Since President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced 2005 as the “Year of Africa,” he visited almost all corners of Africa. He is going to places that he formerly visited as prime minister for the second –even third- time as president now. He is going with delegations that include ministers, deputies, bureaucrats, businessmen, and journalists. In all the countries that he visits, he holds a business forum and puts forth a vision and motivation that will bring mutual economic relations to a better point.
This initiative is not planned to benefit Turkey alone. On the contrary, mutual benefit is necessary for improving and sustaining relations--- which is most important message of the Foreign Economic Relations Board (DEİK) business forums. And this is what differentiates Turkey from other countries in its interest to Africa in the past and present. Any country certainly stands to gain back as much through fostering ties with Turkey.
Turkey has reached all of Africa through its trade and investments on one hand, and through its Doctors Worldwide, Humanitarian Relief Foundation (İHH), Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA), Yunus Emre Foundation and Maarif Foundation and charity, cultural and educational activities of series of non-governmental organizations on the other hand. Digging water wells in villages where the nearest muddy water resource is five to ten kilometers away, Turkey provides people with water. It opens the eyes of thousands of people with cataract disease through operations and provides education to thousands of African students in Turkey with the scholarships it gives.
The approach of Western countries toward Africa presents an important chronicle regarding the truth behind the entirety of European history's and modernity's polished values such as democracy, freedoms and human rights. Today’s world order has been established on this relation of exploitation, invasion and domination. It is impossible to establish a new world without criticizing and facing this relation.
For this reason, Erdoğan, who is talking about establishing a new world, expresses in his Africa visits that Africa will be among the determining actors of this new world. Repeating that the world is bigger than five in the business forums in Mauritania and Senegal, he said that a new world order will be established for sure and that during this establishment he wanted to walk together with Africa.
As companions of the new world, he reminded that there are no black stains in the thousand-year mutual history that they can use against one another. For example, in this context, there are no spaces where African people were enslaved, piled on ships and stored to be sent the U.S., the civilized world of today, such as on the Goree Island in Senegal. Possessing a pristine common history turns being in a close relationship in the construction of the future an obligation.
On our president’s course this time is northern Africa’s Algeria and west Africa’s Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali. The common trait of each four countries is that all of them are French colonies. The colonial practice of France in Africa is one of the most shameful pages of history, considering it is the cradle of modern Europe, Enlightenment, democracy, equality and human rights, and it has caused all these values to develop in Europe. In that practice there is racism, there is insulting the human with all thier beliefs and values, there is cruelly limiting all freedoms, there are the most criminal tortures, rapes, massacres, genocides, and deportations.
It is impossible the erase the practices that it implemented for 132 years in Algeria, which it occupied in 1830, from the memories of the Algerian people. Being under the influence of the French culture doesn’t make them forget what they have experienced. It is necessary to interpret that cultural exposure just like one Algerian intellectual once said: There are things they are owed from what France possesses today and their familiarity with the French culture makes it easier for them to collect.
Hence, in that culture, there is its own pestering moral compass that questions what France made Algeria live through.
That moral compass has reappeared today as the philosophy called post-structuralism and postmodernism. Right here, we can draw attention to the role Algeria played in the development of the “postmodern” movement, which has been coming to the fore lately due to the “February 28” events.
The common trait of many pioneer philosophers of the postmodern discourse in which modernity was questioned, its values were castigated, its end was announced, is that they were all French and all lived during Algeria’s struggle for independence. This is a striking relation that has escaped from attention and made by Robert Young in his book named White Mythologies. The famous Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and top figures of post-structuralism such as Jacques Derrida, Fellis Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Albert Camus… Almost all of them have an Algeria experience in their past and most of them revolted against the practices of their country. For many of them, this opposition has led to a place where all concepts and values of the enlightenment were questioned.
They have all witnessed what the humanist, universalist and progressive ideals of France that represents and implements the modernist concept and practice, have become in the exploitation of Algeria.
This testimony has had a disappointing effect in their early ages against modernist values, of which France is an upholder, and started a strong criticism shaking modernity to its core.
In this way, Algeria, through postmodernism, seems to make Europe, particularly France, remorseful for the oppression that it imposed on the country.
The ancient and broken-down modern world owes a lot to Africa. For this reason, Africa has to be a founding actor in the new world that is being established.
Erdoğan’s Africa visits have a dimension such as keeping Africa’s claim of being a debt collector alive as well.
