Tag: Senegalese author

Cheikh Hamidou Kane and Our New Ambiguous Adventure

On By Dr. Y.In Great Literature, Great Moments, Great PeopleLeave a comment
Cheikh Hamidou Kane (Source: Wikipedia)

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?

L’Aventure ambiguë de Cheikh Hamidou Kane

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.

Artificial Intelligence (Source: IBTimes.co.uk)

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.

So Long to Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and the Ambiguous Adventure

On By Dr. Y.In Great Literature, Great PeopleLeave a comment
Cheikh Hamidou Kane (Source: Wikipedia)

A few days ago, on October 3, Senegal and Africa lost one of its great intellectual voices. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, writer, statesman, and author of L’Aventure ambiguë, died in Dakar at the ripe good age of 98. His passing brought me back to a novel I had to study in school, and which was on the curriculum of most schools across the continent. The question at the heart of his most celebrated novel: How do we open ourselves to the knowledge of the world without losing who we are fundamentally?

Cheikh Hamidou Kane lived this question in many ways. Born in Matam, northern Senegal, in 1928, he descended from a prominent family of traditional Fulani chiefs and muslim scholars. He grew up between Qur’anic teaching and French schooling, later studying law and philosophy in Paris. He returned home before independence and went on to serve Senegal in senior government positions, including as a minister of both  Léopold Sédar Senghor and  Abdou Diouf. He was a good friend of Senegal’s first president  Senghor who was one of his professors while in France, and Mamadou Dia (one of Senghor’s prime minister) whom he tried to reconcile. While in France he met some who would later become leaders in Africa and the Caribbeans, such as Aimé Césaire, Félix Houphouët-Boigny (president of Cote d’Ivoire), Joseph Ki-Zerbo (Burkinabe historian), Abdoulaye Wade (president of Senegal), and many more.

L’Aventure ambiguë de Cheikh Hamidou Kane

Published in 1961, his novel, L’Aventure ambiguë tells the story of Samba Diallo, a young Senegalese man whose education takes him from a deeply spiritual Islamic upbringing to the French school and eventually to Paris. The novel received the Grand Prix littéraire d’Afrique noire in 1962 and went on to be translated into at least 40 languages. But the real journey is not from Senegal to France. It is from one way of understanding the world to another, how to absorb in Samba’s case, Western knowledge without cultural self-erasure. This dichotomy remains relevant to Africa’s current negotiations over money, governance, geopolitical autonomy, and existence as a whole.

That is what I find so moving about Kane’s book. We often think of education as simply gaining knowledge. But Kane asks a harder question: What if learning something new also changes how we understand what we already knew? He doesn’t give us an easy choice between Africa and Europe, tradition and modernity, or faith and reason. Instead, he leaves us with the ambiguity.

Following Kane’s death, Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye beautifully captured his legacy as the question of opening ourselves to the world’s knowledge“sans rien perdre de ce que nous sommes“, without losing who we are. More than sixty years later, the question remains. Perhaps that is the mark of a great writer. He doesn’t simply leave us answers. He leaves us questions worth carrying forward. And looking at the world around us today, I wonder whether we are all beginning to live our own aventure ambiguë.

Fetishism in Africa: Its Origins ?

On By Dr. Y.In Great Art, Great Civilizations, Great People2 Comments
Senufo face mask (Kpeliye’e) exposed at the MET

In Africa, there is the concept of fetishism which has been prevalent as a description of African beliefs. Thus, a fetish is an object which holds spiritual power or supernatural significance. Given that African statues hold deep cultural, spiritual, and symbolic significance [Authorship in African Art: The Case of Yoruba Art], the term fetishism has been historically associated to them. Early European anthropologists have linked African religions and statues to fetishism. However, we are learning that this was a technique designed by Europeans to denigrate and dehumanize the African person so as to justify slavery [Dum Diversas or The Vatican’s Authorization of Slavery] early on, and colonialism later on. 

Cheikh Anta Diop, the great Senegalese historian, anthropologist, philosopher, physicist, and politician, showed in his book, Nations Nègres et Culture: de l’Antiquite nègre égyptienne aux problèmes culturels de l’Afrique noire d’aujourd’hui, that fetishism in Africa is not an inherent school of thought, but rather arose from the disconnection of modern Africans to their original religions due to violent exposure to centuries of attacks (slavery) from the West. Thus, he said, 

Cheikh Anta Diop
Cheikh Anta Diop

“From one end of Black Africa to the other, passing through Egypt, the statues were originally intended to be the support of the immortal “double” of the ancestor after his earthly death. Placed in a sacred place, the statue was the object of offerings and libations: this fact, misinterpreted by Westerners, created the false idea of ​​fetishism. In reality, there is a tendency towards fetishism, that is, idolatry, only where the meaning of the cult has been forgotten through a break in tradition.”

Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations Nègres et Culture, Présence Africaine, Paris p. 339 (1954). Translated to English by Dr. Y, Afrolegends.com.

100 years after René Maran, An African wins the Prestigious Prix Goncourt

On By Dr. Y.In Great Literature, Great People1 Comment
Mbougar Sarr
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Source: France 24)

Meet Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, the Senegalese writer who has just won the Prix Goncourt, France’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize. This makes him the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa, a Black African, to win the prize. Isn’t it funny that I was recently reading about René Maran, the first person of African descent (from French Guyana) to win the prestigious Goncourt prize in 1921 for his novel Batouala? This was the first French novel to openly criticize European colonialism in Africa, which caused violent reactions and was banned in all French colonies. So 100 years later, we have the first African to win the prize.

Mbougar Sarr-la plus secrete memoire des hommes
“La plus secrète mémoire des hommes” de Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Mbougar Sarr is the youngest winner of the Goncourt since 1976. He hails from Senegal, where he grew up in the city of Diourbel, a small city located about 100 miles from the capital Dakar, before moving to France to study literature. His winning novel, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men), tells the story of a young Senegalese writer living in Paris who stumbles by chance across a novel published in 1938 by a fictional African author named TC Elimane, nicknamed “the Black Rimbaud” by an ecstatic Paris media. The story, described as a reflection on the links between fiction and reality, follows the life of a cursed African writer echoing the real-life experience of the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem who in 1968 was the first African winner of the prix Renaudot, but was later accused of plagiarism, and had to flee France and vanish from public

life.

Rene Maran_1
Posting of René Maran as he won the Prix Goncourt for Batouala

Previous works by Mbougar Sarr, Terre Ceinte (his first novel published in 2015) and Silence du choeur (2017) have won several prizes including the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma, and the Grand prix du roman métis. Congratulations to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr for winning the 2021 Prix Goncourt. It took 100 years after René Maran for Sub-Saharan Africa to have a winner of the Goncourt !!!