“Africa is present in all the pasts”

No less than three books, in this new school year, for the historian and archaeologist François-Xavier Fauvelle. The first, The Masks and the Mosque, which focuses on medieval Mali, is a resumption of his 2021 course at the Collège de France, where he holds the chair of History and Archeology of African Worlds. The second is an expanded reissue of the already classic golden rhinoceroswhich sweeps away the golden centuries of the African Middle Ages (VIII^e-XV^e century), when the continent was at the heart of global trade between Europe and Asia.

As for the third, Africa and the world: retold stories, which he co-directs with art historian Anne Lafont, director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, it brings together around ten contributions testifying to the shift taken within the discipline in order to offer a more global and interdisciplinary approach to the history of Africa. Which, in reverse, makes it possible to reread the history of Europe to include its African part. Explanations.

In “Africa and the World”, the African story is twofold. It concerns African presences in the world, but also the presences of the world in Africa. Why insist on the need to link the two?

Francois-Xavier Fauvelle: This book was born from a proposal that had been made to me to write a world history of Africa. Quite quickly, it dawned on me that something had to be done which would be both a world history of Africa and an African history of the world, which would reflect on what African societies have done to the world and on what the world has done in Africa. Because not only do African societies have a history – that’s obvious! – but they have always been present with other companies in the world in all the past.

This dual approach leads us to re-examine regions that we believe we know very well. “Africa” ​​is a word, a concept, which has a modern history, as demonstrated by Valentin-Yves Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa [1988 ; Présence africaine, 2021]. But so does the concept of “world”. The interest is to show that these inventions occurred at the same time: they are two artefacts of the global modernity of the world in which we have lived since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, and which is now more than four centuries old.

Which brings you to integrate what, since the work of the British historian and sociologist Paul Gilroy, has been called “the black Atlantic” – this space which took shape, with the slave trade, between Africa and the diasporas in America and Europe – as being fully part of this plural Africa…

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