African Lectures of Varying Scope
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The writer A. Mabanckou published his lectures given at the Collège de France in 2016 under the title Huit Leçons sur l’Afrique (Eight Lectures on Africa) (2019). These lectures are superficial. They do not cover the whole continent, although Mabanckou deals with the nature of vernacular literature and the place of contemporary events like the Rwandese genocide in novels. Unfortunately, the author shows his contempt for French African studies, as commented in the volume editing the seminar that followed his lectures. This same kind of spirit can be found in the Dictionnaire enjoué des cultures africaines (2019) that he wrote in collaboration with the Djiboutian author, Abdourahman Waberi. The headwords are partial and biased. This view of things can also be found, paradoxically, in the issues of the newspapers La Vie-Le Monde, L’Atlas des Afriques (Cabé & Baumard 2000) and the dossier of the journal Esprit, « Depuis l’Afrique » (Bidima & Garapon 2020). The historical section dealing with the precolonial and colonial periods of the Atlas is very professional but the more contemporary sections are pretty journalistic. The African philosophers, J. G. Bidima and S. B. Diagne, published in the Esprit issue, must be read absolutely. However, these publications still emphasize the Francophone part of the African continent, which is very debatable today.
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