On the threshold of the year 2018, Africa has not yet succeeded in resolving its multiple difficulties. Despair inherently afflicts its populations, which are defeated by hunger and disease.
But if the danger sometimes seems more threatening than ever, reminds J.-C. Guillebaud, the means of getting out of it have progressed in proportion. “Each human society and each new generation will have found before them as many reasons to hope as to despair (…). At all times and in all places (…), 'peril' and 'what saves' have been more or less equivalent. Despair is not better founded than hope (…). It participates (…) in a way of cowardice (…). Remembering the great 'optimists' of yesteryear who were able to move history, it behooves us today to be as joyful and as determined as they were” (Lire Un autre monde est possible, p. 213-214 - Read Another World is possible, pp. 213-214).
This is why it is important to welcome the publication of Pini Pini's new book on The African Renaissance. Not with the aim of theorizing indefinitely on this concept to the point of escaping from the social transformations that are essential. But it is because Pini Pini went to put his finger on what gives itself to be seen as a mode of presence in African history and of manifestation in historical visibility of an Africa which tries to be reborn from its ashes.
After having identified with critical rigor and lofty view the trial of the African past which explains the vertiginous falls to which the black continent is delivered, Pini Pini draws attention to the fact that “Africa, as hammered by Colonel Mohammar Gaddafi, must wake up, because there is no reason why it cannot do so” (p. 114). It can only achieve this judiciously on the basis of the rich ancestral model of the Egyptian-Nubian paradigm. Beautiful pages of the author's writing allow him to unfold all this.
Methodologically, it seems justified to consider that the immersion in the ancestral discourse is a good introduction to the roots and the vision of the Songhai center of Porto Novo in Benin Republic.
This center was born in 1982 on the initiative of a Nigerian academic who evolved in the USA until the day when he decided to land in Africa in order to deny in his own way the disadvantageous statistics on the continent. About him, Pini Pini writes: Godfrey Nzamujo “wanted to take up the challenge of reviving the values rooted in African civilizations, of transforming the innumerable comparative advantages of the continent into competitive advantages and of effectively exploiting the opportunities available” (p. 152) . This is how he started the Songhaï project in October 1985 “by attributing to himself from the outset the prestigious name of the powerful and flourishing West African Empire of the 15th century, Songhaï” (p. 153). His ambition was to reconnect with “the great values conveyed by the ancient Empire and which enabled it to build a great people: vision, courage, creativity, sense of the common good, discipline, solidarity. These were the foundations of the Songhai Center inaugurated on October 5, 1985. This concrete example of the African renaissance currently totals 32 years of existence.
Today, no one doubts the success of the Songhai center. Young people come from all over. They follow a training that they will put into practice in their living environments. They assimilate the model of green rural towns that the Songhai center has set up. This pattern persuades them of the need to live in their rural living environments as was customary in ancestral times. It offers them living conditions and services to which they aspire. There is the new face of the ancestral villages (p. 160s).
In view of all this, it appears that the “African Renaissance must become a global political project (…), but it can start without delay with small local actions which are accelerators of the global project” (p. 173). This is the merit of Godfrey Nzamujo and his team of collaborators. This is what the initiator of the Songhaï center rightly points out: L’Afrique maintenant (Africa now) reference to the book by Godfrey Nzamujo entitled Songhaï. Africa now, Paris Editions du Cerf, 2016).
By echoing the ongoing African Renaissance, Pini-Pini invites us to constantly light the flame of hope which both concerns the future and is lived in the present, which it illuminates and enriches. It shows how much a new Africa is germinating in Songhai and in other corners of Africa.
La Renaissance Africaine. Les villes Rurales vertes de Songhaï,
PINI-PINI NSASAY, K.,
Douala, Ed. C.A. Diop, 2017.
By Prof Kalamba Nsapo, Theologian and interculturalitologist
