Reflections on The Surreptitious Speech

The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness is a compilation of essays edited by V.Y. Mudimbe, celebrating forty years of the journal Présence Africaine. In his engaging summary at the end of the compendium, Mudimbe sets the tone for the collection and reflects on the journal’s profound legacy.

Defining a New Space

In its first four decades, Présence Africaine did more than just publish; it organized a new intellectual territory. Mudimbe describes it this way:

In the span of forty years, the journal and publishing house Presence Africaine succeeded in organizing a new literary and intellectual space for ‘a surreptitious speech.’ This space is not the other side of what we may call the Western space. In fact, it belongs to that space, though it is true that from the beginning Presence defined itself on the margin of this center it challenged.

There was a clear political necessity for this positioning. André Gide made it explicit in the very first issue: why should Présence speak according to the expectations of a culture that was violating the very values Présence sought to promote?

The Algebraic Metaphor

As I read this, the idea of “constructing space” struck me as a deeply algebraic operation. In algebra, we construct spaces constantly; they are powerful tools for reasoning in mathematics and the sciences. I began to wonder: how could such an abstract tool be useful in a field as concrete as African Studies?

Mudimbe clarifies that the space created by Présence is indeed a theoretical construct, much like a mathematical one:

A space is always a construct. It is a theoretical articulation that claims to render and represent operations or, put simply, the reality of a place, that is, a primary experience. A space is, to say the least, a second-order plane reflecting upon a first-order practice of life and human experience.

Modeling Reality vs. Changing It

In algebra, we use spaces to model specific aspects of reality. We might model the forces acting on an object as vectors in a three-dimensional plane. To do this, we intentionally ignore the messiness of the real world, escaping into the “clean” world of vector spaces.

However, there is a fundamental difference between an intellectual movement’s space and a mathematical one. A mathematical space is passive — modeling a scenario as a 3D vector space doesn’t actually change the physical laws of the object.

An intellectual space, by contrast, is active. In a Schrödinger-esque manner, the fact that an intellectual movement studies a certain society fundamentally changes the reality of that society. Mudimbe notes:

This second-degree organization, by its very being, considerably alters and transforms the primary logic in which it claims to root itself. To that extent, its narratives as well as its postulations invent ‘what is really out there’ in the field of everyday place. Methods of faithfully expressing the place, at least in social and human sciences, undergo regular transformations in order to reflect better the reality of an experience and its complexity.

Breaking the European Paradigm

This metaphor of “spatialization” highlights just how herculean the task of Présence Africaine was. Before its founding, African cultures were forced into a European theoretical space that viewed them only as relics of the past — pre-historical versions of the “modern” West.

Mudimbe captures the weight of this silencing:

The memory of the European space would appear thus, diachronically and synchronically, as the paradigm of human experience and, at the same time, as that which historically has muted all other human differences by reducing them to the project of an evolutionary becoming. In this perspective, Presence Africaine could appear to signify the unthinkable: an otherness spatializing itself from a nowhere that could not but be a utopian project.

In this light, Présence Africaine was a “surreptitious voice” facing Western culture. It spoke in the name of absolute difference — yet, fascinatingly, this very difference emerged from within the Western space it sought to challenge.