Regimi di verità. Nazionalismo anticolonialismo e afrocentrismo nella galaxie patriotique in Costa d'Avorio

The patriotic movement supporting the president Laurent Gbagbo in the years of the Ivorian political-military crisis, made extensive use of public parliaments popularly known as “agora”, in order to mobilize citizens. The orators animating the agora, offered a day-by-day commentary of political actualities and diffused a virulent anticolonial discourse directed against France (as formerly colonial power) and “the West”. Moreover, they proposed narratives of Africans and of their history where afrocentric and panafricanist doctrines were mingled with a religious ideology of deliverance uttered by Pentecostal pastors. In their discourse, “western” narrations of history and their representations of Africans were denounced as rhetoric devices aimed at obviating the recognition of African agency in history. In order to counter them, the orators explicitly constructed regimes of truth with a specific performative power: the power of defining and recreating an imagined african self and its place in history.