Amadou Hampâté Bâ and the Power of Time in the Social Reconstruction of West Africa

Abstract

Abstract Engaged for much of his life with the swell and ultimate ebb of the French colonial state in West Africa, Amadou Hampâté Bâ sought to reconstitute African societies apart from the destruction of the preceding century. Trained in ethnology by the colonial state, Hampâté Bâ collected oral histories of the area to gain a greater grasp on the power of local conceptions of social and political forms. He appreciated the power of “tradition,” a controversial view that caused many critics to brand him as reactionary. In contrast, Hampâté Bâ positioned his work as an escape from colonial domination. His work fought against European depictions of static, unchanging African societies by employing what he saw as a more African understanding of time. Embracing nonlinear conceptions of the fluidity of human experience across eras, Hampâté Bâ instead proposed that West Africans look to the past to escape the present and reimagine the future. He extolled the virtues of continuity across the rupture of European modernism, pushing Africans away from European norms while widening the applicability of African sociopolitical ideas across West Africa in a fraught effort founded on the mythic histories of the Sahel. Hampâté Bâ sought universality in the particularity of these myths, a contested process that carried the potential of social innovation, growth, and change without the destruction of foreign domination.