Second, the United States needs to elevate a greater diversity of voices among its elites. The most important American virtue is the commitment to pluralism— the ability of diverse cultures to coexist and thrive under equal protection. It means lawyers should be joined by engineers, economists, and other sorts of humanists to make sure that the country is able to work for the many, not only the few.

The goal was very clear. Imperial educational policies were meant to create colonies of the mind, among the elite of the colonized. The success of these policies is undeniable. A variation of the Irish situation, where even after independence, the intellectuals express themselves more fluently in the language of imperial conquest than in the languages from their own country, is present in every post-colonial situation. In the case of Africa, you even hear the identity of the continent being described in terms of Europhonity: Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone, mainly. Even where the elite are nationalistic and assertive of their independence, they find it easier to express their outrage and hopes in the languages of imperial conquest. Ninety percent of the monies allocated for language education goes to pamper imperial languages. Ninety percent of the population still speaks African languages anyway. Some governments even view African languages as enemies of progress. They believe that imperial languages are really the gateway to global modernity.

Balanced and inclusive education calls for a new slogan: Network, not hierarchy. We have to understand that all languages, big and small, have a common language: it is called translation.

Education systems should never lead to linguistic and cultural self-isolation. I want to connect to the world, but I don’t have to negate my starting base first. I want to connect to the world from wherever I am. I believe that the goal of education is knowledge that empowers, that shows our real connections to the world, but from our base. From our base we explore the world: from the world we bring back that which enriches our base.

All this calls for a grand alliance of scholars, academies, publishers, and educational policymakers. Intellectuals inside and outside Africa must lead: they have to live up to their venerable tradition. The intellectual in all cultures and histories has been a pathfinder, and in all cultures, these intellectuals have had to pay a price, not too big a price, but a price all the same: prison, exile even. The intellectuals of our times must not run away from the fight, from the zones of war.

The modern university should be the great refueling center for that oxygen. Perhaps Aimé Césaire put it even better in his great poem Return to My Native Land, where he wrote that:

. . . it is not true that the work of man is finished,
That man has nothing more to do in the world
But be a parasite in the world
That all we now need is to keep in step with the world
But the work of man is only just beginning
And it remains to man to conquer all of the violence embedded in the recesses of his passion

And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of freedom
There is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.