Complex histories

Extract

Asking different questions about and adopting an alternative perspective for understanding what happened in the past are rightly highlighted by François Richard as crucial to our understanding of colonial situations like that in 16th- to 18th-century West Africa. He frames his discussion with a speech given in Dakar by Nicolas Sarkozy, who in mid-2007 had just assumed the office of French president, and uses the strong reactions to those words very effectively to make it clear why thinking about the colonial past continues to matter, both in Africa and elsewhere.