The place was covered with kola nuts, with palm oil and pieces of broken calabash, the components of all Bamileké sacrifices. Intrigued by their dignified gestures, which, if I was a son of Senghor, I would connect to evidence of “Ancestral Africa,” I asked them what was happening. “We’ve just made offerings to our relatives killed by the French in ’60.” They were my age, these people, and thus, like me, had not lived through those years, but their actions displayed the depth of their conviction. “Why?” I asked. Their response: “So that they rest in peace.” My compatriots thus rewrote our history, in its deepest paradox, because the ones whom they wished would rest in peace were shot down by people such as a certain Colonel Lamberton, who was not afraid to say that Bamilekés “are an irritating pebble” in the foot of Cameroon. The shrieking and clattering of bullets covered by the sound of waterfalls, the bodies thrown into the Metche river, all had been forgotten. They were thus “unburied dead” in a country which believes if a corpse is not returned to the earth, its soul will eternally haunt the sky of the living. The fact that since 2005 an Association of Cameroonian Veterans (ASVECAM) has formed, reuniting more than two hundred “former maquisards” from the leaden years of 1956-1970, is more than just laudable. It bears the accusation of French genocide in Cameroon, and it bears the demand for reparations and for recognition of the historic importance16 of their combat, so potent in the silence of our families. Fortunately, Mbembe’s research on the maquis17 of the Sanaga-Maritime,18 and, before him, the anger of Mongo Beti in Main basse sur le Cameroon (in our time banned in France), exposed the criminal dimensions of the French presence in Cameroon’s lower country and in the region of my origins, in Bamileké country. The importance of this history, of this mute violence, is not only that it is the root of Cameroon’s present, those killed being those who first demanded the independence of and reunification of Cameroon—a fact that still defines our country—the importance of this history also derives from it being the expression of the Cameroonian people’s critical intelligence; it is at the foundation of what I called a “Cameroonian reading” of Senghor.
It is this Cameroonian reading that guided the four axes of my analysis of the “Senghor complex,” and which, even if it is at the source of Cameroonian literary, philosophical, and historiographical inspiration, is not yet acknowledged in school curriculum, is in fact entirely absent from the official history and pedagogy of Cameroon. Because, if this critical intelligence teaches us the truth, then my country’s official history, since 1914 at least, is a cloth woven of appalling lies. Such a critical intelligence reminds us that Cameroon, after 1916 with the German defeat, was “la colonie de personne,”19 let alone that of France, but was a country placed by the League of Nations under “a joint mandate,” and by its successor the United Nations under the “double tutelage” of England and France. Such critical intelligence also informs us that, along with Algeria, Cameroon under French tutelage obtained its independence through bloodshed, and that Cameroon under English tutelage was included in Nigeria and independent in 1961; so the “Cameroon” we know obtained its independence twice—from France and from England. This intelligence reminds us that those who obtained Cameroon’s independence under French tutelage, Ahidjo and his clique, were not beaten for it, worse, they were formally opposed to independence, and thus were rewarded for a battle that they had not fought, because of the simple fact of their “fraternelle amitié” with France. This intelligence also tells us that Cameroon today is not entirely “francophone,” but instead is “bilingual.” These rewritings of the country’s history—and we must understand these to include the work of Mongo Beti as well as that of Bernard Fonlon, Marcien Towa, Jean-Marc Ela, Eboussi Boulaga, and of course that of Achille Mbembe—have in the meantime hollowed a deep intelligence from which today it is easy to write, when one is a Cameroonian author.
To think with this critical intelligence means to be anti-Senghorian; the logic of the Cameroonian reading which stems from it is necessarily opposed to Senghor’s essentialist logic, to his “servitude,” as Marcien Towa names it so precisely, because the character of this reading is full of eruptive passion and reverence for the unburied dead at the Falls of Metche, and for all the dead “Maquis.” The épistèmè of this reading disrupts Senghor’s ethnographic dualism using a radical critique of ethnophilosophy and Eboussi Boulaga’s work on the “bantou problematique.” And the ethics of such a reading distances it from the language of “Djali” when, in the company of Jean-Marc Ela, “the Priest in the Bou-Bou,” we look for knowledge in what is whispered, for wisdom in the fragile space of “political beginners” and for “empowerment” in the ways that “little people” do things; when in these ways we search for truths, for the logics of history “from the bottom.” Its politics, finally, clearly describes “l’amitié francafricaine” as the straitjacket of all Cameroonians who are, and want to think of themselves as, “bilingual,” in the tradition of Bernard Fonlon, if there is not to be another undertow of the “postcolony,” as Achille Mbembe names it. Yet these Cameroonian disruptions of Senghor’s complex would be meaningless if we did not listen to them in the interstices of this time of violence, which since 1956 (the year which began the insurrection of the UPC (Union of the Peoples of Cameroon) and continued until 1970 (the year when Ouandie was stopped) has opposed the intellectual tradition that Cameroon claims as its critical intelligence with the official statements of a puppet regime, no, rather a regime imposed by France and its henchmen; if these disruptions are not read with the knowledge of the genocidal root at the heart of Cameroon, genocide which, they will one day say, is our Saint Bartholomew; if they are not read in close relation to the thousands of unburied dead whose absent tombstone is still today the constitutive stone of Cameroon. Many times we have said that Rwanda is the grave of Negritude. With genocide in our land, in the country of my origins, Bamileké country, it is difficult to pull words from us, words that for Senghor amounted only to applause, because we know that villages—my father’s among them, Bazou—were razed. We know houses were treated with napalm, that thousands of people were killed, and that still today, corpses turn over inside our parents’ silence, all as in the numerous enmities that strangely compose the matrix of Cameroonian peace. How to write the place of the “Civilisations Ancestrales” when we have the violence and silence of forty years to manage, and what is our country’s State that it has orchestrated this violence and this silence? When we hold in our hands the falsification of a million lives erased by the logic of the Cameroonian State, which does not only usurp our history, but also imposes itself as the historian of our lives, which denies the dead who still swim in our rivers, and which has forbidden us for forty years to speak their names in public? When we discover that the maquisards—who were dead at the time of our birth, but who inspire us because they died for our red land—when we discover that when they were buried it was inside reinforced con
crete? For me, the difficulty with Senghor will always be that, in the thousand pages of his writings, despite the length of his life and the reach of his voice, he did not demand justice for the dead who haunt our lives, for those who endure, believing themselves hidden, but sat down too quickly beside their assassins. More than his surfeit of writing, it is his silence that for me remains complex.