Hide it in a Book

There is a popular saying which I am not sure of its origin that says if you want to hide something from an African or a black man, put it in a book.

I was in class one day when a colleague of mine, a European said: “Go and check, the author of that work may not be an African.” He was responding to an example made by our lecturer on a subject that has something to do with African history. What actually caught my attention was the manner he said it. It was with utmost disappointment. For him, Africans should write more about their own reality not by non-Africans. The idea is that we don’t write and we don’t read.
The fact is that there are many African or Black authors who have contributed volumes in the academic field. However, their thoughts are not favoured by the West. Therefore, in the Western reality, you hardly find a text of an African scholar used as part of their curriculum. The case is quite different for us, I mean Africans. We tend to prefer what comes from the West to ours almost in all aspect and education is not an exception. In fact, it is the main tool used by the West to underscore whatever is African.
We celebrate our own CCAF member, Mahougnon Sinsin and his colleagues, Claudia Caneva and Scaria Thuruthiyil as they launch their new book – Filosophie in Dialogo (Philosophies in Dialogue).