Caught in the traps of unfinished decolonizations bearing mechanisms for the reproduction of violence both against the other and against oneself, contemporary African societies have not ceased to be the home of multiple, diverse and contradictory simultaneous trajectories that are distributed in two poles.
On the one hand, we have the dynamics of resilience largely built on the values of the commons, and therefore capacities to preserve the bond that repairs and protects against the shock of the catastrophic figures that narrate our history and presence in the world.
And on the other hand, we have entropic resources that do not cease to promote, at the heart of our current social, cultural and political situation, a recurrence of verbal, physical and psychological violence that suggests an inability to be-world together other than in the accommodating bond of mentalities and behaviors that offend the physical integrity of the citizens who constitute our communities.
Despite the existence of occasionally avant-garde legislation, our contemporary societies seem to be trapped in an unequal, inhospitable, and violent social reproduction whose first victims are the spaces for critical thinking, women, young people, and migrants.
This situation, characterized by a great crisis of coexistence, raises the challenge that we want to address: how to reinvent, reconfigure and revive inclusion and confidence in the political project of society, but above all, around what levers, knowledge, and actions engage the entire social fabric in this direction? How and under what conditions could we mobilize and (re)teach our societies the meaning of pluralisms that, in the past, made their great political entities exemplary? How to intervene in the asymmetry of power relations between men and women and thus eradicate gender violence? How to reformat the harmful figures of social success that foment a set of excesses that are inadequate for the construction of a fraternal and fair society capable of generating abundance?
The absence of a regular, well-informed, and high-quality public debate seems to us to be one of the main problems impeding the emergence of an inclusive social contract based on a constant demand for social emancipation. It is, therefore, a matter of understanding in order to act and to act with understanding.
In this perspective, the Coming African Popular University, which is coming and which we will build together, cannot escape two key and joint dimensions: a culture of co-production of knowledge and a vocation for transformational action.
On the one hand, it is a question of better addressing the challenge of understanding the political, social, cultural, and religious value system that affects in Africa the vivre-ensemble, that sense of community, and that negatively impacts on the social status of various groups (women, youth).
On the other hand, the aim is to generate exchange, awareness, and popular education actions through educational initiatives and festive events that promote positive changes in mentalities and behavior, in addition to creating capacities to uproot better geopolitical balances from the iniquitous international order.
And to this end, we are building the African Popular University, which can no longer wait and which will host, for the benefit of all audiences and under any possible format, the libraries of our conditions in order to dialogue with all world knowledge, from the tools of oral reason, of our research-action needs and of our choices of convivial pedagogy.
