During these last four years, I have found myself unable to define exactly what I was “touching” with my eyes, but only able to glimpse its spectrum, its driving forces and its distant political and philosophical connections. But each time, I have tried to read political and social facts in the light of values ​​that seem to me to have to be defended and sanctified everywhere.

Reason, freedom, democracy, within the framework of republican principles, constitute for me absolutes to be defended and preserved. Who would have believed that in Senegal, one of the most advanced African democracies, leagues of scholars would have been formed to make insurrection a normal way of conquering power? An elite that is silent when the University of Dakar is set on fire, but which multiplies petitions in the service of the destruction of democracy and living together is necessarily sick from its submission to the derisory privileges of the small political world and the dubious glory of digital crowds.

Read the column – Did you say, ruined State?

I never thought I would see packs of radicalized protesters invade the Capitol to contest the results of an American presidential election. I never imagined that among the crowds that took to the streets after the shock of April 21, 2002, twenty years later, millions of voters for the party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen would emerge. When, at the end of the 2000s, I created an account on social networks, I was far from imagining that these platforms, where schoolboy and even dirty jokes were told, would become the preferred spaces for the dissemination of hateful and obscurantist speeches and the fight against the truth in favour of polarized opinions.  When Donald Trump returns to the White House to purge what remains of decency in politics, a « techno-industrial » oligarchy, once considered leftist or even hippie, submits to his project, the aim of which is to kill reason in favour of only emotions in society.

I didn’t think that after what happened in Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Darfur, we would be defending in the media that a life in Kfar Aza was more valuable than another in Gaza. The idea that the Senegalese could say to themselves that the presidential office, exercised by Léopold Sédar Senghor, is now so insignificant that they can put anyone in it, is curious and then terrifying.

Read the column – Moustapha Diakhaté, a fierce republican

When one is in charge of being a public writer in the 19th century sense, the risk of being summoned is easiest coming from readers, whether they agree with your words or not. Kamel Daoud, who was a columnist for the Quotidien d’Oran for decades, warned: “We select the sentences that can be retained in the trial of your membership and your supposed allegiance.” Behind my titles and my texts, many were those who conceived their responses on a supposed influence, or worse, of the sponsors, because the idea of ​​a free man acting in the name and on behalf of his conscience alone is fatally foreign to them.

This column has sought each week to pursue a long-term political objective, inspired by Faulkner’s thought on the refusal to give in to the temptation of the end of man. I persist in imagining, in the wake of the Christian doctrine of Bishop Théodore Adrien Sarr, for man, “a global salvation,” in a disturbing complex where no reference point seems to hold, where the injunction to choose one’s side punctuates daily life. Now, I think that one can hate the extremist government of Netanyahu and Hamas at the same time; One can criticize US imperialism and not give in to any dazzle for Latin American autocracies; one can, in the same vein, criticize constitutional coups and military putsches in Africa. When the praise of nuance and complexity becomes suspicion and the degree of conviction is measured by the yardstick of decibels produced, I continue to believe that it is possible to hold both ends of public engagement and thus avoid the trap of Manichaeism.

Read the column – To the democratic Malians

My American writer friend Ta-Nehisi Coates, comparing the apartheid of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to Jim Crow laws, hammers home in a serious but obvious tone: “I know this story.” When I observe in my country the temptation to destroy democracy through the submission of the media, unions and parties, the desire to reverse social gains such as the right to strike and freedom of expression, the choice to make everything conflictual in order to promote the stigmatization of the other and the refusal of difference, then, like Coates, I repeat: «I know this story.»

I know, from my assiduous reading of history books, what the same causes have produced as results elsewhere. And I can say that the end cannot be happy. But to resolve to it, somewhere, is to betray my people and to renounce honouring this profoundly Senegalese spirit, a mixture of panache and bearing.

Liberal democracy and the use of reason, the celebration of differences and the formation of a common humanity are under threat of all kinds. Before our eyes, the progressive and democratic left and the liberal and humanist right are disappearing. Everywhere, there seems to be agreement on a refusal of nuance in favour of a morbid confrontation whose common base is the temptation of the worst.

The sky of 2025 is full of threats to democracy and freedom.

In Africa, sovereigntists and xenophobes have confiscated the Pan-Africanist idea to transform it into a tool for hating the other, especially France. Intellectuals and politicians have surfed the wave, in the name of opportunism or cowardice.

In the Sahel, putschists and their zealous admirers’ parade, issuing fatwas to anyone unfortunate enough to have a different thought, to still believe in the primary idea of ​​democracy, which states that power is acquired through the sovereign People.

I am seized with fear in the face of the immensity of the fault and the materiality of the collapse.

Read the column – Le Pen, Trump, Sonko and their judges

When on October 15, 2020, Mohamed Guèye – we were seeing each other for the first time – asked me to write this column in the pages of the newspaper, I immediately accepted before… thinking about it. The support of the newspaper’s management and the editorial staff has never failed me, despite the passions that these texts have sometimes provoked. For a time, I entertained the temptation to do like some of my idols. Claudio Magris, a writer who is dear to me, was a columnist for fifty years at Corriere della Serra, the great Italian center-right daily. These texts allowed him, he said in 1967, to write when he was « struggling with moral furies. » Maureen Dowd is entering her thirtieth year as a columnist for the New York Times. But referring to a poem by Cendrars ‘When you love, you have to leave’, Traverses ends here.

I am now engaged in politics to continue my reflection, adding to it now the action on the ground, in the service of the values ​​that are the foundation of my life: the Republic, freedom, democracy and secularism. »

By Hamidou ANNE /  hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH / Serigne S. DIAGNE