This is a phrase I have come across several times recently but I'm not sure what it means.
Sarkozy said it when addressing a university in Dakar in 2007:
I also came across this idea when reading Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahu's:
“This interpretative capacity allowed [Jews] to remain outside history and dwell in myth [...] Now that Israel exists, however, the days of the Bible tales are finished and the true history of my people can finally begin” (282-284).
What does it mean to enter, or to be outside of, history? Are Jews and Africans not always already part of history?
In French, entrer dans l'histoire has a simple and clear meaning. To say that a person, or a group of people, enters history means that this person or group has become relevant enough to be part of the global historical record. This is relatively straightforward for individuals : Gengis Khan, Napoléon, Marie Curie, Bill Gates or Nelson Mandela have "entered history" because their actions have had widespread consequences. But even then, who gets to decide how historically "relevant" a person is problematic. Has Nicolas Sarkozy "entered history"? The French one perhaps... For groups, this notion is close to nonsensical, and hearing Sarkozy apply it to an entire continent left a number of people aghast, in Africa and elsewhere. But let's return to Sarkozy's speech, because he does makes his idea quite clear:
The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history. The African peasant, who for thousands of years have lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time, rhythmed by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words. In this imaginary world where everything starts over and over again there is no place for human adventure or for the idea of progress. In this universe where nature commands all, man escapes from the anguish of history that torments modern man, but he rests immobile in the centre of a static order where everything seems to have been written beforehand. This man (the traditional African) never launched himself towards the future. The idea never came to him to get out of this repetition and to invent his own destiny.
As we can see, the whole idea, which was presented at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop - a Senegalese historian! - was that those "Africans" had kept themselves in stasis for "thousands of years", just watching grass grow. They had not "entered history" because they had done nothing significant. This part of the speech was extremely regressive and patronizing, and so was the entire speech, except in the beginning where we can credit Sarkozy for making a relatively sane assessment of colonization, possibly the first time that a French president did that:
[The European conquerors] believed that they were superior, that they were more advanced, that they were progress, that they were civilisation. They were wrong.
But those were only a few well-written lines. After that came the usual praise of the civilizing mission with the #notallcolonizers coda:
The coloniser took, but I want to say with respect, that he also gave. He built bridges, roads, hospitals, dispensaries and schools. He turned virgin soil fertile. He gave of his effort, his work, his know-how. I want to say it here, not all the colonialists were thieves or exploiters.
This was straight from colonial propaganda from the first half of the 20th century. Here is for instance a excerpt of the speech given by Paul Reynaud, minister of the Colonies, at the inauguration of the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931 (Excelsior, 7 May 1931):
Far away, alone in the bush, officers, administrators and pioneers, often unrecognised, even disowned, took initiatives, responsibilities and risks. [...] And with an admirable effort, our doctors are curbing epidemics that were on the way to wiping entire populations off the face of a continent. To thousands and thousands of human beings, they give life a second time. And you will see the photographs of those bright classrooms with the bright little faces of the black schoolchildren staring at the teacher. We have brought light into the darkness.
Sarkozy's Dakar speech has been widely criticized for its regressiveness and for its liberal use of colonial-era stereotypes about Africa and Africans, so I do not need to go further. It was part of a general revisionist discourse about colonization ("it was kinda bad, sorry for that, but we build schools!") - along with that of an odd race-based notion of national identity - that is still being pushed by the French far-right.
The bit about the non-existent African history had itself a long history, and there is quite a large literature about this. In a collective book published in response to the Dakar speech, L'Afrique répond à Sarkozy, several authors pointed out that Hegel, in his Philosophy of history (1822-1830) was particularly disdainful of African history:
Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained — for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World — shut up; it is the Gold-land compressed within itself — the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night. [...] At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it — that is in its northern part — belong to the Asiatic or European World.
Another forerunner of the Eurocentric idea of history is quite infamous: Arthur de Gobineau himself, one of the fathers of white supremacism and of the whole Aryan master race theory. In his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855, book IV, Chapter I), Gobineau wrote that "history exists only in white nations." According to him, the other races, even those that Gobineau found to be civilized, like the Indian and Chinese ones, did not have history.
The Western world, as I have just outlined it, is like a chessboard where the greatest interests have come to struggle. It is a lake that has constantly overflowed onto the rest of the globe, sometimes ravaging it, always fertilising it. It is a kind of field of variegated crops where all plants, salubrious and poisonous, nutritious and deadly, have found cultivators. The greatest amount of movement, the most astonishing diversity of facts, the most illustrious conflicts and the most interesting by their vast consequences are concentrated there. [...] I need not point out that where the black races fought only with themselves, where the yellow races also turned in their own circle, or where the black and yellow mixtures are at loggerheads today, there is no history possible. The results of these conflicts being essentially unfruitful, like the ethnic agents that determine them, nothing has appeared from them, nothing has remained. This is the case in America, in most of Africa and in too large a part of Asia. History springs only from the contact of the white races.
More recent is the following quote (and also much discussed) made by British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper during a series of lectures in the University of Sussex transmitted by BBC Television in the 1960s (cited for instance by Fuglestad, 1992):
Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely, like the history of... pre-Columbian America, darkness. And darkness is not a subject of history.
Sarkozy and his speechwriter Henri Guaino thus drew - purposefully? - from a long tradition of colonial and racist, or at least Eurocentric, representations that considered that Africa had no proper history and did not matter until Europeans got interested in it.
Sources