“What is Africa? Is the title of a collective work by African intellectuals and the diaspora, whose presentation took place on November 17 at the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco (ARM). It is the Sembura collection and its literary publications including the work in question, prefaced by Professor Abdeljalil Lahjomri, Perpetual Secretary of the ARM and edited by the editions “The Crossroads in Casablanca” of which Abdelkader Retnani, president of the Professional Union of Publishers of Morocco, is the director.
Under the direction of academics and writers Rabiaa Marhouch and Eugène Ebodé, the collective work, What is Africa? was presented tou during the ceremony accordingly, but not that since the participants were also presented with new literary texts from the Great Lakes region (Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda), published in the Sembura collection (The Crossroads, Casablanca).
The film Go by the Cameroonian filmmaker Mary-Noël Niba – who unfortunately could not reach the United Kingdom – who questions the theme of migration and the return to the sources, was also screened in preview, and was, if we can to express themselves vulgarly, “an added value” to this cultural feast organized by the Royal Academy of Morocco (ARM).
The Sembura collection, directed by Doctor Rabiaa Marhouch, wife of Eugène Ébodé, doctor in French and comparative literature, Doctor honoris causa from Mahatma Gandhi University in Conakry, writer and co-author of the collective work therefore presented the first delivery of its literary catalog. This collection is part of the continuity of the work of academics living in the African Great Lakes region and African intellectuals from the African diaspora involved in an educational, creative and unifying project since 2010, that of “Sembura, literary ferment”.
It is therefore under the prestigious dome of the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco that, in turn, have succeeded organizers, coordinators and some of the twenty-one authors gathered in this book as initiators and partners of the Sembura collection, academics and writers from the African Great Lakes region and intellectuals as well as various intellectuals from the Continent and others from various backgrounds including many Moroccans to celebrate this Pan-African cultural event which brought together many figures of this innovative editorial project. The elite of African culture and a little more were therefore gathered in Rabat to say all the good about this collective work.
This event therefore saw the presentation of the book published in November 2021 and even spilled over into a second. But the first, the collective book entitled “What is Africa?” Reflections and Perspectives on the African Continent, is prefaced by Abdeljalil Lahjomri, Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of the Kingdom has, by itself, greatly enjoyed the gallery of a Wednesday, November 17, 2021 under the dome of the ARM. A work of which the perpetual secretary of the ARM will have prefaced thus, among other scraps and “enveloped”: “ Naming Africa is an intellectual task that seems simple, but whoever is called to speak, suddenly, has the impression of lacking words, air, breath “. This is called the “magic” of our continent. And in this regard, Abdeljalil Lahjomri will say as an excellent tribune that if it was up to him, he would have chosen to title the collective work he prefaced ” Our Africa “. Because, he will say, ” our Africa is the name of awakening, the name of challenge, the name of hope, the name of oblivion which must heal the wounds of a painfully charred past, the name of the common will to maintain the effervescence of a bubbling present and the name of commitment to strengthen and consolidate remote lucidity for a peaceful future “.
The 22 intellectuals who participated in the collective work are men and women living in Africa or from the African diaspora should not hold it against him, on the contrary. This collective work, undoubtedly, should give Africa in all its diversity the place it deserves in the world’s peoples’ history. Léopold Sédar Senghor, this inveterate defender of Africanity, was also quoted on numerous occasions by the perpetual secretary of the ARM and other speakers, as was Ahmadou Babatoura Ahidjo that, moreover, Lahjomri will paraphrase ” There are some who write history with scrubs and others with faces “. Words that “could be placed on the pediment of any educational institution” he added.
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