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A trained political scientist and historian, I describe in this article the fruit of my personal experiences as a researcher from the South working on a subject from the North. More particularly, I would like to answer this question: can one talk of a “geography of knowledge” which identifies, distributes and compartmentalizes our interests according to whether we are from the North or from the South? In fact, I am a young African doctoral student, confronted with the lack of understanding of many people in my entourage. My thesis subject has nothing to do with Africa, but deals with industrialized countries, and even with a select club of a few States which are rich enough to embark on the modernization of their armed forces. After a number of years of disarray, I sought the reasons for these reactions, which came just as often from African as from European persons. How could such a truly anti-creative consensus have arisen and become so firmly fixed in people’s minds?