As we mourn the loss of our father Cheikh Hamidou Kane and celebrate his life, we have to re-examine his novel L’Aventure ambiguë as it pertains to our life today and challenges and wins. As such, globalization and artificial intelligence (AI), and the question Kane asked us: can we move forward without losing ourselves? as we move forward, whose story/culture wins? and more importantly, should we lose ourselves? Is there no happy medium?
I ended my last post with a question that has stayed with me: How do we open ourselves to the knowledge of the world without losing who we are? We are Africans, we come from the cradle of humanity, with ancestral traditions that pre-date most of the world’s. We have also been under attack from slavery, colonialism, and now modernism/globalization, should we erase who we are to survive in this world, or do we adapt? Could we have both?
When Cheikh Hamidou Kane published L’Aventure ambiguë in 1961, that question emerged from the encounter between African traditions and colonial education.Today, the world is very different. Yet I wonder if the question has become even more relevant. We no longer need to travel to Paris, as Samba Diallo did, to encounter another culture’s ideas. They come to us through universities, global companies, politics, social media, and the internet, and even faster than ever. And now, through artificial intelligence also.
The new school has no walls. As a scientist, I find this exciting. Knowledge crossing boundaries is one of the things I love about science. An idea developed somewhere in the world can inspire an experiment thousands of miles away. I would never want less of that exchange. But globalization and AI also make me wonder: When knowledge becomes global, whose knowledge becomes global? Which languages and histories dominate? Which perspectives are missing? And what might quietly disappear along the way? AI makes these questions particularly interesting because it is increasingly becoming a way through which we encounter knowledge. The question is not simply what AI can tell us. It is whether we will remain thoughtful enough to decide what questions we want to ask.
We should not simply be consumers of knowledge, but creators of it. Africa has so much to offer, and its story needs to be told as well. In other words, we should be able to say: I want to know what you know without having to become you. And also: I want what I know to become part of what the world knows.
That, to me, is the promise of true globalization. Maybe we are all becoming a little like Samba Diallo now, navigating a world in which knowledge crosses cultural boundaries faster than ever. So perhaps Kane’s question for our generation becomes: How do we embrace the knowledge of the world without losing ourselves, and how do we bring enough of ourselves into that knowledge to make the world richer?
Maybe that is our aventure ambiguë.
