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Francophone Memoirs of migration: another historical perspective?

Edgard Sankara, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Delaware
esankara@udel.edu

It was a long tradition that Europeans exploring Africa wrote their “African memoirs” that have been used as primary material in the writing of the history of the “Dark continent.” In the context of contemporary Africa, what is the value of memoirs written by Africans about their experience in another African country and how does it help in constituting an archive for the writing of history?
The writing of the collective memory is a form of transmission from elders to the younger generation, as the Malian Oral Traditionalist and author of memoirs once said “In Africa, when an old man dies, it is a library that burns down.” This paper outlines the paradox that, due to the collective experience and the use by the French administration of African agents from one country sent to work in another one inside the French empire in colonial times, now in Postcolonial Africa, autobiographies and memoirs written by Africans non-national of a certain country may give a better historical account of certain countries where they lived and worked. Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s Oui Mon Commandant! And Birago Diop’s La Plûme raboutée are two examples that may enlighten the history of the colonial Upper Volta, currently Burkina Faso.
When African writers take up their pens to write about a shared past experience, they are also giving different visions of that past, thus contributing to a truer historical approach that could serve African historians and critics in the Twenty-first century.