The Deberlinization Conference is a gathering of scholars from different disciplines, artists and cultural workers, activists and political thinkers to deliberate on the concept and practice of Deberlinization as well as its cultural, political, economic, and social ramifications. 

Deberlinization is a long-term philosophical and artistic project initiated by artist Mansour Ciss Kanakassy in 2001 and the main point of departure for the Deberlinization Conference, curated by Ibou Coulibaly Diop and Franck Hermann Ekra, taking place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) as part of heimaten. The conference is followed by the publication of the Deberlinization Festschrift, co-edited by the curators for HKW.

It would by no means be a hyperbole to state that the question of a single African currency, which defies the boundaries set up in 1884–85 at the so-called Berlin Conference, and disregards the balkanization of Africa into ‘anglophone’, ‘francophone’, ‘germanophone’, ‘hispanophone’, or ‘lusophone’ zones, is the most crucial political and economic project for pan-African emancipation. A unified African currency is not a new concern; the call to establish it goes back several decades, with perhaps no one embodying it more solidly than the great Kwame Nkrumah, who in his address to the Conference of African Heads of State and Government on 24 May 1963 stated that:

No independent African State today by itself has a chance to follow an independent course of economic development, and many of us who have tried to do this have been almost ruined or have had to return to the fold of the former colonial rulers. This position will not change unless we have unified policy working at the continental level. The first step towards our cohesive economy would be a unified monetary zone, with, initially, an agreed common parity for our currencies … When we find that the arrangement of a fixed common parity is working successfully, there would seem to be no reason for not instituting one common currency and a single bank of issue.[1]

This seemingly self-evident call for a truly independent society has been controversial during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries because a common African currency would mean a common and stronger African market, consolidated control over the wide range of resources on the African continent, socio-economic and political cooperation among African countries, control over banking, loans, and their conditions, control over how much money circulates in African societies, a say on the consequences of inflation, as well as a say on, among other commodities, the price of cocoa, coffee, gold, oil, and diamond. This would imply an end to the prolonged neocolonial exploitations still propagated in Africa today, facilitated by western governments of varying shades and forms, regional armed conflicts fuelled by external political bodies, multinational industries of differing agendas, and corrupt African politicians who serve as stooges to their ‘former’ colonial masters rather than serving their own people. Two figures who tried to push for a unified African currency in lieu of, for example, the colonial currency known as the CFA franc,[2] are president of Togo, Sylvanus Olympio, in 1963 and the president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, in 1987; both paid the price with their lives. It is also rumoured that Muammar Gaddafi met his demise in 2011 partly because he was advocating for a common African currency. 

It is often said that artists, through what one might call foreboding or premonition, or what in pidgin is known as ‘sentement’, have the capacity to imagine society long before academics and politicians. Accordingly, even though there is still no common currency on the African continent, in 2024 Mansour Ciss Kanakassy’s vision of such a currency, eponymously called the Afro, commemorates its twenty-third anniversary.

The Afro is but one of many ‘products’ of the seminal initiative and call to action that Mansour Ciss Kanakassy established in 2001 with the emblematic title Le Laboratoire de Déberlinisation [Deberlinization laboratory]. It is a sociopolitical, socio-economic, and artistic project of recomprehending and re-calibrating histories. Importantly, it is also a project of civic education on multiple fronts—disciplinarily and geographically—aimed at imagining an informed and stronger civil society. As the name indicates, the project constitutes a space where practices are put to the test, examined, and analysed before they get on the field. The Afro currency was thus one of the first tests conducted at Le Laboratoire de Déberlinisation, using a sophisticated design approach and methods such as experimenting with materiality and effigies of great pan-Africanist thinkers and fighters like Nelson Mandela or Thomas Sankara, deliberating upon what resources back currency—Africa has an abundance of gold, diamonds, silver etc., but, paradoxically, the countries and continents that lack these resources are far richer than African countries—questioning standard procedures of currency exchange values, and much more.

Le Laboratoire de Déberlinisation is a deeply philosophical project with regards to how history is conceptualized. Mansour Ciss Kanakassy’s core argument is that rather than discourse decolonization, which has come to stand for everything and nothing, precise and rigorous arguments and practices are needed. Because of the African continent’s balkanization in Berlin in 1884–85, it is tied to Berlin and Germany. The impact of this extremely violent act of carving up the African continent from afar, irrespective of cultural, linguistic, historical, and geographical considerations, colonizing it, and undertaking still ongoing programmes of extraction from its countries, continues to reverberate within African societies in the contemporary. Rather than thinking about decolonization at large, Mansour Ciss Kanakassy proposes we think of Deberlinization in particular.

At the Deberlinization Conference at HKW, experts from various disciplines follow this proposition. They are invited to engage with Mansour Ciss Kanakassy’s concept, to reflect on its theory and praxis, to imagine its existence and impact beyond, and to realize its potential for refabulating the world.

Prof Dr Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

 

[1] Kwame Nkrumah, ‘Address to the Conference of African Heads of State and Government, 24th May 1963’, Revolutionary Path (2nd edn., London: Panaf Books, 2001), 63.

[2] For more on the history of the CFA franc as a neocolonial tool, see: Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, L’arme invisible de la Françafrique: Une histoire du franc CFA [The invisible arm of Francafrique: A history of the CFA franc] (Paris: La Découverte, 2018).