La problématique de l’écriture dans la philosophie négro-africaine et ses enjeux. une lecture de : Histoire de la pensée africaine de Marcien Towa

Abstract

This research work has as theme “The problematic of writing in Negro-African philosophy and its challenges: a reading of Marcien Towa’s History of African Thought”. Indeed, the battle for standardization that the world faces today requires each State to better establish its singularity beyond this sameness that globalization advocates. And it is in this quest for the Negro-African personality that Marcien Towa finds himself, who, in his work History of African Thought, lays the foundations for a more in-depth knowledge of our past. This rediscovery of our past allows the formation of our identity. However, in his endeavor to restore African thought, the author is hinder with the problem of the scarcity of written documentation providing information on our past. To this end, he postulates that writing is not the only paradigm attesting the scientificity of a scientific or philosophical production. So said, oral texts do not constitute an obstacle to the construction of our personality. This multiforme knowledge can today be collected using modern tools and following a very precise methodology. Such valorization of orality posed by Marcien Towa raises a central problem: that of the status of graphic writing in the digital age. In an African context, where digitalization is evolving at the speed of light, where the expansionism of digital machines capable of learning, communication and data conservation, in the world in general and Africa in particular, has fertilized a new vision of things and of humanity, the question of the status of writing has its full reason for being. Our investigation having focused on this question and following a historical-critical method on the evolution of writing in the African context, we arrived at the results according to which, graphic writing and digital writing both deserve their places. In fact, digital technology must be the servant of graphic writing in the sense that this allows the popularization of physical data. This is for better management of our existential situation. It is question of making an adaptation that qualitatively improves our present condition.