How can we think about Africa today? By Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-François Bayart (video in French version)

The African continent is undergoing a profound and rapid transformation, demographically, economically, politically and culturally. Under the effect of migratory and commercial flows, diplomatic action and jihadist mobilizations, it is also being reconfigured in its internal architecture. The Sahara, conceived by Hegel, and then by colonial thought, as a barrier separating North Africa from sub-Saharan Africa, is reappearing for what it has always been: a space of connections. And more than ever, the continent is opening up to the rest of the world, in particular to Asia, the Americas and the Middle East. Religion is a major site of this social, cultural and political energy, and is intimately linked to global economic transformations, to the market, in the sphere of Islam as in that of Christianity. These upheavals require new frameworks of analysis and interpretation from the social sciences and philosophy. Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-François Bayart discuss these issues.