Silences in African History:

Between the syndromes of discovery and abolition (2005)


by Jacques Depelchin


                 


p. 1
“It is a cliché to state that history as professionally practised has been mostly shaped by the forces which have emerged victorious […] In great part for economic reasons (most generally, the winners hold the purse strings or control access to the necessary resources), but also for political and ideological reasons, it is usually easier to go along with than to swim against the current. […] Finally, with regard to specific requirements of historians, the winners’ histories will tend to determine the rules along which historical research and methods will be developed.

Presented this way, the problem is oversimplified because there is much more at stake than the issue of knowing which history should be promoted. The question is how to move away from the embedded practices of policing knowledge, how to prevent the sterilisation of knowledge (history), and instead to allow it to become emancipatory.”




About the book

‘The book's leading theme is the dialectic between African peoples and those who write about them, between African experiences and their narrators, between subjectivity and otherness in African history- or, in Depelchin's formulation, "between the syndromes of discovery and abolition."

Depelchin has written a book that defies categorization, transcending received means of organizing knowledge and eliding established academic disciplines. If his narrative is repetitive, as it is in places, it is for a purpose: he is seeking to be heard above the din as he exposes the syndromes of discovery and abolition in African history. He writes in the tradition of Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Walter Rodney. Among the grave crimes committed against African peoples, Depelchin believes, has been silencing.

He concludes: "Coming out of silenced histories is not unlike achieving freedom, it cannot be given, it has to be seized" (p. 209).’

[Source]




Other quotes:


One may distinguish two fundamentally different kinds of silence: on the one hand, that generated by sheer terror, repression, oppression, exploitation, in short by state power (and its various combinations resting on gender, class, race, religion) and on the other, the silences which are later reproduced by the social scientists and, among them, historians.
p. 9-10


Obviously, there is a relationship between both kinds of silence, the result of which should make historians more than suspicious when they consult archives which, more often than not, are hte by-products of the state activities which silenced those who stood in its path.
p. 10


As a practising academic historian whose social network is constrained, I am sure that even as I am attempting to unveil silences, I will be reproducing others.
p. 10


Fanon was virulently critical of the native intellectuals who had grown incapable of recognising knowledge coming, so to speak, from their own backyard because they had been trained to despise it. This criticism would be applicable to all of us who drew out theoretical and methodological lessons from cultural, ideological and political arsenals foreign and often hostile to the reproduction of African history as lived by the majority of African working peoples.
p. 12


How does one go about uncovering all silences? Is it just a question of reading more archives, looking at more data, finding new data and so on, or is it a question of acknowledging the existence of voices which, up to now, have been ignored? To pursue this question to its limit is to face the question of who the producers of historical knowledge are […] for whom is this knowledge being reproduced, and for what purpose?
p. 13


The symbolisation of history as a river means that the course of history can change. Even the disappearance of a river would not mean the end of history for there is more than one river.
p. 20






About the author

Born in 1942 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), Jacques Depelchin is a notable Congolese scholar, historian, and activist, well-regarded for his work on colonialism and capitalism in Africa, offering critical insights into the socio-economic issues facing the continent.

Depelchin’s work explores alternatives to oppressive structures, highlighting local and indigenous knowledge systems that contribute to social healing and justice. He is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Ota Benga International Alliance for Peace in the the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

He was educated at Lovanium University (Kinshasa) in the DRC, the University of London, Johns Hopkins University in Italy, and Stanford. He has taught African History and related subjects at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State, Stanford, Syracuse, and universities in DR Congo, Mozambique, and Tanzania.