It is not just migrants or asylum seekers who are shipwrecked in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, adding to the list of those missing in the waters that unite (and separate) the continents. What, perhaps less obviously but with no fewer consequences, are the shipwrecks of the European continent in Africa or, better, in the Africas that constitute it. A privileged observatory of these historical processes is, among others, the Sahel where the writer has been for over 13 years. A time which, ‘inhabited’ by events such as the burned churches of Zinder and Niamey in 2015, the kidnapping of his friend Pierluigi Maccalli in 2018 and yet another coup d’état last July, offered emotions, reflections and the search for meaning. Like everything else here, however, it is a thought of ‘sand’. After pushing the French military to abandon Niger, it is now the turn of the American military presence and its two military bases to organize an ‘orderly and responsible’ retreat from the country. What remains, pathetically, is a group of German and, more numerous, Italian soldiers ‘watchfully awaiting’ the decisions of the military junta in power (and the now well-established Russians). What the Italian embassy organized in the capital Niamey seems surreal. This is a conference planned at the university and an exhibition on Pinocchio against the backdrop of ‘Italian Design as a driving force for innovation and creativity’. Already in the past, days of Italian cuisine as well as Italian arthouse films had been organised. There is naturally worse in the diplomatic life of a country and nevertheless what has been quoted suggests something of the drama I alluded to in the introduction. They manifest themselves, from the ‘sand’ observatory of the Sahel, with three types of shipwreck of which the first is found in the ‘gaze’. In fact, despite the criticisms, the works of anthropologists and the changes that have occurred in the interpretation of cultures, the West’s gaze on Africa is unable to free itself from the ‘colonial’ past. A gaze, the Western one, which continues to presume itself unique and therefore capable of judging, from ‘its’ center and point of view, every difference ultimately understood as inferiority compared to the single European model. Perhaps it has not yet been understood that even Africans have stopped speaking with the mouths of others and looking with the eyes of others. They chose to use their mouths and eyes to tell their stories. The inability to listen to others is precisely what constituted the second shipwreck of the West. The arrogance of the power of technology, of the economy and, let’s not forget, of weapons, has created the fearful disease of European deafness which speaks about itself and to itself without ever leaving itself. In all these years of development projects, humanitarian assistance and bilateral agreements, the great absence has been the attentive and humble listening of those who could have saved Europe from itself. Finally, at the root of the shipwrecks lies the great betrayal which would have led to the loss of thought and the ethics consequent to it. It is about the dramatic separation of spirituality from everyday life, the non-random mutilation of every interiority, the loss of the sacred, of the soul and of what constitutes the dignity of the person. The expropriation of this essential dimension was the fundamental work of capitalism that neoliberalism continues to complete. Africa will not easily accept being sold out to the dominant ideologies of the ethical West. For those who ‘every day is a life’ it is not credible that changing the sex of children or LGBT rainbow flags are a priority.
