Senegal: Amadou Makhtar MBOW the Universalist

Senegal woke up this Tuesday, September 24, 2024, under an overcast sky, and sad to show its mourning, following the disappearance of the patriarch, Amadou Mahtar Mbow, former director general of UNESCO for 13 years from 1974 to 1987.

The whole world on five continents pays tribute today to this statesman, whose name is associated with UNESCO, in particular, when this UN institution was at the turning point of its evolution. A man of conviction and vision, Amadou Mahtar Mbow knew how to drive under his direction the strategic direction of UNESCO, with the work of the commission led by Sean Mc Bride, including the report entitled Many Voices, One World, released powerful recommendations for establishing a new, more equitable world information and communications order.

The debate was thus posed in North-South relations, in an area as important for the governance of the World.

The tone was already set by Professor Mbow upon his installation as 6th Director General of UNESCO, originally from the South, Africa and Senegal, and who pointed out the enormous challenge he had before him and which he met brilliantly throughout his mandate.

Moreover, during the conference on the 90th anniversary of Professor Amadou Mahtar Mbow, his successors at the head of UNESCO, including in particular the Director General Federico Mayor, expressed in extremely laudatory terms the quality of his vision, both through its entirety and through the supportive interactions that it carries, to the point of making Mr. Amadou Mahtar Mbow a universalist of the first rank, beyond the humanist that he was.

Which made Professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, associate professor of philosophy, now a professor at Columbia University in New York, say in 2012 that President Amadou Mahtar Mbow (we call him that because he was president of the National Conference at Senegal) embodied both, a universalism of aplomb, but also a universalism of laterality; I quote it from memory.

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Indeed, Amadou Mahtar Mbow from his highly strategic position as Director General of UNESCO, the deceased had left his mark on the emergence of the problems of the South, of the Third World as they said at the time, and which was reflected in UNESCO programs. This did not please the Western countries, which until then were in control of the institution, with their way of seeing the world, particularly on questions of education and of course questions of decolonization.

This is one of the reasons which earned it hostility from certain Western countries, which thus drastically reduced their contribution, particularly the States until the moment of their withdrawal from Unecso, plunging the UN institution into an extremely acute financial crisis.

Thirty-seven years later, the vision of Amadou Mahtar Mbow remains extremely relevant, particularly on the New World Information and Communication Order (NOMIC), to the point that some have attempted a comparison with George Orwell who in his work 1984 (Big Brother is looking at you) had also anticipated the information and digital revolution before its time.

It also embodies a universalism of laterality, in the sense that Mbow will have been in all the fights; he was alongside trade unionists, men of culture, his life journey which took him to all continents, made him a transversal man of a very vast culture and boundlessly loving his country and its cultures.

Amadou Mahtar Mbow will therefore remain a legacy and a viaticum, which the university which already bears his name will be able to preserve for current generations who were not his contemporaries.

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