First of all, I want to point out that the academic, the economist, the musician, the editor, the writer…. Felwine Sarr will be on the banks of the Ébrié lagoon, on May 12, 2022 at the Institut Français d’Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire to talk to Ivorians about “everything and nothing” and to tell them about his latest novel: “Places that inhabit my dreams” (L’Arpenteur – Gallimard, 176 pages, 18 euros)”I haven’t read the book yet.” It will not be long. However, I will be there, even if my boss does not give me a ruble for transportation. I will not cause trouble.
Afrotopia! What a book! This book made me see in all colors. And, to tell you the truth, I had a hard time. Terribly. Who is this asshole who said that reading is escaping? Let me see it! I would like to give him one.
Afrotopia is above all the books that Felwine Sarr had to write. It forces you to reposition yourself and rethink the way you had previously viewed the world, especially the North-South relationship. When you come out of that trial, you’re off the hook. You’re off the hook. A real slap in the face. It’s like, cataracted, you were ripped out of the lens of ignorance that troubled your sight. Afrotopia is a major project that proposes a re-reading of the world from our condition as Africans. When we ask him what Afrotopia means, it is to push us further into the meanderings of misunderstanding. He answers that it is “an active utopia that gives itself the task of flushing out in the real African the vast spaces of the possible and fertilize them.”
Have you understood anything! Oh my God! That I suffered emotionally during the reading! But when one consents to the effort of understanding the first pages, one falls nose-to-nose on an oasis of principles that could be the project of a new African movement.
In this book, I dare say, Felwine Sarr shits about the Bretton Woods institutions. It is an institution which, with its own barometers, dares to give rules of good economic conduct to an Africa which, fundamentally, has nothing to do with an economic morality foreign to its values. For a man trained as an economist, it is a big poop that he can lay there. In short, scatological allusions.
If there is a book that will have marked me, it is this one. Sarr does not do as these writers who open the bandages, without however proposing solutions: Africa, by its socio-economic and cultural values, can rise up, and even supplant these directors of the universal consciousness, the West. The West is not this manneken and who wants to make the world believe that without its pee in the face of Africa, this Venus of Milo, the latter would come to nothing. Africans must show that they have science, brains to promote. The African continent, far from being a survivor of the world’s skiff, should, in an intergenerational symbiosis show that it is not the great whiner who knows nothing else to ask for the obole.
It is a book “full of emotions and humanism”, relatively long – I confess it – for heads of linot. But nothing hurry, everyone can read it according to his requirements. However, I know that some will say that there is too much idealism in this, that this book is of immeasurable boredom. Perhaps because there is not the long-awaited happy end. But I can reassure you. This trial is not without interest.
A major information. The beginning of the weekend will be happy for Ivorians. Felwine Sarr will come, from Senegal, to the Institut Français d’Abidjan on May 12, 2022. Felwine Sarr will be in Abidjan. Chic then!
Felwine Sarr – apart from Senegalese nationality and the gift for beautiful letters, he has nothing to do with Mouggar Sarr – has been teaching contemporary diasporic philosophy at Duke University, USA since 2020. Seen through his works, Sarr is a virulent critic of the victimary mentality and congenital assistants of Africans. He would make a very feared politician, a bit like a Jean Luc Mélenchon, ready to denounce all political scandals. Anyway, he doesn’t chew his letters. An economist and deeply committed to democratic principles, he was in favour of African countries leaving the CFA. In the case of Abdoulaye Wade’s third term, which he rejected, he alienated many Senegalese politicians. After the meeting on the 12th, I will debrief you. Be sure! On the 12th of May at the Institut Français in Abidjan!
