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From Citizenship to Négritude: “Making a Difference” in Elite Ideologies of Colonized Francophone West Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Michael C. Lambert
Michael C. Lambert
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

By examining three historical stages between 1914 and the late 1950s in the development of African political ideology in Francophone West Africa, this essay will explore the problem represented by the category of the colonized.1 This category, first formulated in 1961 by Frantz Fanon, has increasingly been used to revise understandings of African ideologies formed before 1960 in terms of political economy. Indeed, ever since Fanon published his polemical, The Wretched of the Earth (1968), the rage of the colonized has been naturalized in academic literature as the reaction to colonization. Yet in arguing that the rage of the peasants did not characterize the reaction of the “most completely” colonized (the elites and merchants), Fanon acknowledged that rage did not define the position of his elite predecessors. Fanon's work appeared in the twilight of the colonial era not as a dispassionate analysis but as a call to action. He intended to awaken the peasant's rage, which he considered the legitimate and local reaction to colonialism, within the elites, who did not share this attitude towards the colonizer.

Type
Defining Difference
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , April 1993 , pp. 239 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1993

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