Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-05-08
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Christophe Premat, Professor, Canadian and Cultural Studies, Stockholm University
What does it mean to be an intellectual today from Africa or its diasporas, if not to occupy an unstable position, caught between colonial legacies, global constraints, and struggles for critical autonomy, often at the cost of social marginalization?
As shown by the workAfrican intellectual sensibilities, to which I have contributed, African intellectualism cannot be understood without taking into account the sensitive, ethical, and cognitive forms through which thinkers inhabit their era. The intellectual is not only a producer of knowledge, but a situated subject, marked by contradictions, engaged in a world he contributes to transform.
Breaking out of the “exotic intellectual”
- Thinking the critical break – Jean-Godefroy Bidima
The philosophy of Bidimaopens onto another way of thinking, more relational, more situated, attentive to the concrete forms of meaning production. It is rooted in a revaluation of aethics of palaver.
Far from a visionfolkloristic, thepalaveris for Bidima a true philosophical figure of debate and judgment. It designates a space of speech where truth is not decreed, but constructed collectively, in the confrontation of points of view, in the long temporality of exchange, in the attention to multiple voices.
Palabre is thus an epistemic and political practice involving a rationality that is not reduced to abstract argument, but integrates affects, experiences, social positions. It allows for a different way of thinking about deliberation, outside strictly Western models of discursive reason, while avoiding any naive idealization.
In this perspective, the intellectual is no longer the one who speaks in a condescending manner, but the one who participates indevices for co-creation of meaning. He must learn to listen, to decenter himself, to inscribe his speech within a relational fabric.
- Deconstructing frameworks of thought –Seloua Luste Boulbina
Seloua Luste Boulbinaradicalizes this demand by showing that colonization has produced a lasting mental infrastructure. From Boulbina’s perspective, thinking never consists in inhabiting a language as a stable ground, but in standing withinthe gap between languages, where concepts waver and where their supposed universality cracks.
His philosophy thus falls under aactive deconstruction: to think “between languages” is therefore to assume a position of discontinuity, displacement, and hybridity, where no linguistic or conceptual belonging can be taken for granted.
- Translate and circulate– Souleymane Bachir Diagne
With Diagne, the exit from alienation passes neither through rejection nor through pure deconstruction, but throughthe translationThis is conceived as a major philosophical operation: to translate is to circulate ideas, but also to transform them.
He defendsa relational concept of knowledge, where philosophical traditions are not closed off but in dialogue. Africa is not on the periphery: it actively participates in the reconfiguration of knowledge. From this perspective, the intellectual becomes a mediator, capable of navigating between multiple linguistic and conceptual worlds.
The intellectual face to power: between critique and marginality
- Thinking about violence and the postcolony withAchille Mbembe
Mbembe’s thought is anchored in a radical questioning of the historical forms of violence. Slavery, colonization, postcolony: these experiences are not just past events, but structures that continue to shape the present.
The concept ofpostcolonyhere occupies a central place. It does not simply refer to the period following independence, but to a specific regime of power, characterized by the intertwining of the colonial past and contemporary forms of domination. The postcolony is a space where continuities and transformations are intertwined.Command logics, of violence and dependency inherited from colonization are reconfigured there rather than overcome. Mbembe notably insists on the daily and diffuse dimension ofpostcolonial power. This power is exercised not only coercively, but also through forms of complicity, theatricality, and internalization.
Power and the subjects it governs are caught in an ambivalent relationship, made up both of submission, subversion, and participation. This ambivalence produces a condition marked by what Mbembe describes as a paradoxical “conviviality” with power, where domination and adherence coexist.
The postcolony is thus a space where the political mixes with the affective, the symbolic, and the corporeal, producing an experience of the world marked by excess, precariousness, and uncertainty. The intellectual, for Mbembe, is one who confronts this complex configuration. He works from a world marked by what he calls a “great night“, that is to say a dense history of dispossession andviolence, but also of resistances and reinventions.
- Anchoring thought in lived experience –Jean-Marc Ela
WithJean-Marc Ela, the reflection on the intellectual is anchored in a strong theological and political requirement: to think from the concrete lived experience of populations, in particular of the African rural worlds that have long been marginalized by dominant knowledge.
His theology, close to theliberation theology, breaks with an abstract and disembodied approach to both religion and knowledge. On the contrary, it asserts that all authentic thought must emerge from the real conditions of existence, experiences of precariousness, struggles for dignity, and ordinary forms of resistance.
Criticizing development as an injunction
- Denounce the injunction to develop – Aminata Traoré
Aminata Traoré offers a direct critique of the development discourse, which she analyzes as a newform of domination. Global economic policies impose standards that dispossess societies of their capacity for self-definition. Development becomes a mandate, a restrictive framework that reproducesoutbuildings.
His work highlights the political, cultural, and symbolic dimension of these processes. The intellectual here is a figure of resistance, who works to restore margins of autonomy and to give meaning back to thenotion of sovereignty. This criticism fits perfectly within the analyses of the book on the structural marginalization of Africa in global dynamics.
For apoetic dwelling of the world
- Living the dissonance – Felwine Sarr
For Felwine Sarr, the intellectual is characterized by a gap with their environment. This mismatch stems from a particular lucidity that makes them perceivethe contradictions and unspoken aspects of the world. Such a perception makes any simple agreement difficult and creates an inner tension. This tension is not only uncomfortable, it is also the condition for demanding critical thinking.
However, this clarity does not only lead to a form of discomfort. It opens a space for creation. The intellectual is not limited to analyzing or denouncing; they imagine other possibilities and sketch outnew horizons. His/her/Their clarity then becomes a resource that enables transforming criticism into invention.
The result is a figure that is both exposed and creative, whose strength lies precisely in this ability to make lucidity aprinciple of openingrather than a simple observation.
- A condition more than a school
These thinkers do not form a school in the strict sense, but reveal a shared condition. They outline a space of thought where intellectual demand arises from the concrete relationship to the world and a rejection of ready-made solutions. Their diversity does not weaken their impact; it constitutes their strength, by showing that thefigure of the African intellectualis not reduced to a single model. This plurality appears as a way of inhabiting the real rather than as a doctrine to follow. It also engages a unique relationship with Africa, not as a fixed essence or a mere object of study, but as ahorizon of thought.
Christophe Premat is the director of the Canadian Studies Center at Stockholm University and a professor of Francophone cultural studies. He co-directed with Buata B. Malela the book African Intellectual Sensitivities (Hermann Editions, 2025), dedicated to contemporary forms of African intellectuality.
–ref. Seven Francophone thinkers to understand the contemporary intellectual condition –https://theconversation.com/sept-penseurs-francophones-pour-comprendre-la-condition-intellectuelle-contemporaine-281903