Dakar, January 20 (APS) – Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne called for asserting the African presence on all major world issues, believing that Africans will have to commit to working on them instead of limiting themselves to strictly African issues. even Senegalese.
»(…) To have the impression that sovereignism is going to be islands and insularities is to not understand the configuration of the world and the movement of the world. And in this world movement, we must be committed, we must affirm the African presence on all the major issues of the world,” he declared.
Facing his readers, Saturday, at the Harmattan bookstore, the teacher-researcher at Columbia University (USA), believes that instead of saying that “we simply have strictly African questions which would be strictly ours, or strictly Senegalese questions, etc., thanks to the internet tool, Africa can assert its presence in the world.”
”New technologies allow even small differences to assert themselves. (…) And therefore working towards this African presence in the world is the direction in which we must move. And this must not be, once again, this purely reactive and purely defensive attitude,” he insists.
The Senegalese philosopher returned extensively to several concepts addressed in his last two works, namely ”Ubuntu, interview with Françoise Blum [historienne]” and the essay ”Universalizing for a dialogue of cultures” published by the French publisher Albin Michel.
The world, according to him, is crossed by becoming and it will be more and more so, affirmed the philosopher for whom “nationalism is the worst enemy of education and that the idea of amputating oneself from a language or another is pure nonsense.
It is not a question, says Souleymane Bachir Diagne, of replacing the German philosopher Emmanuel Kant, Plato (Greek philosopher) with Kocc Barma (Wolof philosopher) for example, but of putting into the educational system so-called classic texts which deserve to be being in class and which will sharpen critical thinking.
”Understand that education is engaged in the movement of Ubuntu, that is to say teaching humans to become fully human, or even teaching humans the capacity for decentring, the capacity for sharpening the critical spirit that exists in decentering, that is true education,” explained the author of “The bundle of my memory” (Philipe Rey-2021).
According to him, this education must obviously be done in the languages that are ours, because, he specifies, “confining our Wolof language to a simple activity of private interaction does not do justice to this language there”.
Preaching the values of “Ubuntu”
Responding to questions from Senegalese journalist Pape Alioune Sarr and the numerous public, Souleymane Bachir Diagne invites us to “avoid any withdrawal into identity”, preaching the values of living together, acceptance and love of others, simply “Ubuntu”.
-‘’Ubuntu, [traduit par co humanité -rendre la communauté meilleure- traduction politico politique de Nelson Mandela]a Bantu word that has become a political and ethical concept associated with my work translates into these positive feelings of creating humanity together, of building a tribal instinct,” he explained.
”Ubuntu is precisely a concept that supports human community,” he continues.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne underlined that ”mixed race is not simply a state, but a value, a capacity that we must cultivate within ourselves”.
Questioned on nationalist discourses in a global context of tribalization, racialization, identity conflicts, migrations and social inequalities, the author’s response is “Ubuntu” first.
According to him, ”we must move away from tribalism towards a universality, of course reconciling positions and avoiding any sort of identity withdrawal”.
The Senegalese thinker then believes that the concept of universality is inseparable from the concept of “Ubuntu”. He indeed advocates a universalism which is nourished by the diversity of the world, so to speak, therefore ”the universal is humanity”.
On the question of social networks, he believes that it is like the language of “Aesop”, “the best and the worst of things”.
”The best insofar as social networks by definition and in their very name should have, should be means of creating community, of constituting sociability, of sociality and of being a technological translation of Ubuntu”, says Professor Diagne.
But, he adds, ”we see that social networks can also very easily be transformed and caught up, so to speak, by tribalism. Tribalism is perfectly satisfied with these tools (…) You have real political commandos in the social networks who are there on the lookout for what is being said and who are watching what is being said,” points out the philosopher who underlines this manipulation and fabrication of opinions.
He calls for social networks to be returned to their original idealism by trying, says Souleymane Bachir Diagne, ”to always continue the fight to be worthy of this legacy that Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu left us”.
SC/FKS/ADL/OID/ASB
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