Abstract
Rumor has it that Henry Morton Stanley perplexed over a quandary facing colonialists: “we cannot justify our presence among “natives” if we do not educate them; but I suspect that we are not prepared for what they will say about us when and if we do teach them to write.”1 Stanley correctly predicted that “natives” would have different understandings of the colonial act and that what appeared to the colonizers as virtues and necessities may well appear to the former as weaknesses and acts of barbarism. Stanley’s ruminations also show that the colonial act was accompanied by anxieties over the eventual prise de parole by natives, that is their self-conscious expressions of thought on colonialism. The core of these anxieties has been whether postcolonial discourses can be aligned on the rationalizations of the colonial act by its agents.
The defenders of the double voter rolls abuse and exploit Montesquieu by going so far as to deny that the law of numbers is a fundamental element of democracy.
—Ouezzin Coulibaly, Journal Officiel, April 1951
These words of Diderot come to mind: There is something more odious than slavery: it is having slaves and calling them citizens. (Loud applause on the extreme left. Strong protestations at the center and the right. Prolonged noise).
—Ouezzin Coulibaly, Journal Officiel, June 1949
Descartes was not always right.
—Alfred Bour, Annales de L’Assemblée de L’Union Française, July 1948
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Notes
Gary Younge, “No More Mr Nice Guy,” The Guardian (London, September 19, 2002).
Cathal J. Nolan, The Longman Guide to World Affairs (White Plains, NY: Longman Publishers, 1995), 436.
I illustrate this point in both French and Anglo-Saxon contexts through discussions of Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
Anthony G. Hopkins, The Future of the Imperial Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), ix.
Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, c. 1997).
For a historical account of social theory as theory of the self, see, for instance, Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
François-Marie Arouet Voltaire, L’Ingénu et autres contes (Paris: Bookking International, 1993).
Dénis Diderot, Political Writings, trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Jean-Pierre Biondi and Jules Morin, Les Anti-Colonialistes (1881–1962) (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1992), 223–307.
See Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi’s Camus à Combat: Editoriaux et articles d’Albert Camus, 1944–1947 (Paris: Gallimard, c. 2002).
These denunciations were taken up later by French structuralists and functionalists, whether Marxists or not, most notably Louis Althusser. See, for instance, Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966–67), François Matheron, ed. (London: Verso, 2003).
Laurie Spurling, Phenomenology and the Social World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 143–163.
Mohamadou Djibrilla Maiga, “Vote des crédits militaires pour l’Indochine,” Journal Officiel, no. 33 (March 29, 1947), 473.
Boubou Hama, “Débats sur un incident,” Annales de l’Assemblée de l’Union Française, no. 21 (March 11, 1949), 360.
Devalois Biaka, La ‘Disparition’ du Patriote Victor Biaka Boda (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993).
Coulibaly was formally affiliated with the metropolitan Union Républicaine et Résistance (1947); Groupe Parlementaire Communiste (1948), and later USDR, the precursor to the French Socialist Party.
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© 2006 Siba N. Grovogui
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Grovogui, S.N. (2006). Daniel Ouezzin Coulibaly: Descartes Wasn’t Always Right, Diderot Maybe. In: Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy. Culture and Religion in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08396-8_6
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