Black Cosmopolitanism and Anticolonialism

Pivotal Moments

Babacar M'Baye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138331877
• eBook ISBN: 9781351984966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book examines the cosmopolitanism and anticolonialism that black intellectuals, such as the African American W.E.B. Du Bois, the Caribbeans Marcus Garvey and George Padmore, and the Francophone West Africans (Kojo Touvalou-Houénou, Lamine Senghor, and Léopold Sédar Senghor) developed during the two world wars by fighting for freedom, equality, and justice for Senegalese and other West African colonial soldiers (known as tirailleurs ) who made enormous sacrifices to liberate France from German oppression.

Focusing on the solidarity between this special group of African American, Caribbean, and Francophone West African intellectuals against French colonialism, this book uncovers pivotal moments of black Anglophone and Francophone cosmopolitanism and traces them to published and archived writings produced between 1914 and the middle of the twentieth century.

1 Blaise Diagne’s cosmopolitanism and views on French colonialism

In her essay, “Who Speaks for Africa?”, Conklin argues that both the Guyanese intellectual René Maran and Diagne

moved in multiple worlds, with considerably more complex identities than simply black or white, French or noir that the sharp dichotomies of Pan-Africanism might suggest—complexities that echoed the permeable and unstable boundaries of the French color line overseas and at home.

(2003, 303–304)

Conklin introduces a concept that is desperately needed in the study of African political and intellectual figures—this is the notion that a continental African can be both black and French in the same way an American or Caribbean can be black, white, Anglophone, Francophone and more at the same time. Therefore, blacks of both Africa and the diaspora can have multiple consciousnesses and identities. Emphasizing this diversity is vital since, unlike blacks of the diaspora, those of Africa are not usually perceived as having complex and “fragmented” selves. One of these complex black Africans was the Senegalese leader Blaise Diagne, who used his privileged space within the métropole’s administration to be a voice of both French and black cosmopolitanisms. Drawing on French republicanism, he developed a cosmopolitan discourse that firmly believed in the métropole’s will to uplift the conditions of its colonial populations. In defense of this cosmopolitanism, Diagne developed a fervor and loyalty to the French empire and a civilizing mission that often led him to minimize the colonial populations’ agony. Nonetheless, in spite of his unbending assimilationism and allegiance to the French empire, Diagne ultimately was a black cosmopolitan and radical leader. His fascination with French cosmopolitanism did not prevent him from developing a black African equivalent of this discourse that sometimes prioritized the needs of the colonial populations over the empire’s exigencies.

Indeed, Diagne was a black cosmopolitan since he often denounced indigènes’ unfair status and limited rights and the inequalities between tirailleurs and their white French counterparts. Yet, he often contradicted his black cosmopolitanism by frequently ignoring these inequities and supporting the use of forced labor in Senegal. Therefore, Diagne was an enigmatic and conflicted leader whose ambivalent ideas about indigènes, servitude, and tirailleurs must be understood in the troubling World War I context when his role of spokesperson for French colonialism in Africa prevented him from publicly disparaging this system. Re-inscribing Diagne into the anticolonialism to which he contributed despite his frequent support of colonization and obligatory labor, this chapter examines the ways in which he contradicted his self-defeatist, elitist, and condescending views about indigènes by sometimes defending the rights of tirailleurs in unflinching ways. Referring to speeches that he gave at la Chambre des députés [the French Chamber of Deputies hereafter referred to as the Chamber] and comments that he made in La Dépêche Coloniale et Maritime and Les Annales Coloniales, this chapter shows how Diagne was a paradoxical black intellectual who was so obsessed with his cosmopolitan loyalties to France that he was willing to tolerate the suffering of members of his own race and birth-country for the benefit of an empire that was bitterly struggling to control its West African dominions.

A major problem in African studies is the critics’ neglect of Diagne’s role in black anticolonialism even if this leader did not resist French imperialism in the same ways in which Du Bois, Garvey, Touvalou, Padmore, and the two Senghors did. The critics’ denial of Diagne’s contributions to this history stems from their reluctance to acknowledge this leader’s deserved place in black radical traditions. In “Politics and Nationalism in West Africa, 1919–1935,” A. Adu Boahen argues that many “radical intellectuals” later “came to regard the Blaise Diagne of the 1920s and 30s as conservative and even anti-African” (1985, 646). Similarly, in reference to the Maran-Diagne litigation of November 1924, Hillary Jones states:

Diagne won the case. The trial, which captured the attention of the mainstream press in Paris, however, symbolized the shifting politics of black identity and politics in the post-World War I period. Blaise Diagne’s position appeared more conservative vis à vis this increasingly radical and anticolonial movement.

(2010, 100)

One of the reasons why Diagne is taken out of black radicalism is the historical association of early twentieth-century Pan-Africanism with elitism. In Framing a Radical African Atlantic: African American Agency, West African Intellectuals and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, Holger Weiss explains the roots of this concordance when he observes:

Political Pan-Africanism, it seemed in the eyes of the radical African American intelligentsia, by the 1920s, was a bourgeoisie intellectual movement, which had little interest towards the masses and their plight in the African Atlantic. In their view, a totally different approach had to be taken if one wanted to challenge to [sic] [the] racial and the colonial system, namely one that would engage the masses of downtrodden toilers and agricultural workers.

(2014, 53–54)

Diagne must not be written out of Pan-Africanism and anticolonialism because he stressed the importance of black solidarity numerous times even if he envisioned this unity to be balanced and constructive rather than just reactionary. His ideologies reveal divergences in his association with Du Bois and the Pan-African movement. Yet they should not exclude him from black radicalism, anticolonialism, and other liberation movements that must be conceived in terms of variations, disagreements, and contradictions as well as similarities, consensus, and accords. Dismissing Diagne from such struggles flattens black history by representing it as a linear trajectory in which intellectuals fight oppression only in similar ways. This methodology is problematic because it neglects the different ways in which black intellectuals resist domination through different means that may include Pan-Africanism, cosmopolitanism, and (or) radicalism, among other ideologies. Addressing these issues requires a reconceptualization of black radicalism as liberation strategies with cosmopolitan representations of the world that may sometimes involve negotiations with the status quo or hegemony. The need to re-theorize black radicalism is apparent in the 2009 essay “The African Diaspora Today: Flows and Motions,” in which Anthony Bogues argues that the “ideas of black liberation, pan-Africanism, and forms of black internationalism,” that evolved in London, Paris, New York, Cape Town, São Paulo, and Moscow during the early twentieth century emerged “sometimes independently, at other times in collaboration and then in competition” and developed “a set of political ideas about what would constitute black freedom” (2009, 2).

Bogues’s flexible conception of black radicalism as a pliable, rather than rigid, set of ideas allows us to understand how Diagne could have both defended and disparaged the French colonial establishment while working within the métropole to reduce and, later, end the empire’s injustices toward Africans. Although he defended colonialism, Diagne was often anticolonial because his support of French cosmopolitanism enabled him to take a radical stance against a colonial administration that ignored its ill-treatment of World War I tirailleurs. Denouncing these injustices, Diagne appealed to a fair cosmopolitanism founded on loyalty to a transnational French empire in which he saw the métropole and Senegal as making equal contributions. His cosmopolitanism accepted French colonialism while rejecting undemocratic, racist, and prejudiced European attitudes toward tirailleurs that he viewed as counterproductive for the empire’s reputation and prosperity. Examining Diagne’s views on colonialism within the theoretical framework of his cosmopolitanism helps us to uncover his pivotal role in the development of a subtly radical intellectual and political tradition about the relations between the métropole (France) and Senegal. My definition of “métropole” is informed by the materialistic praxis which theorizes this term as a central locus of the empire where directives about vital colonies are made. The métropole and the colonies are socially, economically, politically, and, above all, financially, dependent on each other. Discussing the interactions between the two regions, Carla Freeman alludes to “the structural relationship of dependency between ‘the hinterland’ (the supplier of raw material) and the ‘métropole’ (the center for decision making)” (2000, 82).

Another issue in the scholarship about Diagne is how critics mainly represent him as an assimilationist or hypocritical leader who either betrayed his people or failed to defend them against European oppression. In Nationalists and Nomads, Miller describes Diagne “as the walking embodiment of assimilation” who “succeeded in recruiting 60,000 soldiers with ‘virtually no armed resistance’” (1998, 17). Likewise, Martin Thomas represents Diagne, in The French Empire Between The Wars: Imperialism, Politics And Society, as a proponent of assimilationism from whom Senghor, Césaire, and other black students in 1930s Paris wanted to distinguish themselves (2005, 256). In a similar vein, Michael Crowder depicts Diagne as a “prime example of the French pursuing a policy of assimilation when it suited them, and abandoning it when it did not” (1962, 30). First, the three scholars ignore that assimilationism was a strategy Diagne frequently used to defend the Senegalese in the French empire. Second, Diagne did not remain assimilationist since he often supported in his speeches the idea of an autonomous Senegalese society that could become independent from the métropole in the future. Although it was a part of his rhetoric, assimilationism was not the major trait of Diagne’s philosophy. Instead, cosmopolitanism was the dominant attribute in Diagne’s discourse since he always attempted to find a balance between a France that theoretically accepted Senegalese as equals while practically oppressing these populations and denying their humanity.

Diagne’s story is that of a tragic hero who rose from humble beginnings to become the highest administrative public officer from colonies known as A.O.F. (Afrique Occidentale Française [French West Africa]). Most records show that Diagne was born on October 13, 1872, on Gorée Island, in Senegal, although Jean-Francois Maurel dates the figure’s birth to October 14, 1872.¹ Diagne’s birth on Gorée is symbolically important since this island was one of the major slave houses in West Africa during the Atlantic human trade. Moreover, as Amady Aly Dieng argues, Diagne’s nativity is historically significant because it occurred two years after the fall of the Second French Empire and the beginning of the Second French Republic (1990, 19).

Diagne’s mother was a millet pounder while his father was a cook on Gorée (Gerbi, 2006, 75). Diagne was a product of local ethnic and cultural mixing that reflected the hybridity of colonial Senegalese society. A 1934 posthumous homage indicates that “M. Blaise Diagne devait avoir des ascendances confuses que l’histoire même de l’île justifiait” [Mr. Blaise Diagne must have confused ancestries that stemmed from the history of the island].”² Discussing his ethnic origins, Jones writes:

She [Diagne’s mother Gnagna Preira] traced her maternal line to the Lebou ethnic group of Rufisque and her paternal line to the Afro-Portuguese population of today’s Guinea-Bissau. Diagne’s father, Niokhar Diagne, came from the Serer ethnic group and grew up in the town of Joal.

(2010, 93)

While his ethnic origins remain unclear, it is established that Diagne was an intellectually precocious child who had already mastered the French language at a very young age. His gifted intelligence soon caught the attention of his uncle Adolphe Crespin, who allowed the child to finish elementary education in Senegal and be sent to France. Diagne graduated from the École Laïque de Saint-Louis in August 1884 with a palmarès prize shortly before a letter from the Governor of Senegal, dated August 24, 1884, awarded him a scholarship to the École Professionnelle Fabre, in Aix-en-Provence, France.³ Suffering from loneliness and maladjustment, Diagne failed in his studies in the métropole and was sent back to Senegal in 1890. There, as G. Wesley Johnson states, “he [Diagne] redeemed himself in Saint-Louis by graduating at the head of his class in secondary school. Then Diagne passed a rigorous competition for entering the French colonial customs service, which was still open to qualified African applicants” (1966, 237).⁴ Diagne completed his administrative education in a timely manner in 1892 (the same year he was admitted to the colonial customs officers’ administration school and was, thereafter, sent to numerous parts of the French empire. The areas where he served included: Dahomey (1892), Congo (July 1897–October 1898), Réunion (1898–1902), Madagascar (1902–1909), and Cayenne (1910–1913). In 1913, following a six-month leave of convalescence in France, Diagne returned to Senegal to be involved in politics.

Though it is uncertain whether Diagne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Writing Africa into black Atlantic studies
• 1 Blaise Diagne’s cosmopolitanism and views on French colonialism
• 2 W. E. B. Du Bois’s cosmopolitanism, anticolonialism, and relations with Blaise Diagne
• 3 Marcus Garvey’s cosmopolitanism, anticolonialism, and responses to Blaise Diagne
• 4 Kojo Touvalou-Houénou’s cosmopolitanism, anticolonialism, and relations with Marcus Garvey
• 5 Lamine Senghor’s cosmopolitanism, anticolonialism, and similarities with Marcus Garvey
• 6 George Padmore’s cosmopolitanism and views on French colonialism
• 7 Léopold Sédar Senghor’s cosmopolitanism and responses to French colonialism
• Conclusion: Roadblocks to black cosmopolitanism and France’s integration of its minorities
• Notes
• Index