The Afrotopos is the name Senegalese economist and writer Felwine Sarr gives to another Africa, the one still waiting to be built. Neither an otherworldly utopia nor a fixed programme, this promise calls for breaking free of purely mechanical reasoning and ready-made slogans, so that Africa can be thought from within itself, far from both Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism.
So what exactly is Felwine Sarr’s Afrotopos?
Breaking free of this imported image means daring to think in a way that no longer needs permission from elsewhere to call itself legitimate.
Felwine Sarr puts a name to an idea worth pausing over: the Afrotopos. It is neither an otherworldly utopia nor a programme laid out in advance, but the other Africa, the one that has yet to come into being, the one that finally fulfils its happy possibilities. A promise still to be built.
To get there, the economist calls for breaking free of a purely mechanical reasoning, one that reduces everything to calculation and efficiency, and of ready-made slogans that confine more than they open up. A gentle but firm way of saying: let’s think for ourselves, without copying and without being dictated to.
Why be just as wary of pessimism as of optimism about Africa?
Philippe Hugon describes it as a pendulum. On one side, the pessimism inherited from René Dumont, who as early as 1962 diagnosed a Black Africa "off to a false start". On the other, an equally blind optimism that erases the real difficulties and keeps only the promise. Between these two poles, the right way of seeing is still being sought.
Hugon and Servant trace what came next in this pendulum swing: after pessimism came euphoria, carried by the idea of a continent finally taking off. Then realism reclaimed its place, when South Africa and Nigeria, the continent’s two economic giants, slid into recession. Neither complaint nor enthusiasm is enough to understand Africa: both must be kept at arm’s length.
Can African universities finally think for themselves?
Felwine Sarr makes an observation that is as unsettling as it is illuminating: the African university was not born on the continent (it was implanted there by the coloniser). The coloniser built its walls and its curricula, and above all imposed an image, its own, and the one it wanted Africans to adopt as if it were their own. An imprint so old that it ends up being mistaken for the natural order of things.
This is precisely what Sarr invites us to shift: to look at knowledge differently, from within Africa itself. Breaking free of this imported image means daring to think in a way that no longer needs permission from elsewhere to call itself legitimate. A warm idea, at heart: picking up the pen to write one’s own story again.
Has the old pan-African dream finally taken shape?
The dream has not stayed a dead letter. Since 2019, the African Continental Free Trade Area has been taking shape, and its very texts carry the legacy of that old pan-African dream: a union of the continent's states, conceived as a single market, a single economic breath. It is hard to read Afrotopia without hearing a direct echo of this work in progress.
Before it, there had already been a founding step: the African Union, born in 2002 on the European model, which took over from the Organisation of African Unity. Two institutions, two generations of the same ambition, which give Sarr’s utopia a very concrete anchor: thinking Africa from within itself is already a political architecture under construction.
Closing Afrotopia feels a little like leaving a long conversation with a friend who has made you want to look at Africa differently, far from labels pinned on too hastily. Felwine Sarr promises nothing: he opens a door, that of a thinking that starts from itself, that invents its own words rather than borrowing those of others. Music, the city, youth carry on, waiting for no one, sketching the outlines of this Afrotopos, which he has finally given us a name to long for.
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