Mohamed Benaïssa is a distinguished Moroccan diplomat, statesman, and the sitting Mayor of the city of Assilah as well as the Secretary General of the Assilah Forum Foundation. He formerly served as Morocco’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Culture.

The great poet and former President of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, once wrote a poem of great semantic intensity:

“Here dies the Africa of empires.
It is the agony of a pitiable princess
And also Europe to whom we are connected by the navel.
Fix your unchanging eyes on your children who are commanded.
Who give their lives like the poor his last garment.
May we respond present to the rebirth of the World.
Thus, the leaven which is necessary to the white flour.”
(prayer to masks).

So close, yet so far: a view of Africa from the coast of Gibraltar

In this poem, Senghor highlights both the collapse of an old ancestral civilization—the black man’s connection to the land and the mysteries of existence—and the fading hegemonic supremacy of the modern European in pursuit of global power and control.

The fate of these two humanities is now sealed, although their trajectories are different and even contradictory.

And is African identity, in one sense, merely a creation of European anthropological reasoning, like Edward Said’s famous formula, which speaks of an Orient created by Western imagination?

Far be it from us to indulge in the nihilistic temptation of denying the historicity of African personality, especially for me, as I am the heir to a rich civilizational and historical African legacy, encompassing its Amazigh, Arab, and black components. Morocco, as I will demonstrate later, was once—and remains today—a center of rich and fruitful interaction between the various aspects of African civilization.

The “constructed African” mentioned here is the product of a cultural domination strategy, which relies heavily on a reductive taxonomy that divides African space according to so-called ethnic, tribal, or religious identities, thereby transgressing the principle of inclusive plurality that has always characterized African societies.

Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe objects to this sectarian view of community ties, demonstrating that in Africa:

“There was only fractured, dispersed, and fragmented identity. Moreover, what was important was not the self as such, but the way in which it was composed and recomposed, each time in relation to other living entities... there was identity only in becoming, in the web of relationships of which each was the living sum. Identity, in this sense, was not an infinite substance. It was what one entrusted to the care of others, in the experience of encounter and relation.”

The distinction entrenched in colonial tradition between Arab Islam and black Islam reflects this taxonomy, which also introduced the racial nativist notion of community, imposing an ethnic lens that did not correspond to African traditions.

The African is thus the other of the European; their diversity is seen not as stemming from intrinsic cultural or social specificities but rather from a historical inferiority, being at the stage of European childhood. The “civilizational policies” implemented by colonial practice aimed at his effective insertion into universal historicity, which has as its endpoint the European present.

A former European president (namely France’s Nicolas Sarkozy) shocked his audience by declaring in 2007 before students at the University of Dakar that “the drama of Africa is that the African man has not entered history enough... In this imaginary where everything always starts again, there is no place for human adventure or the idea of progress.”

Old colonial representations are resurrected here, offering the African only two calamitous choices: either the sterile mimicry of reinvented tradition or blind, alienating followership.

The African is reduced either to the clone of the “primitive savage” or the “assimilated newcomer.” His human and cultural dignity is denied in the name of a fictitious universality, which is the other face of colonial domination.

However, there is a need to move beyond this harmful dichotomy. Three centuries of interaction and mixing have undoubtedly created indelible links.

The African soul has surely reached the European personality, and the new African man has his undeniable share of Westernization.

Another Senegalese writer, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, expresses this through a character in his 1961 monumental novel L’Aventure ambiguë (Ambiguous Adventure):

“Far from men resisting, for as long as necessary, the madness of the West, far from them avoiding the delirium of Westernization, for as long as necessary, to sort and choose, to assimilate or reject, we see them, on the contrary, under all latitudes, trembling with covetousness, then metamorphosing within a generation, under the influence of this new malady of the ardent that the West spreads.”

This “malady,” feared by Kane, who published his novel at the beginning of the African decolonization period, has today become an effective reality. The role of dominant Europe cannot even be reduced to its harmful aspects; no one can deny the benefits of a modernization dynamic and integration into the cycle of developed humanity. Even the glorified tradition cannot be a reliable solution for our globalized African societies.

Postcolonial discourse in its ideologically militant form suffers from simplism, advocating an impossible and harmful break with modern Westernization.

Paraphrasing the title of a book by the Iranian liberal philosopher Daryush Shayegan, one might even say that “light today comes from the West.” Light refers both to the rational humanist thought of the Enlightenment centuries and the modernist goals that impose themselves on all societies and cultures.

Certainly, a strong wind of defeatism and declinism is currently blowing over the West. One could not exhaustively list the recent titles on this trendy theme (it suffices to mention here the latest book by French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West) (2024), written in the context of the terrible war in Ukraine).

French President Emmanuel Macron even used these alarming words: “We must be lucid about the fact that our Europe today is mortal. It can die. It can die, and it depends solely on our choices” (speech at the Sorbonne on April 25th, 2024).

Macron here explicitly refers to the famous quote by essayist Paul Valéry, who in 1919 wrote in the context of World War I: “We, later civilizations… we too know that we are mortal.”

The signs of the Old Continent’s regression are notable: the return of war to Europe, demographic decline, increased deindustrialization, and the rise of radical populism.

Political scientist Bertrand Badie has described this regression phenomenon in his book 2019 with the expressive title New Perspectives on the International Order: No Longer Alone in This World. In this book, Badie points to the major structural changes that have affected international relations over the last two decades, including the shift from a Eurocentric world to a decentralized one, the rise of the Global South, and the impotence of power as a regulating factor in the new types of international conflicts.

Europe is struggling to accept the inevitable renunciation of its monopoly on power after three centuries of total hegemony over the world. One of the problematic aspects of the complex relations between the old continent and Africa stems from this new reality.

No one can deny today that European influence in Africa is in sharp decline. Among a large segment of the new African elites, the image of Europe has significantly deteriorated, while other rising non-Western powers now share an increased portion of geopolitical and economic interests in Africa.

One often unacknowledged reason for this loss of influence is Europe’s policy of retreat, building walls, and selective interference in the name of the noble ideals of human rights and democracy.

Europe’s Africa policy is often reduced to confronting violent terrorism and stemming southern migration flows. While these phenomena, which threaten the stability and peace of European societies, cannot be denied, it is necessary to recognize the interests and demands of African states related to development and sovereignty issues.

The sovereigntist demand is indeed the keystone of the new political discourse of African elites, and it sometimes translates into actions or initiatives that clash with European sensibilities. The latest political developments in the Sahel are a clear illustration of this. Perhaps the time has come for an objective assessment of the long trajectory of Afro-European relations.

If the face of Europe, engaged in a successful dynamic of continental integration, has changed significantly, so too has that of Africa, which has undergone crucial changes that must be taken into account.

The population of Africa, which was only one hundred million in 1900, is now estimated at 1.5 billion people, exceeding 17 percent of the world population, and it is projected to account for a quarter of humanity by 2050. All economic, demographic, and geopolitical indicators attest that the second half of this century will be African, as Jacques Attali predicted.

After the end of the Cold War, a widespread sense of Afro-pessimism spread around the world and even within Africa itself. This was a period marked by civil wars, genocides, economic collapse, and deadly epidemics.

At that time, a Franco-African journalist Axelle Kabou even posed the question in the title of a now-famous 1991 book: Et si l'Afrique refusait le developpement? (And if Africa Denies Development?) Some voices even advocated a return to colonization, whether in the classic European form or through regional powers—as suggested by Kenyan historian Ali Mazrui.

This grim period is over. Nowadays, Africa is sought after by all the global powers; some African states have risen to the ranks of emerging countries, while others have become key players in the new international geopolitical landscape. While some African countries experience phases of political turbulence, others are classified among the free and stable democracies.

African regional institutions are functioning regularly, and the dynamics of continental integration are being consolidated.

The radiant face of Africa is evident, although challenges and problems are numerous. One of the major issues of this situation concerns Africa’s place in the world of tomorrow. This is a crucial question that requires intense and sustained reflection.

African political thought certainly faces a delicate and profound issue related to possible accommodations with the imported European model of modernization and governance. While one cannot dismiss the normative legacy of modernity in the name of imaginary and fallacious authenticity, particularly the achievements of liberal democracy and human rights, one also cannot ignore the legitimate demands for autonomy and sovereign free choice.

Taking into consideration the objective social realities and endogenous cultural specificities is a necessary condition for a successful political and economic modernization endeavor.

In this sense, the conceptual and methodological efforts made by prominent African intellectuals aim to firmly anchor and root the imported modern European models in the local social and cultural context.

These efforts have led to a rethinking of the archetype of the centralized national state that monopolizes legitimate violence and establishes egalitarian citizenship relations based on legal individualism.

Congolese political scientist Mwayila Tshiyembe, reviewing the record of socio-political studies on the theory of the African state, has pointed out the impossibility of establishing a centralized national power model in Africa. The model that would better correspond to the realities of the continent would be the “multinational state,” understood as a “capacity for collective action” that encompasses the different community components of society. Its integration scheme is dual: integrating nations and citizens, or collective subjects and individual subjects. Its management of territoriality takes into account inter-state community issues, and its institutional representative modalities reflect the complexity and permeability of national identities.

Other African thinkers are exploring democratic paths suited to African contexts to mitigate the negative effects of chaotic competitions, which often lead to tragic civil wars or unconstitutional power seizures. For these thinkers, electoral standards alone cannot be sufficient or decisive for establishing the democratic health of states. Several political regimes considered democratic are closer to the concept of “competitive authoritarianism” developed by American political scientist Steven Levitsky.

Our ambition here is not to position ourselves in relation to this debate currently agitating our continent. While we reject the idea of an “African exception,” which is fundamentally a racist and ethnocentric notion that essentializes African being in a fixed positivity, we cannot deny the necessity and legitimacy of a self-centered approach that embraces African socio-cultural realities.

Understanding this complex equation is the key to mutual understanding and a beneficial partnership between Europe and Africa.

The era of moralizing paternalism and the “duty of humanitarian intervention” is over. While it is imperative to maintain special relations between Europe and Africa, in the interest of both parties, respecting the African demand for the right to difference and the attributes of sovereignty and independence related to it is also an absolute requirement.

Autonomy, sovereignty, and diversity do not contradict shared values and mutual interests.

I began with a poetic quote from President Senghor, and I refer to him once again to define the notion of a “civilization of the universal.” In a 1964 text, Senghor reveals the meaning of this concept of great interest:

“Our concern has been to embrace this Négritude by living it, and having lived it, to deepen its meaning, to present it to the world as a cornerstone in the building of the Civilization of the Universal, which will be the common work of all races, of all different civilizations—or it will not be.”

For Senghor, Négritude, which is the civilizational soul of Africa, is the contribution of the black continent’s populations to world culture, within the framework of this universal that must be reinvented. Senghor, a champion of Négritude and a committed Pan-Africanist, was deeply convinced that identity enclosure policies were fruitless. He worked with all his strength for cultural dialogue, favoring special relations between Europe and Africa. But he was convinced that this highly desired dialogue could not be conducted under unilateral hegemony; rather, it requires the values of equality, trust, and solidarity.

Senghor said: “The pride of being different should not prevent the joy of being together.” 

Difference is not the opposite of openness and complementarity, and the past is not a barrier to the future.

Just as it is clear that an approach based on rupture and autonomy inevitably leads to harmful isolation and even self-destruction, the universal that is to be achieved can never be identified with a model imposed by violence or cultural or political domination.

Portuguese writer Miguel Torga defined the universal as “the local without walls.” This insightful formula suggests that every culture, through its humanist values, naturally tends toward the universal, and that the universal remains an abstract potential in the absence of a concrete local culture.

Our African cultures are rich in humanist and universal ideas and values.

Few people know that the first Universal Declaration of Human Rights was born in Timbuktu, under the leadership of the great Mali emperor Soundjata Keita in the thirteenth century, long before the French Revolution. In this declaration, known as the “Mandé Charter,” the basic principles of universal humanism are outlined: human dignity, active freedom, equality among humans. This charter was recognized by UNESCO in 2009 as part of the intangible cultural heritage.

Several African thinkers have widely disseminated the wisdom of the Bantu peoples, who developed the concept of Ubuntu, translated by philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne as “becoming human together, one with the other and in reciprocity.”

This salutary injunction could serve as a motto in the strategy of dialogue and mutual solidarity. My commitment as a Moroccan African, resident of Assilah at the gateway to Europe, is unwavering and wholehearted.

My country has always advocated for fruitful rapprochement between the two continents and has been an active player in the ongoing process of blending African and European cultures.

Morocco, a founding country of the Organization of African Unity in 1963, applied for membership in the European Communities in 1987 as a clear expression of its belonging to this vast multicultural and multilingual space, to which it is bound by unbreakable ties. Under the leadership of its visionary King Mohammed VI, Morocco has made cooperation and solidarity between Europe and Africa a priority in its strategic actions and permanent diplomatic orientations.

I conclude my essay with this wise statement by our illustrious late King Hassan II: “Morocco is a tree whose roots dive into Africa and which breathes through its leaves in Europe.”

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