Exposition – (Dé)colonisations : des artistes africains interrogent l’histoire: Aboudia, Roméo Mivekannin
For the first time, the Caen Memorial is presenting an exhibition devoted to sub-Saharan Africa, its history and its artists. Through some sixty remarkable works, distinguished both by their aesthetics and by their messages, the museum seeks to address colonial and postcolonial history as seen through the eyes of African artists. These paintings, photographs, sculptures, textiles and films explore a process of remembrance and historical re-foundation, carried out with respect for geographical, political, cultural, religious and linguistic differences.
AFRICANS IN WARS
“You, Senegalese Tirailleurs, my black brothers with warm hands beneath the ice and death. Who will sing your praises if not your brother-in-arms, your brother in blood?”
Léopold Sédar Senghor, Black Hosties
They are little-known heroes. Those known as the “Senegalese Tirailleurs” were soldiers in the French colonial army, originating from the territories of sub-Saharan Africa within the Empire. Willingly or by force, they were recruited to fight in numerous wars.
Two hundred thousand defended France during the First World War. Then, when the Second World War broke out, 179,000 left their countries to fight Nazi Germany as part of the Allied forces and to defend freedom in Europe. They took part in decisive battles and died by the tens of thousands in each of these wars.
But who knows of their existence and their feats of arms? Their history bears the bitter taste of oblivion and racism. Differences in treatment, pay and pensions meant that the “Senegalese Tirailleurs” experienced painful discrimination at the hands of France. By depicting them and paying tribute to them, artists confront us with their memory and with the injustices they suffered.
THE ORDER OF INJUSTICE
“My mouth will be the mouth of those misfortunes that have no mouth. My voice, the freedom of those who collapse in the dungeon of despair.”
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
“The order of injustice” is how the Senegalese poet and president Léopold Sédar Senghor characterized the colonial relations between the North and the South. To this, one could add the paradigms of domination, violence, race, destruction and exploitation.
A traumatic historical period that followed the transatlantic slave trade, colonization is a major issue and theme for artists from the African continent.
How can one reclaim one's own narrative? How can one break with imperial history?
The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe liked to recall the following proverb: “Until the lions have their own historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.” Intellectuals and artists from postcolonial African states have made this saying their own. Through their research, their writings and their works, they seek to establish and pass on their history, long denied and disparaged by the colonizers.
The aim is not only to deconstruct and correct imperial history, but also to reconstruct African historical consciousness and imagination. As diverse as they may be in their aesthetics and their messages, the works presented here are part of this vast undertaking so that, one day perhaps, the order of justice may prevail.
THE AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE
“Colonization sows desolation, death and chaos among the colonized. But it also sows within them — and this is its most diabolical success — the desire to become what destroys them.”
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men
“I am not a country of the Diallobé distinct from a distinct West, coolly assessing what I can take from it and what I must leave it in return. I have become both. There is no lucid mind between two terms of a choice. I am a strange being, distressed at not being two.”
Thus speaks Samba Diallo, the main character in the famous novel The Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, published in 1961. The young man embodies the identity and cultural rupture experienced by generations of African women and men during the colonial era, but also during the postcolonial period.
For in the aftermath of independence, African societies, shaped by acculturation and hybridity, faced multiple political, economic, social and cultural challenges.
After decades of struggle, power seemed officially to have changed hands... but has the colonial system of domination and exploitation really come to an end? Nothing is less certain. Neocolonialism, conflicts, corruption: the ills of contemporary Africa are numerous. Artists are still among the first to portray and denounce them. Sometimes at the risk of their lives.
But the continent is not defined only by its shortcomings. Against all odds, it also possesses countless riches, both material and immaterial, human and symbolic, which artists explore and invite us to discover.
A WORLD TO BE REBUILT
What should we do today with the often unjust colonial legacy that deeply permeates our lives in Africa, Europe and the rest of the world?
The history of colonization and decolonization is still too partially and superficially taught in most countries. Yet it is urgent that we continue and accelerate the decolonization of European and African societies and, more broadly, of international relations if we want a better and sustainable world.
The challenges are immense, whether they concern the climate emergency, respect for human rights, the struggle for gender equality or against racism, or the restitution of looted cultural heritage...
As the world seems to be entering a new era, marked by disruption and uncertainty, numerous public and private, individual and collective initiatives are nevertheless working towards a fairer world, not only for Europeans or Westerners, but above all for peoples who continue to suffer the consequences of (de)colonization.
In this immense and essential task, artists play a considerable role by frequently engaging with these issues and opening up new horizons.
The world is to be rebuilt, and for this, artists are indispensable architects.
