“Crimes of History” Senegalese Soccer and the Forensics of Slavery

Abstract

In describing the coercive security measures that characterized George W. Bush's 2003 visit to Gorée Island residents complained that, “It was like slavery had returned.” Despite, in his speech, referring to the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a “crime of history” Bush, that day, traded on the spectral capital afforded by captive Senegalese to diminish the legacy of U.S. involvement in this earlier moment of human trafficking by inadvertently re-staging the exchange of bonded Africans.

The Gorée fiasco occurred as a result of events set in motion several decades before, but which catalyzed with the tragic September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Immediately afterward, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade created an African coalition “contre le terrorisme,” which the U.S. supported rhetorically and, ultimately, financially. Senegal was perhaps a likely candidate for African leadership in this regard one of the primary architects of Africa's newest neoliberal solution to economic crisis, NEPAD (the New Partnership for African Development), Senegal was also, during the Cold War-era, an outspoken critic of Soviet assistance in African liberation struggles. With its long history of political participation achieved through exceptional status the French colonial government granted Senegal, the country has a long history of republicanism. Still, the widespread idea that Senegal is more democratic than other African nations camouflages a pragmatic politics whose benefits are unclear to a population faced with a weakening currency and unprecedented rates of unemployment. Senegal is, despite this, celebrated as an African success story, both because vendors abroad typify the austere work ethic privileged in meritocratic narratives as the solution to economic distress, and because the government maintains close ties to the United States, especially in the post-9/11 period, since its status as an Islamic country makes it, from the standpoint of the U.S., a valuable ally.

Keywords:

• Gorée
• Island, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, senegal, sports, War on Terror, 9/
• 11

Notes

“The reenactment of the event of captivity contrives an enduring, visceral, and personal memory of the unimaginable (Hartman 2002 760),” and not simply for people from the African diaspora returning to Senegal as part of a heritage crusade, but also for this Senegalese population, many of whom acknowledged no previous link to the history of the Transatlantic slave trade, despite inhabiting a region steeped in the history of its commercial transactions.

BBC News, “Country profile Senegal.” Accessed on 15 May 2005 at http //news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/country_profiles/1064496.stm.

Tidiane Sy, “Senegal opposition to amnesty law,” BBC News, 11 January 2005.

Postcolonial “lawlessness,” thus, “[often] turns out to be a complex north-south collaboration” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006a 8).

Seck was once so close to Wade that when the President appointed him Prime Minister of Senegal “he told the media that he knew the president so well that he did not even need directions to ‘transform Wade's vision’ into concrete acts.” Seck, in fact, claimed he was “an embodiment of the President's vision.” And yet, in the early months of 2005, rumors began circulating that Seck hoped first to have Wade displaced from the Presidency through means as unspecified as they were clandestine, then to gain control over parliament in the elections of 2006, and ultimately to run for President in 2007. What was once a political alliance disintegrated into a criminal conspiracy. A conspiracy theory, at least.

A short time later, opposition leader Abdourahim Agne was charged with “threatening state security” after making a speech that encouraged Senegalese people to “go into the streets by the millions and demonstrate peacefully for change” so they might be able to improve the country's “dire state.” The director of a film “examining Abdoulaye Wade's election promises” Agne—his lawyer told reporters—“had been charged under laws banning attempts to overthrow the state.” The state's charge against Agne seemed to render explicit what remained hidden behind the “more serious charges” added to the case against Seck after the fact of his arrest Wade's fear he might be displaced either by a candidate the people preferred or through a radical critique. For more on Agne's case, see “Senegal opposition leader charged,” BBC News, Tuesday, 31 May 2005.

DJ Awadi's song “Sunuugal,” whose name is inspired by a word that means “canoe” in Wolof but which is also the etymological root of the word Sénégal, features this lyrical critique of Wade

• “You promised me I would have a job/You promised me I would have food,You promised me I would have real work and hope/But so far—nothing,That's why I am leaving, that's why I am taking off in this canoe…I would prefer to die than to live in this hell” (Winter 2006).

“Alterity” because forensic inquiries entail assumptions about human difference. They rely, sometimes, on historical patterns unique to specific demographics and nearly in every instance on bodily signatures like fingerprints (Beavan 2002), footprints (Abbott 1964), and, even, voices (Hollien 2002).

This extraordinary claim appears on the back cover of Colin Beavan's (2002) Fingerprints The Origins of Forensic Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science.

“In 1846,” as Williams Pietz has shown, “the British Parliament abolished England's ancient quasi-religious law that compensated wrongful death accidents according to the money value of the lethal object. It was replaced with…[t]he Fatal Accidents Act of 1846 [which] established the modern method for determining the money value of human life that has been used ever since in Anglophone capitalist societies…” (Pietz 2002 36). The “quasi-religious” law of the deodand—which had been in operation for centuries—was finally eradicated because it was believed, as noted legal reformer Lord Campbell argued, this doctrine was “not applicable to the present state of society.” As far as he was concerned, in this period—which also witnessed “the legal revolution that created modern corporations” (Pietz 1997b 105)—it should no longer be upheld “that the life of a man was so valuable that they could not put an estimate upon it” (Hansard's Parliamentary Debates 1846, also cited in Pietz 1997b). This was the same moment in which clinical pathologists began routinely using invasive surgical procedures on a human body that was suddenly, neither in that context, too sacred for more rational and scientific treatment (Foucault 1975).

Methodologically and conceptually, forensics offers ethnographers a powerful set of tools. It is, of course, the science of human traces, of that which is “written in blood” (Wilson 2003, cf. Caplan and Anderson '21 , Walls 1974). It, ideally, connects us with the “‘action’ to be recounted” (Rhine 1998 XIX). Thus while it is usually concerned with identifying and treating human remains (Boddington, Garland, and Janaway 1987; Nafte 2000; El-Najjar and McWilliams '41 ; Weston and Wells 1974), or with assisting in legal investigations (Ferllini 2002; Rhine 1998; Ubelaker and Scammell 1992), it need not be restricted to these contexts (van Duyne et al. 2003). In its inception, after all, the word has a rather broad field of signification. That which is “forensic,” in Latin, derives from the word “forum”—a meeting ground or market. Forensis, consequently, “means belonging to a public space, since in Roman times, legal trials, sentencing, and executions were…literally for the public to view” (my emphasis) (Nafte 2000 5). I ask the reader to retain this sense of forensics as a particular way to frame perspective as I consider the relationship between sports, spectatorship, and the fetishization of subject positions in athletic contests and in the political projects with which they share discursive thematics.

Wade's determined position on the matter did not reflect the nuanced exchanges taking place in Senegalese popular media. Critical of the way Bush's coalition was driven by, what seemed to many to be, a divine right to fight, Cheikh Bamba Dioum published an article in Le Soleil entitled, “God bless the USA…and Afghanistan.” (Le Soleil, Friday, 12 October 2001. My italics.) Malick Ndiaye, Leader of the Collective Social Forces for Change, declared that he supported “neither Bush nor Ben Laden” in his L'info 7 piece (“Les partisans du ‘Ni Bush ni Ben Laden’ remittent ça aujourd'hui,” L'info 7, Wednesday, 7 November 2001). Religious theorist Ebrahim Moosa has noted parallels between the two adversaries “Both Bush and Bin Laden claim to have divine mandates, to have access to secret spiritual knowledge that obliges them to do certain things, even if those things run counter to their religions' most basic ethical teachings. Both men claim they're going to save people through their actions…(as quoted Bremer 2006 12). Moosa contends, furthermore, both men “believe they have messianic missions to fulfill” (Ibid.).

See “Pour la création d'un Pacte africaine contre le terrorisme,” L'info 7, Jeudi, 20 Septembre 2001, and “Le président Wade propose un ‘Pacte africaine contre le terrorisme,’” Soleil, Vendredi, 21 Septembre 2001.

No doubt this course of action was easier for Wade to pursue because his Islamic nation is ruled by a secular state. “Islamic law,” differs dramatically from “common law or civil law systems” (like the French codes Senegal uses); instead, it is structured largely by the “opinions of religious scholars, who argue, on the basis of the text of the Koran, the Prophetic hadith and the consensus of the first generations of Muslim scholars, what the law should be” (Peters 2005 1).

“Les chefs d'État réaffirment l'engagement sans faille de l'Afrique,” Le Soleil, 18 October 2001, p. 3.

Ibid.

Ibid. “M. Bush également annoncé la création d'un fonds de soutien des investissements privés dans la région…des garantie et une couverture du risque politique pour leurs projets en Afrique sub-saharienne.”

Greg Mills (2004) cites the preponderance of paramilitary groups operating within the African continent, and the fact that NEPAD was ratified in October of 2001, as evidence that African leaders share with their Western counterparts an interest in fighting terrorism. It is doubtful that African Heads-of-State would envision their struggle against militia groups and rogue soldiers in the same uncompromising way that Bush envisioned his crusade against terrorism. Mills’ claim that, “[h]ad there never been a September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush arguably never would have made a visit to Senegal, South Africa” and other African countries (Mills 2004 158), on the other hand, it is compelling as a way to think about how U.S. Foreign Policy in Africa is, at times, structured by historical contingencies.

For more on this burgeoning alliance, see Lara Pawson's (2004) article, “France tackles U.S. trend,” in BBC News

• French President Jacques Chirac holds talks with Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade in Paris on Thursday. The meeting comes as French-Senegalese ties appear to be under pressure, largely due to the West African state's more recent friend – the United States. France, the former colonial power, remains Senegal's biggest donor and trading partner. Dakar has played down the talks, insisting that relations are very good…. But skeptics say the meeting is a chance for Paris to remind Senegal who pays out millions of dollars in donor assistance each year.

It should be noted that Senegal also gained favor with the United States during Ronald Reagan's presidency, for its willingness to serve as a contingency landing site for space shuttle missions. During the presidency of George H.W. Bush, Senegal supported the U.S. by condemning the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, for which two Libyan men were convicted (although suspicions were raised, subsequently, about whether due process was upheld during the trial).

“Bush et Wade rêvent d'une finale Sénégal–USA,” Le Soleil, Wednesday, 19 June 2002. The front page headline translates as “Bush and Wade dream of a Senegal–USA final match.” The article heading itself, on the newspaper's interior, carries a similar sentiment, “Bush et Wade souhaitent USA–Sénégal,” or “Bush and Wade wish for a USA–Senegal final.”

Admittedly, it is not altogether clear how this demographic label is being deployed. To the extent that “youth”—as a sociological moniker—often refers not simply to people of a certain age, but those who have not yet accessed well-recognized institutions of social reproduction (marriage, parenthood, and stable employment, in Senegal), it encompasses people from ages associated with adolescence up through age thirty—and beyond. What's more, the term is typically, as the Senegalese case emphasizes, gendered as male.

See statistics provided by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. See www.ciaworldfactbook.com/senegal.

See “Senegal celebrates Cup heroics,” British Broadcast Corporation Sport, 21 July 2001.

“Senegal back to heroes welcome,” BBC Sport, 22 July 2001.

Ibid.

“Lions players rule in France,” BBC Sport, 13 August 2001.

“Africa's obsession with soccer,” BBC Sport, 18 August 2001.

“Senegal in fever over World Cup debut,” BBC Sport, 14 May 2002.

“Soccer fever,” 12 June 2002.

See “Divided loyalties for Fadiga,” BBC Sport, 8 April 2002.

“The whole of the Cameroonian squad plays abroad, along with 22 Senegalese, 21 Nigerians, 16 South Africans, and nine Tunisians.” Isabelle Saussez, “Africa on the sidelines,” The Courier ACP-EU, July–August 2002.

“Senegal's success story,” BBC Sport, 16 June 2002.

This includes granting amnesty to Murids who, besides accounting for one of Senegal's largest incomes via remittance packages sent home from overseas, make valuable donations to the government in return for tax leniencies. In this way, their holy city of Touba can be considered, from a certain perspective, privatized.

Birdsall and Nellis (2003), for instance, assess the impact of privatization by distinguishing between “winners and losers.”

For elites, “the watchwords of the sporting canon—competition…‘fair play’…transpose quite naturally from his [or her] individual conduct to that of a company or indeed a nation. Here they may take on fancier, more imposing titles Free Enterprise, Competitive Trading Position…the National Interest, Equality before the Law, etc., but the inherent ideas are still the same” (Brohm 1978 ix).

International lending agencies, North Atlantic economists, and donor nations seem agreed that good governance correlates with economic prosperity despite the fact that Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and, increasingly, the Sudan, have topped the list of African countries receiving foreign investment capital during the past decade (Ferguson 2006 196; Reno 2001 187) despite, for different reasons, evidencing some of the continent's most glaring forms of political and civil unrest. Despite this, development discourses insist that Cote d'Ivoire's recent political turmoil and Sierra Leone's protracted social crisis surrounding fierce competition for illicit diamonds are to blame for lackluster economic performance (African Development Report 2004).

See “Pèlerinage à la Maison des Esclaves,” Le Soleil, Samedi, 3 Vendredi 1998.

See “Le Méridien Président sous haute surveillance,” L'info 7, 2 Juillet 2003. The writer who chronicled the modes of surveillance Bush's security forces used found it important to emphasize that not even Clinton's 1998 visit seemed to necessitate such precautions [“Il faut souligner que meme la visite que le prédéceseur de Bush, Bill Clinton, avait effectuée au Sénégal avant l'alternance, n'avait nécessité autant de precautions.”]

Bayo Holsey's 2003 work on slave tourism to Ghana reveals the cleavage between the absence of historical work on the slave trade in Ghanaian educational curricula and the diasporic discourses prevalent among African Americans that encourage them to visit Cape Coast and Elmina to confront a key point of departure for their ancestors who, it is believed, embarked on a Transatlantic journey to the Americas from these sites (cf. Richards 2005).

Djibril Samb, ed. 1997. Gorée et l'esclavage Actes du Séminaire sur “Gorée dans la Traite atlantique mythes et réalités.” Dakar IFAN.

Scholars have not, as yet, considered how or why the experience of being corralled on a soccer field during the Bush visit provoked comparison with the Middle Passage. Despite inhabiting a different historical epoch, a good deal remains to be learned, I think, from studying the infrastructure(s) through which capital—symbolic and economic—continues to circulate in Transatlantic circuits, and the political networks that sustain these forms of exchange.

Bush here suggests the United States government is using its “power and resources” to introduce “peace” and “end conflict” in ways that are especially beneficial to African people. The millennial captiveries at Gorée, it hardly needs to be emphasized, tell a very different story (cf. Hesse 2002).

For the full transcript of his speech, see “President Bush Speaks at Gorée Island,” Remarks by the President on Gorée Island, 8 July 2003, as posted on the official website of the White House, accessed 19 April 2007 at http //www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030708-1.html.

And “criminality” has, for young actors in postcolonial and postindustrial contexts, provided if not exactly “a means of production” a repertoire of techniques for achieving the “productive redestribution” of resources among those people “alienated by new forms of exclusion” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006b 278; cf. Venkatesh 2006). Ironically, this was less true for Akon than it most likely was for his peers in the underworld. The top-selling recording artist was, by his own admission, raised “middle-class” though he “gravitated toward the ‘hood, running with tough crews in all the cities where his parents moved” (Checkoway 2007 94).

Laura Checkoway's (2007 92) Vibe magazine article quotes Akon as saying, “Bend…over, look back, and watch me,” to ex-“it” girl Tara Reid whose legs were then wrapped around his waist as the hip hop balladeer performed, “Smack that,” before an audience at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Crucial to the way Akon understands himself to be racialized in ways consonant with African Americans is his concern with celebrating what I have elsewhere termed “hip hop fantasy,” an ideational frame that hinges on performances of material excess and the insistence—at least in the public persona of many hip hop (and, in this case, hip hop R & B) artists—of depicting the female body as a vehicle for sexual escapades (Ralph 2006a).

Hartman mentions encountering in Ghana “visiting scholars, artists, and journalists” who paid “obruni prices for rent and everything else” without “receiving the quality of goods and services that the powerful commanded and that Ghanaians exacted” (2007 25). Yet her critique of the way Ghanaians skillfully exploit African Americans says nothing about opportunistic enterprises rendered in reverse. What, looking in the opposite direction, are we to make of Andrew Young, whose persistent interest in maintaining extensive diplomatic ties to Africa (especially Nigeria) throughout his tenure as a United Nations Ambassador subsequently translated into commercial interest in Nigerian oil reserves (Dart 2002; Ashley 1995) through his GoodWorks International consulting firm amidst local protest among students that oil exploitation had upset the local ecosystem. In the late 1990s GoodWorks was, in Nigeria, rumored to be behind the murder of local youth who protested oil deals that Young's company had helped to negotiate. It was never confirmed that Young, nor any of his associates, were guilty of such allegations. Yet one cannot but help notice the irony that a former U.S. Ambassador and freedom movement leader now finds himself in the curious position of having to defend corporate policies and profit-seeking projects linked to death and environmental destruction in Nigeria. Young has been soundly criticized for implicitly endorsing—or at least refusing to condemn—injustices perpetuated by Nigerian political officials, like President Olegun Obasanjo, whose regime remains mired in “corruption, crime, poverty, and violence” according to Human Rights Watch (Gentry and Poole 2007), forcing some to now question the former civil rights leader and Mayor of Atlanta whose political credentials no longer seem sufficient to defend his newest ventures in Africa (Meier 2007). Young, it should be noted, first met the Nigerian leader in his capacity as Ambassador though he kept in touch with Obasanjo even after he resigned from the Carter Administration, not simply making it possible for his sons to attend to Morehouse College and Georgia Tech in Atlanta (Suggs 2000), but providing him with “books, tapes, and a [copy of the Holy] Bible” when Obasanjo was imprisoned under a previous President (Ibid.).

If “slavery” ultimately “stripped your history to bare facts and precious details,” Hartman (2007 11) seems unable to imagine a history apart from any “trace” of ancestral evidence (Ibid 7). I am sensitive to the formidable challenge of reckoning with one's past in the absence of documentation, of trying to form a narrative despite the innumerable “blank spaces” (Ibid 12) that occasion the “bare bones” (Ibid 11) recollections of familiar lore. Still it seems, paradoxically, evidence of too strong a romance with the violent dehumanization of enslavement to suggest “towns vanished from sight and banished from memory” are all any African American “can ever hope to claim” (Ibid 9). What of the historical understandings African people developed beyond the rigid criteria of verifiable proof (cf. Brown 2003), the meaningful ties they manage to forge despite “the slipperiness and elusiveness of slavery's archive” (Hartman 2007 17)? Whose ancestral connection, after all, is indubitably real?

The overlapping articulation of actors and constituencies that participated in the Transatlantic slave trade (and domestic circuits connected to it) are difficult to discern given the way Hartman (2007 208) theorizes this historical matrix, “Simply put, slaves were stolen from one group, exchanged by a second group, and then shipped across the Atlantic and exploited in the Americas by a third group.”

I find Hartman's quest to locate an appreciation for Africa steeped “in the efforts thwarted and realized, of revolutionaries intent upon stopping the clock and instituting a new order” promising, and think it not simply commendable but appropriate that, instead of longing for the myth of a glorious past, she claims a position “articulated in the ongoing struggle to escape, stand down, and defeat slavery in all its myriad forms.” Still, rendering this the preferred posture of a “lost tribe” ((Hartman 2007 234–235)—instead of theorizing the diasporic connection as an admittedly prosthetic but nevertheless consequential political alliance forged by people occupying similar structural positions linked through certain critical sensibilities who also share something of a historical trajectory (Edwards 2003 13–15, 143, 282, 303)—seems, to me, remarkably complicit with the peculiar institution's project to sever the histories of its captives. From whence this extraordinary efficacy?

Beyond the historical particulars of Senegalese social life, Jean Loup-Amselle (1998 [1990]) has convincingly argued that, instead of fixed ethnic distinctions, many African societies have long been marked by an originary syncretism that appears as a fixed tribal identity more readily in ethnographic accounts—and apparently, personal meditations—than it does in reality.

“Jackson,” said one senior official, “has given us a lot of help on this, and we'll all remember him for it,” see “Clinton Opposes Slavery Apology,” in Brooks, ed. (1999 352).

In November 2006, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the Transatlantic slave trade a “crime against humanity” but, like Bush, “stopped short of issuing a full apology.” See “Blair ‘sorrow’ over slave trade,” BBC News, 27 November 2006.

As Malcolm Gladwell (2006 138) is careful to remind us, “Crime…isn't a single discrete thing, but a word used to describe an almost impossibly varied and complicated set of behaviors.” To the extent that Bush's speech reframed the legacy of U.S. activity in the Afro-Atlantic world by “silencing”—so much of—“the past” (Trouillot 1997) he produced a version of history at least as criminal as the virtual enslavement of the Senegalese people who, on 8th of July, 2003, understood their predicament through the lens of bondage.

Recall the scene in Voltaire's (1759) Candide when a mutilated slave who has escaped from a plantation in Surinam confronts the novel's young protagonist to display fleshy scars that remind him, “It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe”—and that Senegal might enjoy their slice of the neoliberal pie.

If “slavery” successfully “established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone” (Hartman 2007 6), forensic methods of calculation, during the nineteenth century, provided what was then considered to be objective criteria for determining “worth” in emergent forms of monetized value by drawing on a shift in Anglo-American legal perspective which suddenly made human beings, previously considered more sacred than scientific, available for quantification (Pietz 1997a 98) based on the physiological and demographic variables planters considered in the “slave pens” where they examined prospective chattel (Johnson 1999 118).

That such a legal concept could nevertheless fit this scenario so appropriately makes one wonder whether this militaristic spectacle is evidence of the way “force ‘trumps’ law” or if “the very concept of law” if, indeed, “juridical reason itself, includes a priori a possible recourse to constraint or coercion and, thus, to a certain violence” (Derrida 2005 xi; cf. Bourdieu 1997 95). Though, as the foregoing discussion suggests, I believe legal concepts and categories are to be engaged and not dismissed as mere “ideologized obfuscations of how social life really comes about and operates…studied only in order to debunk them” (Pietz 2002 35).

These Senegalese “slaves,” then, might be considered “virtual commodit[ies]” (Trouillot 1994), in both senses of the term.

Apropos here, articles 1109 and 1117 of the Code civil des français [French civil code] indicate that a contract is not valid if consent derives from misapprehension (erreur), is achieved under duress (violence), or results from misrepresentation (dol). For the articles in question, see the Code civil

• “Il n'y a point de consentement valable, si le consentement n'a été donné que par erreur, ous'il a été extorqué par violence ou surpris par dol” (Article 1109).

• “La convention contractée par erreur, violence ou dol, n'est point nulle de plein droit; elle donne seulement lieu à une action en nullité ou en rescision” (Article 1117).