How can you break out of your own bubble to discover new voices and fresh perspectives? One of the best ways is by traveling to new places, especially if you’re lucky enough to have welcoming hosts. That was certainly the case for Anne and me when we traveled to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia three years ago. We attended a conference where 40 writers and humanists from around Africa came together to talk about culture, philosophy and post-colonialism. We interviewed a number of those scholars, and since then we’ve recorded more interviews for our radio series "Ideas From Africa."
One of those conversations was with the Kenyan literary scholar Simon Gikandi, who’s spent decades studying what he calls “the unconscious” of books and paintings - the cultural artifacts of the past. He says you can’t understand the rise of European culture - or for that matter, the formation of the modern world - without also knowing how European thinkers demonized Africans and the very idea of “blackness.”
It’s an interview that changed my understanding of the Enlightenment and modern history. You can listen to my conversation with Gikandi in this weekend’s show, “Decolonizing the Mind.” And we’ll have more stories from Africa in the coming months. Charles Monroe-Kane just returned from his own reporting trip to Ghana, with plenty of new stories to tell.
-Steve