Africa has much to take from the modern world

Since President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared 2005 the "Year of Africa," there is almost nowhere left in Africa where he has not set foot. He is going, now as President, for a second or even third time to places he had earlier visited as Prime Minister.

Wherever he goes, he goes with delegations that include ministers, members of parliament, bureaucrats, businesspeople and journalists. In every country he visits, he certainly organizes a business forum and puts forward a vision and motivation that will carry the economic relations between the two countries to a better point.

It is never intended that this opening bring one-sided benefits to Turkey alone. On the contrary, for the relations to be carried to further points and sustained, there must be a two-sided gain. This is also the most important message of the DEİK business forums. This is precisely what distinguishes Turkey, in the past and today, from other countries in its interest in Africa. Turkey's relationship with any country certainly benefits that country to the same extent.

While Turkey goes to the whole of Africa with its trade and investments, it has also entered with Doctors Worldwide, with the İHH, with TİKA, with Yunus Emre, with the Maarif Foundation and with the charity, cultural and educational activities of a series of civil society organizations. It brings people together with water by opening water wells in villages where the nearest source of muddy water is five or ten km away. It opens the eyes of tens of thousands of people who had gone blind from cataracts by operating on them, and with the scholarships it gives it provides the education in Turkey of thousands of Africans.

The Western countries' approach to Africa throughout history offers a very important history for seeing the real face beneath the polished values of all of European history and modernity, such as democracy, freedoms and human rights. Today's world order has been built precisely on this relationship of exploitation, occupation and domination. It is not possible to build a new world without criticizing this relationship, without confronting this relationship.

That is why Erdoğan, who speaks of building a new world, says on his Africa trips that Africa will be among the real determining actors of this new world. At the business forum in Mauritania and Senegal, repeating that the world is bigger than five, he said that a new world order would surely be established and that, while this new order is being established, he wants to walk together with Africa.

As comrades of the new world, he recalled that in their thousand-year common history they have no black stain they could show against one another. For example, in this past there are no places like Gorée Island in Senegal, where Africans were forcibly enslaved, loaded onto ships like goods, and stored to be carried to today's civilized world, the US. Having a spotless common history turns being in much closer cooperation in the building of the future into a responsibility.

On our President's route this time are the North African country Algeria and the West African countries Mauritania, Senegal and Mali. The common feature of all four countries is that all of them were French colonies. While France, the cradle of modern Europe, the Enlightenment, democracy, equality and human rights, gave birth to and raised all these values in Europe, the practice of exploitation it carried out in Africa forms one of the most shameful pages of history. In that practice there is racism, the humiliation of the human being together with all his beliefs and values, the savage restriction of freedoms, the most murderous tortures, rapes, massacres, genocides, deportations.

The practice it carried out for 132 years especially in Algeria, which it occupied from 1830, cannot be erased from the memories of Algerians today. Their being under the influence of French culture does not make them forget what they experienced. That cultural influence must be read, in the words of an Algerian intellectual, somewhat like this: they have a claim on France's present wealth, and their familiarity with French culture makes it more possible for them to collect this claim.

Indeed, in that culture there is also France's own conscience, which questions what France made Algeria go through and does not leave it at all at ease. That conscience has recurred today as the philosophy called poststructuralist or postmodern. Right here we can draw attention to the role Algeria played in the development of the "postmodern" current, which is these days mentioned abundantly and simplistically in connection with "February 28."

The common feature of many of the pioneering thinkers of the postmodern discourse, in which modernity is questioned, its values are fiercely criticized and its end is proclaimed, is that they are French and that all of them lived in the Algeria of the period of the independence struggle. This is a striking relationship pointed out in Robert Young's book White Mythologies (Bağlam Yayınları), but which has drawn little attention. The famous Marxist thinker Louis Althusser, the leading names of poststructuralism Jacques Derrida, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Albert Camus: all of them have an Algerian experience in their background, and most are names who rebelled in this experience against the practices of their own country. In many of them this opposition developed toward a place where all the concepts and values of the Enlightenment and modernism are generally questioned.

All of them were living witnesses of what became of all the humanist, universalist and progressive ideals of France, which represented and applied modernist thought and practice at its farthest limits, within the practice of Algerian colonization. This testimony produced, at an early age, a disillusioning effect toward the modernist values of which France had been the standard-bearer, and they launched the powerful critique that deeply shook modernism.

Thus Algeria seems to have made France in particular, and Europe in general, experience the pangs of conscience for the oppression it suffered, in the form of the postmodern current.

Africa has much to claim from the old, decrepit modern world. That is why, in the new world being built, Africa has to be a founding actor.

Erdoğan's visits to Africa also have a dimension of constantly keeping alive this creditor claim of Africa.