French was imposed on you… or was it luck?
I think it was an opportunity. And it’s French we speak now… right?
I just try.
I also speak English – another opportunity – and I started in Cameroon, where I was born: we speak many other languages, such as Ewondo, so we have appropriated French to communicate with each other.
Was it not the language of the oppressor?
Colonization was oppression, but language is an opportunity that we have known how to take advantage of as a useful tool.
Algeria is now replacing colonial French with English.
It is a mistake: why replace one language with another instead of adding them?
Is adding them adding opportunities?
In the same way that, on the other hand, reducing the history of Africa and Europe to that of oppressors and oppressed, slavers and slaves… is to forget its rich complexity. It was much more interesting than that.
Today we continue reducing it?
Yes, at all. The relationship between Africa and the West is much more than that of immigration and boats. There are many more things to explain.
What story do you tell in your books?
That before the centuries of colonial slavery there were a thousand years of commercial and cultural exchanges; of trips and travelers, with their ups and downs…
It seems more interesting than that of slaves and slaveholders.
It is much more so, and richer and more complex than that dichotomy between good and evil!
The Egyptians who founded the greatest ancient culture, what ethnicity were they?
They could be black, but they could also have brown skin and there were white ones: all skin tones… which were irrelevant then. It was only relevant after European colonization.
Were the pharaohs black?
Let’s see, the important thing is that until the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, skin color did not define you. Race was not your color, but your religion, culture, language, customs…
Does colonialism invent race as an unappealable sentencing of status?
But that relationship between color and race, ergo status, continues to permeate our culture today.
Why did color suddenly matter?
Because colonialism not only wanted to colonize, but also to erase history and replace it with the version that the colonizers were interested in: the one that color determined intelligence – the black was thus less human and less intelligent – ??and that it had always defined status. of societies and peoples. The color of your skin was not relevant before colonialism.
Black Roman citizens?
And emperors: Septimius Severus was born in Libya, part of the Roman empire at the time, and was African. There were other markers to discriminate against people – like we others have today – but it was not the color of his skin.
Do you think there has been any progress?
In the 18th century, life was terrible for people like me and today, however, women have more rights than ever. Studying history makes us aware and liberates us and prevents progress from ending in regression.
Will there be more or less immigration?
It is logical that if your country ends up, among other things because of its colonial past, in a terrible state, you want to emigrate; but Europe is not the place where most African immigrants go. And remember that Europeans are aging and having fewer children every day.
We know about Africa’s problems, but less about the solutions.
Africans want to progress and that is why they emigrate, but for them to progress in their own country, solutions designed in offices in other countries do not work: social distancing from Covid, for example, in Africa meant liquidating street commerce. It was not viable, it generated mortal misery.
Does colonialism persist?
One colonizer leaves, but others arrive and that is very worrying.
Do China and Russia colonize Africa?
Sometimes we have to collaborate with the old colonizer to get rid of the new one.
Geneticists show that the genetic difference between ethnicities is minimal.
I am much more interested in enjoying and valuing the diversity of humans in equality: how we live the human experience in different ways.
But you are a teacher in England and France: do you still feel African?
I enjoy my mix of identities and I try to share that enjoyment with my African and European students and friends. The best thing about being human is that you can be human with various identities.
