L’Afrique entre passé et futur. L’urgence d’un choix de l’intelligence (review)

For the most part, anniversary celebrations serve a symbolic purpose. Nevertheless, the opportunity to reflect on the past, assess progress, and determine future action can be a productive exercise. To this end, 2010 has been no exception, as seventeen sub-Saharan African countries who achieved independence from European colonial powers in 1960 have initiated various ceremonies and events to mark the fiftieth anniversary. However, a cursory overview of the “African condition” (23) raises numerous questions: Is there cause for celebration? How can one begin to explain the African crisis? and “[W]hat exactly is in crisis” (23; emphasis added)? What is Africa’s place in the new world order and what impact has globalization had on this continent? What kinds of educational reforms are necessary? Kasereka Kavwahirehi adopts a multidisciplinary framework, bringing into dialogue history, literature, and philosophy, in order to “better understand the full complexity of the African crisis” (29), its human dimension, and the role of critical thinking in answering some of these complex questions.

Individual chapters are devoted to novelists, historians, political scientists, and philosophers. To this end, insightful readings are provided of Ahmadou Kourouma’s treatment of “the collapse of the metaphysico-religious foundations of society” (68) and of how during the 1970s and 1980 “the African world was transformed by colonial modernity” (73). The role of fiction in apprehending the collective experience and in the analysis of postcolonial practices informs the analysis of V. Y. Mudimbe’s work, and the focus on traditional initiation and healing rituals in Werewere Liking’s texts suggest “[h]ow a community can turn to its heritage as a way of remaking itself, restoring a creative culture” (114), essentials steps in identity formation. In turn, Pius Ngandu Nksahama’s writings propose a “holistic treatment of symbolic languages” and of the ways in which they are “produced,” “codified,” and “objectified” (131) given that the incorporation of the religious, of fiction, and of music makes it possible to grasp the mutations that have taken place at “every stage of social formation” (132). Throughout L’Afrique entre passé et futur. L’urgence d’un choix de l’intelligence, Kasereka Kavwahirehi privileges multiple forms of intellectual exchanges, mechanisms that contain the promise of “establishing, for citizens, genuine spaces for training, information and discussion” (55).

A new generation of thinkers have emerged since the 1980s and endeavored to explain the inability of “African societies to resolutely inscribe themselves in modernity” (295). Rather than attributing the causes of the African crisis to external factors (such as imperialism), they have instead questioned the effectiveness of existing responses to political and social problems (development policies, structural adjustment measures, political reform, etc.), “the limitations of “humanitarian and charitable” measures (23), and overreliance on infrastructural changes (transparent elections, democratic principles, economic models). Kasereka Kavwahirehi advocates instead for a reframing of critical and analytical approaches to the African continent given that educational structures have not sufficiently thought about the ways in which they reproduce or duplicate power structures (230).

At times readers may find an overreliance on quotations and external sources in L’Afrique entre passé et futur. L’urgence d’un choix de l’intelligence–obfuscating or unnecessarily complicating the central argument–but for the most part one can disentangle oneself, extricate valuable perspectives on more recent theoretical paradigms, while also gaining invaluable exposure to a diverse range of thinkers whose work stands to influence all kinds of intellectual inquiries. For Kasereka Kavwahirehi, “major intellectual investment” (306) is essential in order to achieve the “decolonization and modernization of modernity . . . with the ultimate aim of lending a voice to those people who have been oppressed and suffocated by the implementation of a world system in which globalization is merely a stage” (306). At many levels, the writings under investigation share these objectives: Kä Mana (DRC) delineates a revolutionary praxis, Joseph Ki-Zerbo (Burkina Faso) foregrounds education and highlights the...