French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

French is spoken, or at least used, from Paris to Papeete, from Belgium to Benin and beyond. But there is something a little sad about the phrase “global French.” Everyone knows that English is the global language. The French state is painfully aware of this, but its postcolonial response—the policy of la Francophonie, an attempt to compete with “Anglo-Saxon” language and culture on the world stage—has largely failed.¹ The status of French as a runner-up global language is a direct outgrowth of the French Empire, second to the British in North America since 1762 and in Africa since the scramble at the end of the nineteenth century. Still, being “second” to English has, if anything, propelled and justified the global ambitions of France. They try harder.²

Globalization does not happen exclusively in English. Just as a technical-assistance “helpline” in the United States may be directly connected to a call center in India, a call from France may be routed to Senegal, where French-speaking technicians (trained in “neutral-accented French” and identifying themselves as “Jean” or “Monique”) are standing by. Those jobs have been “offshored” by French corporations, or, as it is said in French, “delocalized.” The scholar of globalization Nayan Chanda comments on this: “In a historic irony, [this] perceived ‘threat’ to French jobs comes from the country’s one-time supplier of slave labor.”³ Such a threat, if serious, would be only fitting, for precisely the reason that Chanda suggests: a long history of exploitation ties France to Africa, and that history began with the slave trade. Will offshoring be the new form of “reparations”?

Between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, France exported more than one million Africans to the small island colonies in the Caribbean, where the enslaved were worked until their deaths, producing tremendous wealth for France. In the wake of abolition, France (and Britain) invaded the interior of Africa systematically, leading to a period of colonial and postcolonial exploitation that is not entirely finished, even now. The European powers shifted from a slave-based form of colonization on the islands to “free” (though often forced) labor in Africa, and the French pressed African tirailleurs into service in the two world wars. In the nominally postcolonial era, so-called globalization has famously not done much for Africa: with outsourcing toward Africa at minuscule levels, the continent poses no major threat to the telemarketers of France or the cotton growers of the United States.⁴ Walled off in a “strategic ghetto” since the end of the Cold War, Africa watches as globalization whirls around it.⁵ The continent seems to be in a situation of radical nonreciprocity with the outside world: 46 percent of Africa’s production leaves the continent, but its share of the total world economy is only 1 or 2 percent.⁶ Africa is thus in danger of returning to isolation, sidelined in the global economy and stuck in largely “polarized” and “occult” relations with its former colonial powers.⁷ In the French case, that binary complex has come to be known as la Françafrique.⁸

This essay attempts to produce an overview that connects the history of the slave trade to the world in which we now live. It traces the origins of global French in the history of the French slave trade and examines the resemblances between forms of extraction and dissemination that took place during the centuries of the Atlantic triangular trade, on one hand, and the postmodern, postcolonial forms of globalization of our own times. I describe the place of this trade in human beings within the rises and falls of France as a global power and the eventual emergence of French as a multiracial, “global” (or semiglobal) medium of literature.

On his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa, in 2007, the newly elected president of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, delivered a speech that seems destined to be remembered for a long time. It produced a “disastrous effect.”⁹ Speaking to “the youth of Africa” before an audience at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, he attributed some of Africa’s current woes to the crimes of the slave trade but carefully placed a large portion of blame within the character of a phenotype that he called “African man.” To the consternation of his audience and of those who read his address later, Sarkozy asserted that “the” African “has not sufficiently entered into History”; he “never throws himself into the future [jamais l’homme ne s’élance vers l’avenir].” This man—like Hegel’s African—“remains immobile in the midst of an immutable order where everything seems to be written in advance.” “Modern man” (that is to say, the European), on the other hand, “feels the need to reconcile himself with nature” and thus “has much to learn from African man, who has been living in symbiosis with nature for millennia.” Sarkozy’s “African” thus remains untouched by history, by colonialism, by urbanization or globalization, stuck in an eternal present. As Achille Mbembe pointed out, Sarkozy’s speech revived Hegel’s Africa—a continent stuck in time, outside of History—“almost word for word.”¹⁰

The speech as a whole is a remarkable amalgamation of ideas about Africa that are at least fifty years out of date; of politically correct quotes from Césaire, Senghor, and Camara Laye; of pleasing truisms; and mostly, of moral lessons delivered to the “youth of Africa” in condescending tones. This president of France came to Africa to “challenge” the continent—a continent ravaged by history, then left to fend for itself—to “stop repeating and obsessing,” to “enter into history to a greater extent.” The hope for Africa, he preached, can only come from métissage (hybridization) with Europe in “a great common destiny . . . l’Eurafrique.”¹¹ In other words, to be more specific and more realistic: la Françafrique. But this came from a president who, in his election campaign, called for an end to that relationship, with its “complacency, its smoke-filled rooms, its secrets and ambiguities.”¹² Rhetorically, Sarkozy merely reproduced the pernicious clichés of the past from which he said he wished to escape; and on the ground, his itinerary took him to two of the most traditional partner states of la Françafrique, Senegal and Gabon (the latter ruled by the same man for forty years).¹³ As an editorial in Le Monde put it, this was “not the best way to break with more than forty years of ‘Françafrique.’”¹⁴

Sarkozy’s last sentences are worth quoting here, because they press the Francophone African novel into service for his representation of “African man” and his salvation. If the continent follows Sarkozy’s advice, he promises, “then, only then,” will Camara Laye’s “dark child,” “kneeling [?] in the silence of the African night” be able to “finally feel like a man like all the other men of humanity.”¹⁵ Which apparently is not possible now, because for Sarkozy nothing has changed since the days of the slave trade, when abolitionists had to argue for the humanity of Africans.

Without completely conflating politics and literature, it is not hard to see that the production and the thematics of Francophone African literature have evolved within a virtual Françafrique. Most literature created in and about the former French colonies is, first and foremost, written in French. That fact remains on the ground, undiminished, fifty years after independence. As in Francophone cinema, much of Francophone African literature is at least partially supported by the French government, through the cultural arm of their diplomatic service, organizations like the Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique (ACCT), or various agencies of the francophonie movement—which is overwhelmingly bankrolled by the French government.¹⁶ The vast majority of Francophone literature is published in France. And most of it tells stories that are either about Africa or France or both. As Lydie Moudileno accurately puts it, Francophone African fiction has revolved around “two monolithic poles”—the native land on one hand and the European city (“most frequently Paris”) on the other—“to the exclusion of other transnational spaces.”¹⁷ From Les trois volontés de Malic in 1920 and Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris in 1937 through the landmark novels—like Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir (1953), Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy (1957), Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’aventure ambiguë (1961), and Alain Mabanckou’s Bleu-blancrouge (1998)—Francophone African literature has predominantly told the story of Africa’s encounter with France, of Africans’ journeys to France, and of “ambiguous” relationships that take place within this intercultural space. Most Francophone literature takes as its literal context the space of la Françafrique: the colonies and former colonies of France and France itself. A typical back cover, that of the prize-winning novel L’impasse by Daniel Biyaoula, says that the novel “is situated by turns [successivement] in contemporary France and Africa.”¹⁸ Those two locations alone are ample, but not global.

Immigration has changed the landscape, permanently breaking down the opposition between France and Africa by creating a hybrid term, “black France.”¹⁹ But in many ways that development has only reinforced the binary ties between the Hexagon and its former colonies, as shown, for example, in the works of an author as well implanted in France as Calixthe Beyala. Dominic Thomas’s book Black France analyzes the enduring francocentrism of African literature; Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters sets the problem in a wider context: it is not only Francophone Africans who are drawn, by well-established centripetal forces, to “universal” Paris.²⁰ The novelist and blogger Alain Mabanckou calls Paris the hegemonistic “unit of measure.”²¹

Is there any escape possible, in politics or in literature, from the permanent binarism of this relationship between France and its former colonies? How did it become so deeply entrenched? In order to answer these questions, I want to look at the very longue durée that connects the French slave trade to the present. The early years of the new millennium seem to present three turning points, the supposed end of three outgrowths of the slave trade and colonialism. Each of these has been announced, if not realized:

1. The end of a long French silence on slavery and the slave trade (and the regeneration of the cultural memory of these phenomena)

2. The end of francophonie (and the beginning of a littérature-monde in French)

3. The end of la Françafrique.

As Sarkozy’s performance in Dakar makes clear, saying that you want to end something does not necessarily end it, even if it is already, in practical terms, obsolete. La Françafrique may be over, replaced by la Chinafrique; China is replacing France as Africa’s “mover and shaker.”²² What effects that may have on Francophone culture remains to be seen.

The moments at which the outside world has taken an interest in Africa can be counted on the fingers of one hand: the slave trade; post-1885 colonization; the world wars of the twentieth century; and the Cold War. The first “moment” lasted for some two hundred years, in the case of the French slave trade: from the 1630s to 1831. The modern colonization that followed the Congress of Berlin in the late nineteenth century lasted less than half that long, though its neocolonial afterlife may be endless. During the two world wars, the French recruited many thousands of African soldiers. And the Cold War kept Western powers in the business of propping up dictators like Mobutu.

The widespread association of globalization with hybridity—those two dominant buzzwords of our fin and début de siècle—and the assumption that these trends arose only in the “postcolonial” late twentieth century—both need to be rethought.²³ Globalization as we know it today began much earlier, with the rise of the triangular trade on the Atlantic. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the French minister Choiseul described the Africa trade—the slave trade—as “the motor of all others.” Napoleon saw the Atlantic much the same way, until the loss of Haiti forced him to rethink and to forget sugar, slaves, Haiti, Louisiana, and Africa.²⁴

It has become almost commonplace to assert that the slave trade and the exploitation of New World colonies by Europe amounted to an early draft of globalization. The Africanist historian Patrick Manning describes the slave trade as “the globalization of forced labor,”²⁵ characterized by “a veritable world market in slave labor [that] exissted roughly between 1750 and 1850, encompassing the Occidental, African, and Oriental trades.”²⁶ A leading historian of the French slave trade, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, sees the Atlantic slave trade—in a world that the discoveries had suddenly made “gigantic”—as “a beginning of globalization.”²⁷ The slave trade, writes Elikia M’Bokolo, “radically transformed the mode of insertion of Africa into the world economy.”²⁸ (For all practical purposes, the slave trade was that means of insertion.²⁹) And George Clement Bond, building on the influential work of Roland Robertson, asserts that “the massive trade in Africa slaves . . . laid the foundation of the modern world with its encompassing global networks.”³⁰

Globalization is characterized by two countervailing movements: the expansion of reach (of ships, of capital) on the one hand, and the contraction of distances, on the other (“the compression of the world,”³¹ as Robertson calls it). The voyages of discovery, the slave trade, and the colonization of the New World were all related parts of a process of expanding power and contracting distances.³² The slave trade was built on those two movements, one centrifugal and one centripetal, operating in tandem.

Referring to globalization, the centrifugal gesture is often celebrated for its “freedom.” Free men bravely put their money on the line in hopes of gaining a return; that is the “liberal” economy. Globalization is the “free” circulation of capital.³³ But following this rhetoric into the Atlantic slave trade leads to an appalling irony. Huge amounts of capital were laid out by the armateurs or outfitters of Nantes or Bordeaux or La Rochelle, to fund every one of the 3,649 recorded voyages in the history of the French slave trade.³⁴ That capital circulated “freely” around the ocean, but on one leg of the triangular voyage, it took the form of enslaved human beings, bought as chattel. (Chattel and capital come from the same Latin root.) Thus, during the years of the Middle Passage, the capital that was moving “freely” was literally enchained. Once sold on the islands, the captives’ value was so great that it required two or three more ships, plying the direct route back and forth between France and the islands, to recover their price in sugar or other colonial products, all produced by slave labor. The plantations were outposts of both “economic globalization and white supremacy,” as Hilary Beckles puts it.³⁵

In the French Atlantic, the mercantilist structure known as the Exclusif sought to guarantee the safe, centripetal return to France of the capital that had initially been cast across the Atlantic, thus completing a tightly controlled triangular circuit. All trade would flow directly back to France.³⁶ This was globalization, certainly, but it was not “free” for all concerned: certainly not for the captives who were enslaved as part of this vast process, nor even, in a wholly different sense, for the traders, who were constricted by the Exclusif.

The deep colonization of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, characterized by an “economy of extraction” (une économie de traite),³⁷ the recruitment of African soldiers in both world wars, the BUMIDOM labor-importing scheme of the 1960s,³⁸ and succeeding waves of immigration have all followed the patterns prescribed by the Exclusif. Each colony or postcolony relates, first and foremost, directly to France—to the exclusion of other possible vectors of trade and interchange. Hence the départements d’outre-mer (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyanne, La Réunion); hence la Françafrique.

How, then, were “signs of Frenchness” disseminated around the Atlantic during the slave trade? Not equally: the interior of Africa remained all but impenetrable until the late nineteenth century, since African polities were strong and resistant to incursion. Europeans mostly kept to their small toeholds on the coast, like Saint-Louis and Gorée in Senegal; most captives were brought to the coast by African slave traders and there sold onto European ships. In the tiny Creole societies of those établissements, Frenchness percolated, but it could not reach out much beyond the boundaries of the town or the island. In the Caribbean, on the other hand, France exercised nearly total power and mastery. These were slave societies in two senses: first, they were entirely predicated on slavery, an institution fed by the transatlantic slave trade. And in a second, metaphorical/political sense, these islands themselves were “enslaved” to the metropole through the mercantilist policies of the Exclusif.

During the slave trade, signs of Frenchness were irregularly, unevenly disseminated around the Atlantic and beyond, but Frenchness and slavery together were a strange mix. “France” etymologically means free, after all. French authors vacillated between growing Enlightenment notions of human rights on one hand and the “need” to enslave for profit on the other hand. The missionary, slave-exploiting priest Jean Baptiste Labat and his substantially plagiarized writings were influential in defining both Africa and the Caribbean for generations of French readers; in Labat’s widely held view, enslavement saved the soul of the heathen slave. Montesquieu (who cited Labat) satirized slavery but appeared to rationalize its existence in southern climes. Voltaire invested in the slave trade and allowed his name to be used on a slave trader’s ship, while deploring the effects of servitude at home and abroad. Rousseau utterly rejected the “right to enslave” as “null,” yet ignored the enslavement of Africans in his own times. Abolitionist authors Olympe de Gouges and Madame de Staël both sought, with limited success, to make the plight of the slaves “present” in France, where they were out of sight and out of mind.³⁹

Abolitionist and exoticist French literature foreshadowed the battles for the right to Frenchness and the right to otherness—the battles of assimilation, départementalisation, immigration, and integration—that came in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Madame de Duras’s novella Ourika (1823)—the reality-based story of a Senegalese girl saved from the slave trade and taken in by a French aristocratic family, only to find herself doomed by the color line—is clearly an early skirmish in the battle of race and Frenchness; it foreshadows a postcolonial Francophone text and film like Sembene’s La noire de . . ., in which a latter-day Senegalese “slave” of French colonizers asks, “What am I, here?”⁴⁰

After the second and final abolition of slavery in 1848, the cultural memory of French slavery was thoroughly suppressed. But abolitionist exoticism and the “local color” of adventure literature and maritime literature of the nineteenth century prepared the ground for Francophone writing. Authors like Hugo, Mérimée, and Sue set up patterns of representation that have been appropriated and altered by authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who come from the colonies and former colonies of France.⁴¹ When French first went global, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no one could have guessed that large numbers of Africans, both on the continent and on the islands of the Caribbean, would some day accede to Frenchness—linguistically or legally. In the second phase of colonialism, in Africa, such a prospect was dangled before the elite of the population as an enticement to collaboration with the colonial regime. French was basic to the mission civilisatrice. The bargain worked, although not perhaps in the way that officials would have predicted. Millions of Africans (and others) entered global discourse through French.

And, as Sartre famously asked, what did you expect them to say?⁴² No text from the colonial period of the twentieth century better embodies the ambiguous trajectories of global French than Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Beginning in the “inert” stasis of a Caribbean backwater, this “epic of negritude”⁴³ reaches back into the time of the slave trade both to rehearse the cruel history of the plantation system and to find a symbol of revolutionary change. The poem navigates the entire French Atlantic, from its (unnamed) base in Martinique to that other “native country,” which may or may not be Africa—and to France. The Cahier is not what it is often thought to be—a romantic paean to a lost African paradise; its “negritude” is an open-ended quest rather than a fixed essence. There is no final “return” as such, only a notebook, a complex and ambiguous road map. But one thing is clear: the quest takes place in French and is made possible by a French education. A slave revolt may be the poem’s dramatic climax—the slave is finally present here, “standing and free.” But it is in the forging of new concepts, in French, in neologisms like negritude and “veerition” (a sweeping, scanning movement that is the poem’s last gesture), that Césaire stages his revolution.

Frenchness would not be quite the same after the coming of such texts. Henceforth, it would have to be continually renegotiated. The trajectories of the triangular trade have endured, linking both France and the Caribbean to Africa and Africa to France. The two world wars and postwar immigration renewed and increased the centrality of the Hexagon. At the same time, the rise of Francophone literature has pulled French outward and slightly altered it. Ahmadou Kourouma’s novel Les soleils des indépendances, first published in Montreal in 1968, was hailed as, finally, an Africanization of French. It did not lead, however, to a wholesale creolization of the French language in Francophone literature. The Academy refuses the inclusion of French neologisms that come from former colonies, including Quebec.⁴⁴ French has been globalized, but French remains French. Or does it?

At the beginning of this essay I mentioned three moments of transition that are supposedly taking place: the end of French silence on slavery and the slave trade, the end of Francophone literature with the beginning of “world literature in French,” and the end of la Françafrique. The first ending is a fact, at least for now: with an impetus from forty thousand self-identified descendants of slaves who marched in the streets of Paris on May 23, 1998,⁴⁵ France adopted the Taubira Law in 2001, declaring slavery and the slave trade crimes against humanity and mandating, in effect, the creation of a new French historical memory. The most evident manifestation of this new memory—very much a work in progress—is the new annual day of commemoration, May 10, the first of which was observed in 2006. With new monuments and a new national research center on slavery (masterminded by Edouard Glissant) in the works, it is possible to foresee a new and genuine public awareness of this long-repressed history.⁴⁶

The two other announced endings are closely related: the end of “Francophone” literature has been called for because this category is seen by some as a symptom of the sick, possibly moribund relationship known as la Françafrique. In 2007 a group of forty-four writers published a manifesto, “Pour une littérature-monde en français.” They begin by observing that five of the top French literary prizes of the last season went to writers from “outre-France” (outside France); in this they see the confirmation of a “Copernican revolution”—finally a displacement of the center, which “is no longer the center.” They therefore announce the return of a literature that concerns itself with the world rather than with itself alone, a literature of “incandescence”—and “the end of francophonie.” Like the French abolitionists of the nineteenth century, these writers look across the Channel for a model: in Anglophone “world literature”—represented by Bruce Chatwin, Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, and others—they see “the outlines of a new world” characterized by “plural identity.” This is the antidote to what they describe as the ghetto of Francophonie, “an exotic variant that is merely tolerated” by “a France mother of the arts . . . who continues to dispense her enlightenment like a universal benefactor.” Instead, the writers predict and call for “the emergence of a French-language world literature that is consciously affirmed, open onto the world, [and] transnational.” Such a literature, they say, spells “the death certificate of Francophonie,” which is nothing but “the last avatar of colonialism.”⁴⁷ If this manifesto is to be believed, then, French will no longer be exclusively “French”—the language and its literature will be freed from their “pact” with the nation, with France. French will be, as Achille Mbembe puts it, “denationalized,” ending “the total identification of the French language with the French republic.”⁴⁸

The critique of Francophonie in this manifesto is nothing that had not been argued long before by writers like Mongo Beti.⁴⁹ What is new here is this alliance of “French” and “Francophone” writers, coming together to pull the French literary establishment, perhaps, toward a pluralism that may finally be within reach. With names like J. M. G. Le Clézio, Nancy Huston, Eric Orsenna, and Didier Daeninckx on the list of signatories (although plenty of others are conspicuously absent) alongside those of Tahar Ben Jelloun, Maryse Condé, Edouard Glissant, and Alain Mabanckou, the statement has a different amplitude. It is the accumulated cultural capital of the entire group that allows them to act as “the gravediggers of Francophonie.”⁵⁰

I interpret this manifesto not as anything radically new or different but as one in a series of attempts to overcome the condition of absence, ignorance, and marginalization regarding the (former) colonies that has characterized French society since the seventeenth century. The oldest colonies with their slaves, and the later colonies with their “natives,” were consistently out of sight and out of mind. Abolitionists were barely able to interrupt that condition; the colonial lobby, working to “faire aimer nos colonies” in the early twentieth century—trying to get French people to settle there—never succeeded.⁵¹ Abdou Diouf, head of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie—while defending the idea of Francophonie from the “gravediggers”—complains that French people “don’t love Francophonie”—aren’t interested, aren’t curious.⁵² Postcolonial immigration, by bringing the peoples of the world into France in significant numbers, has altered the equation, so that complete mental marginalization is now harder to maintain. That is one way of reading this manifesto, in the longue durée of history: as the literary outgrowth of this sea change. How much difference there might be, in practice, between “world literature in French” and Francophonie-as-usual remains to be seen.

One sign of change in recent years has been a new global turn taken by certain African writers. It would be easy to miss, because most African writing in French remains focused on French-African relations. But a few authors have turned to broader horizons, breaking away from the binarism of la Françafrique, like their musical counterparts Angélique Kidjo and Youssou N’Dour (and so many other musicians, to whom language barriers do not apply).⁵³ Numerous authors have taken at least a few steps beyond the borders of the Hexagon, sending their characters on forays to other states of the European Union.⁵⁴ Far fewer have reached out to the “globe.”⁵⁵

It makes a certain kind of sense that Henri Lopes, a biracial author and diplomat—the highly privileged ambassador of an authoritarian president, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville (and of two other presidents before him)—should be one of these “global” writers. Lopes leads a charmed international life, enjoying the privileges of power in Congo and the glory of being a celebrated international writer, published by Editions du Seuil in Paris.⁵⁶ He is nothing if not a leading figure of la Françafrique. For all that, he is a rather brilliant novelist, and his recent works have ventured into a new Atlantic and global space that was previously unknown in African literature in French. In contrast to his first outstanding work, Le pleurer-rire (1982), his more recent novels have placed Africa in a global context. In Sur l’autre rive (1992) and Le lys et le flamboyant (1997), Africans interact with the Caribbean, with the United States, and with France. The former may be the first African novel in French that is set (partly) in the Caribbean, in Guadeloupe.⁵⁷ Its title plays on the twin cities of the two Congos—Kinshasa and Brazzaville—one being “the other bank” for the other; here that phrase is transposed in order to evoke a complex riddle of transatlantic identity.

Tierno Monénembo, one of the most complex and challenging of African authors, has produced in Pelourinho a first among Francophone novels, a journey to Brazil, where the African narrator, like a reverse Véronica (in Maryse Condé’s Hérémakhonon), goes to seek his “cousins,” because “we are like twins on the two sides of the ocean.” This is truly a novel of the Atlantic, with a historical vision profoundly rooted in the slave trade; it is Roots in reverse. But that vision (like Césaire’s in the Cahier) is a work in progress for the narrator-writer, and the best he can do, faced with the rupture that the slave trade imposed is to “patch” memory back together (rafistoler la mémoire). Among the interesting choices that Monénembo made in this novel was not to set it in a Francophone space in the Caribbean—in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, or Haiti. Instead, he broadens the reach of Francophone African fiction into another linguistic zone, as he reconnects Africa with the history of the slave trade, a rare gesture among Francophone African writers.⁵⁸

Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique gives every appearance of being the latest narrative of unsatisfying immigration and of the frustrations of francocentrism. As Dominic Thomas puts it, Diome “inscribes herself in [the] long intertextual genealogy” of African writers “explor[ing] the bilateralism of French-African relations” (emphasis added). Yet by continually describing the “Atlantic” as that which separates France and Africa—with the one on the “other side” from the other—Diome alters the geography ever so slightly; that ocean is usually referred to as an East-West vector rather than a North-South one. In fact, Le ventre de l’Atlantique contains “a reflection on globalization and its impact on Africa.” A “foreigner everywhere,” Salie tries to find herself and define herself—to give herself, in effect, new identity papers—through writing: “I am looking for my territory on the blank page.”

A collection of short stories entitled Dernières nouvelles de la Françafrique brings us toward our conclusion. The title contains a significant riddle as well as an obvious pun: the pun stems from the double meaning of nouvelles as either “news” or “novellas.” But also, dernières could mean either “last” or “latest.” Is this the “last news” to come out of (a dying) Françafrique, or merely the latest news (or the last or the latest novellas)? The back cover is very explicit about what la Françafrique consists of: “deals, spies, torture, and other manipulations . . . It all goes on.”⁵⁹ In his introduction to the volume, Romuald Fonkoua describes the relationship as “a visceral refusal of equality” between France and Africa; the short stories are intended as an “interlope” of secret revelations within this hegemony.⁶⁰ The novellas do not, however, describe any end of French domination. In the final piece in the volume, the man who literally wrote the book on la Françafrique, François-Xavier Verschave, suggests what this binarism becomes in the new universe of globalization: “the networks and treasuries of la Françafrique plug into those of its American, British, Russian, Israeli, and Brazilian (and other) counterparts.” If la Françafrique goes global, the result will be a “Mafiafrique.”⁶¹ Verschave’s view comports with that of Fatou Diome in Le ventre de l’Atlantique: for Africa, globalization seems to be neocolonialism by other means.

French, more than English, is only global only because of its colonial history. English is now being used in dozens of countries—and for communication between countries—that were never conquered by Britain or the United States (Belgium, for example).⁶² The global status of France and the French language remains tenaciously rooted in French colonial history and its unloved outgrowths: Francophonie and la Françafrique. Jean Jaurès proclaimed the French language to be the royal road to French colonization and civilization: “For France above all, language is the necessary instrument of colonization.”⁶³ And the two have remained inseparable. The recent authors I have cited here see little change in that situation; the signers of the “world literature” manifesto are trying to put an end to it. So, are we “post-francophone” yet?⁶⁴

The French language is “struggling to keep its place in the world,” writes Le Monde.⁶⁵ Nicolas Sarkozy, during his election campaign, asserted optimistically that “the retreat of French is not inevitable.”⁶⁶ “Francophone” summit meetings continue to draw more non-Francophone leaders.⁶⁷ But France’s prestige in Africa suffered tremendously when the Republic at the origins of modern human rights was perceived to have “helped a regime responsible for organizing the genocide of the Tutsi” in Rwanda in 1994.⁶⁸ La Françafrique has not been quite the same since then. Many observers see France’s influence waning.⁶⁹

What has always been lacking, what is still scarce, is a genuine sense of integration between France and two things, one temporal and one spatial: the French history of colonization, and the former colonies themselves. The re-creation of a repressed memory of slavery and the slave trade, however, is already in progress, and it may at least partially remedy the first problem. The second, spatial problem is what the authors of the 2007 manifesto hoped to ameliorate with their “world literature in French.”

French seems destined to remain a sort-of world language for a long time to come. If the French nation can manage to let go of the rigid sense of privileged centrality that has so long characterized its relations with its former colonies, the place of French in the world will only become more dynamic and more interesting.

1. See Christopher L. Miller, “Francophonie,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, 235–38. “De source diplomatique française, on le reconnaît volontiers, le français est en ‘situation difficile’ dans les institutions internationales [It is openly recognized by French diplomacy that the French language is in ‘a difficult situation’].” Nathaniel Herzberg, Hervé Morin and Natalie Nougayrède, “Le français lutte pour garder sa place dans le monde,” Le Monde.

2. French is rated as second by the number of countries in which it is used (thirty-three, as compared to forty-five for English) and as the second “most influential language” as determined by the number of speakers and five other criteria (by George Weber, 1997): Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, The Story of French, 452–53. But calling French second among world languages takes some sleight of hand, since it actually is eleventh when ranked by the number of people for whom it is the first language.

6. Makhtar Diouf says that Africa’s share of world trade went from 5 percent in 1980 to 1.9 percent in 1997: L’Afrique dans la mondialisation, 163. See also Hugon, “L’Afrique dans la mondialisation,” 160; and Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 434 n. 35. Africa’s share of France’s overseas trade was 40 percent in 1957; in 2008 it was 0.5 percent: Philippe Bernard, “L’image très dégradée de la France en Afrique.”

8. According to the article “Françafrique” in Wikipedia.fr, the term “la France-Afrique” was coined by Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the late and longtime president of Côte d’Ivoire, in 1955. The parodic form “Françafrique” was invented by François-Xavier Verschave in his book La Françafrique: Le plus long scandale de la République; see also his De la Françafrique à la Mafiafrique. The term has become common among those critical of France’s relations with Africa. See also Baadikko Mammadu, Françafrique: L’échec, l’Afrique postcoloniale en question; Jean-Pierre Dozon, Frères et sujets: La France et l’Afrique en perspective, 340; and the illuminating dialogue “De la colonisation à la décolonisation: Les modes de constitution de la Françafrique, une table ronde avec Nicolas Bancel et Jean-Pierre Dozon,” in Sciardet et al., “Dossier: De la Françafrique à la Mafiafrique,” 15–27.

11. “Allocution de M. Nicolas Sarkozy, Président de la République, prononcée à l’Université de Dakar [sic: the university was renamed “Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar” decades ago].” See Philip Bernard and Christophe Jakubyszyn, “A Dakar, Nicolas Sarkozy appelle l’Afrique à ‘renaître’ et à ‘s’élancer vers l’avenir.’” On reactions in Dakar, see “Au Sénégal, Sarkozy prône un partenariat en rupture avec le passé,” Jeune Afrique; Thomas Hofnung, “Sarkozy l’Africain fait grincer les dents;” Philippe Bernard, “Le faux pas africain de Sarkozy”; “Place à la Sarkafrique!”; Vieux Savane, “Volonté de puissance ou complexe du colonisé?” Sarkozy repeated the speech in Gabon. According to Libération, it was written by speechwriter Henri Guaino, an economist known as “la plume de Sarkozy.” One year later Guaino published a defense of the speech: “L’homme africain et l’histoire.” André Julien Mbem defended Sarkozy against charges of racism, arguing that the speech had been misunderstood: Nicolas Sarkozy à Dakar.

47. Muriel Barbery, et al., “Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français.” See also Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, eds., Pour une littérature-monde, with essays by twenty-four of the signatories of the manifesto and three others. The manifesto was preceded by an essay by Mabanckou, “La Francophonie, oui, le ghetto: non!” There, Mabanckou wrote, “La littérature française est une littérature nationale. C’est à elle d’entrer dans ce grand ensemble francophone.”

50. Abdou Diouf, the president of the Francophone organization, complained that this was the pose that the manifesto’s signers were adopting. See Abdou Diouf, “La Francophonie, une réalité oubliée.” Diouf accuses the signatories of “confusing francocentrism and Francophonie.” Amadou Lamine Sall and Lilyan Kesteloot reject the entire notion of world literature in French as nothing new in “Un peu de mémoire, s’il vous plaît!” Le Monde, April 6, 2007.

55. I do not want to give the impression that “going global” is something that African literature should necessarily aspire to or be congratulated for. It is merely another way of writing in (and about) the world. Patrice Nganang also observes that Francophone African literature has not become “global” and is not “yet” a literature of “errancy” (errance): Manifeste d’une nouvelle littérature africaine, 244.

58. On the exceptions to African “silence” about the slave trade, see Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, chapter 14. Sami Tchak, born in Togo but living in France since 1986, is a “global” writer; his novel Hermina takes place in Cuba, Mexico, Miami, and an unnamed European country. His La Place des fêtes (2004), Le paradis des chiots (2006), and Filles de Mexico (2008) are also set in Latin America. It is highly ironic that some of Tchak’s novels, including Hermina, are published in the Gallimard series called Continents Noirs. The series is defined in a statement by its editor, Jean-Noël Schifano, that graces the last page of Hermina and numerous other novels. Schifano reproduces colonial discourse exactly, inviting readers presumed to be white Frenchmen to “bet on Africans from Africa and elsewhere” and their “paper fetishes which are replacing their wooden fetishes.” A similar—supremely patronizing—invitation to a “bet” on “the black race” animated the Colonial Exposition of 1931. More than eighty years after the advent of Francophone African literature, Schifano conjures African writing in order to “unfreeze the novelistic spirit and the French language of the new century”—thereby justifying Gallimard’s belated entry into the field.