About
African of Beninese and Martinican origin, I have made Pan-Africanism my compass for navigating the world for over twenty years. I started this site when I turned 40 to serve several purposes. Properly present the broad outlines of my career while giving access to my agenda, renew my activist commitment which is in line with my work as an organic intellectual, and bring together a certain number of my productions which are available to all those who want to train or retrain in Pan-Africanism in all its diversity.
“Stories of Pan-Africanism” is plural because Pan-Africanism is a set of stories, a tree with several roots that plunge deep into African lands, a trunk that comes out of the continent and branches that, loaded with the fruits of each of the diasporas , cover the world with its shadow. I have chosen four functions among others to introduce myself.
- Historian: doctoral trained, in the tradition of Walter Rodney, my job is to explore and unearth elements of the past which are still active in the present and which can be used to build the future. Thus, placed as a symbol of the site, the mythical bird Sankofa which carries Haiti in its beak and Africa under its wings, sums up my philosophy of history through this proverb “Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyi”: it is not a taboo to go back and take what you have forgotten. I am passionate about history which is my way of expressing my love for Africa.
- Activist: Because the past is obscured by a number of mistakes, the historian must be engaged in his time to try to correct them by explaining that the solution is not to covet power but to create power. Being unsinkable to the flood of rumors, false information or defamation does not prevent me from getting wet by engaging in the current fights for Pan-Africanism, internationalism or reparations, three aspects that are highlighted in my site .
- Writer: my published, coordinated or prefaced books, as well as my scientific and literary contributions, quite simply say who I am. History, literature, politics, sociology, geopolitics … The diversity of media, their critical content and their progressive message are each time invitations to disarm ignorance in order to embrace confidence.
- Consultant: regularly requested by the media to provide my analysis on news, referent to local or international structures that request my expertise on historical, socio-cultural or political projects, I was able to produce my own archives as well as numerous interviews , podcasts or videos which are also resources available for research.
These four functions refer to different participations and commitments on my part in building spaces of resistance and survival with comrades in struggle, love and trust. Quilombos, these fortified villages founded by Africans fleeing slavery in Brazil, or Maroons, these communities of fugitives organized in Jamaica, not to mention the many resistance in Africa, inspire this virtual space.
The reflections of my political engagement fall within the arts of counter-education, a philosophy which has its source in my reading of the work of the historian Godwin Carter Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro, and to which I add three social and activist practices.
The first, “Each One Teach One” refers to the strategy of anti-slavery and anti-apartheid resistance fighters in the United States and South Africa to make knowledge a common good in the service of struggles and to build strong personalities, creative and rich in experience.
Next, “Don’t Agonize, Organize”, a quote from activist and lawyer Flo Kennedy, refers to self-organization in black and anti-imperialist struggles in the United States, as well as in the diaspora as a whole. and in Africa, with the idea that, without denying the interest of spontaneous mobilization, disorganization or mobilization without organization has no chance of succeeding.
Finally, “Ants do not make noise” is my work discipline to grant the end and the means while avoiding as much as possible to do good things for bad reasons. And this site is a good reason to do better things in the future.
Find in link all my public interventions programmed in the weeks to come, as well as your next Pan-Africanist meetings.
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