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Race in Africa: Four Epigraphs and a Commentary

“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile. “Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me. “Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. “Mama, see the Negro! I am frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. —Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness” (111–12) The racialization of the Tutsi/Hutu was not simply an intellectual construct, one which later and more enlightened generations of intellectuals could deconstruct and discard at will. More to the point, racialization was also an institutional construct. Racial ideology was embedded in institutions, which in turn undergirded privilege and reproduced racial ideology. It was this political-institutional fact that intellectuals alone would not be able to alter. Rather, it would take a political-social movement to be dismantled. —Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers (87) Far back as one may go into the past, from the northern Sudanese to the southern Bantu, the African has always and everywhere presented a concept of the world which is diametrically opposed to the traditional philosophy of Europe. —Leopold Sedar Senghor, “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century” (30) Sango's history is not the history of primal becoming but of racial origin, which is historically dated. —Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (9) These four epigraphs give a sense of the diversity of usages of the category of race in Africa and the discourses and practices that coalesce around these usages. I use the textual fragments to open up questions about race in Africa, to explore the various discursive economies in which race is articulated and circulates, and the registers and vocabularies in which responses to it have been conducted. The approach adopted is therefore metonymic: each fragment represents a larger body of texts and practices that broadly constitute a discourse defined by a set of shared characteristics. My purpose is not to discuss exhaustively these characteristics but rather to draw rough distinctions among the conditions that govern their articulation and circulation. In this way I can indicate the network of social, historical, and discursive relations in which the idea of race functions.