language | Rethinking Francophone Africa

Language, Culture and Colonization: the third JIAS conference on the legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

2-4 September, 2019, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study

1 Tolip Street, Westdene 2092, P O Box 524, Auckland Park 2006, Johannesburg, South Africa

Convenors David Boucher, Cardiff University and University of Johannesburg and Ayesha Omar, Witwatersrand University

Colonialism and Imperialism imposed alien cultures and languages on their subject peoples with the consequence that the legacy in each society, or nation, to varying degrees, was a process of ‘Creolization’ giving rise to cultures and languages with mixed origins. Contemporary decolonisation movements confront this tendency by calling for the reassertion of indigenous practices and languages. The aim of this third JIAS conference on colonialism and imperialism is to explore the effects of ‘creolization’ and to investigate the respects in which they have been both negative and positive, particularly in the areas of language and culture. Two of the most influential theorists and activists in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s, for example, took opposing view on the use of the colonizer’s language. For Frantz Fanon, an endemic aspect of the destructive process of colonisation was the acquisition of the coloniser’s language. He contends: ‘A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language’. Cabral, on the other hand views language in purely instrumental terms. Portuguese, for him, was not a threat to the culture of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, ‘because language isn’t evidence of anything, but an instrument for men to relate with one another, a means for speaking, to express realities of life and of the world.’ Cabral argues that ‘we of the Party, if we want to lead our people forward for a long time to come – to write, to advance in science – our language has to be Portuguese’.

The organisers welcome expressions of interest with abstracts of proposed papers exploring issues of culture and language in relation to decolonization. Deadline 22^th April, 2019.

Please send them to:

In 1999, Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa debuted as the first feature film from the country of Chad. The film is to an extent autobiographical, enlisting techniques of both fiction and nonfiction filmmaking to tell the story of an exiled filmmaker returning to Chad to make a movie, identical in many ways to Haroun’s own journey. The film was a runner-up for Best First Film at the Venice Film Festival and launched Haroun onto a string of feature-length dramas set in Chad: Abouna, Daratt, A Screaming Man, and Grisgris.

Despite its richness in philosophy, buttressed by Haroun’s careful dialogue as well as his deliberate alternation between Arabic and French, the film has been remembered as simply Chad’s first feature film, the one that helped launched Haroun’s career. Yet if one digs deeper than the surface-level film reviews, they may expose Haroun’s very personal statements of cultural disidentification throughout Bye Bye Africa as he navigates his own complicated relationship to Chad since his exile in France.

Autobiography and disidentification in Bye Bye Africa‘s narrative

“Once I get a flight, I’ll be on my way,” 37-year-old Haroun says in a Chadian dialect of Arabic, sitting up in bed in the middle of the night in France. So begins Bye Bye Africa, in which Haroun is both directing and starring as a lightly fictionalized version of himself. His character has just learned of the death of his mother in his birth country, which he left to study filmmaking in France. Here is our first indicator of Haroun’s complicated self-identification: a switch from Chad’s trade language, Arabic, to Chad’s colonial language, French, for an off-screen narration: “She died yesterday over there. So far away. And now suddenly, I feel lonely.”

This return to family and birthland is a catalyst for the film’s narrative crux: Haroun wants to make a movie. The evening of his arrival, Haroun sits with his father and the two watch 8mm film from his mother’s youth. His father comments in Arabic, “I remember this! This was at your sister’s engagement ceremony. I remember every moment. […] Your mother was such a beautiful woman!” Haroun’s nephew Ali, a peppy ten-year-old, leans into the light cast by the projector, his silhouette blown up on the screen in front of them. “When I grow up, I want to make films too.”

By Bentley Brown

Rethinking Francophone Africa

Critical perspectives

Tag Archives: language

CFP: Language, Culture and Colonization: the third JIAS conference on the legacies of colonialism and imperialism

Language, Culture and Colonization: the third JIAS conference on the legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

The disidentification of Mahamat Saleh Haroun

Autobiography and disidentification in Bye Bye Africa‘s narrative