From December 7 to 9, 2023, the Center for African Studies at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University is organizing a conference entitled “Reading African societies : texts, gestures, techniques”.
The history of Africa is one of interactions by all standards : it is the history of the circulation of goods and ideas, of local innovation and adaptation, of global change, but also of domination and violence, rejection and rebellion. African societies have always been part of the world.
The purpose of this conference is to look at the world from Africa’s point of view, to make Africa’s role in global history visible, and to free ourselves from a phantasmal Africa, an Africa shaped by missionaries and colonists. Phantasms about Africa produce paradoxes such as an ancient Africa, the source of humanity, but also as an infantile Africa, under colonial control, a place where much predation and exclusion took place.
A growing body of studies is making it possible to dispel the notion of an inscrutable Africa, thanks to the creation of archives and historical documents : the knowledge about the past of African societies suffers less and less from the deficit of thought that has often been associated with them. Literature and human sciences describe and document the social and psychological imbalances engendered by colonization, the urban disorder of megacities, the brutalization of dominated bodies, etc.
More than ever, Africa needs a connected history, a history that recalls the trans-Saharan trade routes that were also spiritual and intellectual paths, a history of trade in goods and ideas in close contact with Europe. Writing such a history results in restoring its continuity to Africa, and in thinking of it of in its entirety.
In the making of this continuing history, we need to write an intellectual history of Africa, and to stop confining North Africa to orientalist studies, and Central and Southern Africa to ethnologists. All cultures interact. There is no such thing as an isolated culture. Societies talk and trade with each other. Africa is no exception. Through a variety of contributions, the conference sets out to participate in the global movement of an Africa that casts its own perspective onto the world.
