Thank you very much.

I will make a confession: I have nothing to say. Really, really [...].

But yes, […] I do have a few ideas; but I am a bit intimidated by all the colleagues who have spoken since this conference began. They have written papers, it is very clear, [...] you can see that really, they are people who have worked hard. […] Bachir was impressive this morning1. I am going to pick up on two little things Bachir said.

Among thousands of excellent and interesting things, he talked about a certain Amo: Amo the Guinean, whom some authors of the time [...] say was born in Aksum – Aksum in Ethiopia –, and who was in fact born in Axim in what is now Ghana. [...] Bachir spoke of Amo as if everyone had already heard of him. I am not so sure about that, eh. I am not so sure about that.2 He’s a philo..., well, a Black man [...], an African born in 1700 or so, 1698-1700 or so, and who was sold into slavery and ended up in Prussia at a very young age, and who made a career in Prussia, who was [...] a Privat docent at the University of Jena, and Wittenberg [...], and in Halle too; and who, in his fifties, returned to his country.

[...] At the time, around 67, I read authors like William [E.] Abraham3. There is also Nkrumah, who alludes to Amo the Guinean, of whom he was very proud, [...] in a philosophy-ideology book with a hyphen, as it was called at the time in Sékou Touré’s Guinea, [...] entitled Consciencism4. […] I had read these works and [...] I gave a paper at Georges Canguilhem’s seminar [... ] at the Institut d’histoire des sciences, rue Dufour, in Paris5; and a colleague who was taking part in that same seminar, Claire Salomon-Bayet6, whom I recently discovered, looking for her contact details on the Internet, had preceded us into the afterlife, – she was editor-in-chief of a fine journal called Les Études philosophiques – [...] said to me: “but, your talk was good, it was interesting, it might interest the readers of Les Études philosophiques, and so, can you [...] make a proper article out of it?” I set to work [...].7

In fact, [...] Amo, Anthony-William Amo, Antonius-Guilielmus Amo Guinea-Afer, Anthony-William Amo the Guinean, was both a model and a counter-model for me. I said to myself: “well, you’re a little African like Amo, you evolved in the Western system, after the baccalauréat you came to the Lycée Henri IV in Paris, you did the hypokhâgne, you did the khâgne, you were lucky enough to pass the entrance exam to the rue d’Ulm, you are an agrégé. And then what? Are you going to spend your life reflecting upon European authors like Amo?” Amo was inspired by Descartes, he read Descartes, he read all the European authors [...] of his time, Aristotle. Well. But what I really liked about Amo is that, at the end of his life, he returned to his country. And it turns out that, back in his country, he lived as a great misunderstood. He was misunderstood. He was completely uprooted. Once again, well, I said to myself, while saluting his courage and his sense of origins: “I would not like to be like him. I would really not like to be like him. I would like to be able to talk, exchange with people back home about the issues that interest them.”

— I will come back to Georges Canguilhem’s seminar later.

Bachir quoted a sentence earlier, the author of which I know a little about: “By ‘African philosophy’ I mean a set of texts…”8. The end of this sentence [...] has given rise to enormous misunderstandings. I quote the whole sentence: “By ‘African philosophy’ I mean a set of texts, specifically the set of texts written by Africans and described as philosophical by their authors themselves.”9 So... instead of saying “written”, I should have said “produced”: “the set of texts produced, either in writing or orally, by Africans”. Well... “and described as philosophical by their authors themselves”, that wasn’t obvious either. Because... It has been said […]: for Hountondji, well, you only have to call yourself a philosopher to be one. But what was important was that, at the time, 69 or so – the article was published in 1970 in Diogène10 –, at the time, for everyone, African philosophy was the implicit, unconscious or semi-conscious system of thought uniformly shared by Africans – Africans south of the Sahara as we would say today, in other words, Negro-Africans. And the model was Father Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy11. Well, at the time, it was new to draw attention to the explicit discourse of Africans themselves, of African thinkers themselves, and to the necessarily plural character of African philosophy thus understood. [...] Anyway, that was new, and it is perhaps the fundamental reason why a team of booksellers, publishers, which decided, [...] at the end of the 20^th century, to draw up a list of the 100 best African books of the 20^th century12… Now, a list like that is bound to be arbitrary. But the 70^th book [...] on this list is a book by a certain Hountondji, Sur la “philosophie africaine”. Critique de l’ethnophilosophie [African Philosophy: Myth and Reality]. The first book on the list is by Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart, translated into French as Le monde s’effondre13. You’ll find on this list Wole Soyinka’s books, a collection of texts by Senghor, etc., etc. Little Hountondji is in there too. Ousmane Sembène, Les bouts de bois de Dieu [God’s Bits of Wood]. So I think that [...] linking African philosophy [...] to the explicit discourse of African philosophers was important.

When I think, I say to myself that, basically, many circumstances beyond myself had led me to pay attention to the existence of these texts. Not much is said about Raymond Klibansky14: K, l, i, b, a, n, s, k, y. He’s a Canadian philosopher, of Jewish origin I believe. I have never met him, but once, when Aloyse Ndiaye15 was vice-rector of the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, in charge of international cooperation, I was invited to an AUF conference in Canada, in Montreal, and a Canadian colleague said to me: “but, why don’t you call Raymond Klibansky?” I hesitated because I stammer, as everyone knows, and I find it hard to talk to people I have never met. But this colleague was so kind, she insisted. She called Raymond Klibansky, she put me through to him. He was incredibly kind. He said: “but, listen, I’m ninety now, I hope to have the joy of meeting you before I am a hundred.” I never met him, but he died two months, I think, before his hundredth birthday. Raymond Klibansky knew Georges Canguilhem well, and he wanted to write a panorama of contemporary philosophy. So, one day, Canguilhem, after his seminar, called me, and said: “listen, have you ever heard of Raymond Klibansky?” I said: “no”. He said: “well, listen, he wants to write a panorama of world philosophy. You gave, the other day at my seminar, a talk that interested everyone about a certain Anthony-William Amo. Would you agree to write the chapter of this panorama on philosophy in Africa?”16 That is how Klibansky’s question [...], basically, directed me towards…, well, drew my attention to the existence of African philosophical texts, just as there were French, American, Italian, etc., philosophical texts. So, in fact, I have to say that the insistence on textuality, it didn’t really come from me. It was…, well, I came up with it on the basis of the questions I had been asked.

[…]

So now I want to say that, written or not, there exists in Africa, as elsewhere, a literature. There exist written or oral texts that it would be interesting to reconstruct, to discover, and I say: Griaule’s book on Dieu d’eau17, […] in which he transcribes the words of an old blind Dogon hunter called Ogotemmêli, well, it’s a bit like a book of Plato listening to Socrates and transcribing his words. We certainly have in Africa, in Africa […] several thousand years old, Ogotemmêlis. Yacouba Konaté, in Côte d’Ivoire, has just published […] a collection of Bamôrô’s tales18. A lot of people have not read it, apart from academics and other Ivorian readers, because the book was published locally, and that’s a problem for books published in Africa. […] It is difficult to get them, and it is […] a young colleague, who is a former student of Konaté’s, who went out of her way to send me a copy […]. So, this is interesting: Bamôrô, Ogotemmêli, Guèdègbé who was the soothsayer to the king of Dahomey, and whom this French writer made famous, a French writer whose name I forget, author... Yes! Bernard Maupoil, author of La Géomancie à l’ancienne Côte des Esclaves19. The Ogotemmêlis, the Bamôrôs, the Guèdègbés, we only know them through those who have written about them, those who have listened to them, just as we only know Socrates through the writings of Plato.

Could Socrates write? I have no idea. I have no idea. But if he could write, he did not make much use of it. So, he is in exactly the same situation as those tens, those hundreds and perhaps those thousands of illiterate African thinkers. That is all I wanted to say. Thank you for your patience.