ABSTRACT
The former French President, Nicholas Sarkozy, raised considerable dust in July 2007, when he made his now (in) famous Dakar speech, where he said, among other things, that:
The tragedy of Africa is that the African has never really entered into history… They have never really launched themselves into the future… The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time… In this imaginary world, where everything starts over and over again, there is room neither for human endeavour, nor for the idea of progress… The problem of Africa… is to be found here. Africa’s challenge is to enter to a greater extent into history … It is to realize that the golden age that Africa is forever recalling will not return, because it has never existed. 1
