English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Dahomey, a name sedimented with history 0:30 I live in the suburbs, I'm also from the plateau. I don't believe in chance, but we'll quickly get to a direction. They travel by gbakas, the gbakas of Abidjan. Every year I meet people, in any case, me, Daouda, I often take the gbakas. It's true that gbakas sometimes cause damage.
1:00 I'm not saying otherwise, but how can we manage if one day they abolish the gbakas. For many of us, it would be like Katanga. First because of his country of origin. There, now it's my turn to be essentialist, when suddenly I've just criticized the Corsicans. And I said, but he's a Beninese. Let's be clear, he's a Dahomean.
1:31 By chance of my biography, my first contact with Africa was in '54. Coming from Indochina, my parents are learning a lot of nonsense. You reconvert wherever you can, because there's still Empire left. So, first contact with Africa. It's called Dahomey. I'm delighted that Sankara changed the name Upper Volta to Burkina Faso. It's more meaningful in every sense of the term. But on the other hand, there, for once, what nonsense!
2:04 For once it wasn't Upper Volta, a typical colonial term, shared with the English, Lower Volta, Upper Volta. No, there for once, Dahomey, the word is sedimented with a history proper to the country, well before the colony. Because Dan, hence Dahomey, Dan was a prince of Allada, I don't want to go on with a whole speech, but he reigned over the south, the north-south divide is crucial in these countries, between the Sahel, harsh and hard to cultivate, and the south, wetter, naturally, like between the Hittites and the Egyptians.
2:39 So, Dan was a prince of the south, who sees a man from the north arrive—it's the classic story—who says to him, may I settle near you? No problem, so he welcomes him. And then the man from the north prospers, and one day Dan comes on a grand visit, and sees that he's prospering, and says to him, to put it quickly, are you going to keep building houses right into my belly? Belly is said in Fon, the language of southern Benin, 'homè.' The other man took his machete, opened his belly, and with his blood kneaded the first elements of the royal compound of the kings of Abomey.
3:14 And so this country bears the name of Dan's belly, Dan Homè. So, you see that for once it's a proper name, a patronym—that means nothing here—but a toponym that expressed a whole historical sedimentation; it's a real shame it was changed to Benin. Benin is the kingdom of Benin, which is rather in Nigeria, it's immense. The current Benin is only a small appendage of it, there you go. But it's important, I'm talking about a country that was already called, when I was a kid, the Latin Quarter of the AOF. French West Africa, as it was called at the time.
3:46 That is to say, little Dahomey, at the time of its independence, had a thousand high school graduates. The immense Zaire, Belgian Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo—I'm mixing up the generations—had two. That sums up the essential. This nursery—I, who am speaking to you, earned my living and was able to have a professional life thanks to Dahomean schoolteachers, who taught me, since I went to primary school there, in the fourth and fifth grades, my own language, even though it wasn't even their mother tongue.
Hountondji, Adotevi, and negritude as founding myth 4:25 If I have a cultural debt anywhere, it's certainly there. So, is it chance? We're not going to essentialize Dahomean-ness in Adotevi. Is it chance that my two favorite African philosophers, West African, let's be more concrete, are Stanislas Adotevi and Paulin Hountondji? Both are Beninese. I didn't do it on purpose. And both, and now I'm answering your question, how would I characterize it, have the same theme.
4:55 That is to say, from the start, both are wary of any essentialism of négritude. We'll get to that. I saw Hountondji—I'll start with him, who is less of a polemicist at the outset than Adotevi, who wasn't around Althusser, who didn't... And I'm talking about him. Later he became Minister of Education, but at the time I knew him, he had a small dusty bookshop in Cotonou.
5:27 And it took some merit, because there was only one state bookshop called the Lipa Wall. At the time, it was about ten years after independence, I was working in the field of school textbooks on behalf of the octopus, Hachette, right? And I was tasked with designing new collections, and I couldn't help going to his shop. I had no professional interest in it—it was a small bookshop. We sold through the big state bookshop directly. It was—you were paying. That is, it was French cooperation that was paying. There you go. But I went there because a bookshop like that, texts by Lukács, I mean, in the dust like that, like us, well, extraordinary courage.
6:10 And there you go. And I saw him—to get quickly to the point—at the Collège International de Philosophie, he was invited to give a talk on what he thought of African philosophy. Invited by ethno-philosophers. And I saw him—he was a heavy stutterer. I've never seen him stutter so little. On the phone it was torture, as is often the case with stutterers, may they forgive me if they hear this. But I adore that man. But there, it was all the passion that made him not stutter. He said—well, a white man, it's the belly.
6:40 Saying: listen, you speak ill of ethno-philosophy, but still, you Africans have an intuitive depth. You must keep it. Well, all the nonsense one can imagine, and which others live off in the end. To sum it up, to be clear for those listening, those watching: the white man is the concept, the black man is the rhythm. That means: you dance, and I keep the tractor. I don't know if it's true, I'm not even settling the substance of it, but I know how he manages.
7:12 I see that he doesn't manage it—he doesn't come to terms with it. It's against that, against that division proper to Senghor, much more than to Césaire—who was honest about it, Adotevi says it very well—it was necessary at the start, négritude as a polemical concept to find a founding identity at the outset, as every history begins with founding myths, Romulus and Remus—it's not certain that it's historical truth—like Cain and Abel, but that's how it is. You have to start there. But afterward it becomes more of a burden than a liberation, a bit like the concept of nation which, at the Revolution, was crucial at the moment of the awakening of nationalities in Europe.
7:49 It's far-left, the nation against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, the awakening of nationalities, that's very good. Afterward, it becomes what we know. Well, négritude had the same fate. That's roughly how I'd summarize Adotevi's theme. But I return to my Dahomean thread. Hountondji, confronted by those white people who said, but really, stay in your deep roots, gave this magnificent reply: 'I am not condemned to serve as your supplement of soul.'
8:23 African philosophy has the right not to be content with the status that soul-lacking white people have assigned it. Not all white people lack soul, far from it. You address me saying, 'Keep your soul'—implying, why? So there's enough for two. It was a magnificent reply. Well, Adotevi belongs to that lineage. There is indeed here what allows me to call the one I'm talking about—racially, but in a positive sense—a Beninese intelligence.
8:54 "Dahomean." There you go. No, let's be clear, I'm going to be a bit Montesquieuian here rather than Marxian, but that's not entirely contradictory. There is an exceptional population density compared to the rest of francophone Africa. In Benin, there are often 100 inhabitants per square kilometer in the south, which is enormous for the region. And you can sense that it's an appendage of the immense Nigeria next door, which is the great exception. That is, in this underpopulated sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria has 130 million inhabitants with a ton of oil per inhabitant.
9:24 I mean, it's fine, there you go. So Benin is affected by that. Maybe that's what makes it, a bit like Burkinabé people—there's also an enormous population density on the Mossi plateau, on land as harsh and dry as the Sahel—and so it sold its labor force as agricultural workers in Côte d'Ivoire or Ghana. Well, the rest you know. So, I mean, there's a natural determinant like that to take into account too, especially when it's combined within the framework of history and praxis. So, to answer your question, he's someone who emerged from that intelligentsia's effervescence that was already there before independence.
10:02 You have to see the extent to which, I won't even say a minister, but a civil servant, a Beninese department director interviewed on RFI, puts to shame our French presenters like Pujadas or... I shouldn't name them, but well, I mean. So, it's a question that's not only interesting, it's somewhat rhetorical to say your question was interesting—no, it's relevant. Even linguistically speaking of the term. I'll take a geographical detour to answer it, to let the names be depassionated, set names aside for a moment.
Gauls, Walloons, Gourmantché: naming the boundary 10:33 Take all the derivatives of the root GAL or VAL. Welsh, Gauls, Walloons, Vaudois. Right? No need to spell it out—linguistically, all of that is the same thing, roughly; the G and the V permute. Wales, the Canton of Vaud, the Walloons in Belgium, GAL, a common patronym in Brittany designating someone who comes from the interior—to speak as Alsatians do when they speak of what we in Corsica call 'the continent.'
11:05 GAL is the one who comes from the interior of France, in Brittany. Each time, these terms designate living populations, and that confirms what you just said, on a march in the geographical sense, on a boundary, right where the Germans begin. The Walloons in relation to the Ch'tis, the Flemish; the Welsh, quite happy to be Welsh when the Normans, the Vikings, the Krauts—I say that with a lot of affection—come to invade the country.
11:40 The Canton of Vaud is the one bordering German-speaking Switzerland. There's something there. Something is happening. Each time, you give the name to whatever is not the center but on the contrary the periphery and the boundary. You risk being in the minority, as you rightly say. I'm very pleased with what you just said because now I'll take an African example for the same idea. The people of southwestern Niger, the border region with Upper Volta—sorry, with my archaeo-colonial archaisms—with Burkina, are called the Gourmantché.
12:23 There's a town deep in eastern Burkina today called Fada N'Gourma, Gourmantché. When you ask the Zarma, the most widespread language in the region—roughly the Songhai—when you ask them what Gourmantché means, they say it's the people who are west of the river. It's not a substance, it's a relation. I presume you see the connection to your question, which is a bit more relevant. Right? It doesn't mean they're different by essence, but they are, simply, west of the river.
12:57 Right? So, there you go, afterward, they'll be in the minority if they cross the river, I mean. So indeed, never has the sub-Saharan—to use a term that's depassionated and geographically neutral—never has the sub-Saharan felt as black, in the most promotional sense of the term, as in the early writings of Césaire and Senghor—and God knows that had a positive role—never has he felt as black as when he was in the Parisian suburbs or when he came to play percussion at the Tabou to vaguely accompany Josephine Baker.
A differentiated reception: the ambitious executive and the old schoolteacher 13:41 There, you're absolutely right, but that's true for practically all minorities. There too, it's a question worth asking, because I'll answer you—the response is highly differentiated. It doesn't apply—I'm only speaking of Africans, that is, the question concerns the echo this has within the African crowd. It's not homogeneous. It's obvious that the official candidate for a mission post at UNESCO—Burkinabé, Guinean, whoever, or Congolese, I mean—he'll lay it on thick about négritude in his texts, in his stuff, in his reports, in his...
14:21 Well, there you go. But the old man, the old civil servant, the old schoolteacher who trained generations in francophone culture because it was social advancement—because if you don't know 'paper,' as they say south of the Sahara, that is, being 'paper' means I'm literate, that's it, I'm pulled out of trouble socioeconomically. So it doesn't matter whether it's in French here, English there, Arabic in Algeria—because in Algeria, Arabic is understood from one end to the other. Let me open a parenthesis: once, my students—all adults, in the final year class—addressed me, in Côte d'Ivoire, they said, sir, starting tomorrow we're doing class in Ivorian.
14:54 Ah, I said to him, ah, I'm pleased you're being so proactive today. But why wait until tomorrow, let's start today, let's go. Ah, what, do we do it in Baoulé? Ah, no, the guy from Korhogo there, that's what you need. Ah, I don't want that. Me, it's up to you, it's not for me to decide. So we do it in Bété. Ah, there's no way. Well, you see, we're going to have a war. Well, go ahead, you'll do as we do. What's 'we'? The French? We speak one language, French, two-thirds of which is that of our former colonizer, Latin.
15:30 Second, the Germanic roots, invaded by the barbarians—great civilizations. We have Arabic, in third place. What we have least of is Gaulish. It's almost nothing—a few place names, a few river names. There you go. It can't be decreed; it will be—I'm sure that one day you'll speak Ivorian, and it will be what I just said, a mix of French, Dioula, Baoulé, Bété, it'll be all of that. That's very good.
16:00 Right. There you go. And in the same way, I mean, your question can't be answered as if there were a homogeneous audience. The old schoolteacher, I think of him, because what solitude. People talk about the solitude of the long-distance runner, but the solitude of the old schoolteacher—he did his William Ponty training in Dakar back then, with the Mamadous and Binetas, who spent his whole life doing upstrokes and downstrokes in appalling heat in non-air-conditioned classrooms—no one was thinking of air-conditioning schools back then—doing upstrokes and downstrokes on the blackboard in dead silence, because he had iron discipline with the switch.
16:43 Right. And who made our language, French, shine in a place no one ever came to inspect. I mean, we could really build him a statue. To those who talk about francophonie, who hold conferences, stuff, funding, and nothing ever comes of it. Those are the pillars of francophonie, those retired schoolteachers now, whom everyone has forgotten, living on a miserable pension. That man will pay very close attention to what Adotevi says, to answer your question. He'll say, some kind of négritude, that, that's not good for me.
17:17 Because it means—I'll sum it up for you—dance for you, tractor-building for me. Dance, my boy, dance. As long as you dance, I'm your master. It's Robinson and Friday. It's surely not a coincidence—it's in that novel, which is a masterpiece. The first time the solitude of the shipwrecked white man finally meets someone else there, it's to establish a master-slave relationship. That doesn't happen by chance, after all. That's just how it is.
17:47 There you go. So that's why I answer this question in a differentiated way. I mean that a certain ambitious youth—and I'm not criticizing it, it has every right to be so, when I refer to the one who wants to join UNESCO, it wasn't ironic or pejorative—is quite right to use any channel available to stop being 'developing,' well, to achieve its social emancipation.
18:18 And that's the least of it. But I mean, he can't help but unconsciously redo the Senghorian gesture without thinking about it spontaneously. He'll use négritude as self-promotion. If he's discriminated against, he'll say it's because I'm black that you're telling me this. Right? To which I often want to reply, but you're not an ambassador of négritude. Africa hasn't delegated you to represent it. There are people who are the same color as you—if that's even a color, since it's actually more differentiated than we think—who say the opposite.
18:53 You—Africa has the right to be diverse. I didn't say divided, diverse. There you go. That's how I answer your question. In my opinion, he's disturbing. And perhaps even more so now than at the time of publication, which is saying a lot. That's why I like your question. He disturbs even more now. Why now? You can guess—because there's a rampant resurgence of identitarianism. There was a conference on French identity not so long ago. It's really unprecedented nonsense like that.
The return of identitarianism: the region has the nation it deserves 19:24 When you have an identity, you don't ask the question. When you ask it, it's already too late. As Hegel said, the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk. Philosophy always comes too late. If you're asking the question of identity, it's because you no longer have it. Do you think the Bororo people with whom Lévi-Strauss spoke asked themselves the question of their identity? 'Are we really Bororo?' That wasn't their problem. So today, to return to Claire's question, where everything happens between Breton-ness with the red caps, Corsican-ness.
20:07 I worked in Thonon-les-Bains. A short period—I was in charge of managing the youth center in Thonon-les-Bains. I'm delighted. It allowed me to see a kind of alpine Corsica, since I saw windsurfing boards on the lake while being right next to cows with bells on the heights and the pastures. Well, it reminded me of Corsica. The sea and the mountains. But once, coming down from Morzine toward Thonon, with lots of switchbacks, I saw written on a wall, like we have here 'French out,' there was written: 'Savoie, France's cash cow.'
20:40 Yes, but I'm sorry, I couldn't help but laugh. If Savoie leaves, France falls like a stone—meaning we have some nerve—'France's cash cow.' Well. So there's a return of identities. I don't want to just be ironic about it. Because nothing exists without cause. If there's this return of identity, it's because there are reasons for it. You can be wrong while still having reasons.
21:10 When—I want to be very precise—the region, sorry, I mean the region gets the nation it deserves, and vice versa. Since you know Africa well, I'll take the example precisely of the Senufo, since they straddle Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina. There's an ethnic group, an identity—if I set aside what 'ethnicity' means—straddling two, in any case a linguistic community, already, the Senufo, straddling two quite distinct nation-states, Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina. Right? Korhogo on the Ivorian side, Banfora on the Burkinabé side.
21:44 At the time of Côte d'Ivoire's economic peak in the '80s, when Côte d'Ivoire was nearly on par with Portugal in income per capita—remarkable, right?—just before the World Bank got involved and imposed SAPs, structural adjustment programs, to bring them back to the Stone Age, with the complicity of the IMF. Let's not get sidetracked. At that time there was a chain of large distribution stores, as you'd say on an African scale, in Côte d'Ivoire, called Chaîne Avion, and another called PAC.
22:16 You could find whatever you wanted—batteries for your transistor radio, stuff—in the most remote village. So Mr. Ouattara—I use the name on purpose, no, not at all, I'm not referring to the president, it's the quintessential Senufo name. Mr. Ouattara is Ivorian. This gentleman is Ivorian, not Senufo. And he had a bit of contempt for the Burkinabé, who couldn't hold a candle to his standard of living. But from the moment when suddenly the center, the capital, abandons the periphery, when there are civil wars, when wealth is no longer being circulated, when Mobutu centralizes everything—it seems he alone held a quarter of UBS's assets, him and his family, I mean the Union Bank of Switzerland—and so Shaba, Katanga as it was called then, no longer receives the benefits of that fabulous wealth that is the Democratic Republic of Congo.
23:15 It's obvious that the region no longer feels concerned by the nation since it receives nothing from it. Corsica, and there I side—there I side, at that level, with the nationalists, the *nepanucci*, the autonomists—for now I'm not nuancing this, because they share that theme in common, but it's historically justified—what have we received, we, from the mainland, sorry, from the mainland, what have we received? We got penal colonies, regions of relegation, like New Caledonia, like the ports, in the eastern plain, because now the eastern plain is as beautiful as California, it's prosperous, there are kiwis as far as the eye can see, which don't sell for much per kilo, but that's not just Corsica, there are the mandarins too—there was nothing before.
24:00 In traditional Corsica, there were proverbs, maxims, it's like, if you wanted, to wish misfortune on someone, you'd wish for them to be stuck in the plain without water. It was all stones. It took the immigration of the pieds-noirs, investments of hundreds of millions of francs that the Corsicans had never even imagined, which created the tensions at the time between Corsicans and pieds-noirs, which led to the events of Aléria, which you must have heard of, which are the starting point of today's Corsican problem. Otherwise, there's a thousand-year-old Corsican problem. There you go. So, let's be serious, I mean, for a long time, Corsica was completely neglected.
24:37 Yes, the Corsicans were interesting for putting up posters in Paris. No, I'm barely exaggerating, it was the mafia that served during the collaboration, there you go, and then afterward, it was the energy at election time for the RPR, the UDR, because Corsica was one of the departments, like Alsace, where the Gaullist party got the most votes. Afterward, it reversed completely. It's anti-Gaullist, anti-Jacobin, anti-establishment. Anyway, never mind. But I mean, so, it never counted as a department, in terms of development plans, etc.
25:11 And then, when it started, well it took a few bombs for that. I'm not going to play devil's advocate, but still, it took a few bombs for the Somivac, the Corsica Development Company, etc., to be set up. Well, which also served to enrich local fiefdoms. Afterward, that's the story everywhere. I don't want to throw stones at it. But, somehow, we find that same logic. That's what I want to insist on, from that point of view. There's a logic that is not Corsican, not African, and that is all of these at once, and that is universal. It's that the region gets the nation it deserves, and vice versa.
The moment of negritude and universal determinism 25:43 If the nation doesn't give back to the regions, that is, the regions will end up demanding their independence, tendentially sooner or later. Oh, well, that's not too complicated to answer. I think its permanent backdrop is still socio-political, let's say, not to say ideological, so as not to sound too... That is, he sees very clearly, when he talks about negritude, for example, to what extent, historically, this is a rather Marxian approach — I'm not saying Marxist on purpose, so as not to sound sectarian — but there's a moment, in the Hegelian sense of the term, where it's very fruitful as a concept, where negritude is a promoter of liberating elements, where it's the stake of a struggle for recognition, which isn't even, I won't even say granted, but I mean, which isn't given, and then, how afterward, what was an instrument of liberation can become a brake, I mean, something that pulls backward instead of pushing forward, as it had done initially.
26:47 So, this approach alone is an answer to your question. There is indeed an ideological, political backdrop, but in a sense opposed to anything politician-like, of course, with an almost symbolic, semantic analysis of the way the Black man is represented, the negro, deliberately the negro, since he's supposed to have a sense of rhythm, as if the Spanish and the Russians didn't have it. There are two great dancing peoples — you'll tell me the Russians are the Asian edge of Europe, and Spain is the African edge of Europe.
27:20 That's interesting. A quick little parenthesis: classical music renewed itself just when it seemed exhausted at the end of the 19th century. It renewed itself in musical modernity through Debussy's legacy, Manuel de Falla in Spain, and then through the Russians, Diaghilev's ballet in Paris — that's quite significant. Today it's world music, it's the djembe, but back then — and Beethoven, already, in the taverns of Vienna, was listening to the Hungarians. And that's the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
27:50 The blacks — I'm saying blacks on purpose — of the suburbs of Vienna, of the taverns, were the Hungarians. Everywhere there's a cimbalom, a balalaika, and you find in Beethoven's writing csárdás, things like that. It's interesting. Adotevi sees all of that very well. Right? And when I say there's a sociological, ideological backdrop, it's because he always places himself from a viewpoint that would still cause scandal today. That's why I say the book is more disturbing today than at the time, because it raises a universal theme.
28:25 He shows that what's said to be specific to negroes, for example, is exactly how, I don't know, white Hispanics in Nicaragua talk about those who are indios, for example. Or how the Vietnamese talk about the Montagnard Moi or Laotians. You see, to show that there's some of it for everyone. So there's a universal determinism — I'm finishing answering your question, which I'm now generalizing — the Tibetans and the Chinese, since that's a bit more topical. There you go. It's exactly the relationship of the Hittites to the Egyptians.
28:55 The Hittites originally come from the mountains of Turkey. What do you want to do in the mountains? I'm a Corsican talking to you. In the mountains, there's nothing to do. I'm speaking economically, mind you. That is, being a shepherd, socially, is the bottom of the barrel. It's not even the farmer yet. I remember an uncle of mine who used to say, 'I saw two men and a shepherd.' And it's funny because in Africa it's the same thing. The Fulani shepherd, likewise, isn't the best marriage prospect. That's normal. Even if he was feared because he's a warrior, still, he's a bit too much in contact with nature.
29:29 But the Hittite would wait for the crops to grow in the Nile valley. He'd come and take what he could. The Tibetan would come down from the Himalayas and go steal the rice harvested in the Yangtze valleys. That's what it is — old structural conflicts. Structural. And then, I'd say, the Albanians in the rich Pannonian plain in Serbia — well yes, it's the same old conflicts, or Macedonia in Greece.
Reaffirming the universal: "they are men" 30:03 There you go. So, somehow, his tendency is to place himself from a universal point of view. But no, let me pick up my thread to answer your question in depth today. And it's all the more disturbing today because today the universal is cursed. Today we're in cultural relativism. 'Oh, what you say, that's fine for you, but among the Bantu...' that's all — and there, I don't want to do philosophy to contradict that. I'll even take it from a humorous angle, but a humor that's still quite lived, because I swear to it by all the businessmen I saw parading through Africa who asked me for advice, as if I were more relevant than anyone else because I had lived a long time in Africa.
30:39 There were some who'd spent 40 years there, the idiots, as if that counted for something. That doesn't mean anything. It's not by osmosis like that, just because you've lived there a long time. I was there for three days. Should I bless them for me? Should I tell his wife? And I'd say to them, lowering my voice, 'I'll tell you, it's a scoop, don't repeat it.' What Africans want is for their children to go to school, bring back good grades, bring back money, and be in good health. I saw a chill, a disappointment on their faces.
31:12 They were expecting something juicy, exotic, an identity, a negritude. And I told them, they're just men. What a disappointment! I was reasserting the universal. I'm sorry. First, we don't get quite the same reception. Compared to — let's say, compared to our opponents, to be polemical again — we get the same one. Compared to those who are very identitarian, very ontological, if you will, to show off a bit with a philosophical category. For whom everything happens on the order of being: negritude, Britishness, Corsicanness.
31:44 No, but I'm not being ironic about that, except when people want to make it into something innate, something on the order of being, there you go, and not of the act. But let's leave philosophy aside — François discovered Africa as a coopérant, with a lucidity I've rarely seen among expatriates, which comes partly from his Corsican side. I gave a whole little speech about this at the famous Corte conference, about how the Corsican, when he was in the colonies — and God knows there were plenty of Corsicans in the colonies — found himself in the reverse position: he was no longer the colonized, but the colonizer.
32:18 Well, how about that! And often within the repressive apparatus, the police, customs — interesting. I had a paternal grandfather who was a non-commissioned officer in the indigenous guard, that is, in charge of repression, I mean, well, that's what I'm talking about. In Tonkin, as it was still called at the time. So, I've admitted it to you, I arrive in the colonial baggage, right? But I absolutely don't regret having known the three phases: before, during, and after independence.
Before, during, and after the independences 32:56 I remember, for example, my driver. Yes, I was 12 years old and I had a driver. Taking me to school — frankly, you can show off with that, when you're 12 you're terrible, reactionary, racist, whatever you like — you have a driver at 12, of course that's racist. But I was fascinated because it was right at the independence of Togo. Togo became independent two years before the others, a trust territory, a former German colony. So it was 1957, a referendum, independence won the referendum, they became independent. And I saw my driver suddenly stop and greet another driver saying 'Federation!'
33:30 I was 12 years old, that was my awakening to political life. Then, what's 'Federation'? You're too young. And, suddenly, I understood that all these countries dreamed of building a West Africa without colonial borders. I witnessed those dreams, having lived through independence. Again, having teachers who would gently grab me in the schoolyard. I remember it as if it were yesterday, in Porto-Novo, in Benin, which was the capital at the time, to tell me: 'Were you beaten last night?'
34:00 I said, 'What are you talking about?' It was Dien Bien Phu. He knew before I did, he was listening to the radio. I was just a kid. I was in fifth grade. He knew my parents had come from Indochina, that they knew about it. Kids are nice, but they couldn't help rubbing it in. It wasn't even my teacher, it was the school's headmaster. But tell me, in Zaire, there would never have been a Black headmaster of a primary school — to show the development of Dahomey, once again. He told me, but yes — those are the important moments of my life, when I say before, during, and after.
34:36 There you go. And one last quip about the 'after,' to sum it up, which is a way of answering the question. The big difference in Abidjan — because after Togo and Benin, my father was posted to Côte d'Ivoire, at the Planning Directorate, which still existed then. 'The Plan,' at the time, sounded Bolshevik. Now people would say that word itself sounds Bolshevik. Whereas it's really wild capitalism, Côte d'Ivoire. Now people would call it Bolshevik. Against where we now stand. I remember very well, we were 50,000 French — sorry, we were 5,000 French at the time of independence.
35:10 Right? Fifteen years later, we were 50,000. That's not a bad deal, independence. For the colonizer, at least, a promotion. Except that, 50,000 French — and I'm not even talking about all those who weren't there before independence, the Japanese settlers, well, the Japanese, German exploiters, and so on, a free-for-all, everyone grabbing what they could, without a license. It's no longer a small monopoly for the French, purely French-French. There you go. So, I mean, my reception of Adotevi is shaped by all of that. Somehow, with him, I immediately saw that he didn't fall into the fantasy-driven mode of most African authors — I'll be a bit harsh, but how many African authors have been promoted by an RFI program, it's a good radio station, generally speaking, I'm not throwing stones, but well, they fulfill a bit of their political function, picking, among all the manuscripts sent to them, the one that always tells the same story: 'I had an identity, when I arrived in the city, I lost it,' yes, etc., 'and I arrived in the European city, coming from my African village' — and then suddenly you see a guy step out of that mold and reconstruct a history instead, not a fantasy.
36:19 Enough to finally be able to construct a history where, suddenly, history replaces the legend that had taken its place. The legend which, once again, had its function — that of Senghor and Césaire. With Césaire, I'm less critical because the Antillean milieu is somehow much more homogeneous. First because of slavery. And then, there's that minority position which is not the same as Senghor's. There you go. When you're backed by the whole Black continent, so to speak, you don't have the minority position of the Caribbean.
From Delafosse to Pharaoh's scribe: ethnology is not innocent 36:51 Like a good archeo-colonial, I'll put on the Franco-African accent to say, but really, your questions, your method, you know it. But it's true, it's true, he's disappeared. There's a logic. There's a logic to answer your question. There used to always be an avenue called Delafosse Avenue in the city. On the plateau, the old plateau, Delafosse Avenue. He was a governor. It's named after him. He was one of the first ethnologists specializing in Côte d'Ivoire.
37:23 The ethnologist-governor — already, that gives a direction for answering your question. Where does anthropology come from? I'm not making this up, it's been studied, it's a classic point that I'm bringing up again, but a classic that doesn't get enough media coverage. Because for me, ethnologist, anthropologist — right away I assume a kind of objectivity, at least scientific, with a scientific ring to it. Even if it's the human sciences, one must be modest, but still. That's not at all the case. At the start, the function wasn't at all to know. Even though admirable work has been done, mind you, I want to be intellectually honest.
37:57 How many times have I seen people today, French people, researchers, from ORSTOM — you know what ORSTOM is, the Overseas Scientific and Technical Research Office — the CNRS, roughly, tropical version, to go quickly — I've seen them pay tribute. They had come across reports from the 1950s and 1940s where they saw a geologist writing reports on resources, on synclines and anticlines inside the Malian Sahara. They said it was fantastic work that had been done. It's a treasure for the country, a scientific heritage, studies that would cost a fortune now to redo.
38:30 So, there you have it. But to come back to ethnology — here's a question for you — from Lévi-Strauss onward, you're no longer supposed to say ethnologist, you have to say anthropologist. Right? These semantic shifts are interesting. Anything but history. Sorry, that's my Marxian side, I'm being blunt, sorry, I've reintroduced history. For me, all these disciplines are part of a history. Unless one is Sarkozyist and tells me Africa still hasn't entered history. I mean, come on.
39:00 There you go, but for me, from the moment you start chipping a flint pebble, you enter history. Via prehistory, but you enter it. So this is very important to honestly answer your questions. The disciplinary figure, the one who suddenly starts writing what had never been written, who transcribes orality — which Lévi-Strauss also did, he had the merit of recording tons of oral tales, myths, stories, lullabies, grandmother's tales, that's very good.
39:34 But that person never has an innocent function to begin with, he doesn't have a cognitive aim first. It may lead to cognitive enrichment, but that's not the intended goal. And there, my emblematic example is the scribe of the Pharaoh. The birth of writing wasn't meant to tell the truth. What do the first historians recount? The exploits of the Pharaoh. And he crushed the Hittites and thrashed them because he is the most beautiful, because he is the strongest, and because he is the descendant of Osiris and has with him the sun, the moon, and Nut, the queen of the night.
40:13 You understand? Ethnicity — sorry. It's hagiographic, as we say quite well in French. It's a story meant to express praise, which isn't... At the start, the scribe isn't there to state objective, scientific truth. Now, of course, progress has been made since. Fortunately, we've made progress. I say the Egyptians, but well, our own chroniclers — the chroniclers of Louis XI: 'it was raining, the king got up, he touched the scrofulous, he met the great Mamamouchi.' All right, come on! I mean, even though progress has been made in objectivity, writing in general and historical writing in particular — in the broader sense, which gives rise to the human sciences — still bears the mark of that origin.
Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, and Tarzan 40:57 So, no ethnology, no anthropology, is entirely innocent at that level. When Lévi-Strauss — I sound like I'm criticizing him, but I have great admiration for him. I know my own investment in musical matters, and Lévi-Strauss had perhaps one of the finest musical cultures in Paris — that's not the point. And The Raw and the Cooked remains one of my bedside books, even though I'm often at odds with some of his theses. I'm not talking about the late Lévi-Strauss, who became senile, who became...
41:27 What's his name again? The guy obsessed with overpopulation, on whom Marx wrote pamphlets — Malthus. Even though the Malthusians, in the end — 'we're too many on the planet.' All those who say that, of course, count themselves among those who would survive if we had to get rid of the surplus. Well, anyway. But no, the great Lévi-Strauss, I mean, an intelligence, a culture that got a proper classical education, as they used to say back then — you had to have an agrégation in philosophy to even begin to specialize in sociology.
41:57 There wasn't even a sociology degree back then. It was very cross-disciplinary, a literary, musical culture — remarkable, once again. Still... Still... Somehow, the first sentence of the book that was perhaps his most popular — though not his most scientific — Tristes Tropiques, which begins by saying that one should start by killing all the explorers. François de Negroni showed very well in L'Afrique fantasme that here he joins a fundamental fantasy of the white man wandering about, on an exotic ramble, who wants to be the only white man wherever he happens to be.
42:33 Well, yes! Me, for instance, if I invite you for a picnic at the Banfora waterfalls in southern Burkina Faso, apparently there are caimans not far off. He says caimans means crocodiles. I'd be embarrassed if we arrived and there were 40 coopérant couples with their children there, you see, listening to RFI at full blast on their transistor radios. I quite agree. But one has to be clear-eyed. 'I want Africa all to myself, like Tarzan.' And so, to answer your question and finish on this, let's talk about Tarzan.
43:04 Do you know why I'm talking to you about Tarzan? Because there's no coincidence. Because, look, Tarzan, literally. The films, Tarzan, the real ones, Johnny Weissmuller, the first ones, I'm not talking about the remakes, etc. What is Tarzan? There are unexplored patches in Africa. There are places where the white man's hand has not set foot, to put it as in Tintin in the Congo — the white man's hand has not set foot there. In short, you can fantasize however you like since you haven't been there. And there, we imagine there's the famous Missing Link, the link between beast and man, King Kong, the Yeti, I don't know, who will finally explain how we went from that ape Darwin talks about to you and me.
43:46 That's there, in the depths of the still-unexplored jungles of Africa. And indeed, we get there. We search for the elephant graveyard, you know the rest, the first Tarzan films. And what's down there at the bottom? No, it's not a beast. No, what is it? It's a German. Johnny Weissmuller. Which also means 'white miller.' I can't help it, but that's a coincidence. But what do you expect — Weiss? White? The white miller — he's doubly white. So there's a dolichocephalic German, a great swimmer, Olympic champion, there you go, magnificent.
44:19 I loved it, mind you. And I loved it as a kid. Even now, I still enjoy watching it. Who's down there at the bottom? He is the one who expresses the quintessence of Africa. He's white. And to reach him, to get to the heart of Africa, to his place, you have to cross mountains. You know these films? It's always the same structure. Chasms, where the porters fall into the chasms screaming. In short, we get rid of all the negroes who are there and end up with only three white men left to reach the origin of everything. These films are extraordinary.
44:49 So, I'm being serious to answer your question. At the bottom of anthropology there's an investment, in the Freudian sense. An investment in the purity of the native. I'm not just talking about negritude, because that's what Lévi-Strauss does with the Bororo, or others with the Navajo, or nowadays with the peoples of northern Thailand or the mountains above the Mekong.
45:20 There you go. I mean, there's an investment directed at what's supposed to be our origins. There's plenty to fantasize about. Nothing is more fantasy-generating, if I may coin the word, than the story of our origins. Cosmogonies... There you go. So, who would objectively win — I don't mean who would enjoy it more, because some would get annoyed — but who would objectively come out ahead, reading intelligently and in good faith?
Who benefits from the book: regionalisms and the cursed triangle 45:53 To begin with, somewhat, all regionalist excesses. Personally, I am in favor of the richness and particularity of each region. Careful — I mean, especially when you're French, having inherited a country that has both the Périgord and the Alps, that has Brittany and Corsica, that has — and I'll even tell you, Lorraine and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais — and I'm Corsican, and it's among the regions I love most. It's a thing of beauty, actually. I'm scandalized that we're no longer allowed to say 'the North.'
46:26 You have to say — what is it now? It's just been renamed the two departments — Hauts-de-France on one hand, or you have to say 'Côtes-d'Armor,' you can't say 'Côtes-du-Nord' anymore. Really, it's scandalous, I'll say I'm from the North anyway. Not that long ago, Jacques Brel sang 'the flat country which is mine.' It was open to all the winds of the North Sea. Nobody found that reductive. It was magnificent. On the contrary, it made me want to go see it. Now, well, now there absolutely have to be palm trees and olive trees everywhere. A bit wrapped up in pots so they don't die in winter. Have you noticed?
46:56 I'm not making this up. On the tram line around Paris, there are plastic palm trees at every station. Well, it's odd, it's a kind of obscenity of sex and sun, the three S's that are the basis of porn films, roughly speaking. I'm thinking of François Negroni, who wrote so well — and not just talked — about 'sexpatriation.' So, I wish upon regionalist excesses, when they are excesses, that is, when they express themselves in identitarian and above all divisive, hostile terms...
47:31 I'm Breton by anti-France, but nobody says they're French. Everyone says they're Poitevin. I said earlier Savoie, the cow-pen of France. Right? There are some, right in the middle of Picardy, who say that the origin of the whole language spoken in the Paris basin is Picard. It's true, one can always, and rightly so, insist on the particularity of a here and now that has its own history, its own geography, and therefore its incompressible richness. There you go. So that can already serve a purpose, by finally telling them, I'm confusing the Negro and the African.
48:02 I'm talking about my identity as that of a Negro when in fact I'm just an African who has to build his identity, like everyone else, all the time. Through relation rather than through substance, to put it in somewhat abstract terms. Right? As we saw very well at the start of the discussion, it's at my limits. It's when the Walloons, the Celts, meet the Germans who name themselves Gauls, Walloons, Vaudois and other Gauls. There you go. So I take advantage of that first.
48:32 Then, among the philosophers, I'll go quickly, among the ideologues — let's be more serious, because I say that ironically, there's nothing more serious than philosophers — but among the ideologues, in the dominant ideology, it does good to all those who disparage the universal. It's time to rehabilitate the universal. For me, the dominant discourse rests on a cursed triangle, that is, the dominant discourse is one that repudiates a cursed triangle: man, the universal, and progress.
49:06 Those are the three things most criticized in the dominant ideology. Progress. Talk with environmentalists, already progress is a nonsense to them. For them, it's the opposite. Progress, for them, leads to catastrophe. Right? Besides, the three are linked, because progress is what man instituted. So man too. Now it's rather the animal, the transgender person, or the woman, but not man. I'm playing on words on purpose, because within "man" there are 50% women anyway, even 52%. Well. And the universal.
49:36 What I was saying earlier — watch out — the Beninese, they want their children to be healthy. I'm sorry, that's not specifically African, but it matters to them. And they want a bit of money and good grades at school. Well, yes. So, once again, this cursed triangle, cursed by the dominant ideology. Progress, the universal, man, humanism — when he handles it, I remind you, Althusser: Marxism is not a humanism; Foucault: man is a recent invention, fortunately destined to disappear soon.
50:18 I'm not inventing anything. Faced with all this immersion in which we've been plunged, in a deadly ideology that, in my opinion, does much more for the anguish of today's man, even when he embraces those ideas — I mean, it's not very gratifying — it's a providential book. Because we find a thin but real fraternity there. I'm Poitevin, and in the end, what is said about the Black man is what I find in my village.
Negroni, L'Afrique fantasme, and development aid 50:49 I find the same oppositions between the one who has three cows in the valley and the one who lives in Poitiers. Already, people don't talk about them the same way — exactly like Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab thinker, who carefully distinguished the city-dweller from the Arab. The Arab is the Bedouin who grazes his flocks in the desert. He's the bottom of the social basket. But yes. I just spoke of a cursed triangle — here's a blessed triangle for me, you see. No, no, but it's true, quite so. So, precisely, twice he stood up against this essentialism, and stood out from the crowd for it.
51:22 He freed himself as much as he avoided falling into its traps. And there I was a bit quick earlier when I told you: François discovered Africa through cooperation work. That allowed him, with the lucidity he has, to produce a typology that nobody — nobody produced a typology as relevant and subtle as his at that time. Not just of the African, but above all of the expatriate, because that's François's originality. His book on holiday camps — sorry, on Africa Fantasized [L'Afrique fantôme] — both are excellent, but I'm thinking more of Africa Fantasized, which is more recent.
52:00 Besides, people think it's a book about Africa. No, it's a book about the fantasies induced by Africa in our white brain. Which is not the same thing. He shows very well that the African must combine completely contradictory qualities in the white man's fantasy world. He has the innocence of a child, he's a bit infantile, but at the same time he has bestial cruelty. One would need to know which. He saw that very well. To conclude, finally, there he's no longer joking — I love it when he jokes, but when suddenly he says there can be no balanced, positive, and generous relationship between two historical and political entities with such disparate levels of development.
52:52 I've never seen one country help another get out of underdevelopment, even though that's supposedly the programmed goal, development aid. We ourselves undercut each other, we Europeans, between Germans, French, English — who's going to sell their cars, their junk, their nuclear plants? And we're going to help Nigeria join the dance? No, there's a problem, they're taking us for fools there. That's not what it's for. It was about giving a bit of money so that certain dictatorships would stay in power and be kept from falling into the Soviet orbit, because at the UN that counts, it votes well for the right camp, and not, there you go.
53:26 Maybe we were right, we're not even arguing about the substance, but let's not claim we were seeking development aid. And once we've realized that, we understand better the moral assessments made today of 40 years of development aid, with countries poorer coming out than they were going in. I notice that since this development aid has been slackening because of the crisis, and so we're taking back the money we'd put there — the little we'd put there — to put it in Poland and Ukraine, because the little Nazis in Ukraine deserve French taxpayers' money more now than Mobutu's or old Bongo's dictatorships did back then.
53:58 we understand better why there's an economic boom that everyone's talking about now. It's the moment when development aid is slackening. That's quite extraordinary, really. There's a little chance there. So maybe the Chinese are being abject in Africa now, but I, an archaeo-colonial, am not going to give lessons to the Chinese. Good grief! We have no lessons to give. It can't be worse than what we did over 40 years — look at the record. So in a way, Negroni [Adotevi] admirably showed that phase.
54:29 That is to say, he doesn't talk about the African in himself. It's always a relation between the expatriate and the "impatriate." I don't mean anything else by that. There you go. Every neighborhood in Abidjan has its own gbaka line. My friends, I tell you, there are even some in Cocody. Maybe one day I'll have a car, but for now, I always ride the gbaka — hey, driver, now it's good to go, OK boss, now we can roll, sir up front, hand over the money, and apprentice, I'm getting off at Banco.
