LITERARY CAFE – 3rd EDITION: Immersed in African Tradition
The NSIF building at Avenue des Banques welcomed Cameroonian anthropologist and writer François Bingono Bingono on the 15th of February. A two-hour discourse imaging the core of the traditional world through his writings.
The third edition of Literary Café featured a writer like no other. Patriarch Bingono Bingono immersed all the guests in his psychic life, and his traditional and mystical experiences, and shared his vision of the world with the uninitiated. The literary event included a discourse of the author's spiritual works: “Et Dieu de plus en plus haut” et “Nkul-Bewu, le tambour des morts”. Through these works, event host Hervé Akame steered the cultural debate toward the merits of “African magic”. At the start of this African Literary Café, Director General Noël Alain Olivier Mekulu Mvondo Akame took the opportunity, at the end of his introductory speech, to reiterate the stakes involved in what is now considered to be a sound cultural promotion plan “We are pursuing what we successfully launched a few months ago. It's an opportunity for everyone to learn about African culture and familiarise themselves with literature as a whole. We have a distinguished guest for this edition, and I hope that everyone will be satisfied and that this edition will live up to its potential”.
Immersed in the subject, the guest invited the audience to discover several traditional themes, particularly the symbolism around a patriarch, which develops in three forms: that of age, that of honorary title, and finally that of initiation. One of the fundamentals of African culture is that patriarchy depends on a level of responsibility. This has to do with the weight of the family and the experience of the man. At this introductory session to the basics of tradition, it was also important to respect the laws of nature, to achieve a positive outcome “I don't believe in a community practice based on theory. Everything we're talking about here is contextualised. The only problem for us Africans is our mental decolonisation. As soon as we are mentally decolonised, everything will be fine” asserts Bingono Bingono, to a standing ovation from the attentive audience.
After a presentation rich in lessons from ancestral cultures, nine questions were asked one after the other, on the author's preparation and inspiration, and the merits of African ‘sorcery’ for common development. Bingono Bingono took the opportunity to call for a rewriting of our history, seen from home and not from elsewhere: “The history of Africans should be rewritten by Africans so that it is more in line with reality and truth. The repositories of all knowledge, whether tangible or intangible, are interested in engraving the fruit of their knowledge on media that can be archived. So that we can finally speak for ourselves about Africa in terms that the coloniser did not always use, the Western explorer”. The author uses this motivation as a guide. He then adds: “We write for this purpose, to describe Africa as it is, because there is no better witness to talk about Africa than Africans themselves”.
All honoured to be invited to this initiation into ancestral culture, the guests, made up of administrators, writers, and culture-loving authors, showed their attachment to the production of intellectual works by taking part in a book-signing session and sharing their impressions with the author. It was a literary day that ended on a high note, underpinned by a commitment to promoting and preserving our traditions.
