Contenu du sommaire : Dossier : Les temps de l'histoire

This paper aims at rethinking by modern historians an African periodization for the whole continent, in spite of the immensity and variety of spaces and times. A relative cultural unity may be hypothezised, at least getting rid of a Western eurocentric view (precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods). Periodization needs afrocentricity, but nevertheless cannot be isolated from the rest of the world, Africa being part of it from the beginnning. Many factors come from inside, such as the environmental change, a climatic periodization, African population history, and cultural trends. Nevertheless, one has to include major events the origins of which is often to be found abroad, such as the conquest of Egypt by the Greeks, the occupation of their African province by the Romans, the invasion by Islam, the arrival of the Portuguese, slave trading, colonial imperialism, and recent independences, all major steps to globalization. The result is a mixed attempt to take into account, at one and the same time, a history of self-centered autonomous processes and of external dependency.

By confronting existing sources and the production of historical discourse, the authors discuss the chronological divisions inherited from colonial time and present criteria enabling to reconsider the periodisation in the history of the Great Lake Region of East Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Southern Uganda, North-West Tanzania) in six main phases, associating closely longue durée and shorter time scales.

This exercise in determining regional historical periods plans to scrutinize the relation between the links of causality and the chronological overlapping that mainly led to the definition of the four major phases of the history of the golf of Guinea. After a long phase of peopling and organizing the region up to the XVth century, the zone appears up to the mid XIXth century as privileged contact zone between the whole of West Africa and Atlantic Europe. Colonial domination leads to the opposite process that is the marginalization of the region and the structural reorganisation of its economical bases, culminating during the XXth century with the questioning of European type Nation States.

The Ta'r?? as-S?d?n is presented principally as a royal chronicle of Songhay, organized around its kings. In opposition to chronicles from oral traditions, it is built on an Islamic chronology. After the fall of the Songhay Empire, the very instable political power imposed by Morocco does not offer adapted divisions for an internal chronology. The story corresponding to the Moroccan period is therefore at the same time more continuous and more dispersed. It is also more influenced by the personal life and experience of the author. Some passages stand out from the rest of the work: they deal with towns (Timbuktu and Jenne), economy and urbanism. In this case the described historical process determines its own time scale.

The concept of the “invention” of African ethnic groups – as introduced by Terence Ranger – has often been criticised. The main criticism deals with the difficulty to tie oneself down to a sole “inventor” and with the problem of defining the Africans as a passive “invented people”. However, the study of ethnic classifications enables the historian to find some answers. Particularly, the history of the creation of ethnic classification in Senegal between 1816 and the 1920s shows that the “invention” was not the work of one author but a long process. Partly this process had already taken place throughout the first half of the 19th century, constructing the Wolof as model. It has been transformed by Faidherbe, who introduced the idea of “races”. Finally, ethnic classification has been taken up by the colonial administrators who used and imposed it during the first third of the 20th century. Consequently, it is not the “birth” of isolated ethnic groups that is of unique importance. Rather, what must be taken into account are the dichotomies (Wolof/Maure, Tukuleer/Manding), the fusions of groups (Manding, Joola), the changes of the appreciation of virtue (Wolof, Bambara, etc.), and the principles of hierarchy (economic, strategic, racial).

This article analyses the concepts developed by French Administrators in Black Africa since the 1930s, concerning the role of their native collaborators. By utilising the case of Léon M'Ba, future President of Gabon, it is possible to show how the mistrust of French Administrators faced with their educated African subordinates motivated them to attempt to integrate this personnel as “indigenous chiefs”. When these allies committed abuses against “their populations”, the French responsible functionaries de-stooled them, only to see them emerge again after World War II in order to re-demand their positions and their prestige. The fact that the French Administration started to interpret their action from a Cold War viewpoint after 1946 permitted to this Black African elite to “change” ostensibly into the anti-Communist camp and by this move to return into high positions, including the Presidency of a post-colonial African state.

In a personal testimony, the author gives his point of view on the past fifty years of African studies in France. "Africanisme", in French, originally designated the study of African languages, literatures and cultures but these Humanistic studies have been increasingly marginalized. The author criticizes the domination by the economic history in the seventies and by the political science in the last two decades. According to him, it is time to return to the study of African verbal productions. The author pleads for the development of performance studies and for a renewed attention towards African texts.

This article aims at going over the writing, in the context of 1990-2000, of the history of the war called the “Algerian War”. Those years saw the coming of age of a new generation of historians, who have not lived through this war and who actually reinvest in it political agendas of their own time. The opening up of archives from the Army Historical Service (Service historique de l'armée de terre : SHAT) between 1992 and 2000 has also influenced the historiography, multiplying studies on the military aspects of the war. It also has produced a history reflecting the military point of view that other sources ought to correct. And last scientific exchanges with Algeria, for a long time moulded by the former colonial relations, are now also disturbed by the absence of democracy and the war going on in that country. These conditions call for historians working on the Algerian independence war to define anew their historical approach.