Kateb Yacine had found the right formula: the French language is our war booty. An inheritance born of the violence of history, certainly, but has become, whether we like it or not, a pillar of our cultural and intellectual reality. Pretending today to ignore it is less a surge of identity than a posture.
Our two Francophone writers, Gaston Kelman and Mbarek Beyrouk, met in Nouakchott, each testify in their own way: Francophonie is neither a bloc nor a colonial nostalgia, but a living space, crossed by tensions, appropriations, and reinventions.
Because finally, if we follow Amin Maalouf, for whom identity is a living, composite, and evolving material, then we must have the courage to face things: the language of Molière is now part of us. Rejecting it in the name of the colonial past alone, while keeping intact the borders resulting from the Berlin Conference, is a selective sorting to say the least convenient.
Beyond slogans and political postures, an obvious fact emerges on this March 20: French is not only a heritage, it is also a lever. An economic lever, a linguistic market of nearly 400 million speakers, including a growing share in Africa. And yet, African paradox obliges, this language that we share remains underutilized, weakened by failing educational systems and inadequate digital infrastructures.
As the fourth global language, the third language of business according to the OIF, French is not in decline: it is in recomposition. And this recomposition is playing out first in Africa. Provided we stop enduring it and finally fully appropriate it.
This is also what Louise Mushikiwabo, at the head of the OIF, symbolizes, not without irony: a Rwandan from a country that has reduced the place of French while refusing to completely cut ties with it. Pragmatism, once again, prevails over postures.
The future is neither in the rejection nor in the domination of one language over another. It is in the lucid cohabitation between French and our approximately 2,500 African languages, these reservoirs of meaning and memory that we paradoxically continue to marginalize in our own educational systems.
The real debate is therefore not linguistic. It is political, economic, and strategic.
The French of 2050 will not be Parisian or academic. It will be African – plural, mixed, sometimes irreverent. And above all, it will be what we decide to make of it: a mere relic… or a true instrument of power.
[Link to video: https://youtu.be/3hJzFgks9mY?si=DY9KD6Bd8HR_E0Nx]
