后殖民文化语言学研究

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE This article was downloaded by: [CDL Journals Account] On: 28 May 2009 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 785022369] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Interventions Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713702083 LANGUAGE AND ONTOLOGY IN COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL SENEGAL Richard Steadman-Jones a a University of Sheffield, Online Publication Date: 01 March 2006 To cite this Article Steadman-Jones, Richard(2006)'LANGUAGE AND ONTOLOGY IN COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL SENEGAL',Interventions,8:1,102 — 115 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13698010500514913 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698010500514913 Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. L A N G U A G E A N D O N T O L O G Y I N C O L O N I A L A N D P O S T C O L O N I A L S E N E G A L Richard Steadman-Jones University of Sheffield ................ This paper focuses on the resemblances that exist between two texts, one colonial and one postcolonial, both descriptive of the Senegalese language, Wolof. The colonial text was published in 1829 by the former French governor of Senegal, Jacques-Franc¸ois Roger, while the postcolonial text is a speech delivered in 1966 by the first President of independent Senegal, Le´opold Se´dar Senghor. In both cases, the structure of the Wolof language is said to encode ideas that are only now emerging in western scientific culture. Senghor mobilizes this assertion to support his claim that a new ‘Civilization of the Universal’ is developing, fully informed by the values of black Africans. But is his text haunted by the ghost of Roger? Does it merely recapitulate a romanticized idea of African languages that was circulating in the early years of colonial occupation? In fact, Roger’s text, far from constituting a straightforward representation of the colonized ‘other’, seems to anticipate the desire for self-transformation and ‘becoming’ that is such a striking feature of Senghor’s. By exploring this aspect of Roger’s work, it becomes possible to read Senghor’s speech as ironizing the desire for self- transformation that was evident in the moment of colonization, and this in turn ...................................................................................... interventions Vol. 8(1) 102�/115 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online) Copyright # 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13698010500514913 Senegal Wolof Senghor language ontology colonial linguistics D o w n lo ad ed B y: [ CD L Jo ur na ls A cc ou nt ] At : 20 :3 6 28 M ay 2 00 9 opens up the possibility of understanding the speech as a far less conciliatory text than it might otherwise appear. ................ L e´o p o l d S e´d a r S e ng h o r o n t h e la n g ua g e o f th e Wo l o f s It is significant that in Wolof, the main language of Senegal, there are at least three words to translate the word ‘spirit’: xel , sago , or degal , whereas images have to be used for the word ‘matter’: lef (thing) or yaram (body). (Senghor 1970: 184) This brief discussion of the Wolof lexicon derives from a speech that Le´opold Se´dar Senghor made at the first International Festival of African Arts held in Dakar in 1966. The speech constitutes a defence of the concept of ‘negritude’, and the way in which the linguistic discussion fits into the overall shape of the argument is important. Senghor’s speech envisages a new humanism emerging in the postcolonial world, a ‘Civilization of the Universal’ that will not be Eurocentric but fully informed by the values of black Africans. Negritude, defined as the ‘sum of the cultural values of the black world’, is seen as making a contribution to this emergent world-view through a process of ‘dialogue’. What is more, Senghor suggests, western artists and thinkers are already reaching towards this new humanism and, in the process, exploring artistic forms and articulating philosophical ideas that are distinctively African in character. Thus the importance of negritude is evident in the very fact that westerners are now acknowledging the limitations of their old rationalist world-view and, in effect, becoming more African. In the artistic sphere Senghor points to the work of Picasso and Braque, whose interest in African art he sees not as a problematic appropriation but as a recognition of the universal values that the work embodies. In the philosophical sphere he has to adopt a more indirect form of argumentation. Whereas it is relatively straightforward to document Picasso’s visits to the ethnographic museum in Paris, it is more difficult to show that modern western philosophers have found direct inspiration in African thought. What Senghor does instead is to point to similarities between contemporary developments in western philosophy and traditional African world-views, his evidence for the latter deriving from a range of sources including the structure of Wolof (Senghor 1970: 179�/92). In developing this argument, Senghor focuses on one particular western thinker, the palaeontologist and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881�/1955). Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophical writing is largely concerned with achieving a synthesis of the scientific and religious LANGUAGE AND ONTOLOGY IN SENEGAL 103........................ Richard Steadman-Jones D o w n lo ad ed B y: [ CD L Jo ur na ls A cc ou nt ] At : 20 :3 6 28 M ay 2 00 9 perspectives that informed his own life and work, and what Senghor finds attractive in his thought is his assertion of the underlying unity of all things: Teilhard de Chardin transcends the old dualism of the philosophers and scientists, which Marx and Engels had perpetuated by giving matter precedence over the spirit. He advanced the theory that the stuff of the universe is not composed of two realities, but of a single reality in the shape of two phenomena; that there is not matter and energy, not even matter and spirit, but spirit-matter, just as there is space-time. (Senghor 1970: 182�/3) At this point the relevance of the Wolof lexicon becomes clear. For Senghor, the fact that Wolof has words for ‘spirit’ but not ‘matter’ implies that its speakers have a monistic view of the universe comparable with that of Teilhard de Chardin. They can talk about ‘matter’ only by using the names of specific phenomena and there is no way for them to draw a distinction between the material and the spiritual at a more fundamental level. So, just as Picasso’s turn to African art can be seen as confirming the necessity of African cultural values for the new postcolonial humanism, so, Senghor argues, the coincidence of Teilhard de Chardin’s ontology and that embedded in the structure of Wolof provides evidence for similar possibi- lities at a philosophical level. The central claim of this essay is that Senghor’s brief representation of the Wolof lexicon and the manner in which this representation is put to work in the overall framework of his argument make his treatment of the language strikingly similar to that found in an early colonial grammar published in 1829 by a former French governor of Senegal, Jacques-Franc¸ois, baron Roger. This work, Recherches philosophiques sur la langue ouolofe , appeared in Paris two years after Roger’s term as governor ended, and parts of the text are very much like Senghor’s in that they characterize the Wolof language as encoding a vision of the world that is only now emerging in western thought. To suggest that Senghor’s work echoes the tropes of colonial discourse is hardly an original claim and it is possible to point to colonial writers more recent than Roger whose work feeds directly into Senghor’s exposition of negritude, not least Placide Tempels, whose influential monograph La Philosophie Bantoue appeared in French in 1945. But to focus only on the relationship between Senghor and his immediate predecessors is to overlook the ways in which his work interacts with the colonial archive in a broader and more dynamic sense, a point that can be brought out by looking more closely at the ways in which the work of Tempels informs the theory of negritude before moving on to examine the ways in which Senghor’s essay echoes the work of Roger. Tempels was a Franciscan missionary and his account of ‘Bantu philosophy’ arose directly from his work in the Belgian Congo. The central interventions �/ 8 :1 104......................... D o w n lo ad ed B y: [ CD L Jo ur na ls A cc ou nt ] At : 20 :3 6 28 M ay 2 00 9 contention of his text is that underlying the beliefs and behaviour of the peoples of central and southern Africa is a world-view, a ‘logically coherent ontology’, that informs and structures their culture in a diverse range of areas including language, religion, and law. Africans cannot articulate this ontology explicitly, he asserts, but it can nevertheless be recovered through a long process of observation and inference. While Tempels’ work does not present a systematic analysis of any African language, it does imply that the study of languages constitutes an essential part of this process of enquiry. In chapter two, for example, he identifies the notion of ‘vital force’ and the principle that ‘force is the nature of being’ as central components of the philosophical system he is describing (Tempels 1959: 27�/46). In the early stages of the discussion he states that ‘[i]n every Bantu language it is easy to recognize the words or phrases denoting a force, which is not used in an exclusively bodily sense, but in the sense of the integrity of our whole being’ (Tempels 1959: 35). Thus, the lexicon of a language is characterised as one manifestation of the world-view of its speakers and the semantic resources of the language are seen as evidence for this underlying ontology. A little later Tempels discusses the notion that ‘vital force’ can be attenuated through external forces and, on this occasion, he cites some relevant terms in order to reinforce his point: In their languages, too, are words like ‘kufwa’ and ‘fukwididila’, indicating the progressing stages of loss of force, of vitality, and the superlative of which signifies total paralysis of the power to live. It is quite erroneous for us to translate these words by ‘to die’ and ‘to die entirely’. (Tempels 1959: 32) The resemblance between this text and Senghor’s essay is clear. Both identify a sophisticated world-view implicit in one or another African culture and both indicate that language constitutes one form of evidence through which it can be uncovered. But in other ways Tempels’ text is quite different from Senghor’s. For Senghor, the point of uncovering the ontology implicit in Senegalese culture is to show what Africa has to contribute to the ‘Civilization of the Universal’ and, in particular, to demonstrate the ways in which African world-views can complement the partial vision of westerners. For Tempels, the aim is to equip ‘all who wish to civilise, educate and raise the Bantu’ with an understanding of the people with whose welfare they are concerned. The question is not how westerners are likely to be transformed through contact with Africans but the ways in which a knowledge of African thought can help westerners convert them to Christianity and engage in the kinds of administrative and judicial work associated with benevolent paternalism. As Tempels himself puts it: LANGUAGE AND ONTOLOGY IN SENEGAL 105........................ Richard Steadman-Jones D o w n lo ad ed B y: [ CD L Jo ur na ls A cc ou nt ] At : 20 :3 6 28 M ay 2 00 9 What the great majority of the Bantu want from us, and what they will accept with profound joy and gratitude, is our wisdom, our means of increasing vital force. On the other hand, if we want to take anything to the Bantu and if we want them to accept the good things we have to offer, we must get to know how to give them in forms assimilable to Bantu thought. (Tempels 1959: 116�/17) Senghor’s argument can be seen as reversing the directionality of this relationship in challenging and provocative ways. But the contention of this paper is that, even in his account of African world-views as a means through which westerners can themselves be transformed, Senghor is echoing texts to be found in the colonial archive and I shall focus particularly on the representation of Wolof to be found in Roger’s grammar as evidence for this claim. The homology of the two representations �/ Roger’s and Senghor’s �/ may, on the face of it, seem problematic. The argument of Senghor’s speech is troubling in the way it makes the value of negritude dependent on western recognition and it is difficult to read it without thinking of Fanon’s scorching engagement with the master-slave dialectic in chapter seven of Black Skin, White Masks . The idea that it also replicates an early example of French colonial discourse might seem to compound this view, suggesting that Senghor’s text is merely fetishizing the ‘paternalistic curiosity’ that Fanon (1986: 221) sees as such a poor substitute for recognition achieved through struggle. But to read Senghor’s text in this way is to assume that Roger’s engagement with Wolof is itself nothing more than an expression of ‘paternalistic curiosity’, an assumption that a closer reading of the Recherches will show to be untenable. T he ch a r a c t e r of R o g e r ’s R ec he rc he s In the early decades of the nineteenth century the French colony of Senegal became the focus of a new economic experiment. The decline of the sugar- producing colonies in the West Indies and the impending abolition of the slave trade led the French to consider establishing plantations on the African continent itself. In 1819 the governor of Senegal, Julien Schmaltz, signed a treaty with the kingdom of Waalo to obtain control of agricultural land close to the French trading post at Saint-Louis. He fortified the area and for the next twelve years the Senegalese plantations produced a range of export crops, cotton, tobacco, and sugar, to supply the needs of metropolitan industry. Schmaltz’s plantations were not in the end as profitable as he had hoped and the venture was discontinued in the 1830s. But the Senegalese historian Boubacar Barry, to whom I am indebted for this historical summary, has analysed the plantation system as the beginning of a larger movement to incorporate Africa into the emergent capitalist system and, in interventions �/ 8 :1 106......................... D o w n lo ad ed B y: [ CD L Jo ur na ls A cc ou nt ] At : 20 :3 6 28 M ay 2 00 9 so doing, to lock it into a relationship of dependency. By the mid-nineteenth century this impulse had found more profitable means of expression, but according to Barry (1998: 129�/31, 137�/42), the establishment of the plantations can nevertheless be understood as a first step in the transforma- tion of the African colonies from little more than fortified trading posts into the dependent periphery that they ultimately became. Jacques-Franc¸ois, baron Roger, assumed the post of governor of Senegal on 1 March 1821, and continued to promote the developments initiated by Schmaltz. Given that he was a leading advocate of the plantation system, it is interesting that his account of Wolof is not concerned with the possible utility of language study in the developing colony but on its ‘philosophical’ dimensions.1 In the preface to his grammar he characterizes the Wolofs as a people in the early stages of social and linguistic development and he asserts that by examining their speech he has managed to ‘catch nature unawares in the act of creating a language’. Studying Wolof has allowed him to see how linguistic order and rules emerge as the ‘disordered product of arbitrariness’. It has given him the chance to consider the ways in which these rules both resemble and are different from those of more familiar languages. What is more, he says, his findings will be of interest to anyone who wants to study the emergence of ideas and the development of the intellectual faculties in the human species (Roger 1829: 6). His work, in short, is reminiscent of texts such as Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues in its preoccupation with the intricate interrelations of language, reason, and society, and in its tracing of these relationships along a diachronic axis. For Rousseau, the examina- tion of mankind in earlier stages of social and mental development was largely conducted through an act of imagination. For Roger, the Wolofs represent living evidence of what a people in the ‘infancy of civilization’ are like, and the Senegalese colony represents a kind of laboratory for the study of these intellectual problems. Roger’s self-representation, at least in the earlier part of the preface, also has a philosophical rather than a political or practical character. He relegates his work as colonial governor to the background of the picture and constructs his move to Africa as a flight from the evils of ‘civilization’: My spirit weary, my heart bruised in the hurly-burly of business, I had seen from too close a range the revolting game of jealous and avaricious passions; I had laid bare the fickle secrets of human activity. Social life had lost its attractions for me, and flying from the world I had sought in the scalding climate of Africa, if not death, at least some solitude and distraction from my troubles. (Roger 1829: 6)2 He depicts himself taking refuge on a remote island in Senegal far from the influence of Europeans and their civilization, developing a keen interest in the Africans he met in the fields and forests nearby, and eventually applying 1 For a useful discussion of nineteenth-century approaches to the languages of Senegal, see Irvine (1993). 2 All translations from the work of Jacques-Franc¸ois, baron Roger, and Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck are my own. I would like to thank Angela Wright, who read and commented on them. I am, of course, responsible for any remaining errors. LANGUAGE AND ONTOLOGY IN SENEGAL 107........................ Richard Steadman-Jones D o w n lo ad ed B y: [ CD L Jo ur na ls A cc ou nt ] At : 20 :3 6 28 M ay 2 00 9 himself to the Wolof language. Thus his account of his personal journey has no obvious political gloss; it is a stereotypically ‘Romantic’ story about a cultivated European turned world-weary wanderer, and again seems Rousseauvian in its emphasis on the limitations of ‘civilization’ and the virtues of life in a ‘primitive’ society. Towards the end of the introduction, however, Roger represents his philosophical project rather differently. He is aware, he says, that a