Amady Aly Dieng, 1932–2015: radical African nationalist, genuine Marxist, witty and free thinker

Amady Aly Dieng, one of the most famous and respected Senegalese intellectuals, died on 13 May 2015 at the age of 83. So much more than an academic (which he was for only a short part of his professional life), Dieng was known to his compatriots and colleagues as ‘Le Doyen’ – meaning dean, master and elder in French – and was an enduring proof of the moral, political and reflective, but also critical, engagement of some members of the Senegalese elite over the past half-century. Dieng was a famous African francophone student activist and leader in the 1950s and early 1960s, an original Marxist thinker and philosopher in the 1970s and 80s, and also in the latter period a highly professional, but critical, economist. Holding a PhD in Economics, he was employed as an expert economist by the Banque Centrale des États d'Afrique de l'Ouest (BCEAO) from 1977 till 1987. Though officially retired in 1987, Dieng became a very public figure in the years 1990–2015, still giving courses and lectures, and writing in numerous Senegalese newspapers (including weekly book reviews that he later published as a book). He subsequently became a historian of the francophone African student movement, and of some of the major figures of Senegalese politics (Blaise Diagne and Lamine Guèye) but was also a remarkable autobiographer and most of all a commentator on Senegalese cultural and political ethics and manners. He was the most modest and honest intellectual activist we have ever met, but at the same time an outstanding debater and critic, far from the traditional image one spontaneously associates with the radical African or Third World activist, whether nationalist, neo-Marxist or Afrocentric. Amady Aly Dieng was absolutely unique, and his death is a strong symbolic blow to the pursuit of African revolution.

Amady's life

Amady Aly Dieng was born on 22 February 1932 in Senegal, in the town of Tivaouane (the holy city of the Senegalese Tidjanes¹) just north of Thiès on the Dakar–Saint-Louis du Sénégal route. His mother was of mixed Fulani–Khasonke origin and his father was Halpulaar. His father had been hired as a public writer by the AOF railway company in 1927. In 1929 he was appointed stationmaster by the company and in 1934–35 he was posted to Kidira, a multilingual and multi-ethnic frontier town on the border between the colonies of Senegal and French Sudan (now Mali). At home the family spoke Wolof, but the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the place left its mark on Amady. Later Amady's father was posted to Diourbel, some 135 km from Dakar. At Diourbel his father's half-brother taught him the Koran. He was then entrusted to a Toucouleur Marabout, Thierno Amadou Diallo, from whom he learnt to read and write. In 1939 he was sent to the preparatory class of the regional primary (French) school. He recalled that there were more than 110 children in that class. On Wednesdays he still attended Koranic school. In June 1945, at the end of the war, he obtained his Certificat d’Études Primaires, the French diploma marking the end of his primary schooling. He enrolled at the Lycée Faidherbe of Saint-Louis (the first lycée founded in Senegal). There he decided to study Latin (against the advice of the Lycée administration) and later, in his third year, also Ancient Greek. For one of these years he was a boarder, and remembered his time at the Lycée as ‘a wonderful experience of formation, emulation, exchanges and discipline’.²

Amady was a very diligent pupil and read a lot of French literature (including Molière, Corneille, Racine and the novelists Balzac, Stendhal and Zola), and he also became acquainted with some Marxist literature. When the Lycée pupils went on strike for better food at the school cafeteria, the administration considered that the French Communist Party (CP) and its leader, Jacques Duclos, were responsible for this mobilisation! In 1951 he was awarded his Baccalauréat, the diploma concluding French secondary schooling, achieving a B (Bien). The year before, he had been awarded a prize in Physics, and another in his Philosophy class. In October 1952 he enrolled at the Institut des Hautes Études de Dakar (which became the University of Dakar in 1957). He read French Literature and Law, and it was at this time that he became very active as a militant.

Amady became a militant in the Association générale des étudiants de Dakar (AGED) at a time when most of its members were still French. The association wished to become affiliated to the Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF), the main French student union, but opinions evolved and AGED became more activist. A student who had returned from France, Tidiane Baidy Ly, was a member of the Fédération des étudiants d'Afrique noire en France (FEANF), and he gave lectures and organised plays and other cultural events. In 1953 another student back from France, Camara Khaly Basile, set up a Marxism-inspired study group. Basile was also knowledgeable about Afro-American literature. After a period as General Secretary of the Muslim Association of African Students (AMEA), which tried ‘to introduce a dose of rationality into Islam’ and which cooperated closely with the Association of Christian African Students, in 1955 Amady Aly Dieng became General Secretary of AGED. In 1956 he played a role in the change of AGED's name to the Union générale des étudiants d'Afrique de l'Ouest (UGEAO). Amady was also on the staff of the newspaper Dakar-Étudiant.

Amady travelled extensively to fulfil these roles. In January 1955 he was sent as delegate to Vienna to attend a joint meeting between the World University Service and the (Communist-inspired) International Union of Students (IUS). He then went to Prague to the International Secretariat of the IUS and attended the 5th World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw. In 1956 he went to the UNEF congress in Strasbourg, where he met Roger Garaudy, a communist philosopher.³ Amady then went to the Soviet Union and visited Moscow and Baku.⁴ His feelings were rather lukewarm after these visits, but the following year, in 1957, he was invited to attend the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, and the triumphal reception for the African delegates led him to change his mind and he became quite enthusiastic. He travelled from Moscow to Beijing, and during the journey his interpreter made him read The principles of Leninism by Joseph Stalin. In September of that year he represented UGEAO at the Coordinating Secretariat of National Unions of Students (COSEC) Conference in Ibadan. He then went to Bamako to attend the 3rd International Congress of the Rassemblement démocratique africain (RDA), the major anti-colonial and nationalist movement in French West Africa. Throughout those years Amady Aly Dieng was always on the road, travelling to Europe as well as to these other places. Wherever he spoke, he talked about the poor quality of the courses given at the Institut in Dakar and described the UGEAO protests. When he returned from China in the autumn of 1957, he found that he had been accepted at the École nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer (ENFOM) – the entrance exam, for which he hadn't prepared, had been compulsory. That same year, after briefly joining Léopold Sédar Senghor's party, the Union démocratique sénégalaise (UDS), he joined the Parti africain de l'indépendance (PAI), founded that same year in Thiès and adhering to a Marxist programme.

Thus October 1957 found Amady in Paris, sharing a room at the Maison d'Outre-Mer first with Ousmane Camara, who was to become one of his best friends (Blum n.d.), then with Abdou Diouf, who later became prime minister under Senghor and then succeeded him as president of Senegal. Much later, in the 1960s, he lived with his wife at the Maison des États d'Afrique de l'Ouest. These lodgings soon became bustling meeting places for African activists. At ENFOM he chose the administration studies option, and also registered at the Law and Economics Faculty. But his constant activism led to his being expelled from ENFOM: during the 1958 summer vacation he organised several public meetings in Diourbel, campaigning for a ‘No’ vote at the September referendum organised by General de Gaulle on whether the neo-colonial links between France and its African colonies should be maintained. The French Diourbel District Commissioner reported him to the head of ENFOM. Mamadou Dia and Senghor, both representatives at the French National Assembly, were shocked and intervened, requesting that he still be considered a non-registered student in order to take his final exams. But Amady refused such a solution, as well as that of becoming a student at the Institut d’Économie et Humanisme.⁵ He also turned down a free return air ticket to Senegal! In the end, he was granted a scholarship to pursue doctoral studies at the Law and Economics Faculty in Paris.

In the ENFOM residence there was a PAI group. It set up debates around the themes of books, such as Lenin's works What is to be done?, One step forward, two steps back, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, The state and revolution, Stalin's Principles of Marxism or The elementary principles of philosophy by the French philosopher Georges Politzer, and every week a member of the group would give a brief analysis of major world political events. Amady also joined the French CP, and was a militant along with Ousmane Camara in the party cell of the French Provinces residence, where the political debates were based only on the Paris newspapers. He remained a member for only one year as he felt that the CP was ‘a very anti-intellectual and workerist party’, but his major divergence arose from his disagreement with the CP's stand on the Algerian problem. He nonetheless still developed his knowledge of Marxism. He was a regular visitor to the CP bookshops, including the Librairie du Globe in the Latin Quarter (where they sold the French editions of Soviet books, magazines and journals). In the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (on the Place du Panthéon) he read J.T. Desanti's books on philosophy and Garaudy's books on the materialist theory of knowledge.

Amady also attended weekly events organised by the Centre d’Études et de Recherche Marxistes (CERM),⁶ when it was under the directorship of Garaudy. Some of the lectures were well attended, such as the one on the relationship between nature and dialectics, where Jean-Paul Sartre was the main speaker. He was also a student of the Université Nouvelle, which was headed by Luce Langevin from 1963 to 1965. It was there that he met his future wife, Adamadian Diallo from Guinea, who was studying Physics and Chemistry at the Sorbonne. They were married on 5 June 1964. At the CERM, 19 lectures were given on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, all of them by secondary or university teachers that were members of the CP. These included Georges Cogniot, Pierre Juquin, Jacques Chambaz, Gilbert Mury, Paul Laberenne, Roger Garaudy, Guy Besse and Jean Bruhat. Amady felt that he learnt a lot through these sessions, but was unsatisfied and sought out other scholars to enable him to read Capital, including Maurice Godelier, Maurice Bouvier-Ajam and Jean Bruhat. All of these lectures and courses were compulsory training for the PAI members. He also met Louis Althusser, whom he grew to admire. But the death of his father in February 1965 meant that Amady had to return to Senegal.

Throughout these years, Amady was very involved in FEANF. He continued to travel on FEANF business and attend conferences, with the same objectives as when he was a representative of AGED and UGEAO. In December 1958, he was the FEANF delegate at the Accra All African Peoples Conference, and when he returned to Paris at the FEANF congress at the end of the year, he was elected vice-president for cultural affairs. He was sent to the IUS Council in January 1959 in Warsaw, and returned with an unfavourable impression of Poland. He also represented FEANF at meetings where his stand was thought too radical, such as the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Rome in March 1959.⁷ Some of the organisers and participants of the Congress – mostly those from the USA – thought of FEANF as a communist organisation that should be neutralised. Amady again represented FEANF at the Conférence Internationale des Étudiants (CIE)-COSEC Conference in Lima in February 1959. In July to August of that same year, the 7th World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship was held in Vienna. Growing disagreements arose in FEANF between the ‘extremists’ – with whom he sided – and the moderates regrouped around Ousmane Camara. At the FEANF's December 1959 Congress he was elected editor of the Federation's publication L’étudiant d'Afrique noire (Black African student). Amady found an independent printer, Castro, who along with many of his employees was Jewish, and commented on this situation, noting that ‘Jews and blacks have been considered the outcasts of humanity and therefore it is possible for them to conduct a common struggle.’

In 1960 Amady visited China again, as part of a FEANF delegation, visiting the country and attending lectures over a two-month period. Next, he attended the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Conference in Conakry in April, where he met Felix Moumié, Frantz Fanon and Mehdi Ben Barka. In December, Amady was elected President of the FEANF, and re-elected to the position in 1961. Half of the executive committee were members of the PAI. But at this time, many students were expelled from France, particularly after the demonstration against the assassination of Patrice Lumumba – many of them at the request of their own governments.⁸ Amady Aly Dieng was strongly opposed to the desire of some of his friends to leave the French universities and go to others in socialist countries. In May 1961 Amady was the FEANF delegate at the first Pan-African Union Congress in Casablanca. In July he travelled once more to Moscow and the next year attended the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki.

In Paris, Dieng attended many lectures and debates, including one with René Dumont, the famous author of False start in Africa. After 1963 he turned away from FEANF because of the heated discussions between pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions. He attended his last FEANF congress in December 1965 and was enraged by the Maoists. The same conflict developed between the AESF (the Senegalese student association) and FEANF. In 1966, he was sent by MEPAI, the PAI youth organisation, to meet its founder, Mahjemout Diop, in Prague. He returned incensed by Diop's attitude and severed all links with the PAI.

After his scholarship was rescinded for political reasons, Amady lived off odd jobs and became a primary school teacher like his wife. At this stage, they had a reasonable income and were able to bring up their two children Baïdy, a boy, and Aminata, a girl, born in 1965 and 1966. Later they had another boy, Mamadou. For the next two years Amady taught in a lycée. His wife went back to Dakar where she was awarded a scholarship to finish her university degree, and Amady returned to Senegal in July 1967. They were now able to afford to buy an apartment at the Sicap Roundabout in this new quarter of Dakar, and from then on lived in the same apartment, which soon became overcrowded with books. Amady then joined the staff of Dakar University as an assistant professor. In 1971 he submitted his PhD thesis in Economics, supervised by Abdoulaye Wade (the future Senegalese president), then Professor of Economics. But later that year, he was expelled from the university for political reasons. Subsequently he was taken on as chief economist at BCEAO by its governor, Abdoulaye Fadiga, who was a friend from FEANF days. From 1977 to 1984 Amady was Head of the BCEAO Research Department, and he stayed on at the bank until his retirement in 1987.

From 1987 until his death, Amady became especially active, giving numerous courses at BA and MA level at the universities of Dakar and Saint-Louis. He was a regular participant in the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) activities and meetings, published weekly book reviews and took part in public debates on social sciences and economics, but also on African or Senegalese political and economic problems. Amady became a prolific author, writing two-thirds of his own and co-authored books after 2000. Some of these are autobiographical memoirs or archival histories of his FEANF period.

Amady's works and intellectual persona

Although an economist by training and profession, Amady Aly Dieng was a global thinker. His reputation is more that of a philosopher, an analyst of modern Western thinkers such as Hegel, Marx and Engels on the one hand and, on the other, a historian of Senegalese politics and witness of the West African student movements of the 1950s and 60s. He was above all a reader, an admirer of the written word and of culture, a collector of archives and documents. In 2007 he donated his personal library (of some 1500 books) to the main library of Dakar's Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) and it is worth reading his official speech delivered on that occasion (2007b⁹). From the 1980s on, Jean Copans personally witnessed the continuing shrinkage of the living space in his apartment so that he could store his growing collection of books. His mother was always complaining about this preference rather than being ready to accommodate family members! As a most active thinker Amady came to reflect upon the nature of the intellectual and academic atmosphere in Senegal, and even in all of Africa (although he never appeared to have had open or written discussions with other members of anglophone or Portuguese-speaking parts of Africa). Dieng wrote and edited over 20 books, which can be classified into roughly five themes: Hegel (see Rousseau 2012), Marx and Marxism; Economics; the history of African student movements; colonial history; and general intellectual and social matters.

Amady was a man of archives and of historical recollection, including a very timid approach to pre-colonial times. He never really undertook live field studies and never tried to discuss the methodological approaches of African sociological and anthropological studies. Above all, he respected Western thinkers for having questioned ideologies and prejudices. He was a sincere agnostic, while still a former Muslim.

Amady Aly Dieng was a lifelong advocate of self-criticism, a champion of modernity over traditional forms of authority and knowledge (and therefore against oral culture as such), and was against all forms of nationalism and Afro-culturalism. He was first and foremost a promoter of a Marxist point of view for the understanding of society and history. Of course we have no space in such an obituary as this to discuss Amady's views on Hegel, Marx or even Althusser. From the beginning, his profound knowledge of the words of all these thinkers made a deep impression on his readers. It is debatable whether Amady was a genuine Marxist theoretician in economics, history or social analysis, but his stand against all forms of idealisation and dogmatism of Marxism, as a doctrine or as a global can-opener of sorts, cannot be called into question. This was the strength of his morals when dealing with personal intellectual pretences, radical shortcomings, and most of all, academic laziness. He was a model civic activist always confronting clientelism, patrimonialism, nepotism and intellectual corruption. He was both a solitary and a public thinker, condemning the consultancy culture that was more and more pervading African reflection. Jean Copans has described him as something in the nature of a Greek philosopher (both Socrates and Aristotle) – a promoter of the peripatetic school, teaching colleagues and advanced students in the morning, debating at noon on the terrace of UCAD's academic cafeteria (his second home, he regularly declared!) and speaking in the evening or at weekends to friends (though less and less in recent years because of his tiredness) (Copans in Ngaïdé 2012, 124–126).

Amady's modesty (he never dressed in European style), his basic intellectual and scientific honesty, his radical opposition to all forms of personal aggrandisement and his continuing involvement in collective forms of debate, but also his very witty and humorous perspective on people (frequently catching his best friends off balance!) resulted in a unique form of reflection and activist involvement. He lived for the liberation of the African people and for the intellectual freedom of African thought – believing the latter, intellectual freedom of African thought, absolutely necessary for attainment of the former, liberation of the African people. His life combined in ideal fashion a life of radical nationalist action and a self-critical modern manner of thinking and debating. To conclude, we quote some metaphorical definitions of his identity advanced by some of his compatriots before his death: ‘Le dernier vrai intellectuel !’ – the last true intellectual (Penda Mbow in Ngaïdé 2012); ‘Avertisseur avant l'incendie’ – he who raises the warning before the fire (Bidima 2012); and after his death: ‘Amady Dieng, l'intellectuel magnifique’ – Amady Dieng, the magnificent intellectual (Dia 2015).

Acknowledgements

J. Copans wishes to thank Abdourahmane Ngaïdé as well as CODESRIA (in particular the General Secretary, Ebrima Sall, and Aminata Diaw, programme administrator) for their permission to use this text. He also thanks all the Senegalese intellectuals and academics who enabled him to obtain access to the various papers and tributes published after the death of A.A. Dieng (including Momar Coumba Diop [Diop and Diouf 2010] and Abdou Salam Fall).

This paper is part adaptation and part translation of the biographical note written by F. Blum for the Le Maitron, the Historical Biographical Dictionary of the Working Movement (http://maitron-en-ligne.univ-paris1.fr/) and of the testimony written by J. Copans for the book dedicated to Amady Aly Dieng and edited by A. Ngaïdé (2012).

Notes on contributors

Jean Copans is a former Professor of Sociology at Paris Descartes University and an Africanist anthropologist.

Françoise Blum is a historian and a senior research engineer at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

Notes

1. The Tidjaniyya is the most important Muslim brotherhood of Senegal. Unlike the Mouridiyya, a purely Senegalese brotherhood founded in the second half of the 19^th century, the Tidjaniya goes back to the end of the 18^th century, and was introduced from Algeria during the 19^th century.

2. In his conversations with A. Ngaïdé (Ngaïdé 2012), Amady refers to his French professor as Jean Galet. But after the death of Amady, his daughter notes on the website Seneweb that her father had already died some years earlier and corrects Amady Dieng: her father's name was Paul and not Jean!

3. Roger Garaudy was an important figure in the slow de-Stalinisation process in the French CP. After his retirement Garaudy became a Muslim, adopting an extreme rightist and anti-Semitic discourse.

4. Let us recall that it was in Baku in 1920 that the First Congress of the Peoples of the East was held, during the Third International! No African delegate attended it.

5. The Économie et Humanisme movement, with an institute, a journal and a research think tank, IRFED, was founded in 1942 by L. J. Lebret (1897–1966), a friend of Senghor. Lebret had trained as a professional naval officer, but became a Dominican priest in 1923, and in the 1930s and 40s was very active in setting up the National Union of Fishermen, following a period of research–action to gather the information required. In the 1950s, Lebret went on to become a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) researcher in Sociology, promoting social and Third Worldist views on development. He was, among other things, the author of Senegal's First Development Plan in 1960 and was influential in the country's adoption of a self-managing and humanist form of socialism (cooperatives, rural animation, etc.).

6. The Marxist Research and Study Centre, official academic meeting place and publication institution of the French CP.

7. The First Congress, held in December 1956 at the Sorbonne in Paris, was instrumental to the defence of black culture, as it brought together the people from the Caribbean, the Afro-Americans (such as Richard Wright) and the black Africans: see the journal Présence Africaine and Dieng's paper (2007a, listed with other works by Dieng after the main references section).

8. Jean Copans personally witnessed (more than participated, he acknowledges to his great shame) this demonstration held on 15 February 1961 near the Belgian Embassy at the Place de l’Étoile in Paris. It was the most violently repressed demonstration he has ever seen. The so-called Algerian War was still going on and the French police were very racist and violent. Let us recall that later that same year, on 17 October, the murderous repression of the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) demonstration took place, leaving 74 dead and 66 disappeared … . The actions by state forces against the demonstrators remain to this day a state and judicial scandal.

9. Works by Amady Aly Dieng are listed separately, after the works by others cited in the article under the main references heading. In addition, a number of tributes to Amady are listed after his own works.