It has happened to me over the last four years that I have not been able to define with precision what I “touched” with my eyes, but have only glimpsed its specter, its motives and its distant political and philosophical connections. But each time, I have tried to read the political and social facts in the light of the values which seem to me everywhere to be defended and sacred.
Reason, freedom, democracy, within the framework of republican principles, constitute for me absolutes to defend and preserve. Who would have thought that in Senegal, one of the most advanced African democracies, leagues of scholars would have been formed to make insurrection a normal mode of conquest of power? An elite that is silent when the University of Dakar is burned down, but which multiplies petitions in the service of the destruction of democracy and living together is necessarily sick of its submission to the derisory privileges of the small political world and to the dubious glory of the crowds. digital.
I didn’t think one day I would see packs of radicalized demonstrators invade the Capitol to contest the results of an American presidential election. I did not imagine that among the crowds who took over the streets after the shock of April 21, 2002, there would emerge twenty years later millions of voters of the party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen. When, at the end of the 2000s, I created an account on social networks, I was far from imagining that these platforms where dirty, even serious jokes were told, would have become the privileged spaces for the dissemination of hateful and obscurantist speeches and of fighting the truth in favor of polarized opinions. When Donald Trump returns to the White House to purge what was left of decency in politics, a “techno-industrial” oligarchy, once considered leftist or even hippie, submits to his project whose aim is to kill reason for profit. only affects in society.
I did not think that after what happened in Srebrenica, in Rwanda, in Darfur, we would be defending in the media that a life in Kfar Aza had more value than another in Gaza. The idea that the Senegalese can tell themselves that the presidential office, exercised by Léopold Sédar Senghor, is now so insignificant that they can put anyone there, is curious and then terrifying.
When you have the responsibility of being a public writer in the 19th century sense, the risk of attribution is easiest coming from readers, whether they agree with your point or not. Kamel Daoud, who for decades was a columnist for the Quotidien d’Oran, warned: “We select the sentences that can be used in the trial of your membership and your supposed allegiance.” Behind my titles and my numerous texts were those who conceived their responses on a supposed influence, or even worse, of the sponsors, because the idea of a free man acting in the name and on behalf of his conscience alone is fatally foreign to them.
This column has sought each week to pursue a long-term political objective, inspired by this thought of Faulkner relating to the refusal to give in to the temptation of the end of man. I persist in imagining, in the wake of the Christian doctrine of Mgr Théodore Adrien Sarr, for man, “a global salvation”, in a worrying complex where no reference seems to hold, where the injunction to choose one’s camp rhythm of daily life. Now, I think that we can hate the extremist government of Netanyahu and Hamas at the same time; we can criticize US imperialism and not give in to any dazzlement for Latin American autocracies; In the same vein, we can criticize constitutional coups and military putsches in Africa. When the praise of nuance and complexity becomes suspicion and the degree of conviction is measured by the decibels produced, I continue to believe that it is possible to hold both ends of public engagement and thus avoid the trap of Manichaeism.
My American writer friend Ta-Nehisi Coates, comparing the apartheid of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to Jim Crow laws, hammers out in a serious but obvious tone: “I know this story.” When I observe in my country the temptation to destroy democracy through the submission of the media, unions and parties, the desire to go back on social achievements such as the right to strike and freedom of expression, the choice to conflict everything to promote the stigmatization of the other and the refusal of difference, then, like Coates, I repeat: “I know this story.”
I know, through frequent reading of history books, what results the same causes produced elsewhere. And I can say that the ending cannot be happy. But to resolve it, in some way, is to betray my people and to give up honoring this profoundly Senegalese spirit, a mixture of panache and outfit.
Liberal democracy and the use of reason, the celebration of differences and the formation of a common humanity are subject to threats of all kinds. Before our eyes the progressive and democratic left and the liberal and humanist right are disappearing. Everywhere, we seem to agree on a refusal of nuance in favor of a morbid confrontation whose common basis is the temptation of the worst.
-The sky of 2025 is full of threats to democracy and freedom.
In Africa, sovereignists and xenophobes have confiscated the pan-Africanist idea to transform it into a tool for hating others, particularly France. Intellectuals and politicians rode the wave, in the name of opportunism or cowardice.
In the Sahel, putschists and their zealous admirers parade, issuing fatwas to anyone who has the misfortune to have a different thought, to still believe in the first idea of democracy, which states that power is acquired through of the sovereign people.
I am overcome with fear at the immensity of the fault and the materiality of the collapse.
When on October 15, 2020, Mohamed Guèye – we saw each other for the first time – offered to write this column in the pages of the newspaper, I immediately accepted before… thinking. I have never lacked the support of the management of the newspaper and that of the editorial staff, despite the passions that these texts have sometimes provoked. For a while I entertained the temptation to do like some of my idols. Claudio Magris, a writer who is dear to me, was a columnist for fifty years at Corriere della Serra, the major Italian center-right daily. These texts allowed him, he said in 1967, to write when he was “struggling with moral furies”. Maureen Dowd begins her thirtieth year as a New York Times columnist. But referring to a poem by Cendrars “When you love, you have to leave”, “Traverses” ends here.
I am now involved in politics to continue my reflection, now adding action on the ground, in the service of the values that underpin my life: the republic, freedom, democracy and secularism.
By Hamidou ANNE
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