The Politics of Biography in Africa

Borders, Margins, and Alternative Histories of Power

Anaïs Angelo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367679408
• eBook ISBN: 9781000432688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Institutions & Public Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Bringing together historians, political scientists, and literary analysts, this volume shows how biographical narratives can shed light on alternative, little known or under-researched aspects of state power in African politics.

Part 1 shows how biographical narratives breathe new life into subjects who, upon decolonization, had been reduced to silence - women, workers, and radical politicians. The contributors analyze the complex relationship between biographical narratives and power, questioning either the power of biographical codes peculiar to western, colonial origins, or the power to shape public memory. Part 2 reflects on the act of (auto-)biography writing as an exercise of power, one that blurs the lines between truth and invention. (Auto-)biographical narratives appear as politicized, ambiguous stories. Part 3 focuses on female leadership during and after colonization, exploring on how women gained, lost, or reinvented "power". Brought together, the contributions of this volume show that the function of biographical narratives should no longer oscillate between romanticized narratives and historical evidence; their varied formats all offer fruitful opportunities for a multidisciplinary dialogue.

This book will be of interest to scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds working on the African postcolonial state, the decolonization process, women's and gender studies, and biography writing.

Part 1

Scales, borders, and frameworks

1 What are the boundaries of African political biography?

Reflection based on the Biographical Dictionary of African Mobilizations and Protests, the “Maitron Afrique.”

Martin Mourre, Ophélie Rillon and Alexis Roy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133452-1

Keeping names alive and writing history: that was Jean Maitron’s objective when, in 1955, he launched the project Biographical Dictionary of the French Labour Movement. Now a monumental documentation of social history, the dictionary contains more than 189,000 biographical narratives of men and women—railway workers, electricians, teachers, intellectuals, elected officials, or “mere” activists, socialists, communists, or anarchists—who participated, from 1789 to date, in “labor and social movement.” Far from being interested only in the great figures of the struggle, the aim of the dictionary is to bring out of the shadows thousands of anonymous individuals who have left few traces in archives and memoirs but have contributed in significant ways to history. Almost 60 years later, a group of researchers decided to extend this enterprise to the African continent and create a “Maitron Afrique.”¹ Backed by the initial project, the Biographical Dictionary of African Mobilizations and Protests is consistent with its founder’s objective, while opening new avenues in the writing of African history, and renewing the biographical approach.

As members of the Maitron Afrique group, we intend to examine the reflections and gaps generated by the dictionary’s geographical and epistemological scope. The importation of concepts and methods forged in the West presents difficulties that are constantly discussed in African Studies in general, and in the field of political biography writing in particular. Although the opening up of African studies allows us to depart from culturalism to achieve a welcome normalization of research on activism in Africa, it also contributes to the fixing in stone of concepts and categories.² The risk is to erase the complexity of the societies studied and keep unconventional individuals and forms of commitment³ in the shadow. The “political biography”⁴ as conceived in Maitron Afrique differs from the editorial practices aimed at edifying the trajectory of prominent figures of institutional politics. These have two main biases: they risk falling into the trap of the “biographical illusion” Bourdieu warned against and remove from historical narratives the trajectories of the defeated, or the experiences of activism that have remained on the “fringes” of official narratives. They also stifle the articulation of individual and collective logics in which singular lives⁵ took part. The borders of activism and “political biography” envisaged in this African dictionary still need to be defined.

While attention to life trajectories is a long-standing practice in African Studies—as it is in studies on the working class and on women—in recent years it has contributed to a new approach to the history and sociology of activism in Africa.⁶ African Studies have not escaped the turn instigated by the “return of the actor” in the 1980s. Paradoxically, the movement for “politics from below,” which emerged in France during the same period and produced works on everyday social life in the same breath, threw “political, event-driven and biographical history” out of the window.⁷ It took another decade for the biographical approach to regain its legitimacy. From its status as “source,” biography gradually became a method of analyzing forms of engagement. In the social and human sciences, emphasis is now placed on activists’ careers, resources, bifurcation of trajectories, family legacies,⁸ individual life cycles, and the links between spheres of life (work, family, activism, school, religion). It was under the influence of this new research that the desire to create an open and collaborative database grew: Maitron Afrique allows us to “collectivize” and disseminate knowledge. This multidisciplinary literature has contributed to the imploding of the old narrow boundaries of activism, seen through the prism of a male worker activist in the context of parliamentary regimes⁹—a model partly used by the original Maitron dictionary, but with which members of Maitron Afrique feel ill-at-ease and by which they feel constrained.

The conception of labour movements which colours European historiography of social and political struggles, constitutes the first bias.¹⁰ Apart from South Africa, and to a lesser extent Nigeria and Kenya, the working class constitutes a tiny part of African societies, which are overwhelmingly rural. The category of public employees (also a minority in Africa) is a further bias Maitron Afrique has difficulty in overcoming, as it is still over-represented in the dictionary. At this stage, it is not only a question of the socio-biographical reality of African societies; the limited state of research (mainly oriented towards urban themes) and the inherent limits of available sources significantly constrain the conceptual developments of the Maitron Afrique. In colonial and independent state archives, peasant societies are generally seen as an indistinct “mass” without individuality, thus hindering access to biographical data. Conversely, sources are abundant for retracing the trajectories of male (and to a lesser extent female¹¹) urban workers connected to international political networks (socialists, communists, third-world activists, humanists, alter-globalists, etc.). Archives of political organizations (and often, of their political repression) make it possible to retrace (male) activists’ journeys and exchanges, dreams and aspirations, ideological tensions and various forms of identification, while some individuals have also written their memoirs and autobiographies to leave a trace in history.¹²

Maitron Afrique thus faces a serious methodological challenge: finding biographical traces and clues in the sources; placing biography at the heart of the writing of the history of African struggle; and questioning the boundaries of activism as it has been conceptualized in line with Western societies. To shed empirical light on these issues, we propose a perambulation through the dictionary’s narratives and gray areas, and this will follow three paths: the historical temporality, the ideologies, and at last the geographical space embraced by Maitron Afrique. Rather than providing definitive answers to the problems raised, this stroll allows us to sketch out a reflection on the use of biography applied to the study of activism in Africa.

Temporalities of activism: African ways

Change of continent, change of scenery: the Maitron Afrique compels a rethink of periodization of the struggles of the African continent. 1789: the date speaks for itself in the French national narrative. It is easy to understand that 1789 does not have the same echo in other parts of the world. The French Revolution cannot be divorced from the history of the Caribbean, where slaves and freedmen of color rose up against the colonial order demanding equal rights; or Senegal, where the inhabitants of Saint-Louis sent a Register of Grievances to Paris. However, the founding moment of contemporary French political history sounds relatively hollow when regarding African history. Beyond that date, it is broadly the issue of periodization in African history that we are confronted with. How can we depart from a Western-centered approach to chronology, and specifically the “contemporary history” category?¹³ “Periodization is a construction,” recalls Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, and this construction inevitably refers to an interpretation. Therefore, what could periodization of activism in Africa be, if we postulate the relevance of a temporal grid common to such multiple societies? Is the concept of activism uniform, stemming from the Western world, from the time of the Enlightenment and from labor history?

As mentioned above, Maitron Afrique is dependent on the state of historical research. In this regard, the study of struggles and protests in Africa focuses almost solely on contemporary periods, from the end of the 18th century to the present day. For the earliest periods of this time sequence, reference to “activism” seems somewhat anachronistic. The authors have favored other terminologies to qualify the revolts studied—banditry, rebellion, or resistance—to better translate the modalities of protest against established order and domination (slavery, colonialism, royalty).¹⁴ The biographical approach, although constrained by lack of access to sources, has notably made it possible to reconstruct the trajectories of slaves—those who emancipated, and others who rebelled and/or fought for the abolition of slavery.¹⁵ Situated on the boundaries between individual emancipation and collective struggles, do these life stories have a place in the dictionary? Our colleague Marie Rodet suggested that we write a biographical narrative of a little-known figure who resisted slavery.¹⁶ This was Second Lieutenant Mansouka (c.1860–1920), a “Senegalese Tirailleur” from French Sudan who was not an “activist,” strictly speaking, but whose trajectory reflects the struggles of his time. He emancipated himself from slavery and opposed the local chieftaincy. His individual and family struggle was part of a broader context of collective slave revolts at the beginning of the 20th century in West Africa. Although Lieutenant Mansouka has not yet found his place in Maitron Afrique (though he will soon be included), his life story sheds new light on the concept of activism by diversifying the frontline of struggles, including those that are usually overlooked.

At the other extreme of social hierarchies, but still for the same historical period, is the issue of including great West African leaders who led jihads and built empires in the 19th century. Samori Touré is one of the most ambivalent figures. His memory is deeply cleaved; leader of a “dyula revolution,” in the words of Yves Person,¹⁷ he was considered a bloodthirsty tyrant by the colonial administration, has been seen as a slaver in some Ivorian and Malian societies, and is celebrated as a pan-African hero of the resistance to colonization in Sékou Touré’s Guinea.¹⁸ However, beyond the controversies relating to memory, the biographical history of Samori Touré challenges the trajectory of great men, their relationship to power, and the emancipation of a few men versus the domination of other sections of society. While the issue is not about circumventing the challenges raised by the biographical narratives of the continent’s national heroes, Maitron Afrique’s contributors favor historical periods that can give pride of place to less emblematic trajectories.¹⁹

In the end, without this being an editorial orientation, the anti-colonial struggle constitutes the core of the narratives. In January 2019, more than two-thirds of the narratives concern men and women born between 1910 and 1935, who had grown up in the context of the political liberalization in the colonies, the struggle for equal rights (political, economic, social),²⁰ and then the struggle for independence. Many men and women went through the colonial school system before finding work as administrative assistants in education, healthcare, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 Scales, borders, and frameworks
• PART 2 Autobiographies as construction sites of power
• PART 3 Hide and seek: Women, politics, and biography writing
• Index