2024-10-03 05:00:00
Africa is caught in the grip of two colonizations. Although Western colonization is more denied, Arab colonization, under the guise of Islam, had a greater impact on the consciousness of the people, due to religion, coercion and geographical proximity. Not only did he win over the elites, he convinced the masses. It was a gradual maneuver, even more skillful because it succeeded in establishing authenticity, localizing itself and contributing to the process of rejection of France, which had also colonized it, effectively establishing a community of political and religious destiny .
Over time, this Islamism, which turned in customs, modified the calendar, prohibited the plurality of references and pushed some local identities, put together the idea of a necessary communion between two victims of Western colonial order. If this religion is raised, it is a way to reject the West as well as it offers in terms of dogmas, rights and absolute benefits. In the Algerian War, religion was used as a tool of resistance against the Western order, drawing on the sad legacy of colonial crimes. On the fringes of the most radical religion, it was literati such as the Muslim Brotherhood, through Sayyid Qutb, who theorized this clash of civilizations long before Huttington. In a world that has seen the Iranian Revolution and 9/11, the Ummah is a geopolitical issue in post-colonial disputes.
This proximity is less clear when history is taken into account, given the bloody nature of the Arab-Muslim slave trade. This opportunistic story also flourished thanks to the mosques and the diplomacy of the religious community, skillfully managed by Wahhabism. Islam has often been a magnet for this international of the damned of the world. It offers an anti-model that expands its spectrum, thanks to its great transcendence, if necessary by force. At the crossroads of this waste therefore there are various lies, which led to an opportunity. In the case of Senegal, this rejection also relates to the resistance to colonialism of religious symbols such as Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba, who opposed the colonialists, raised local authenticity and called on his followers to face. Although the details of this resistance must be unbundled for reasons of historical justice, in Senegalese legends this version is accepted without ground. That is an unparalleled person who founded a great brotherhood whose power is growing, with a real identity and political and religious projects.
Strange situations emerge from this whole picture of imaginary worlds, intertwined with real facts but also with exaggerated or even rewritten legends. The jealously guarded colonial archives reveal much more about numerous collaborations. Colonization is not the exclusive preserve of the West. Nor slavery, which was also inter-African, as studied by Ibrahima Thioub with some difficulties, with less dramatic effects than the Arab-Muslim and transatlantic slave trade. This confusion and uncertainty about an unpredictable history, this inability to have clear thoughts creates the conditions for defeat, because the other aspect of rejection is related to the context, the impotence, the frustration, the bile in the center of resentment where the other side is. it must be the guilty, the person responsible.
It is the African situation, ultimately, that explains the industrious nature. If the continent had overcome its basic problems, we can bet that there would have been less criminalization of the colonial fact. But as we have seen, there was no break with the past, and independence did not foster local engineering, and the continued targeting of autopsy as an act of treachery opens up this convenient field where no one is to blame. colonization and the tragedies listed above. That is why the entire accused dispute, this model of the community of thought, produced the inexorable inability not to look the other way, to keep the two ends, to produce, to create and not to submit to the temptation of eternal sacrifice. It often seals decisively the inability to act, to hunt down the enemy, which is inevitably external. While all this lends legitimacy to the complaint, Africa’s history is not limited to colonization.
However painful, it is still an important and decisive bracket in light of all that came before, but History is not complete in it. Its forms are not guaranteed to last eternity. And, no matter what anyone says, even if the picture is bleak, there is significant progress in allowing African countries to create their own destiny, elect leaders, govern and create meaning, because it is ” incompleteness” of our condition as historical societies. By mixing everything with facts, we forget that this colonization does not necessarily always achieve its goal, that the resistance kept the hearts of men invincible from the beginning. It is this colonization that has to be explored, allowing the good news to emerge from the chaos: no colonization can completely overthrow it. Hybridity and multiple identity is the human condition. It is the illusion of purity. The search for the latter, as Nazi suprematism teaches us in many ways, is based on racism.
Elgas – @Sophie Perrin Kamurasi
The author
Elgas is a young, brilliant Senegalese storyteller and actor living in France. In addition to this essay, which has sparked major debates in Africa and Europe, he has a novel to his credit, A black manto come from E/O. Elgas is also a journalist and host of the RFI (Radio France International) radio broadcast. Africa, memories of a continent.
The festival
After the success of the first edition, The CaLibro Africa Festival returns to Città di Castello, from 4 to 6 October, renewing the collaboration between Edizioni E/O and CaLibro Festival. This year’s international guests include Franco-Congolese writer Érik Mukendi; the Senegalese intellectual Elgas; the Djiboutian writer Abdourahman Waberi; from Nigeria the writer Chibundu Onuzo. During the festival there will be a tribute to Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan writer and journalist who died in 2019; and a tribute from Pier Paolo Capovilla to the poetry of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Among the Italian guests Emanuela Anechoum, Saba Anglana, Riccardo Bozzi, Chiara Piaggio, Daniele Piccini, Giorgia Sallusti, Daniele Scaglione and Pietro Veronese,
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