ABSTRACT
In this world, no culture is ever totally homogeneous. All societies, insofar as they do not thrive in a closed vessel, come, at one moment or another in their history, to know diverse cultural infl uences, more or less numerous, according to the amplitude and the profundity of the contacts which they entertain with their neighbors. . . . Roman Africa, far from being an exception to this rule, was one of the regions most favorable to such mélanges, owing in part to its geographic situation and in part to the vagaries of its history, which made it a veritable crossroads for multiple infl uences, both from the Orient (from Phoenicia, above all, but also Egypt, Asia, and Syria) and from the Occident (Sicily, Magna Graecia, Rome, and the western provinces of the Roman Empire). One realizes from these conditions, to what extent the question of African [culture] constitutes among the most complex of enigmas, owing to the number of different cultures represented there. 2
France has entrusted every baccalauréat with the responsibility to know this complex of enigmas, even as France-itself never totally homogeneouscontinues its neocolonial investment in برﻐﻤﻟا, 3 which we too, more or less numerous, according to the amplitude and the profundity of the contacts that
each of us entertains with the history that nuestra América shares, then and now, with precolonial Africa, witness as our responsibility, then and now, to know this, then and now, as a condition of the possibility of a recuperation, here and now, of a “Lucius Apuleius” ﻲﺒرﻐﻤﻟا 4 perhaps . . .
