Communication et interculturalité en Afrique de l'Ouest francophone

Robinson, Gertrude J. (Supervisor) The study of interculturality ("intercultural competence"), its foundations and its effects in francophone Western Africa reveals the need for a reconceptualization of intercultural communication. A theory of interculturality should be interdisciplinary, non-positivist, critical and reflexive. Because conventional approaches and their applications create a spatial and temporal distance, and undervalue endogenous knowledges, they limit understanding and hamper reciprocal intercultural exchanges. The observation of communication processes around a sub regional West African organization (the "Communaute economique de l'Afrique de l'Ouest") reveals that interculturality is not a characteristic of better educated Africans or of those most exposed to foreign cultures, and even less of Whites or of other members of dominant groups. Rather, it is more pronounced among women, members of marginalized ethnic groups and, above all, among urban marginals. Interculturality manifests itself through interactions. It is the result of singular positions (standpoints) rooted in endogenous knowledges, in training (in its broadest sense) and in the experience of subordination in pluriethnic contexts. The texts that inform the dominant definitions of situations create a communicational and intercultural handicap, also linked to a superior status in the informal hierarchy. On the opposite, the mobility of an insider-outsider position confers an advantage, an aptitude for conversation, or for an egalitarian exchange in various local and imported spaces of culture and power. Such a position is a condition for intercultural studies and practices. Individually, it can be developed through a formal or informal initiation, empathy and an awareness of one's own limits. In development programs, the interculturality acquired by certain members of marginal groups is at the origin of processes of diversion--a reorientation of resources towards locally negotiated ends--which reveal the endogenous conceptions of participation and social change. The study of interculturality in Africa thus supports the idea that a communicational approach to intercultural problems could be fruitfully applied in other contexts.