What is the connection between the Doctoral School, which brings together students working on various thesis subjects, and other intellectual workshops that bring together researchers who are, say, more senior, in order to reflect on global issues?

The question is how can a workshop that brings together accomplished scholars, like the Ateliers de la pensée, have a lasting impact on those who experience it. It is a question of how to ensure the long-term sustainability of such an initiative. There is only one way to do that: by fostering a new generation of scholars. It is the only way to establish a continuity between those who came before us and those who come after us. The belief here is that the time is right. That is, time for this is right because the fate of the continent, fundamentally, is in our hands. And that fate, particularly in intellectual terms, will depend on our ability to recover the power of description, analysis, and interpretation of our realities, which have been taken away from us. It is the power to set the stage ourselves rather than continually responding to discourses that are not ours. For this to take root in the long run, we need to train a new generation of thinkers, hence setting up the Doctoral School.

These students come into the Doctoral School with research projects already created, which you then help to refine. What have you noticed about these 26 doctoral scholars who make up this first class of this Doctoral School?

They work on very current subjects. They are interested in questions that will determine the future of either their countries or their continent as a whole. Often, however, they have difficulty formulating the right question. All questions are not good ones. There are some questions that lead nowhere. So, for our five days together here, we have worked on how to compose these questions. The objective each time is to return to reality. The reality of Africa has been stunted by paradigms that make believe the continent is fundamentally a problem. Africa is not a problem, neither is Africa a project for development. The discourse about development, as it is formulated, has, to a great extent, veiled our reality, which is multiple, dense, complex, and which requires, in order to realize it, the mobilization of different forms of intelligence for its liberation. This is the kind of work that they have undertaken, while understanding that this workshop is only an intervention in their work. They otherwise study at other institutions, they have thesis directors that they work with day-to-day. The workshop’s function is to expose them to other tools, to equip them with other methods, to open their eyes to great international debates, to facilitate their entry in networks that do not confine them within the often-stifling rapport among students and their advisors.

It may be too early to talk about impact, but how has this framing about discourses related to Africa and its realities been received on the other side, that is from people who think that there is an inability to think Africa?

The launching of the Ateliers has provoked keen enthusiasm pretty much everywhere we have talked about it, I mean, in Africa itself and in Europe, the United States, and so on. I am not exaggerating at all. The Ateliers de la pensée have not gone unnoticed. For example, there has been a lot of enthusiasm and interest among the African diaspora, and among the European or American institutions that are conscious that Africa may be the preferred laboratory for the future of our world. We believe that. We are convinced of it, and of all those people who think deep down that taking these local realities seriously is likely to help the renewal of the human sciences and critical thinking in other places in the world as well. All these issues that we face speak beyond our particular context. So, the time is right.