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Pour Qui File La Comete
(2017)
The appearance of a comet in some African beliefs is taken as a bad omen. In the 1960s, appeared in this imaginary land a comet whose shape resembles that of a sword and it can be seen only at dawn. People at once related this appearance with sad events. Soon after the appearance of the comet this land experienced painful events of civil war. Adouma, the main character of the story and son of a Marabout (an Islamic scholar), has attended both schools, Coranic and French. He lived through this troubled period which took place between 1960 and 1990. He waged war and also endured the harms of war. It is an enthralling and moving narrative that combines fantastic story with auto-fiction.
How really worth are the African endogenous knowledge and know-how? Why and how can we promote this inheritage, while the so-called western scientific model looks like the best means of knowing and mastering the world? This book answers these questions by examining ifa, a West-African system of knowledge and practices which a narrow knowledge reduces to a fanciful divinatory art, an art then logically 'perceived as inconsistent and theoretically useless'. Yet, more than a divinatory art, ifa, when we submit it to analysis, appears to be an organized set of knowledge and researches, a science in the making. What makes us really think that way is the intellectual vocation that defines ifa, the rigor of the logical operations that it implies and which recalls in one way or the other the game of implicit mathematics, the objectivity requirement which is valued by the actors of the system and rests on a genuine critical tradition. This opinion is also based on the weight of myths upon which ifa rests and which constitute an important granary where a prominent set of knowledge is packed. Beyond the establishment of the consistency and the limitations of ifa, this book has strived to define a 'method' of examination and validation of the knowledge which has emerged out of the official scientific system. In fact, the questions which arise from it are finally intended to give a new foundation to philosophy of sciences and to epistemology.
This book discusses various issues related to university governance in Africa, with a specific focus on current dynamics. It provides an understanding of the changes in the governance structures of higher education institutions. The book will appeal to those who wish to transform Africa in the context of the knowledge economy.
To claim its culture, to demand its right to cultural diversity or to proclaim its belonging to a group of believers and to seize the flag of that belief in order to perpetrate actions that are then called 'holy', to terrorize others by imposing their vision Of things and its law, are undoubtedly two of the most worrying features of the entry of our societies in the twenty-first century which is beginning. This is why the texts gathered here have been judged to be appropriate, to open a serious and methodical reflection on religion and culture in Africa at the threshold of the 21st century. The contributions gathered in this volume are opened by an interrogation and, rather than closed, end with an opening on research horizons. There is something here to open up and nourish the inquiries which alone or in structured groups the specialists in the sciences of man are invited to imagine and lead on the religion and culture of Africa today.